AppExchange Business Playbook

APPEXCHANGE BUSINESS PLAYBOOK HOW to QUICKLY ADAPT, REIMAGINE, and TRANSFORM 1

APPEXCHANGE BUSINESS PLAYBOOK HOW to QUICKLY ADAPT, REIMAGINE, and TRANSFORM TABLE of CONTENTS Keep Your Teams Engaged and Informed 2 Digital Marketing Strategies for Your AppExchange Solution 4 Selling and Engaging Customers in Uncertain Times 7 Enhancing Resilience Through Business Continuity Planning 10 TOGETHER THROUGH EVOLVING TIMES The AppExchange team is here to help you with your changing business needs. We’ve put together this playbook so you can find current best practices and advice all in one place. From tips on business continuity to transitioning to a remote workforce, you’ll find it here. As you continue to reimagine and transform your business, we’re here to make it easier. Together, we can confidently meet challenges and keep your business moving forward, beyond crisis, toward success. 1

KEEPING YOUR TEAMS ENGAGED and INFORMED BY ANDREW ALBERT, SVP, ISV TECHNICAL EVANGELISM I lead a team of 50 individuals across nine time zones, and while I am based out of Salesforce headquarters, 75% of my team work outside of HQ. My direct reports are all remote, some international. Our employees around the world have been strongly encouraged to work from home. With our highly distributed workforce and many of our employees typically working remotely, this shift has been relatively smooth. At the same time, there are still challenges to keeping teams engaged and informed. Here are a few best practices to help us. ENSURE TEAM WELLNESS There are a lot of excellent wellness tips about building a work-from-home setup and schedule that work well. Read a blog from Movable Ink. This is a critical foundation that can get overlooked easily. Ensure your team creates their own comfortable workspace. Remind them to exercise, eat well, take time to step away, be kind to themselves, stay connected socially, schedule virtual coffee chats, and so on. What you can try: Salesforce uses the V2MOM to align, and I’ve included a wellness measure on my own V2MOM to set an example that holds us all accountable. If you tend to work late or on weekends, consider the team impact. If you must work off-hours, use tools like Gmail Scheduled Send and hold off making comments in collaboration docs. Even if your email states “it’s not important, ignore,” it still disrupts personal time, and people feel the need to respond instantly. BUILD TEAM TRUST Build 100% trust in your team. Trust that they are managing their time responsibly, taking care of themselves, and doing their best work. Give your team the space to deliver, be creative, and solve problems. Make sure your team knows they can contact you anytime as issues arise or they need help. What you can try: If you’re unsure about team productivity, have honest and open conversations about accountability. For example, ask your team to post personal appointments to a team calendar. Bottom line, track deadlines and not schedules. Again, the V2MOM is a great framework to track goals and progress. SCHEDULE A MEETING CADENCE Schedule weekly and bi-weekly meetings including all-hands meetings, staff meetings, one-on-one meetings. It may sound like a lot, but it’s even more important to communicate and stay well-informed in uncertain times. Be flexible with time zones. For example, make sure all your global calls work for your global teams. Set expectations that every team member engages with one another, not just with team members closest to them. If it is impossible to get everyone together at one time, record every meeting and post a summary in Salesforce Chatter, our collaboration app, for discussion. For team calls, allow your team to crowdsource agenda items for discussion. More important, if you’re not able to attend a meeting, it doesn’t get cancelled. Designate a person to manage, moderate and record the meeting. 2

