5 Surprising Ways to Break the Mold with AppExchange Solutions

New, rapidly developing technologies — such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and massive computational power used to analyze Big Data — have become great equalizers for companies. As these technologies become more prevalent and democratized, companies will look for ways to maintain an edge over the competition while focusing on their customers.

For Salesforce customers, one way to break the mold is by using AppExchange solutions. Time and time again, we’ve seen Trailblazers accomplishing incredible things at their companies using Salesforce and augmenting that functionality with solutions from AppExchange. In helping their companies undergo a digital transformation, these Trailblazers found ways to do things differently. Ultimately, they created new efficiencies, opportunities, and functionality to their Salesforce orgs — ideas their fellow employees may have never thought possible..

Below are five AppExchange apps that can help you break the mold and do things differently, with descriptions of the app alongside how they help you stand out among your competitors.

Accounting Seed

What it is: Accounting Seed helps you run your whole business from Salesforce by combining the front and back office on a single platform without requiring integration of external programs. You’ll get rid of the pain and suffering from broken sync tools and duplicate databases. You can use Accounting Seed to track financial data through the entire business lifecycle, and with all of your data on the Salesforce platform, you can customize and automate the back office just like your Salesforce org. 

How it helps you break the mold: If your accounting and finance teams rely on spreadsheets or Quickbooks to manage the back end of your business, chances are you are duplicating a lot of data from CRM, to accounting, to siloed applications — not to mention having an incomplete view of your customers and business. And all of the data syncing is error prone and labor intensive to reconcile. 

Using an accounting solution like Accounting Seed helps you do things differently by running your entire business from Salesforce. Tell your team they don’t have to live their lives out of spreadsheets, and save them valuable time by removing syncing of data, invoices, purchase orders, and more. They’ll thank you later (or immediately).

Learn more about Accounting Seed

TaskRay Project Management

What it is: TaskRay helps customers use cloneable project templates, repeating tasks, and automation features to make projects run smoothly while seamlessly tying them to existing Salesforce accounts, opportunities, and contacts. Built 100% on Salesforce, TaskRay accommodates a wide variety of work processes, project management styles, action plans, and reporting.

How it helps you break the mold: Project management applications have, traditionally, lived as a separate tool for project managers and stakeholders to transfer information to and from other places where project data lives. But just because that’s always been done does not mean that the Trailblazer must keep it that way.

Instead, project management apps from AppExchange such as TaskRay help connect projects back into Salesforce, utilizing existing data from Salesforce fields such as accounts and opportunities. Your project managers will do less duplicate data entry and won’t have to recreate new projects from scratch. If creating a new project is a project of its own, you are ripe for some project management solution disruption.

Learn more about TaskRay Project Management

Conga Contracts

What it is: Conga Contracts helps close deals faster with automated contract creation, controlled negotiations, e-signature integration, and reporting built into Salesforce. You’ll control your contract lifecycle management (CLM) with ease by managing message and format, report across contracts to eliminate bottlenecks, and shorten contract negotiations by giving reps the power to negotiate legal approved contract terms.

How it helps you break the mold: Whether you work in a high-velocity sales organization, or deal in long sales cycles with enterprise clients, the last thing you need when a deal is on the precipice of closing is an issue with the contract. For years, contract management was a manual process, requiring manual entry and unapproved templates that don’t live in a central repository. And for reps trying to negotiate terms, they would often have to go back and forth with a deal desk or sales operations team each time they wanted to offer updated terms to a prospect or customer.

With a contract management solution such as Conga Contracts, you’ll throw your sales team a bone by providing standardized contract templates. You’ll help them shorten contract negotiations by offering legal-approved contract terms that reps don’t need permission to offer. Their success will be your success.

Learn more about Conga Contracts

Fonteva Events

What it is: Fonteva Events is enterprise events software built on Salesforce that provides online registration, agendas, planning logistics, and more. Fonteva Events seamlessly integrates into your events operation, helping you manage, plan, and execute events directly in Salesforce. You can choose from more than 50 different event types alongside full payment processing and customizable, branded registration websites. Plus, all your events engagement data resides back in Salesforce.

How it helps you break the mold: Planning and managing events can be a stressful, complicated process that often involves a number of technology solutions to plan, track, and follow-up. Your events marketing team has enough work to do planning an amazing event for your organization without needing to deal with a host of disconnected solutions that don’t track back into Salesforce.

But if you, the Trailblazer, provide your event marketing team with a solution that helps with logistics planning, online registration, agendas, websites, and more, you would be in line for a hearty thank you. Instead of manually uploading registrants and attendees back into Salesforce at the end of the event, a solution like Fonteva Events already connects seamlessly with your Salesforce org to deliver that information right into your accounts and opportunities. This way, your demand generation and sales teams can get to work following up with attendees without delay. That is so exciting, it deserves an event of its own.

Learn more about Fonteva Events

Octiv

What it is: Octiv increases productivity and streamlines workflows through document management, contract generation, proposals, redlining, and e-signatures. With Octiv, you can create, share, sign, store, analyze, and manage documents. Help your sales reps improve follow-up, reduce sales cycles, and increase revenue with real-time alerts and analytics distributed through text messages, email, and Chatter. 

How it helps you break the mold: Doing things the "old way" when it comes to generating and managing documents is a recipe for trouble. Without a central repository for approved, on-brand documents, your employees are left to their own devices to use outdated templates, or create their own. Instead, put your best foot forward when engaging with prospects and customers by giving your employees approved proposals, documents, and more. Plus, saving a significant amount of your team's time by eliminating much of the manual entry needed to create documents is a huge boost to your organization, eliminating a major time commitment for sales reps and other employees. Using a solution such as Octiv to automatically move data from Salesforce into contracts, and proposals means your team can spend time on the things that matter most. And if you, Trailblazer, can achieve that, you'll have earned a document celebrating your success. 

Learn more about Octiv