The powerful and praised Salesforce cloud platform has their own “AppExchange” app repository and we think it’s amazing. With the ability to extend your Salesforce instance with tools that increase productivity and efficiency, and do so with ease, I think you’re going to find it quite amazing, too.
Let’s take an in-depth look.
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is the world’s #1 customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Being a CRM, Salesforce pulls together your sales, marketing, accounting, and operations teams (just to name a few) onto a single platform.
Working from the same data, information is updated across departments in real-time. Departments, like sales for example, can see information on a specific customer’s lifecycle with your company. This may include pre-sales interactions as tracked by the marketing department and post-sale invoicing entered by the finance folks. This allows your team members to be better informed when preparing to reach out to your clients.
As a cloud platform, the Salesforce CRM is available to your geographically dispersed teams. Whether in remote offices or at a client location, your staff stays connected to key home base information.
Extending Salesforce CRM
As the CRM provides countless benefits on its own, there are still areas of your business that rely on certain tools to perform that aren’t natively part of a CRM ecosystem. Keeping with the single platform spirit, Salesforce allows you to extend the capabilities of their platform by way of task-specific apps.
To help you more easily discover and implement these apps, they developed their AppExchange.
With the AppExchange, third-party software developers are now able to produce and share extensions to Salesforce that require less heavy lifting to implement. Common are no-code installations that fit nicely within your existing CRM configuration and other apps, adding power to your workflow minus the headaches.
Native Apps Provide Faster Deployment & Reliability
The real beauty behind these Salesforce apps is that they don’t need to replicate existing code. Since they’re built natively on the Salesforce platform, it’s understood early in the programming process that it will be developed specifically for use on this system and, therefore, can piggyback on existing code infrastructure. This translates into less complex and lighter weight deployments, which amount to more stable and reliable solutions.
With native apps, compatibility is a non-issue.
What’s more, when you’re implementing native applications, platform-wide updates and feature enhancements are more likely to play nice with one another. This is all to say that your business can continue uninterrupted, saving you time and money.
Platform Administration Just Got Easier
Regardless of the technology you choose, software updates are inevitable. It’s important to keep your software running the latest version…not only to realize the latest and greatest features but, most importantly, to stay on top of security patches.
Anyone experienced with maintaining an IT infrastructure can tell you there are times when a software update—performed with all the best intentions—winds up taking your system down. While it doesn’t happen often, it can be frustrating and time-consuming when it does. This lost productivity can quickly turn into lost dollars company-wide.
With myriad reasons to explain a patch blunder, most often what’s responsible is simply incompatibility between two systems introduced by the update. It’s not surprising that one developer, unfamiliar with the underlying code of another developer’s application, can release an update that’s incompatible.
To limit these hiccups, you need to consider native applications. With the common foundation code shared between the apps, these issues become a lot less frequent. This makes platform administration substantially easier. It may also equate to less technical staff required or, at least, a more efficient use of their time.
Less Trying Training
Often, a deterrent keeping a mature business from integrating new technology is the time it would take to get their team up and running—even more so than the costs of the tech itself. Knowing time is money, the downtime and lost productivity due to training staff on a new system can be tough to accept.
Of course, this time is often well invested if the tools introduce enough efficiency.
But, what if you could implement new tech and not require as much training?
When your team is already accustomed to relying on the Salesforce platform every day, adding new features and functions to Salesforce doesn’t require them to learn an entirely new system. Using their same single login, mobile app, and workflow, your departments can get up to speed much faster. This time savings equates to gained productivity.
A Platform That Grows With Your Business
At last count, the Salesforce AppExchange houses more than 3,000 apps available to extend your capabilities. Given how feature-rich the CRM is on its own, you can quickly imagine the possibilities.
By nature, businesses begin small and grow larger. In order to do so, they need to establish a solid foundation to support this growth. That may include a detailed business plan, the right early hires, and understanding of the marketplace and competitive set.
I make this [obvious] declaration in order to create a parallel with your cloud platform decision making.
See, much like starting a business, selecting the right foundation of tools that you’ll use to conduct your business is vital. With the wrong foundation, you can quickly find yourself outgrowing the initial system. To solve this problem, you might be taking three steps back to move one step forward.
Selecting the right foundation early on allows you to grow smoothly and more predictably. To do so, you need a platform that is capable of growing with you.
At the beginning, you likely don’t have a need (or budget) for all of the bells and whistles but you need to be prepared to upgrade to those features as your business expands. That preparation starts with selecting the right platform.
To come full circle, the expandability inherent in Salesforce thanks to their app repository is yet another reason we find AppExchange to be absolutely amazing.
To learn more about how to get started with Salesforce and more, Contact Us today.
