The Salesforce AppExchange recently hit an amazing milestone – 3 million installs. This is not only significant for Salesforce (3 million installs is a testament to how robust the Salesforce1 Platform is), but it is also important for marketers everywhere using Salesforce.
In the digital age of marketing having the right tools to run, track, and measure your marketing programs is critical – and the AppExchange has many of them to help you accomplish this. Plus if your company uses Salesforce then tools that are native to that platform or at least have strong integrations with it make this much easier to do.
Think about it this way, the AppExchange is literally a candy store for marketers with 250 marketing application listings as well as an additional 46 analytics applications. It has solutions for marketing automation, analytics, event management, website forms, campaign influence and attribution, marketing performance management, and much more available to help you augment your marketing efforts.
When Full Circle CRM officially launched our first product in Q4 2012 we already had Salesforce installed. The first place we went to look for other tools to help us with our email marketing and other programs was the AppExchange. Since then we have downloaded other applications from the AppExchange across our various departments and use them regularly. It was a great resource for us then and continues to be one now.
The one thing I really want to highlight about the AppExchange though is that it is the top source for native Salesforce tools. For marketers this is especially important for any analytics or campaign attribution solutions that measure campaign performance. If they aren’t built on the Salesforce1 Platform then they work with incomplete data and can’t accurately tell you which programs work and where to continue investing your budget.
These quotes from our some of our customer reviews highlight this point best:
“Sales, business development and the executive team have a greater understanding and trust in our marketing metrics. We have more alignment between marketing and sales than ever before, because we are looking at the same data in SFDC. We no longer struggle to prove the value of marketing initiatives.”
– Gonzalo Mannucci, Marketing Director, One Login
“The funnel and campaign metrics provided by Full Circle CRM’s Response Management application provides the common ground needed to get sales and marketing aligned to maximize pipeline and revenue. And the fact that it’s a native Salesforce application minimizes objections from IT and allows reps to continue to use the Salesforce product they are already familiar with.”
– Niel Hildebrand, Head of Marketing Ops & Analytics, AppDynamics
“Full Circle CRM puts our Marketing metrics miles ahead of what any other solution on the marketplace is able to offer . . . [its] extremely customizable: Being that it is built directly within the Salesforce campaign member record you are guaranteed to have all the customizability that Salesforce natively offers.”
– Bryant Lau, Marketing Operations & Analytics Manager, Socrata
These quotes are not meant to be a sales pitch for our company but rather to highlight why native applications are often better solutions for your marketing analytics and other data needs then those that just have integrations with Salesforce.
If you can track your complete demand generation waterfall in Salesforce and report on how marketing truly influences pipeline and revenue then you can align sales, sales ops, marketing, and marketing ops to build one huge demand generation machine. With everyone looking at the same accurate data it is much easier to see what is working and build a strong plan to drive revenue.
This is fundamentally what Full Circle’s four native Salesforce applications do – and why we decided to build them 100% on the Salesforce1 Platform.
So marketers when you are thinking about what solutions to use (especially marketing performance management or analytics solutions) start your search on the AppExchange.