What you can try: Factor in all time zones of attendees before scheduling your meetings, and make sure you have recurring meeting times scheduled for your org, direct reports, and stakeholders. Trust your team to manage without you. It gives them leadership opportunities to expand their experience. COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE Make sure everyone feels informed, productive, and connected by creating ways to engage and communicate. Open up lines of communication and remove impediments so your team can execute. A culture of virtual communication and engagement is key. We use three Salesforce Chatter groups – one for general Q&A, a leadership group, and a virtual water cooler group. No surprise; the virtual water cooler group is popular because the team shares nonwork-related topics including photos from family trips, volunteer updates, book recommendations, TED Talks and more. What you can try: Ask your team to list the channels they like to use to communicate and, as a team, agree on a purpose for each channel. For example, Chatter for team discussions, meetings for career conversations, email for urgent matters. Then, set the example for your team. SHARE BEST PRACTICES FROM YOUR ECOSYSTEM We value our entire ecosystem of partners for their expertise and experience focused on customer success. CodeScience has been one of our partners supporting AppExchange for over a decade. Here are tips from Brian Walsh, CEO of CodeScience, about management of his mostly remote-based team and how he’s evolving his company in this Tweet. Success or failure managing remote or distributed teams comes down to culture – how your team makes decisions, prioritizes, assesses risks, and interacts with each other when executives aren’t in the room. With a company that is natively remote, your cultures and values need to be aligned in the beginning and continually invested in to scale. Five tips from CodeScience: 1. Define your culture and values to align with the 3 T’s of remote work. Transparency, tools, and trust. We display and reiterate our culture and values at every opportunity. We leverage systems built for remote. Technology and tools have come so far in supporting remote companies and teams. 2. Publicly celebrate success. Our Legend of the Moment (LOTM) program gives our employees the chance to acknowledge and reward those who are doing well in a public forum. Our culture is driven by a carrot, not a stick. 3. Schedule weekly company calls. We bring the team together once a week to connect and align on our priorities, wins, and opportunities. 4. Video on is a must. We work with video on as body cues and facial expressions enhance communication. Plus it’s the best way to engage when you’re not in the same room. 5. Mobile-enable your ceremonies. Meet your employees where they are. For those team members who cannot be at their desk when a ceremony is happening, give them the chance to have their voices heard through their mobile device. To learn more about keeping your teams engaged and informed and other tips for navigating your business in uncertain times, visit our Partner Community page for the latest information. Together, we can learn and grow as we all make adjustments to the new realities of operating a business in today’s uncertainty. 3

DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGIES for your APPEXCHANGE SOLUTION We are living through ever-evolving times, and as you reimagine your marketing strategy, the AppExchange team would like to offer some guidance and best practices. Below you’ll find recommendations to sustain pipeline, shift to digital, and use this time to focus on fundamentals that will help you confidently address the challenges ahead and emerge with a strong marketing foundation. KEEP THE FOUNDATION STRONG The Salesforce ecosystem has rapidly rallied to help fellow partners and their customers. Creating new or updated assets is a great way to communicate with customers and show how solutions can assist them with their business operations during this difficult time. Enhance Your AppExchange Listing This is your company’s digital storefront and an extension of your brand. Be sure that your AppExchange listing speaks to the current and future needs of your customers. Consider using this time to fill out your listing with relevant content and learn ways to enhance your visibility. • Watch this tutorial webinar to learn how to navigate the publishing console, adopt best practices around managing your listing, and get insights into how your customers shop on the marketplace. • Check out the Salesforce Partner Field Guide: Building A Perfect AppExchange Listing. This comprehensive guide has everything you need to perfect your AppExchange listing. • After reviewing, reach out to us here if you have any questions. • If your company is offering short-term programs to help support customers (e.g., trial extensions), these can be mentioned in your listing text and graphics. Please note that paid solutions cannot be listed as free and your listing storefront must represent the product that has gone through security review. Update Your Core Assets Now could also be an opportunity to work with AppExchange Marketing Program (AMP) to create professionally produced co-branded marketing assets including videos, podcasts, and advertising that highlight your company’s products and thought leadership. Start thinking about how this digital marketing content can help with your 1-to-1 relationship building. Are you looking to give customers some extra attention now that they no longer have an event speaking opportunity? Could your sales team use an initial touchpoint to nurture leads from a webinar you’re running? After the assets are produced, AMP will work with you to get the most reach from your investment and help generate awareness and capture more leads. • Assets such as The Exchange Lead Share, AppExchange Mavericks, and “60 Seconds With” videos include AMP-run paid promotion as part of the offering. For other assets, like the product demo or event videos, we’re happy to discuss additional AMP-run paid promotions. • Create a free customer spotlight asset to show how your solution is helping a customer. Submit your customer story here. • Do you have a thought leadership topic to share with the Salesforce ecosystem? Salesforce partners are invited to contribute to the AppExchange Medium channel to spark conversations and share insights. Read the blogger guidelines here. 4

