Approaching this week’s Higher Ed Summit, we got to thinking about the power of the Salesforce AppExchange, and our customers’ favorite apps.
Through the AppExchange, Salesforce has built an ever-growing community of partners that offer solutions for the full range of CRM needs. We encourage our customers to check out all of the AppExchange solutions available. The plug-and-play apps allow colleges and universities to pick and choose enhancements that meet a specific need and extend the value of their CRM into other critical business areas.
Where should I start?
The AppExchange is incredibly powerful and constantly growing. But with so many choices to consider, how should a school get started?
In keeping with our Quick Start program – which prescribes a strategic “Crawl Walk Run Succeed” approach to CRM implementation – we recommend that schools break down the AppExchange into two categories: must-have apps and nice-to-have apps.
There are a handful of app categories that customers typically see as must-haves at the start of your CRM implementation. This includes Enhanced Data Quality Tools, Document Merge Apps and Email Marketing Tools, which can deliver immediate value. Data quality tools are a high priority for our customers, and many schools turn to AppExchange apps from providers like CRM Fusion. Document merge apps, such as Conga Composer, are also customer favorites from the onset. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers an industry-leading platform to build and manage constituent relationships across multiple channels. Whether you use the Salesforce Marketing Cloud or another email marketing tool, we can support your efforts to optimize the data captured through the CRM.
As customers’ CRM implementations become more mature and they’re ready to add on more functionality, other nice-to-have apps like Email Integration, ETL, Address Verification and Text Messaging are popular. For Outlook/Gmail integration, there are solutions like LinkPointe 360, Groove or Cirrus Insight. Many customers use Jitterbit for their ETL solution, and Experian QAS or Strike Iron for address verification. And if it’s not already part of your existing email service provider offering, then Enrollment Rx can work with you to identify potential fits that meet your SMS/text messaging requirements, helping you reach constituents via a new channel, on the mobile devices where they now live.
It’s important to first understand your business problem and how you want to solve it. Only then should you start exploring the range of different solutions that meet your need, be it enabling a greater level of efficiency and/or increasing the quality of support you’re able to provide to internal and external constituents. The key is to do more with less.
In the end, you need to determine whether the best option is to build or buy. In many cases, you’ll find there’s no need to reinvent the wheel with the AppExchange at your fingertips. The AppExchange is a great resource for higher ed institutions to complement their CRM capabilities, both for immediate needs as well as future considerations.
Enrollment Rx is proud to be a Gold Sponsor of the Higher Ed Summit. Stop by to hear more about our customers’ experience with full lifecycle CRM and AppExchange apps.
