The Aha Moment an AppExchange partner has allowed it to gain access to the Melanie Fellay joined an early-stage startup in San Francisco Salesforce customer base. Melanie shares that “AppExchange right out of college where she worked in a variety of roles. One and the Salesforce ecosystem as a whole has helped us scale of her responsibilities was overseeing the company’s Salesforce and move faster through the community. What I think is so instance. Melanie recalls, “It was about five or six years ago, so magical about the Salesforce ecosystem is that while there are there weren’t many people in the company that were familiar a lot of Salesforce-led events, there is a huge community that’s with Salesforce. I was the lucky one to be selected to manage it. also very, very engaged.” In a lot of ways, I was an accidental admin.” Investing in the AppExchange Partner Program has allowed Melanie was responsible for ensuring that all of the employees Melanie and her team to access a customer base and understood how to use Salesforce and any related processes. community that she can tap. Melanie has the ability to reach The main challenge that Melanie ran up against was that as she out to customers in the Salesforce ecosystem for feedback on was implementing changes, she didn’t have an effective way of Spekit’s product. As a result, the Spekit team has been able communicating them for employees to retain. to solve their customers’ problems by receiving input from the customers themselves. By leveraging the power of the As a result, she began searching for different solutions ecosystem, Melanie has tapped into the Salesforce customer that could help her solve this challenge. She found that her base to learn, grow her company, and spread the word company had an LMS, a knowledge base, and “help text” throughout the community. bubbles; however, all of these solutions lived across different systems and were difficult to access. It was through the discovery Learning From the Journey process of looking at different solutions on the market that Melanie has learned that you don’t need to be aligned with Melanie realized there was an opportunity to make the process your business partner on 100% of their decisions to be a easier. That’s when she took the situation into her own hands perfect match. She believes that “While the day-to-day decisions and created Spekit. don’t always need to be aligned, the underlying values that are driving those decisions are.” According to Melanie, a healthy The Secret to Scaling partnership is driven by your beliefs in company culture, In order to scale successfully, it’s important to identify your customer engagement, and your business priorities. key channels for driving lead generation. For Spekit, being 17