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The Salesforce.com AppExchange – A Time Saving Resource for Marketers

By Maria Pergolino on August 12, 2010

Marketers frequently need to review and choose new tools to help improve or streamline their marketing programs.  This can be time consuming and may lead to many dead ends.  Because of this, some marketers make the wrong choice because they just pick software based on a salesperson’s promise or friend’s suggestion.  Other marketers take time to do product trials which saves them from selecting the wrong solution, but again, this process may be time consuming. 

I had accepted this as part of the job of being a marketer, until I started using the Salesforce.com AppExchange.  The Salesforce.com AppExchange is a collection of cloud computing applications, all of which are pre-integrated with Salesforce.com.  On this site you can easily find, test drive and install hundreds of pre-integrated applications from Salesforce.com partners and customer community.   While some of the software in the AppExchange is relevant to support, human resources, and administrators, others have been created specifically for marketers- everything from lead nurturing and lead scoring to dashboards to email tools. 

Of the over 800 applications on the site there are currently 180 applications listed under the Marketing category.  These software programs include tools for marketing automation, product management, survey creation, event management, and more.  Plus, over 70 of them are free. 

Benefits for marketers of finding programs in the AppExchange include:

• Pre-integrated with and tested by Salesforce.com
• Easy to find the solution you need
• Reviews by other marketers
• Easy to compare different solutions
• Demos and screenshots of solutions
• Free test drives
• Easy to install

So how do you get started using a program from the AppExchange? 

• Go to www.AppExchange.com
• Either search by keyword (lead management, survey, etc) or click on Browse by Categories and select Marketing to view all the applications relevant to you. 
• Watch short demos, take test drives, and see reviews of the relevant applications and select the one that is right for you

Email your administrator with the link of the solution so they can download it into Salesforce.com.

I suggest starting with a free application developed by the Force.com Labs.  One that is useful to many marketers is the Marketing Metrics Dashboard.

Next time you are considering new software, forget searching hundreds of websites to find your new vendor and instead save time by turn to the AppExchange where you can find a tested and rated solution perfect for your organization.