FormAssembly was recently featured in a Salesforce video, “3 Ways to Integrate Your Business App with Salesforce,” where our Director of Partnerships & Strategic Alliances, Jaret Manuel, gave insights into FormAssembly’s history as well as our success partnering with Salesforce. Keep reading for highlights from Jaret’s portion of the video!
Note: Excerpts have been edited for clarity and length.
Jaret’s Role at FormAssembly
“I’ve been with FormAssembly now for four and a half years, and I was actually the first hire located outside of the U.S., 7th team member at the time, and first sales hire. I started growing the sales team basically from zero, one, to seven people while remaining largely bootstrapped, and now I’m mainly focused on leading business development partnerships.”
FormAssembly in a Nutshell
“Essentially, FormAssembly is a drag-and-drop web form builder, Enterprise data collection platform offering unmatched, Web-to-Any Salesforce Objects, form pre-filling, and a lot more. So think of it as smart web-to-contact or lead forms, application, order, payment, registration forms, basically any kind of web form or feedback survey that you can think of. We make it very easy for non-technical folks to build and distribute where they want to collect information. We’re at the forefront of digital transformation given web forms are a common data entry point, and we’re significantly improving business logic and process automation. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. We have a relentless focus on data compliance, governance, and security across the entire enterprise. In conjunction with our leader position around Salesforce, that makes FormAssembly very compelling.”
How FormAssembly Became the Solution You Use Today
“Basically in 2006 our founder was fairly bored as a university webmaster and saw that web forms could be improved greatly, and he had a lot of time on his hands. So he started a side project and FormAssembly was born. In 2012, that’s when things really got interesting for us. The company launched an Enterprise platform for multiple users, and the governance aspect, so it became more of an Enterprise platform. And since then we’ve garnered customers such as Amazon, Aetna, City of New York, Disney, Harvard, Merck, Michael J. Fox Foundation, and Novartis, to name a few. Shortly after, I joined to help with sales and business development. And I wish I could say it was all me for the success we’ve had since that date, but I’ve been very lucky to work with a passionate and growing team. In 2013, we launched a successful partner program that spans globally. We continue to predominantly set ourselves around Salesforce consulting partners and the ecosystem at large, hence a lot of the reason why I’m speaking with you today. In 2016, we launched Compliance Cloud that serves three main tenets: HIPAA compliance, PCI Level 1, and high availability. This plan targets around HLS, so health and life sciences, but it’s also applicable to FinServe and other verticals that are central to information. In 2017, early this year, we became a Salesforce AppExchange Partner. So we’ve grown to nearly 40 teammates since I’ve started, we now have hires in over 8 countries, and we have over 2,000 plus Salesforce customers, very big, some mentioned, and small, across profit and non-profit, most major industries, in 40 plus countries.”
How We Partner With Salesforce
“Salesforce started recognizing those significant growth opportunities to work with excellent partners like us that don’t live natively on Force.com, and the connector model was what really raised its head and made the most sense for FormAssembly. I think it’s been a fantastic move for us, allows more options for those of us on the call today and future partners. The Salesforce ecosystem benefits as well because there’s more acquisition opportunities outside of their traditional core product, simply meaning there’s a lot more non-Salesforce opportunities for Salesforce partners.”
Why Other Businesses Might Want to Partner With Salesforce
“The AppExchange is a major lead generator factor for us. Partnering allows you to accelerate and we will participate in increased investment over time, there’s no question about that one, it makes sense for us. The formal partnership is helping with leveraging account expansion. So we’ve been doing a really good job, especially through the AppExchange for landing accounts, but it’s this partnership that’s going to help expand and go deeper, wider and higher up into the enterprise organizations. You also have deeper Salesforce employee networking. Salesforce engineers and platform architects are a huge part of our success. Tonight I’m flying to London for the Salesforce Partner Forum World tour over in the UK and I’ve been offered several introductions by the ISV team for that, so it’s been a great help for events like that. And ISV networking, some of you will become excellent partners and we might likely get a good chance to work together. If you’re native you’re already a fit to partner with FormAssembly so that gets really interesting instantly.”
Thoughts on Salesforce’s Tremendous Growth
“By now, everyone is well aware of the $389 billion dollar Salesforce economy by 2020 that Aaron mentioned. It’s absolutely staggering. And what’s interesting about that IDC whitepaper, it actually refers to an ecosystem of partners. An economy of this magnitude hovers over around the top 30 ranking country by GDP, that’s a size comparable to the economies of Austria and Norway. That’s very large; it’s staggering in its own right. So you have to ask yourself a few questions. How dependant are you on Salesforce customers for your business? How important is participating in this ginormous digital economy for your business’s future? What is the cost if you do not participate? And that’s just by 2020. How big will the Salesforce economy be, say in 2025, 2030 and onward? The benefit of getting in early is no doubt a good thing. FormAssembly is known as the leader around Salesforce, yet we’re not even scratching the surface with our 2,000 plus customers. Wayne Gretzky said it best: “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.”
Closing Words of Wisdom
“The final takeaway is this partnership is a long-term investment. It involves constantly planting seeds and being proactive. Those who do will thrive and see a positive return sooner that you might think, but it definitely isn’t overnight. And the ISV team, I just want to say before I finalize, they’ve been excellent prior to this formal agreement, they’ve been excellent throughout the legal process, and they’ve been amazing to work with so far. Their success is definitely aligned to your success.”
Ready to learn more about FormAssembly + Salesforce? Download our free eBook.
