Salesforce Unraveled – AppExchange

Let’s talk about the AppExchange; what it is, why you would use it and what are some of the good and the bad things are about it.  

Now let’s play the scenario first. You are in a business and maybe you have a sales team going out and about going to customers and selling stuff. Whilst with the customer they work out a proposal of items of interest to the customer. Customer says there and then, yeah let’s go for it and then they want to buy it.

At that moment, it means your sales team goes back to the office, deal with the paperwork, they sign it off to the customer and then they have to wait for the customer to  ead the email to sign it off and to send it back again. And over time quite a lot of customers just don’t do it, they will either delay it or not sign at all and it is causing a lot of frustrations.  So what are your solutions?

Basically you have two solutions: you can either look for a developer or a company to build a bespoke for you, or you can go to the AppExchange and see what is there and if you can use anything of that.  

Now let’s go to those two scenarios and see what the  pros and cons of each of them are.

Developer

Pro’s	Con’s
You get exactly what you want	Expensive developer time
You can make changes you want to make	Future changes difficult if developer is not available

AppExchange

Pro’s	Con’s
Product has been build, buying or subscribing to product often cheaper than developer time	Limited options to change the solution
List of solutions to choose from	Not bespoke

Basically, AppExchange is a big store of Salesforce solutions that you can implement in your org (of course Sandbox first!). It ranges from simple solutions like reporting / dashboards to integration solutions for example for finance.

Like with any store, here you can also find reviews, recommendations and feedback of other businesses already using the solution.

Even if you do not think you have a potential problem or challenge in your business, it is worth doing some browsing on the AppExchange. You might come across solutions that can improve the way you use Salesforce.