In this episode of SaaS Connect by Cloud Software Association, Daniel Saks, Co-CEO and President of AppDirect uses his many years of experience to share with you how to build, monetize, and scale your ecosystem.
A value-packed episode, here are some of the points about what’s covered:
- How to enable ecosystems around content training enablement, so your customers can get value from those partners and start adopting.
- How to convince your company to strategically invest in building an ecosystem.
- The one core similarity between all of the AppDirect clients that are successful versus those who are not.
- The pitfalls and what makes it hard to build an ecosystem.
- Lessons learned. For example, those who focus on segmentation do best.
- Billing integrations.
- Tips for building a rich ecosystem include:Start small. AppDirect found that those that fail are those with a very ambitious business case, with no sense of value prop to the end user, and essentially they miss their metrics in the early days and don't have the momentum to keep investing in the project.
Build the value proposition around your most successful integration partners and streamline.
As Partner Manager, you will know which services work best with your product. Manically focus on adding value through that solution, and on being able to package and integrate it so it's seamless for your customer.
Try to remove the complexity of having to internally and externally motivate so many players before getting started. This is where AppDirect can help because it eliminates a lot of development.
- Examples of high-quality value propositions when pitching companies to join your ecosystem and develop an app (in summary, figure out what the value point of that integration is, leverage data, show that you know the customer, and start small).
- The apps that do well are those within the functional flow through your app. So when customers are going through your app, and they need another app to complete what they're doing, those are the apps that will sell because the customer needs another piece of software to finish the work that they're trying to do.
- The most successful partners are ones that see the platform as a way to enable their ecosystem and they have the ability to think of creative ways to promote and drive traffic.
- Embedded sales experience ideas.
- Readiness checklist and KPIs for success.
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