GENERATE LEADS THROUGH DIGITAL CHANNELS One of the biggest requests we’ve heard from partners in recent weeks is generating leads to replace in-person conversations and demos usually presented at events. Fortunately, there are plenty of opportunities to create marketing assets that help spread awareness and generate leads. The following are great options to consider (at different investment levels, depending on scope), especially if you are diverting event budget to other lead-generation activities. Right now it’s critically important to put care into a marketing message that cascades through all your assets and campaigns. Please follow us on the Partner Community for the latest guidance. For specific recommendations, review the Salesforce Guiding Principles for COVID-19, the Salesforce COVID-19 V2MOM, and the first episode of Leading Through Change, featuring Salesforce CMO Stephanie Buscemi, about communicating with customers in times of change. Create White Papers and E-Books Thought-leadership white papers can serve as the foundation for an effective lead-generation campaign. Consider working with an industry specialist to create an asset that attracts a strong readership in association with name-brand publications like Harvard Business Review and The Economist, or analysts like IDC and Forrester. You can use a digital format and create a gated version on a website to collect lead information prior to downloading. Host Webinars Sponsored webcasts and webinars are a popular way for prospects to consume information and interact with experts. Webinars can tap into a big subscriber base and bring in large groups of leads. About 50% of registrants typically show up for these online events, and the webinar can be hosted on a site for months to collect leads from replays. Fuel Your Social Media Drive additional traffic to your assets and increase brand awareness by combining any lead-generation mechanism with a social campaign through LinkedIn, Twitter, banner ad placements, and more. There are ways you can collaborate with AppExchange on this at no cost. CONNECT WITH SALESFORCE ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES Another request we’ve heard from partners is to get in front of the direct sales teams at Salesforce, who can involve partners in joint deals to solve customer pain points. Here are some options to create content that will help partners educate our AEs and SEs on the right time to bring them in. Grow Communication Touchpoints To start, we recommend listening to the March 27 Partner Town Hall where Leon Magnan, SVP, Alliances, offers his first-hand recommendations on how to engage with the Salesforce field at this time. We all need to prioritize communication. Consider how marketing assets can generate additional touchpoints with Salesforce AEs and SE. For example, if you were planning an in-person meeting, creating a customer story asset could be another way to stay in touch. Create or Refresh Your Salesforce-Facing Content Boost engagement and sales by showing how your solution unlocks the power of the Salesforce Platform and drives digital transformation. Templates can be found here. • First-Call Deck: Fine-tune your first-call deck to clearly communicate your company’s messaging and resonate with your target audience. Now is the time to make sure it’s concise, engaging, and relevant to a Salesforce audience. • Battlecard: Boil down your value proposition to a compelling, easy-to-consume one-pager that speaks directly to an AE. 5

• Win Stories: Use this time to rank your biggest wins with top brand names. Do you have client speakers identified at these companies? Spread the word within Salesforce by submitting a win story now. The most effective stories focus on a joint sale, a competitive win, high ACV, multiproduct solutions, and a quote from a Salesforce AE. • Org62 Chatter Group: If you have one, refresh your Org62 Chatter group. Make sure that key members of your company and your Salesforce team have joined. Use the navigation panels to upload/update new content and socialize it out to the channel. And begin crafting more ways to use Chatter to facilitate effective communications. • AMP Promotions: Use the Partner Solution Showcase to present customer-centric demos geared toward Salesforce solution engineers, take part in a SE Demo Jam, or join in a discussion on the “Partners You Should Know” podcast to highlight joint work between a Salesforce AE and your AE. TRAIN FOR THE FUTURE Leverage Trailhead Don’t forget to link your Trailhead and Partner Community accounts to ensure all your badges are recognized. Encourage your employees to explore these trails: • Cultivate Philanthropy at Work: Learn about the global platform that transforms how companies and their employees donate, volunteer, and engage with causes. • Trailblazer Community Groups: See how the Trailblazer Community helps you learn from, connect with, and get inspired by our customers. • Grow Your Business as an AppExchange Partner: Manage your business and help your customers thrive with your AppExchange products. Give Back to Your Communities As Marc Benioff recently wrote, “This moment reminds us that we’re all connected like never before.” On behalf of the Salesforce AppExchange team, we want to share a volunteer opportunity with Meals on Wheels outlined in a recent blog post by Woodson Martin, “We’re Here for You. A Message from AppExchange.” Please join us if you can. 6

