The Basics: What is the Salesforce AppExchange?

Short answer? It’s the Appstore for B2B business applications.

The Salesforce AppExchange is the biggest marketplace for B2B apps out there.

You’ll find apps from ISVs (Independent service vendors for) productivity, documentation, project management, marketing & sales, and of course, apps catering to specific verticals, niches, and use-cases.

Salesforce allows connecting the entire customer journey across sales, service, commerce, marketing, and every other touchpoint. This means it has got every approach that could bring a business closer to the customers. Reaching closer to the customers becomes easier when it is through an application that is easy to use and proves to be functional for them. This is where the role of a Salesforce AppExchange developer comes into play.

Having your application on AppExchange means that your business is visible to the customers. But this will be true when your app is good enough to leave an impression. A professional Salesforce AppExchange developer creates application for a business, creating something just what they had expected.

Here are some of the roles and responsibilities of the developer:

• To develop, configure, and deploy a business application using the Salesforce platform, ensuring that the security standards of the application are top-notch.
• To create, execute, and maintain APEX code, VisualForce, Salesforce incorporation, and AppExchange pages.
• To effectively test and implement the application, managing all the processes like coding, configuring, installation, maintenance, and debugging under proper timelines.
• To work closely with the business teams and develop custom workflows and CRM solutions.

As a quick take away, here are some top rated Apps that highly skilled Salesforce Developers leverage.

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1) Slack

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Salesforce developers have the opportunity to be at the forefront of this world by using Slack to surface the information their customers need at the time they need it. Developers can extend their apps and allow users to use Slack as their collaboration hub and take action on data from Salesforce and other business systems. Combining the low code capabilities of Salesforce and Slack’s user interface, developer toolsets, and API services, Salesforce developers are in a unique position to build apps that can provide a connected experience for employees and customers.

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2) RingLead

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Streamline the health of your database by continuously capturing, cleansing, protecting, and enriching your data with customizable technology and real-time, crowdsourced intelligence. The RingLead Platform orchestrates Salesforce and Marketing Automation processes like managing duplicates, data normalization, segmentation, enrichment, routing, and much more.

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3) Deployment Manager for Marketing Cloud

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Easy to use, no doubt that this app is a strong ally for those who have more than one business units to separate the production environments from the test environments. Deployment Manager was one of the highest rated sessions in the Partner Lodge at Dreamforce 2019 and it’s also the 2nd most downloaded Salesforce app which allows partners to streamline account creation, migration and setup.

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4) ORGanizer for Salesforce

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ORGanizer for Salesforce Extension lets you forget about your Salesforce.com username and passwords and help you to recognize Salesforce.com tabs on your browser. ... With ORGanizer you can choose color and title of every ORG tab you open. Developers work in many orgs and have individual passwords and logging for each that they use. With ORGanizer they now will have a user friendly and save way of accessing each org. As a Salesforce Developer anything that saves me time when it comes too tools is worth it's weight in gold.

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5) Building your own app

With Salesforce Platform, there’s no infrastructure or software to buy, set up, and manage. With a few clicks, you can start building custom cloud apps now. For developers, Trailhead is the easiest way to go further with Salesforce. Designed as a series of fun, interactive tutorials, Trailhead takes you step by step through Salesforce, and you can start at any level. As a Developer, building an app is a great way to pursue digital transformation. A great app becomes a tool customers and employees eventually feel like they couldn’t live without. In that sense, the “development” of an app doesn’t end with the launch. You’ll continue to iterate, improve and reimagine what your app will do. And as that happens, your business will keep on benefiting from the results. Salesforce is an eden for Developers as it has a tremendous amounts of support on the platform and provides a low code solution in building powerful apps.

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The AppExchange is a power marketplace and has thousands of Apps to help everyone on your team. For Developers the App exchange is where they can find new tools to innovate within the Salesforce instance and even create and publish new apps for other to use.

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Now that we discussed the features of Salesforce we don't like, let's talk about the features that we do like — and there are A LOT. At Relay we are not only experts in Salesforce, but we are incredible advocates for the platform as well. There is simply no competition to the breadth of features that Salesforce provides. Let's take a look at the five Salesforce features we are most thankful for.

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1) Can Prototype a Solution Very Quickly

Because Salesforce is such a broad platform and encompasses so many components, you can take an idea from inception to completion incredibly quick. Many Salesforce developers choose to use third party apps such as Avonni Creator or Sketch to prototype their UX ahead of time, but if you already have a sense of what you want your app to be, you can work right in Salesforce. Using Lightning Web Components, you can mock up a rough version of your app in no time, without ever writing a single piece of code.

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2) Free Apps on the AppExchange

It's no secret we are huge fans of the Salesforce AppExchange. Now due to the nature of Salesforce, most of the apps on the AppExchange skew towards the more expensive side. But in fact, there are a ton of great free apps that often go overlooked. Whether it's Ringlead Field Trip, to analyze your org's field usage or S-Docs to supercharge your Salesforce documents, there is no shortage of absolutely free apps that will improve your team's productivity.

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3) Paid Apps on the AppExchange

While we do love free apps on the AppExchange, it's only once you delve into paid apps that you can truly transform your Salesforce workspace. Looking to revolutionize your sales operations? Take a look at SalesPath+ that will give you full control of your sales lifecycle. Need advanced contract management? Docusign is the absolute king of that space. What if you need to build complex forms for data intake? Formstack will allow you to create forms natively right within Salesforce.

Whatever challenge you are trying to solve, the AppExchange will have an app that can provide a solution.

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4) Salesforce Community

Behind the entire Salesforce ecosystem, lies the community that has made Salesforce what it is today. Chances are that if you have an issue within Salesforce, there are hundreds of trailblazers and community members who are having the same issue. Join groups, ask questions, make connections and attend events — it's what makes the community extremely powerful.

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5) It's as Complex as You Want

What really makes Salesforce such a special platform is the adjusting learning curves based on what you are looking to do for a given task. If you are brand new and just learning, you can design page layouts in Lightning Experience or add fields using drag and drop without an ounce of code. If you're a more advanced user, you can use Apex to create very complex applications that do exactly what you need. Both users on the same platform, working in concert.

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These are only a few of the hundreds of reasons we love and are thankful for Salesforce. It's the world's most powerful platform and it's growth is only beginning.

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