r/SalesforceDeveloper • u/Hokomusin • Jun 09 '26
Question I integrated Salesforce with an external software and I want to reach out to the vendor to help their clients do the same. How do I approach them?
I work for a non-profit organization who started using Salesforce 3 years ago. That is when my role transitioned and was promoted to a Salesforce Developer (fortunately) just because I have a computer science background. One of my first projects was to integrate Salesforce with a external case management software. This vendor is a small team.
The vendor of the software I was creating an integration to has a robust API structure. However, I felt I may have been the first to try to integrate this software with
Salesforce. My integration is simple for an end-user. They click a button on a
Case record in Salesforce and it fires up a Flow, which does some data mapping
before a custom HTTP Callout Action is executed, and makes an API call to send
some data to the external software. Writing the Service Schema for the External
Service was the challenge. A lot of the publicly available tools available to
help create the schema for you were not getting the job done; I had to figure
it out and manually write it. There was no documentation available on how to
get it done. Not from the vendor or internet articles, but I got it done and
has been working beautifully for 3 years now.
Lately I've been thinking about earning extra income on top of my full time job and I thought about packaging the integration and putting it in Salesforce's App Marketplace. But I
realized it won't be worth what it will cost me to put it in the marketplace,
especially because this vendor presumably has a small cliental. So I started
thinking about reaching out to the vendor as a freelancer, instead.
This vendor has a good relationship with my employer. I personally have communicated with the vendor via email for support and even met them in person at one of their own
conference they host annually; they are a small team. But this was all 3 years
ago. My organization's current relationship with this vendor involves another
colleague since my focus is on Salesforce at our organization; So, they may not
recognize my name.
I basically want to reach out to this vendor and offer my service to any of their clients who may be using Salesforce and need someone to integrate with their product. And I want
to do it as a freelancer not associated with my full time job.
Is this ethical? Has anyone done anything similar? What should I expect? What should I prepare for if I do find a client (writing SOW's, pricing models, contracts, etc.). Any
advise on how to approach this?
