Tour Solutions by Type
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Differentiate between AppExchange solution types.
- Identify use cases for each solution type.
Follow Along with Trail Together
Want to follow along with an expert as you work through this step? Take a look at this video, part of the Trail Together series.
(This clip starts at the 16:59 minute mark, in case you want to rewind and watch the beginning of the step again.)
Solutions by Type
The Solutions by Type section shows you solutions filtered by type.
There’s a Type for Every Challenge
Let’s look at how you can use each of the different types to solve real-world business challenges.
Ursa Major Solar’s business has gone through the roof, or—as its Chief Operating Officer (COO) Roberto jokes—on top of it.
He compiled a list of tasks that Ursa Major employees currently complete outside of Salesforce. He’s asked Maria, Ursa Major’s Salesforce admin, to find AppExchange solutions that allow employees to complete these tasks within Salesforce. Maria is ready to go.
Complete Tasks with Apps
First on the list is improving the sales contract workflow. Ursa Major’s sales team regularly sends contracts to customers to close deals. Multiple people need to sign the contracts. It’s not uncommon for Ursa Major to end up with several copies of a contract, none of which has all the required signatures.
Maria considers this problem. She’d like to solve it with a fully baked, ready-to-install solution that sends a contract to stakeholders, collects signatures, and tracks approvals. Last year, Maria installed an app that generates sales contracts from within Salesforce. The same partner also offers an app that automates the contract approval process.
Maria quickly gets Ursa Major up and running with the contract approval app. Now, sending a contract, collecting signatures, and tracking approvals are automated and integrated within Ursa Major’s Salesforce workflow.
Plug-in Components
Next up, some help for Ursa Major account executives (AEs). Currently, AEs use an external calendar that displays alerts when it’s time to contact an account. They like how prominent the calendar alerts are, but dislike having to leave the Salesforce interface to review them. Maria suspects she can resolve this complaint with a component.
Components are compact, configurable, and reusable elements that can be packaged into an app or other solution type, or added to a web page. Components make it easy to plug in small features, screen elements, or functions to existing systems.
Maria searches for and finds a component that adds an alert message to a page. She adds it to the account record page, no coding required. Then, she configures it to display a message on the account record page when a follow-up date is approaching.
As a result of this relatively small change, AEs are connecting with customers more frequently and Ursa Major Solar sees a bump in client retention.
Bolt Ahead in Your Industry
Maria’s on a roll. She decides to tackle one of Roberto’s bigger requests.
Ursa Major Solar is growing and hiring. The team that staffs the employee support desk is fielding twice as many help requests as they did last year. To reduce the support team’s workload, Maria looks to implement a self-service employee support ticket creation and tracking portal that integrates with Salesforce cases. In the support world, a case is a question, feedback, or issue. Support agents review cases to see how they can deliver better service to employees.
To achieve this goal, Ursa Major must replace their legacy help desk software with a solution that integrates with Salesforce. Maria searches AppExchange and comes across a Bolt solution that provides an easy-to-use, transparent help center ticketing system that integrates with Salesforce cases. It’s a soup-to-nuts solution with themed web pages, business logic, and workflow built in.
From the AppExchange solution listing, Maria connects with the Salesforce partner that created the Bolt solution. With the partner’s help, Maria tests, installs, and customizes the Bolt solution to meet Ursa Major’s needs. Employees can now get the help they need faster than ever and the support team has more time to work on strategic initiatives.
With internal support issues resolved, Maria is ready to take on another challenge.
Enrich Your Data
To find new customers and support existing ones, Ursa Major Solar’s sales and marketing teams rely heavily on CRM and third-party data. Clean, up-to-date data is critical to the company’s success. Yet Ursa Major struggles with managing data quality and availability.
The company currently relies on a simple data loader that imports data files into Salesforce. It’s an unsophisticated process that works, but just barely. There are troublesome side effects, such as duplicate, incomplete, and out-of-date data. It comes as no surprise to Maria that Roberto’s wish list includes a request for a smarter data solution.
Maria browses Lightning Data solutions on AppExchange and selects one from a niche vendor. It’s a data integrity package that has third-party, industry-specific data subsets that can clean up, verify, and augment Ursa’s current data.
Lightning Data solutions are easy to deploy and integrate with clicks, not code. Maria sets it up faster than Roberto can say photovoltaic.
Now data updates automatically and continuously. Ursa Major’s sales and marketing teams use the enriched data in custom reports and dashboards, giving them a wider view of customers and prospects.
Go with the Flow
There’s no stopping Maria now. She’s about to help the folks in the finance department onboard new accounts. Roberto, Ursa Major’s COO, brings her up to speed on the request.
Before a deal closes, finance runs a credit check and kicks off a predefined series of steps to set up the customer account for billing. Some of this process is automated; some is manual.
Roberto, given the company's recent investment in a new sales and distribution center, envisions a fully automated solution. Yet, the reality is that delivering a seamless, automated process is difficult. First you have to integrate systems of data. Then you have to build the process logic. To top it off, you have to build a beautiful user experience.
When Maria hears process automation, her first thought is flow solution. She considers using Flow Builder to create a flow from scratch. But the onboarding process she needs to automate is complex. To reduce costs, Maria would prefer to use a prebuilt solution that can be quickly customized to meet Ursa Major’s needs. She’s counting on solving this problem with a flow template.
Maria finds the perfect flow template solution on AppExchange: It’s a complete flow that uses a third-party app to run a credit check, pulls the results back into Salesforce, and stores billing info.
Maria installs the template in a sandbox, saves the template as her own flow, then customizes it to meet Ursa Major’s business needs. She tweaks the logic, adds a flow action, and activates the flow. Roberto is thrilled, and she checks the last task off her list.
Now it’s your turn to install and configure an AppExchange solution.
