The Gap in Your Enterprise Software Product

I would argue enterprise software’s defining characteristic is the inclusion of enough configurability to satisfy a large company. The fewer times your sales rep has to say, “sorry, we can’t do that” the better. It’s easier to build extensibility and preferences into your app than to convince all your corporate customers to use the same process.

Salesforce has a particularly robust set of tools to allow system integrators or IT teams to expand upon pre-packaged apps with custom workflows, reports, and even code. In some cases, it makes sense for the software vendor to stop short and let an integrator solve for the last mile.

nCino is a particularly successful example of this; they’ve balanced the competing concerns well enough for Accenture to develop a practice around their product. It’s a lot easier to bootstrap such a thing if all the consultants with Salesforce skills can be brought to bear on your implementation.

So if you’d like the largest global system integrators to be a channel for your product, consider building on Salesforce.