4 Tips to Shape Your AppExchange Strategy

For a decade, I’ve been working with a variety of sectors and companies in the Salesforce ecosystem. One constant is that customers extend the capabilities of the Salesforce platform using solutions from the AppExchange.

So what is the AppExchange, and how do you maximise your success using it? AppExchange is Salesforce’s business app marketplace that lets users extend their Salesforce functionality with 4,000 ready-to-install solutions, including apps, components, Bolt solutions, Lightning data, and Flow solutions for every department and industry, including sales, marketing, customer service, and more.

I position the AppExchange as the opportunity to broaden the capabilities of a Salesforce org without the costly and time-consuming process of custom building.

Companies who embrace what the AppExchange offers can deliver value and innovation on their Salesforce org quicker. But with such a wide range of choices and capabilities, using the AppExchange without a clear strategy can have the opposite effect.

Here are four approaches I have seen successful companies adopt as part of their AppExchange strategy.

1. Map Out Enterprise Capabilities

Mapping out your As Is and To Be capabilities helps you understand:

• What capabilities must be provisioned to serve my company’s business goals? For example, the need for electronic signature or self-registration of new customers
• Do my existing platforms provide that capability, or is this a gap to fill?
• How efficiently can I deliver these capabilities within my IT applications?

On the AppExchange, there are multi-faceted applications that deliver several capabilities. You may only need to negotiate and onboard one vendor to meet several capabilities, which translates to quicker time to value and maximising your ROI.

Fig 1: Capability Map. In this example, Compliance Lifecycle and Data Quality are gaps that could be met with a single AppExchange vendor.

Mapping out your capabilities and understanding your gaps enables informed conversations with your vendor portfolio on aligning roadmaps to your company’s needs.

2. Apply Proportionality

With many vendors and solutions, the depth and breadth of offerings on the AppExchange varies. When assessing the suitability of a solution, tailor your assessment framework according to its relative impact on your Salesforce org. Some areas to consider:

• Does the application have access to change my data on the Salesforce org?
• Does it process my data outside of the Salesforce org?
• Is the application managed or unmanaged?

As you answer these questions, a view forms on the critical services or data points this solution affects, influencing how you assess suitability. If you apply the maximum assessment criteria to each app you onboard, you risk losing the agility and delivery speed the AppExchange can deliver to your business.

Fig 2: Example assessment type decision tree.

3. Assess Compatibility

Not every solution has the goal of global compatibility. It may have been created for a specific use case within a particular geography.

When considering scalability, it helps to assess:

• What are the supported markets or geographies for the application?
• Does the application allow the use of standard Salesforce localisation tools like Translation Workbench?
• What are the case studies and references for the application? Are these for companies like yours, operating in similar markets?

While you should assess compatibility across your user base, don’t rule out an application because it only covers 60% of your geographies. If this helps increase your sales in these geographies, it’s a worthwhile investment.

Fig 3: The App has good coverage where the company earns the majority of its revenue; using this as the criteria rather than pure geographical coverage delivers high revenue uplift.

4. Bring Security On Board

Companies small and large list solutions on the AppExchange; you might be using a product from a multi-national corporation or a small business with five employees. You can’t expect every vendor you shortlist to have the resources to complete a 50-page Security questionnaire typically submitted for a standalone Enterprise application.

Bring your Security team on board early to agree on a tailored strategy according to the relative security implications. Some key considerations:

• Is the application 100% native?
• Is it publicly listed?
• Does it use standard Salesforce platform security features to provision access?

If the answer to questions such as these is ‘Yes,’ your original Security assessment of the Salesforce platform covers these parts, so a reduced Security assessment is more appropriate.

Conclusion

Deployment at speed is critical to serving customers in the timelines they expect. Solutions on the AppExchange are an opportunity for any company to optimise and innovate on their Salesforce org rapidly.

To maximise returns from your AppExchange investments, take the time to formulate your company’s AppExchange strategy. With your company’s full engagement and the breadth of the offers available, you can be successful.