Milind Katti
COO & Co-Founder, DemandFarm
Salesforce’s revenue reached approximately $31.25 billion in 2023. Not just that, over 150,000 companies globally depend on Salesforce for CRM services, with the US making up 62% of Salesforce customers.
Salesforce continues to dominate the CRM market, reflecting its widespread adoption and the value it brings to businesses across various sectors. Salesforce’s AppExchange plays a critical role in this success, offering add-ons that expand and enhance the platform’s capabilities.
These tools not only streamline operations but also boost efficiency and improve customer engagement. By leveraging these add-ons, companies can effectively manage their customer relationships and accelerate development cycles, ensuring they stay ahead in the competitive market landscape.
Let’s look at the best Salesforce add-ons that can enable your business in 2024 and effectively increase your revenue.
Top Key Account Management Applications
1. DemandFarm
DemandFarm’s key account management software integrates with Salesforce, using the platform’s features to provide a solution for managing accounts. The software offers real-time market knowledge, decision-making capabilities, and advantages across your strategic account portfolio.
DemandFarm offers a 100% Salesforce-native product suite to manage key accounts and maximize revenue growth from your portfolio. You get dedicated features to create and track complex account plans, map out whitespaces, manage strategic relationships at scale, and optimize sales cycles for large deals.
Being Salesforce-native allows DemandFarm users to access account data and analytics within their CRM, enabling them to make decisions with real-time data. DemandFarm can also be customized to fit all popular sales methodologies and their custom variations.
Top 3 Salesforce DevOps tools
1. Copado
Copado is a comprehensive DevOps platform streamlining the entire release management lifecycle for Salesforce applications. It enables end-to-end deployment automation, from planning and coding to testing and releasing. Copado also integrates DevSecOps practices, which embed security at every step of the development process, thus enhancing the overall security posture of deployments.
The platform’s back-end infrastructure supports agile methodologies, enabling faster and more reliable deployment cycles.
2. Gearset
Gearset is a tool designed to manage Salesforce deployments effectively. It offers advanced features such as continuous integration and delivery, crucial for maintaining consistency between development and production environments.
Gearset provides a comprehensive solution for comparing differences between Salesforce metadata and handling deployments across multiple environments. It also simplifies the management of release pipelines, enabling teams to deploy changes more frequently and with fewer errors.
3. Prodly
Prodly focuses on Application Operations, particularly for complex Salesforce applications, making it ideal for administrators and sales operations to enhance operational efficiency.
The tool facilitates faster and safer deployments of applications like CPQ, Billing, and custom apps, by automating the manual steps usually involved in updating datasets in Salesforce environments. This not only speeds up deployment processes but also reduces the chances of human error.
Top 3 Chatbot Integration Applications
1. Qualified
Qualified captures and converts leads by engaging visitors the moment they land on your site. The chatbot qualifies leads through interactive and intelligent conversations, directly linking with Salesforce to ensure that sales teams receive real-time notifications about potential customers.
This targeted approach ensures that the chatbot engages with potential leads who are most likely to convert, making the interactions more efficient and effective.
Moreover, Qualified’s seamless integration with Salesforce is a key feature that empowers sales teams. As the chatbot engages with visitors and gathers intelligence, it feeds this data directly into Salesforce, creating or updating leads with enriched data.
Sales teams receive real-time alerts about these interactions, which enables them to step in when a human touch is needed to close the deal.
This integration ensures that no potential lead falls through the cracks, as all information captured by Qualified is promptly and accurately recorded in Salesforce.
2. Drift
Drift is a conversational marketing platform that facilitates communication between businesses and potential customers directly on the website. It’s designed to detect intent and respond with automated yet personalized messages or route important conversations to the right salesperson, thereby enhancing lead conversion rates.
Drift can decide whether to handle the conversation automatically or escalate it to a human sales representative. This ensures that visitors are always speaking to the right person or bot, enhancing the customer experience and increasing efficiency.
Integrating Drift with Salesforce amplifies its effectiveness by enabling a seamless transition of conversation data into actionable insights within the CRM. This data is invaluable for tailoring follow-up communications and for strategizing more effective sales approaches.
Moreover, Drift’s Salesforce integration facilitates enhanced lead scoring and segmentation. By analyzing the details of conversations and visitor behaviors, it helps refine lead scoring models, enabling sales teams to prioritize leads based on their likelihood to convert.
3. Intercom
Intercom is a customer communication platform that supports marketing, sales, and support. Its ability to deliver personalized communication at scale makes it invaluable.
Intercom can automate tasks such as booking meetings or sending follow-up messages, and its integration with Salesforce means all interactions are tracked and stored, providing a comprehensive view of customer engagements.
The integration with Salesforce enhances Intercom’s capabilities significantly. By syncing with Salesforce, all interactions that occur through Intercom are automatically tracked and logged within the CRM.
This provides teams with a comprehensive view of customer engagements, allowing for more informed decision-making and strategy development.
Sales teams can see the full context of a customer’s interactions, support history, and engagement preferences, all within Salesforce. This integration ensures that data flows seamlessly between systems, optimizing the customer lifecycle management.
2 Must Have Customer Service Enhancement Applications
1. SurveyVista
SurveyVista stands out as a powerful tool for enhancing customer engagement by leveraging the data housed in your CRM system. This tool allows organizations to create customized surveys, forms, and quizzes that can be directly integrated into marketing campaigns.
By doing so, businesses can gather valuable insights from their existing CRM data, making it easier to understand customer preferences, satisfaction levels, and potential areas for product or service improvement.
The ability to tailor questions based on specific customer data points ensures that the feedback collected is both relevant and actionable, facilitating more targeted marketing strategies and product development efforts.
2. Service Cloud
Service Cloud is a comprehensive customer service platform designed to streamline the management of support cases and automate service processes. With Service Cloud, businesses can offer quicker and more efficient customer support, significantly enhancing customer satisfaction.
The platform provides a suite of tools that includes ticketing systems, a knowledge base, and access to powerful analytics.
These features allow customer service teams to track and analyze customer interactions and satisfaction, enabling them to identify trends, anticipate service needs, and improve response times.
Additionally, the automation capabilities within Service Cloud help reduce the workload on customer service agents, allowing them to focus more on complex issues that require a personal touch.
Conclusion
The integration of SurveyVista, Service Cloud, Quip, and Slack for Salesforce transforms business-customer interactions and team collaboration. These tools streamline operations and enhance customer interaction quality, enabling businesses to operate efficiently and respond effectively to customer needs.
Using these Salesforce add-ons and integrations allows organizations to use real-time data, automate processes, and create a collaborative environment that improves productivity and customer satisfaction.