Continued from Four Best Apps for Salesforce.com Part 1
Composition Engines
Another popular application type on the AppExchange is composition engines or document generators. Composition engines help sales reps extract customer information from Salesforce.com and insert them into documents based on common office automation packages like Word, Excel, Powerpoint and pdf. These tools help the sales rep put together attractive proposals (RFP’s) and contracts using forms and templates. Some of the more advanced apps also track the document through its creation and interaction with a customer. I think of composition engines as Mail Merge on steroids. Conga Composition, made by Appextremes of Broomfield, Colorado, is the leading document generation app on the AppExchange. Conga costs $12.00 per user per month and claims to have 3,000 customers. Document Generation tools are consultant-intensive, so Conga also sells through a large number of Salesforce.com consultants. The runner up is S-Docs, by ME2 Systems LLC. ME2 Systems appears to be a very small company and ranks disproportionately high on the AppExchange because its app is “free” with up to two templates – pretty worthless in my opinion. The AppExchange favors free apps, even ones with “bait and switch” business models, so screen by rating as well to see how users really rate an app. Loop Document Services by Drawloop Technologies is the third best document generation app. It costs $12.00 per user per month. Drawloop is located in Southern California and has been in the dynamic document package (DDP) segment for Salesforce.com since 2002. Composition Engines can be found on the AppExchange under the Category (Sales) and Sub-Category (Document Generation).
Social Network Integrators
Connecting Salesforce.com to social networking sites is a brand new field. The newness of the segment shows in the rather low ratings these apps get and their relatively high prices. But they offer really interesting new capabilities, if you can get them to work. The ostensible leader in this segment is Salesforce for Twitter and Facebook (4.11.1) which is produced by Salesforce.com itself. Like many free apps provided by Salesforce.com, this app seems to suffer from poor or out-of-date documentation and ‘blocker’ bugs, for which the community has to find workarounds. With a 3.4 rating, there is obviously room for a third party developer to come up with something better. The Salesforce.com app allows the user to manage Facebook and Twitter from inside of Salesforce.com. LinkedIn comes in as the second most popular social networking app. The LinkedIn app gives the end-user access to LinkedIn Contact information from inside Salesforce.com based on email address matching between the two clouds. This app is also poorly rated at 3.4 and surprisingly expensive at $39.95 per user per month. The best social network app is from Fliptop. It shows whether or not a contact has accounts at three social networking sites – Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – from inside a Salesforce.com record. Fliptop is free and appears to be a lead generation tool for the company’s commercial products. Social network integrators are listed on the AppExchange under the Category (Sales) and the Sub-Category (Sales Intelligence).
About the Author: Alison Sribnik
Alison is a Principal at Full Throttle Consulting, a Salesforce.com consulting firm located in Scarsdale, New York. She began her career in sales and IT working for Northrop Grumman’s commercial IT sales division. She then took her people skills, computer expertise and Fortune 500 experience and helped grow the sales divisions of start-up companies in the high tech industry, selling to Fortune 1000 companies. In that capacity, she became an expert in Salesforce.com and was certified as a Salesforce.com Certified Administrator. Alison then brought this expertise and experience to Full Throttle Consulting, where she is a trusted adviser to small-medium sized businesses implementing Salesforce.com and the apps that extend its value to social networking, email integration, and web site lead capture.