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Nate Shilling (@nds9619) is a salesforce.com Certified Technical Architect at Appirio and has been a user, admin, and developer on the platform since 2003. Nate held roles as a Sales AE and Pre-Sales Engineer, and is now a consultant. He enjoys working with clients to help them transform their businesses in the cloud. Nate's was recently voted the 2011 Ultimate Team Player at Appirio; he also has three children--busy guy!
The AppExchange and salesforce.com, in general, have changed so much about how business solutions are delivered to users. Whether you are rolling out salesforce.com in a new organization or department, evaluating an AppExchange solution or building from scratch, I encourage all my clients to ‘jump in’. Don’t be afraid to quickly build a new application or install a trial AppExchange solution in a sandbox and engage your users early to validate your design and prototype. If you get stuck on a problem, engage the community forums and Twitter. There is an amazing family of community experts that share knowledge and advice freely.
Here are a few of my recent ‘must-haves’ for enterprise clients, SMBs and startups that are new to the cloud.
Mass emails continue to be the mainstay for lead generation, nurturing and customer communication. There are a number of high-end, best-of-breed marketing automation platforms that integrate tightly with salesforce.com. In many cases, however, I find that the simplest solution is the best for clients new to salesforce.com and with few marketing automation needs. When mass-email requirements exceed the salesforce.com daily-governed limits, I recommend AppExchange partners like Vertical Response.
Vertical Response provides and augments all the canspam opt-in, bounce and email-open tracking features you find standard with salesforce.com. Apps like Vertical Response allow clients to leverage salesforce.com’s marketing campaigns, generate compliant email lists, build html creatives and execute the campaign all in the cloud. Sure to be a time-saver vs. merging contact lists into desktop productivity tools!
Whether a client is looking to automate Net Promoter Score surveys or simple post-sales follow up questionnaires, I haven’t gone wrong recommending Clicktools. I like the ease of building survey question wizards in Clicktools. Even novice users can appreciate the simple process of mapping questionnaire values back into new or existing salesforce.com records. The app’s user interface also boasts a drill-down analytics tool that was tailor-made for dissecting survey statistics. Clients I’ve worked with find more and uses in their business once they see how easy it is to build their first questionnaire.
Adobe EchoSign for Salesforce.com
The e-signature act of 2000 was a huge milestone in eliminating latency and ‘friction’ in business processes that require signatures. Today, you can merge your cloud data into an electronic document, define the routing steps and within seconds deliver a request for approval, never printing or faxing a single page. Great for order forms or contracts, it is also easy to use EchoSign with any of your custom objects in salesforce.com.
Standard document forms can be imported directly in EchoSign as a template or use the document attachments on your salesforce.com data as the source document for signing. Once you click the ‘Send’ button, EchoSign manages the entire process including capturing user-entered form values & signatures, notifying the approval team throughout the process and storing audit-compliant details - all in the cloud. I highly recommend e-signature solutions to every client I work with and EchoSign is at the top of that list.
I wouldn’t think of forgetting a Force.com Labs product in my favorites list. One of my recent favorites has to be the Milestones PM app. Let’s face it, so many businesses have needs for lightweight project management tools, but how many of them are easy to start using AND have the ability for your administrator/developer to tailor? This open source application brings all the core tools you need to lay out project schedules, create milestones, assign resources and control costs. Add salesforce.com Chatter to the equation and you have project management with a new definition of collaboration.
Whether its tracking all the moving parts of rolling out enterprise applications, planning the execution of a product rollout or simply tracking team initiatives for the fiscal year, Milestone PM can move your project tracking out of Excel into the cloud.