SELLING and ENGAGING CUSTOMERS in UNCERTAIN TIMES BY MIKE WOLFF, SVP, ISV SALES In this period of uncertainty, I ask myself one question: How do we want our customers to describe us in six months, 12 months, and five years from now? We want our customers and partners to know that when times got toughest, Salesforce was there. The most important thing for any salesperson to do right now is to show up. For all of us, this is a unique situation. We must be empathetic and understand that everyone is being impacted in different ways. Ask yourself how you want your customers to remember you. Did you lean in? Did you add value? Did you provide your customers with tools and best practices to navigate this situation? Below are some ways you can think about organizing your sales teams to ensure customers look back at your company in a helpful and positive light. MEET YOUR CUSTOMERS AND PROSPECTS WHERE THEY ARE It all starts with empathy. Everyone is experiencing this situation differently, so it’s important that we meet customers and prospects where they are. Over the last month, I have had countless conversations with customers to understand where they are at and have tried to simply be vulnerable with them. The realities for people are different, whether you’re talking to CEOs, people on the front lines, or your employees. You should have relevant conversations based on where people are in their current situations. Some customers and prospects will thrive, while some will struggle. From an execution perspective, we need to treat these relationships differently. You’ll have a different conversation with customers who are trying to stabilize as opposed to customers in growth mode due to circumstances. In the case of the latter, how do you make sure that you’re resourcing, helping, and arming customers with the tools they need for optimal execution? Think granularly about how you approach your business. Break it down around industry, market segment, and geography. Each of these segments has different circumstances, and those segments will have different timing on when the effects of the crisis start and stop. FOCUS ON THE BASICS Whenever there is uncertainty in the market, a company’s sales execution flaws are immediately revealed. Weaknesses and process gaps become exposed. Identify where those gaps are and get back to basics. This is not a time to add layers of complexity in your organization. It’s a time to build your foundation. When the selling environment tightens, all our bad habits are going to show up, so it’s crucial to really focus on the basics. For example, if your team struggled with managing its sales pipeline prior to this crisis, this bad habit will become amplified as your team tries to effectively sell in these uncertain times. Therefore, now is the time to clean up your bad habits and build your fundamentals. SWEAT THE DETAILS When you have a conversation with a customer, send a recap to make sure everyone had the same takeaways from the call, and validate that you heard the customer or prospect correctly. Clearly outline what the next steps are, who’s responsible for what, and when each step should be accomplished. Get the customer and prospect to confirm in writing that they’re on the same page as you. That’s the level of detail we need to get to during this time. 7

DOUBLE DOWN ON PROVING BUSINESS VALUE Business value matters. When I think back to the 2008–2009 financial crisis, I remember Salesforce’s Tony Rodoni and Adam Gilberd, my managers at the time, emphasizing the importance of building airtight business cases that justify a material ROI. No customer executive will make a decision without a mutually agreed-upon business case and justification. ROI and business cases are important at all times, but they are critical now. CREATE MULTITHREADED RELATIONSHIPS Often, salespeople have really strong relationships with one or two people in an organization. What’s important now, however, is to make sure you have relationships at all levels of an organization. In sales, that means you have multiple stakeholders involved. This requires engaging the full power of your organization to build relationships with key customer stakeholders. The objective is for everyone to approach these relationships at different levels of an organization in order to triangulate insights. This is the biggest gap that we see most often in times of crisis: We’re single-threaded and don’t have a clear understanding of what’s going on. UNDERSTAND THE LINE OF DECISION-MAKING In uncertain times, it’s not just one person making a decision. Decisions that were previously delegated are quickly assumed by core leadership. It’s critical to understand how decision-making processes have changed within your customers’ organizations, to learn the specific steps around how a purchase decision will be made, and to understand how and when stakeholders get involved. Map out the decision-making process with the customer to understand the who, what, and when with respect to decisions being made within their organization. Your job is to help your customer make informed purchasing decisions. OWN IT Now, more than ever, it’s critical to own each step in the sales process. For example, if you’re in the technology industry and you’re working with a systems integrator to implement your solution, it’s not unusual for a salesperson to cede control and have the partner run with a call or parts of the sales cycle. You need to be a part of every interaction and to present a collaborative front to customers. Leave no loose ends untied. REINVENT YOURSELF Take this opportunity to evolve your playbook. How are we communicating differently with our internal teams? How can we be proactive with our customers? How can we deliver value and help our customers manage through this uncertainty? There’s a lot of discussion about how, when this crisis ends, we’ll get back to normal. While we can let the experts forecast what that new normal might look like, it’s incumbent on us to take a deep look at the different parts of your organization and make tweaks now to prepare for how the landscape is changing. WHERE TO START If you’re looking at this list and thinking it’s a lot to do during a stressful situation, the three suggestions below can help focus your immediate next actions: 1. Start at the top. Leaders need to live, breathe, and own your company’s focus. If you, as a leader, stood in front of your team and said, “The basics matter,” but didn’t demonstrate that in your actions, it’s not going to happen. For example, in 2008–2009, creating business value was so important that my bosses rolled up their sleeves and taught all of us. This is the time to lead from the front. 2. Coach the “why” and not the “what.” There are two types of leaders: Those that tell you “what” to do and leaders that share with you “why” you 8

should do something. Sales teams perform best when they understand situational context for why leaders are emphasizing certain priorities. Further, the “why” questions are also a test. If you can’t answer your own question, most likely your team won’t answer it for it for you. Giving context around the “why” will lead to a highly motivated and customer-focused team. 3. Show them. Don’t tell them. Recap and get buy-in at every step in the process. If you’re sweating the details, everything else will fall into place: You’ll create multithreaded relationships, you’ll understand the line of decision-making, and you’ll double down on proving business value. 9

