Top 8 Must-Have Salesforce Apps & Add Ons (2022)
- May 6, 2022
Salesforce is easily the most powerful enterprise CRM platform on the market and it has created an ecosystem of developers, agencies, add-ons, blogs, and resources designed to help to get the most out of it.
And did we mention that Salesforce doesn’t come cheap?
The average Salesforce deployment costs up to $100,000 and when you factor in implementation fees, training, salaries for Salesforce specialists, and recurring licensing fees, you’ll end up spending several tens of thousands on ongoing support every year going forward.
At that price point, you definitely want to get all your money’s worth out of your Salesforce investment. But there’s only so much you can do with a salesforce deployment by default.
If you want to further customize your organization’s Salesforce installation, Salesforce has an ecosystem of over 4,000 tools and third-party add-ons you can integrate with your build.
Salesforce integrations will help you integrate with the rest of your stack, channel Salesforce data to other tools automatically, automate sales tasks, and free up your SDRs to focus on closing deals and delighting customers.
So again, which one of those Salesforce add-ons should you invest in? How do you figure out the Salesforce integrations that can help you get the most out of the platform?
This article will help you understand:
- What types of Salesforce add-ons you should consider integrating with your deployment
- Whether you need a custom integration or if you can make do with existing add-ons, and
- The 8 best Salesforce add-ons for businesses looking to make the most of Salesforce
8 Best Salesforce Add-ons
- Whatfix
- MailChimp
- DocuSign
- Formstack
- Clearbit
- Pandadoc
- Dialpad
- Stripe
What Type of Salesforce Add-ons Do You Need?
The Salesforce Appexchange features 4,000 different extensions and CRM integrations designed to help you:
- Expand your Salesforce CRM’s functionality
- Integrate with the rest of your sales and marketing stack
- Streamlined the sales process, and ultimately
- Close more deals
Before you can achieve any of those targets, you need to figure out your strategy by asking questions like:
- What pain points am I trying to solve?
- What are my options?
- What existing tools can I integrate with?
- Do I need a development agency to build me a custom solution?
We’re going to break down eight different types of Salesforce add-ons you can integrate with your installation to get better outcomes.
1. Payments
According to research by Profitwell, close to 35% of all customers churn due to failed payments. If your SDRs currently have $1 million in deals in the pipeline, that means that roughly $350,000 will fall through because of failed payments.
That can be at the point when they’re trying to charge a card that gets rejected or when you can’t find a payment channel that works for a customer after closing the deal.
Integrating with payment gateways like Stripe, Paypal, and Square simplifies the payment process and makes it easy to accept multiple payment types (credit and debit cards, ACH, Venmo, etc.), optimize the checkout experience, reduce churn, and delight your customers with a reliable fulfillment workflow.
2. Email management and productivity
According to a report by McKinsey, knowledge workers (salespeople included) spend 2 hours daily working on email. That’s roughly 25% of their productive time or nearly 63 days (working Monday to Friday, 250 days a year) spent on email.
Imagine how much more sales your SDRs and AEs can bring in if they could spend less time on email and focus on sharing your product with potential customers?
Tools like Cirrus Insights can integrate with your inbox and make email conversations happen inside Salesforce so your SDRs can spend less time jumping from email and back to Salesforce.
3. Data entry and document automation
Data entry is the most-hated professional task & yet 71% of salespeople report that they waste considerable time manually copying and pasting data.
Salesforce Appexchange features integrations with tools like Conga Composer and FormAssembly that are designed to help your SDRs collect sales data quickly, store it automatically in your CRM, and finally do away with manual copying and pasting.
4. Telephony & SMS
In a world where email marketing gets all the credit, it’s easy to forget that SMS gets open rates of up to 99% — with 97% of those within ten minutes, compared with just 20.9% for email campaigns.
Integrations with text messaging and telephony software like Aircall, Dialpad, and Twilio will help you engage prospects at scale, initiate conversations quickly and close deals faster.
5. Lead generation and contact enrichment
A lot of work happens behind the scenes before SDRs initiate a conversation with a prospect. You have to research potential leads, collect their details into a database, and use enrichment tools to make up for the data you couldn’t find.
Lead generation and enrichment tools like Clearbit, Crunchbase, and Zoominfo are designed to enrich your database with contact emails, phone numbers, job titles, company revenue, and several other tidbits that’ll help you make a stronger impression when you’re closing the sale.
6. Chatbots
Chatbot platforms can boost engagement and conversions by initiating conversations at the right moment. Research suggests that having a chatbot installed on your website can increase conversions anywhere from 10 – 100%.
Appexchange integrations with tools like Drift and Intercom take it further by helping you engage prospects and customers through chat, email, and video without leaving Salesforce.
7. Email marketing tools
Email may be old, but it’s a reliable engagement channel that promises open rates of up to 20.9% on average. Integration with email marketing platforms like Mailchimp will help you send mass campaigns, track open rates, and CRM workflows to schedule emails when conditions are met.
8. Form builders
Whether you’re collecting signups to your newsletter from your website, or leads via a contact page, you need a form builder to automate all that work. Form builders like Formstack & Typeform will help you create forms right inside Salesforce and collect the data submitted into your database.
4 Benefits of Using Salesforce Add-ons
Appexchange add-ons are designed to help users get the most out of the Salesforce ecosystem by bringing the functionality you already use in the rest of your tool stack into Salesforce so you can work faster and more efficiently.
1. Expand Salesforce functionality
On its own, Salesforce is a powerful platform. But you’ll find that your sales team is severely limited if you depend on Salesforce alone to help you manage your sales process. Third-party add-ons are built by companies whose users already love their product and want to see some of their functionality inside the Salesforce ecosystem.
