It’s official!

As an entrepreneur, you tend to go by gut feel a lot. Especially when you are breaking new ground like we are – with technology to manage and grow Key Accounts. It is all about building the solutions you believe in, nurturing the people you think will go the distance, working with partners that can help create value and taking the epic journey into the future just based on intuition.

However, on some rare occasions, you get confirmation from a credible, fact-based entity that you are on the right track; that the dream is indeed real; and that the choices you have made are 100% justified. Today is one of those days. Today, we are celebrating the confirmation of something we have all grown with and grown from. Today we are celebrating the success of the Salesforce Economy.

Why today?

Because we just received word about new research that shows that Salesforce and its ecosystem of customers and partners will create nearly 1.9 million jobs and add $389 billion in GDP impact worldwide over the next five years.

Because the research confirms that Cloud computing is slated to grow at more than six times the rate of traditional IT spending from 2015 to 2020. Because Salesforce customers have installed apps from the Salesforce AppExchange more than 4 million times.

Also, because DemandFarm is one of the awesome apps on the AppExchange that’s been creating value by transforming the way B2B companies manage and grow their Key Accounts.

The Ecosystem that has got our head in the clouds

When we set out to build DemandFarm as the preferred technology for B2Bs to manage and grow Key Accounts, our goal was to create unparalleled value for our users. This goal was and is in many ways made possible by being a part of the Salesforce Ecosystem.

Being native to Salesforce makes it easy for our customers to deploy and use DemandFarm securely and seamlessly from AppExchange, on the cloud. More importantly, it helps address major pain points for our users – Sales professionals and Sales Ops teams – when it comes to data management and customer-centric insights.

Here is how we leveraged being on the Salesforce ecosystem to help solve a major customer problem – the lion’s share of data that goes into DemandFarm is populated automatically from the Salesforce CRM data. That means minimal-to-no data entry for Account Managers – which means more time for real Sales work!

Because of everything about the Key Account – including Annual Plans – is in one place in one format in DemandFarm, Sales professionals no longer spend hours just entering, collating or compiling data to generate reports or make Account plans.

Because the data and the related intel mined from the data are auto-populated and real-time, Sales Ops teams save hours spent chasing after various stakeholders for customer-related data points, crunching the numbers or other data management tasks.

DemandFarm joins the dots across complex Account data, so everything about the Key Account is right there in real-time – customer-centric intel that helps make all the right strategic decisions.

A Brave New World

As we continue to learn, grow and innovate with Salesforce on this epic journey deeper into the clouds, this seems like a great time to take stock of what we have achieved with DemandFarm.

With users across every B2B verticals including manufacturing, automotive, retail, and finance, we are pretty delighted with the response we are getting from leadership and users alike. You can read some of our customer success stories here. This year forward, our renewed focus is on enabling the people (read: all stakeholders) and institutionalizing the processes that drive growth for Key Accounts.

What do we mean by that? It is pretty simple – everything that matters to Key Accounts and can be managed, facilitated or enriched with technology, we try and make DemandFarm do it.

It is about balancing the art and science of Key Account Management– with all the lightness of being on the Cloud, and the convenience of AppExchange. If you are B2B and if you are on Salesforce, then I would strongly recommend a free trial of DemandFarm to see if Salesforce account planning can transform the way you manage and grow your Key Accounts. This month, it is an all-access pass to every single feature we have, for up to 3 users in your company.

Don’t miss it. In the meanwhile, we are going to be in celebration mode along with all our compatriots in the Salesforce Ecosystem, as we make our way together into the future of automation and technology.