To Salesforce SI leaders building company plans to start the new year: Formstack wants to work with you.
I’ll introduce myself over the course of this post, but since we know your time is money in a services business, let’s get right to how we’d like to help you grow in 2025:
Evolving with the market
We firmly believe that an SI’s decision on what software to work with (let alone, partner with), should be based first on answering the question: “Are the products the right ones to add value for my customer?”
As you may not be fully familiar with Formstack, here’s the rundown:
We’ve taken a native-to-Salesforce approach to developing Salesforce products. With our two AppExchange products, Forms and Documents, we cover high demand use cases for Salesforce customers ranging from embedded website forms, prefilled forms for recurring data collection, payment forms, Experience Cloud forms, document generation from a button, triggered-based document automation, and digital signature. With Formstack, SIs can help customers consolidate their tech stack from multiple vendors to a single source native to Salesforce solution – delivering better end-customer experiences that are easier to maintain and driving cost savings on licensing.
Our SI partners give us strong reviews for our products, and our native-to-Salesforce approach creates a highly predictable delivery for our SI partners to be able to deliver repeatable use cases for customers, consistently on-time and on-budget.
From that foundation, we’ve layered in significant innovation – with each of these additional areas creating more opportunity for us to help our SI partners:
- Agentforce – We were the first to build Agentforce POCs at Dreamforce, and have since packaged on the AppExchange. This is creating co-sell opportunities with Salesforce and our SI partners, and as such a new emerging area for Salesforce, SIs are crucial to customers realizing the value of Agentforce. Also, the core value prop of Salesforce, collecting and using quality data in your Salesforce org, is foundational to any successful AI strategy.
- Migration Tools – We are releasing our first migration tool for document templates that will help customers get a significant head start in moving from incumbent document automation systems for Salesforce. Feedback we have been getting from the market is with incumbents bringing in significant pricing changes to products that are not getting investment from vendors; customers are looking for better fit solutions like Formstack Documents. Traditionally the time to rebuild templates would have been cost prohibitive; with our migration tool we can help customers speed that up significantly, and bring in expert partners to help them complete the migration, update templates and look at other ways to add value for these customers. Instead of customers being stagnated on other aging software, this migration tool adds value for customers and creates new services opportunities for our partners.
- Product Innovation – In addition to our native Salesforce products, our product team is innovating in products to create further opportunities for our partners. Our additional product line allows for partners to serve customers with data sources beyond Salesforce to power workflow, data collection, document automation, and digital signature. This is helping our partners build diversified service areas and help customers with data and AI strategies across Salesforce and other vertical-specific systems of record.
We have your back
From the earliest days of our partner team and program at Formstack, we knew the importance of partners knowing that we have their back. SIs are often working against very tight deadlines, with very thin margin for error on project plans – and it’s crucial that partners get them help when they need it. We are known for our partner enablement to prepare delivery teams for projects, as well as a strong partner support and escalation process.
“We have your back” is a theme for our team that we deliver on for partners on a daily basis.
Everything above is foundational – strong, trusted products, innovating, and helping partners. We use that foundation to support SI partners, amplifying their Salesforce practices, or even creating new Formstack practices. This is the playbook we’ve developed and honed over the past year, and now we are scaling out across more partners this year:
- Generating Projects Together – Formstack has 20,000+ customers; we ‘account map’ to identify Formstack customers where partner expertise can add value to make introductions. We look at your prospects or customer relationships where our document use cases can support generating new services projects. The work is performed by our partner activation manager, Kevin Gordillo (KG!) and once partners are activated, they are extended by Jordan Dimit who runs engagement with our certified and activated partners.
- Alignment to a specific AE to setup customers for success – We align our partners to a specific Account Executive (AE) to build a trusted, repeatable process to support co-selling – and that AE is also receiving inbound marketing leads in order to look for Formstack prospects where we can bring our partners in to co-sell. Working with us will set the bar for bi-directional partnership – and most importantly consistent co-selling allows us to ensure all customers originating from either company are being set up for success.
- Selling with Salesforce and other ISVs – We also have team members aligned to Salesforce teams (Justin Lowell) and other Salesforce ISV ecosystems (Kayla Miles). We can build specific programs, selling and / or marketing to those audiences together. A current example – Justin is working with SIs to bring Agentforce POCs to Salesforce selling teams. Formstack is also always looking for co-marketing activities and sponsorships to help our partners.
- Excellent Enablement & Support – It’s so important that I’ll mention it again here – throughout our SI partner engagement from Day 1, our program is built around providing top of the line enablement and support to our partners in every interaction.
- License Revenue Share – I mention this last because some partners aren’t interested in this option, and others have built entire business lines around this – Formstack helps our partners build a significant recurring revenue stream through license revenue share. Our partners have told us this is an excellent perk of our partner program that they greatly appreciate.
We're investing in partner growth
Partner motions require executive support to stand out in the market and deliver on the type of investments we’ve outlined here. It’s foundational to Formstack based on partner leadership and broader executive leadership, notably:
Zak Pines, your writer here. I’ve championed Formstack’s growth in the Salesforce ecosystem for the last six years. I understand the mindset of an SI having worked so closely with consulting firms and agencies over the past 25 years; and even having been part of one of the first five Marketo services partners back in 2010.
Drew Quinlan, our SVP of Ecosystems, Aled Miles, our CEO, and Dave Cole, our CTO are all partner-first leaders with decades and decades and decades of track records leading partner-first businesses.
We’ll prove it to you
Our suggestion is to get started by kicking off with these three activities:
- An enablement session with your delivery team to brief on products and ensure a strong fit for your customers
- The account mapping session with your sales team to get started on bi-directional selling
- A meeting with the person you designate to lead our collaboration together to build out a joint plan to execute – we’ll get a joint Slack channel going and we’ll be off and running
This launch plan will have you covered both for the “day to day” use cases your delivery teams are typically being asked about by Sales Cloud and Vertical Cloud customers; and it will also set the stage for new services areas and revenue streams for you.
We’ll start small and quickly grow. Reach out to anyone on our partner team, our partner sales team, or me at zak.pines@formstack.com and we’ll get started.
Hear it from the SI community
No one better to hear it from than colleagues across the SI community – on our partner approach, products, and support. On our partner team and approach:
Spencer Lowe, CEO of growing Salesforce firm SOLVD:
Christi Kane, from Hike2 & Bridgenext:
Kyle Tuominen, Salesforce Professional Services & Coastal Cloud:
And on our products – which you’ll notice have a strong partner angle to the comments as well:
Alex Nicholas from ArgoLogic:
Mathew Tragash from RedPoint Solutions:
Dan Davis from Azur Technologies:
Romil Shah from Servio:
Lynda En from Cascadia Solutions:
Let’s get started
We’ll start small and quickly grow. Reach out to anyone on our partner team, our partner sales team or me at zak.pines@formstack.com and we’ll get started.