ENHANCING RESILIENCE through BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLANNING Together with our partners, our ecosystem is currently experiencing a wide variety of circumstances related to COVID–19. Our Salesforce AppExchange team is actively working to address specific issues and develop programmatic approaches as we continue to evaluate current circumstances with customers and partners alike. Based on our recent Salesforce partner survey, approximately one-third of responding AppExchange partners do not have and/or are not prepared to execute a business continuity plan (BCP). This means we have a great opportunity to share best practices together as we take the necessary steps to plan for the future. In this overview we’ll provide: • What business continuity planning is and how it can be helpful to your organization • An overview of the Salesforce business continuity program • General resources that can help your organization take initial steps to get started BE PROACTIVE, NOT REACTIVE There are many potential disruptive events to businesses worldwide, both natural and human-made. Taking steps now to help protect your organization against future disruptions should be top of mind, and if you haven’t already done so, it’s a good time to start developing your own business continuity plan. Business continuity planning is an imperative investment in your organization to help withstand disruptive events in numerous ways. It is an essential discipline of creating a system of prevention and recovery, to help: • Mitigate reputation and financial damage • Avoid ad-hoc decision-making amid a disruption • Map a clear path forward to expedite recovery and return to normal operations It’s important to note that business continuity plans are not emergency response plans (for example, plans that address response to office hazards and safety), crisis management/incident response plans (for example, plans that guide leaders in decision making in response to a crisis event), or disaster recovery plans (for example, how to recover essential technology systems). While they often work in conjunction with these other aspects of your resilience plan, the primary focus of a business continuity plan is to mitigate disruption to critical business process operations. FORMALIZING A BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN Development • Engage BCP stakeholders to secure leadership endorsement and initiate the plan development process. Meet with senior leadership, detail benefits of the BCP, estimated timeline to completion, level of effort, ongoing support requirements and more. • Conduct regular business impact analyses to understand potential disruption impacts to your organization. • Develop your BCP by working with subject matter experts who execute critical business processes in their respective areas on a day to day basis. 10

Maintenance • Plan reviews regularly with plan-maintenance staff. At Salesforce, we conduct these reviews quarterly. • Practice plans regularly and ensure your critical staff are familiar with them. Use exercises as an opportunity to validate work around strategies and modify your plans where gaps are identified. Reporting • Work closely with your business continuity partners to ensure their plans are in compliance with internal policy. • Ensure your plans are prepared to meet standards requirements for external and internal audits to maintain business-critical certifications. Implementation • Support teams when they activate their plans during real-world events. This may include supporting alert and notification procedures, leveraging identified workaround strategies, assisting with escalating, and resolving issues as workaround strategies are implemented. • Coordinate with response groups (for example crisis management teams) as needed. BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLANNING AT SALESFORCE At Salesforce, our business continuity team collaborates with departments with business processes that must be restored to normal business operations in the event of a disruption. This ensures the ability to protect our Ohana and comply with regulations as we continue to meet Salesforce, customer, and partner needs. From a product perspective, a subset of groups we maintain plans for include Core App, Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Heroku. Each of these products has its own specifications, and we emphasize the plan must work for the teams who will be executing against them. While we capture common information categories across our plans (such as critical vendors, staff, work locations, equipment, and so on), the goal remains to create a business continuity plan that is tailored to the specific team, and one that is updated and exercised regularly. It should capture viable workaround strategies to maintain and recover critical operations through a disruptive event. In doing so, we help to bolster the overall resilience of the company and our extended Ohana. WHAT’S NEXT? As our ecosystem continues to respond to uncertainty around COVID-19, our Salesforce AppExchange team is actively working to support our partners and our customers in every way we can. Learn more about Salesforce’s business continuity planning specific to COVID-19 by visiting sfdc.co/SalesforceBCP. Tell us how we can help you, and your organization, during this time. We’re here for you. This post is provided for informational purposes only. Each business is different, and your business continuity plan needs may not be the same as those discussed above. We encourage you to undertake your own assessment of your organization’s business continuity plan needs. 11