As a result, when you’re using a Salesforce extension, you’re using a product existing users have found useful enough to integrate into their day-to-day workflows.
2. Manage all your work inside Salesforce
Jumping through apps and tools can limit your focus and reduce the time your SDRs need to focus on closing deals. Salesforce add-ons connect third-party apps with your Salesforce dashboard and database so that you can use them right inside Salesforce without moving back and forth manually.
3. Close deals faster
When you can reduce the time spent going back and forth between apps, your sales team ends up with more time for closing deals. Salesforce integrations can help you enrich contacts, send them emails and texts when they’re most responsive, offer custom discounts, and engage them more actively than let’s say, via email or phone alone.
4. Store all your data inside one source of truth
It’s not unheard of for SDRs to have dozens of spreadsheets where each one stores some obscure contact list, and tracks conversations, leads, or deals. When sales data is all over the place, opportunities fall through the cracks and your team can’t communicate effectively.
Salesforce add-ons can help you bring data from different sources (web form submissions, third-party applications, lead generation, spreadsheets, etc.) into your database to serve as one source of truth where your entire team can work together with maximum visibility.
8 Best Salesforce Appexchange Add-ons
The Salesforce add-ons you need will change per time, depending on what phase you’re at, the problem you’re trying to solve, and the size of your organization. This is why we started with sharing the different kinds of solutions available before listing out the products that can make it happen for you.
Here, we’ll break down 8 of the best Salesforce Appexchange solutions by pricing, functionality, and how much they can help optimize your sales process.
1. Whatfix
Pricing: Get a custom quote for your team’s needs
Companies spend 12 weeks on average choosing a new CRM— if you’re looking to invest in an enterprise CRM like Salesforce, you might spend longer deciding which solution to invest in. Then you hire an implementation partner that spends weeks cleaning and migrating your data, building custom applications for you, and training their SDRs and AEs to use Salesforce.
Good to go, right? Well, not exactly.
With all you’ve spent on Salesforce, you realize you have another interesting problem: after the initial on-site coaching, your SDRs and AEs are still not finding their way around Salesforce (at least, as quickly as you expect).
During that learning curve, sales drop as your SDRs struggle to meet quota.
That’s what Whatfix is designed to fix.
Whatfix is a guided onboarding solution that speeds up adoption by coaching your SDRs and AEs to use Salesforce better — in real-time.
Instead of having your team spend hours plowing through Salesforce support documentation, Whatfix provides contextual assistance that provides help with whatever a user is doing with Salesforce at the moment.
2. MailChimp
Pricing: Free (Mailchimp); $39 per company per month for ChimpConnect
Mailchimp is a marketing platform designed for all things email: newsletters, product updates, receipts, etc. When you connect MailChimp with Salesforce, amazing things happen. Using Mailchimp, you can:
- Create custom workflows inside your CRM that email leads (with offers, updates, reminders) when they carry out certain actions
- Track open rates,
- Engage leads at scale, and
- Spend less time in your inbox
MailChimp is the simplest email marketing solution for sales teams looking to spend less time on email and more on selling.
3. DocuSign
Pricing: $20 – $60 per user, per month
DocuSign helps you close deals faster with simple, legally-binding signatures your contacts can access on any device. You can use DocuSign to send, sign, and track contracts and agreements without leaving Salesforce.
4. Formstack
Pricing: $92 per user per month; Formstack Documents: $225 per company per month
You can use Formstack to create and host forms, both on your website or for collecting more information from particular prospects. Formstack’s native integration with Salesforce means any data you collect comes to live inside your CRM and you don’t have to manually copy and paste it.
5. Clearbit
Pricing: $18,000 per company, per year
When prospects submit their email addresses and domain names, Clearbit enriches their profile with more information such as names, title, role, seniority, industry, company employee count, funding, and revenue, etc.
What’s more, you can use Clearbit to find new prospects inside Salesforce by picking filters that match your existing prospects.
6. Pandadoc
Pricing: $10 per user, per month
Using Pandadoc, you can generate documents, contracts, and agreements with custom fields, approval workflows, and document analytics that show who’s viewed your proposals, etc. Pandadoc comes equipped with e-signature functionality for easy signing.
7. Dialpad
Pricing: $25 per user, per month
Switching across apps can be a focus killer and Dialpad aims to stop that. Dialpad is an online telephone and their Salesforce plugin helps your agents call, record, transcribe, and summarize calls from the Salesforce dashboard.
8. Stripe
Pricing: $1 per user (one-time)
Stripe’s payments integration is designed to help salespeople capture payments from customers across 135 countries, reduce processing fees, and eliminate FX fees with dynamic currency conversion that works for your customers whether they’re based in San Francisco or Lisbon.
An investment in Salesforce can be substantial but it easily returns a 300 – 500% ROI over four years, along with lower IT costs, fewer emails clogging your SDRs’ inboxes, and 25% fewer personal meetings.
Yet, choosing the Salesforce platform is only half the battle. You can only make the most of the functionality Salesforce offers if you can train your sales team to understand how the platform works and start using it for their entire sales process.
Whatfix offers real-time coaching that helps your sales reps understand and use Salesforce more efficiently by offering tips, guides, and feedback inside the dashboard —right when you need it.
Learn how Whatfix can increase your sales team’s productivity with a guided adoption platform designed around your needs.
Request a demo to see how Whatfix empowers organizations to improve end-user adoption and provide on-demand customer support
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