This month's Voice of the Customer post comes from Brian Vass. Brian leads the marketing team for The Sant Corporation, a software company that helps sales people accelerate the creation of proposals and presentations. Brian is a certified administrator and is responsible for the successful implementation of salesforce.com across multiple departments within Sant.
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I’ve had a lot of success implementing applications from the AppExchange. If I have a need for functionality that isn’t available in salesforce.com "out of the box", the first place I turn is the AppExchange. It’s very likely that someone has developed a solution to meet our needs.
I also visit the AppExchange every month and browse the "new" and "most popular" listings. This is an easy way to discover applications that can add value to your salesforce.com implementation.
Some of my favorite applications include:
1. Clicktools
My company is passionate about customer satisfaction and we survey our customers frequently. Customers may receive a survey after they close a technical support case, complete a professional services engagement, or upgrade to a new version of our software application. We configured salesforce.com workflow rules to deliver Clicktools survey invitations.
Using Clicktools we configure the surveys and map the response fields back to Salesforce. We are able to associate survey data with Contact and Account records so all employees can monitor the satisfaction of a particular customer. In addition, we roll-up the survey data to reports and dashboards that are reviewed by department managers daily.
Clicktools is easy to use and the salesforce.com integration is very flexible!
2. Landslide Custom Sales Process Manager
We developed a new sales process at Sant and wanted a way to reinforce the process within Salesforce. Our process consists of a series of phases and steps within each phase. It’s one thing to develop a process and roll it out to the sales team. But it’s another to get the sales reps to actually follow the steps.
I found Landside via the AppExchange and it does a great job addressing this issue. Each sales rep is presented with a visual representation of our sales process. The screen displays each phase and the steps/activities within each phase. Reps simply check off the steps throughout the sales process and the opty status and % probability is automatically updated. As a result the accuracy and predictability of our forecasting has improved. The application reinforces good behaviors in following the steps of the sales cycle, allows other team members to see what activities have been completed (team selling), and allows marketing to analyze the steps/activities used in deals we won – identify best practices.
3. ZoomInfo
About a year ago we asked our sales team to do more proactive prospecting. We gave them access to an online resource where they could lookup companies and download contacts. The reps didn’t like typing the leads into Salesforce so they often sent marketing a spreadsheet for us to import. This wasn’t a very scalable process.
I found ZoomInfo which is a service used to research companies and identify contacts within a company. Reps can search for contacts and instantly add them as leads in Salesforce. Reps can identify contacts that work for a specific company or build a list based on industry, company size, title, geography, etc. This application made it easier for our sales reps to do their own prospecting and get the information into Salesforce (without having to type it in or import).
4. Silverpop EngageB2B
As marketers, we would go to a trade show or host a webinar and we’d accumulate a list of leads. We would import the list into Salesforce and ask the reps to follow-up. Unfortunately, the reps skim the good leads and the rest hit the floor. As a marketer that’s not acceptable. My team wanted a way to nurture the leads until they reach a certain lead score, and then send the lead over the Salesforce and assign it to a rep.
We found Silverpop EngageB2B in the AppExchange and it’s been a very powerful solution for us. Engage is a marketing automation platform that allows us to score leads, track website activity, and send multi-step email nurture campaigns. It gives sales people insight into the quality of a lead (lead score), pages an individual viewed on our website, email activity (opens, clicks, history), and email alerts.
5. Case Age in Business Hours
Our technical support director needed a way to track the amount of time it took to resolve a support case (from open to close). However, she wanted to filter out the time the case was in the “waiting for customer validation” status.
I found the Case Age in Business Hours app on the AppExchange. This is a free application developed by Force.com labs. The app allows us to leverage our business hours to keep track of the time that a case is open. And best of all, we can only apply the timer to certain statuses.
Implementing this application was a big win for our technical support director.
My advice to everyone is to leverage the AppExchange to make your salesforce.com implementation even better for your organization. You’ll be glad you did!