Last Updated on March 15, 2023 by Rakesh Gupta
Over the last decade the Salesforce AppExchange has been widely successful due to its ability to help businesses drive success and growth. Today there are 6,000+ apps and consulting firms listed on the exchange. With so many great options available, identifying the right solution to fill a specific gap or challenge can be overwhelming and time consuming. But the complexity doesn’t stop there. Once you identify a short list of solutions, there are many considerations during the app evaluation process. What if the selected app works for business leadership, but doesn’t meet the needs of your security, compliance or development team?
It is safe to say that finding the right app for your needs can be time consuming, complex, and filled with risk, if the wrong solution is implemented. The InVisory marketplace was created to help solve for this challenge. By leveraging the marketplace, Salesforce users make better and more informed decisions to drive greater business value for their organization. Unlike other software review sites, InVisory is solely focused on the Salesforce ecosystem which allows for more nuanced evaluation (e.g., is the app native vs. non-native).
How does the InVisory marketplace work?
InVisory aims to help organizations more efficiently discover and select the most valuable apps and/or consultants for their specific business use case. They have developed several one-of-their kind tools to help you in your app selection and evaluation process
Discovering the Best Apps
Once you identify a pain-point or need in your organization the first step is often starts with searching out specific apps that solve for your use case. In the past, this involved seeking information from general software marketplaces, the AppExchange, referrals and other sources. Each of these sources have their own limitations from being too general, difficulty in finding specific solutions, biased recommendations and generally just being a time consuming process.
InVisory streamlines this process by helping you carry out your own research, providing recommendations based upon your interests and letting you pursue trending apps.
Conduct Your Own Research
Have a specific need and want to do your own research to identify the best apps? InVisory has simplified that process for you. You can use their guided search functionality. The editorial team has tagged all the 4,000+ apps with specific search terms. This ensures you find exactly what you’re looking for and points you in the right direction when you kind of know what you’re looking for, but don’t know the exact nomenclature.
They have also curated the solution categories to ensure only the most relevant apps surface. For instance if you search “Sales Intelligence” on the AppExchange over 450+ providers surface, but with the InVisory marketplace, they stratified the list to about 100 providers which offer strong capabilities in this area. These innovations ensure you find relevant solutions in a more timely fashion.
Receive Proactive Recommendations and Insights
Sometimes organizations may not even know that a game-changing app exists. To keep you informed, InVisory proactively surfaces solutions for you. For instance, based upon your profile information your homepage will display apps that could be useful for your organization. You’ll also keep up-to-date on trending apps, top scoring apps and more to ensure that your suite of Salesforce apps are having maximum impact.
Expedited evaluation process
Now that you’ve discovered or created a short list of apps the next step is to evaluate and identify the contenders. InVisory has you covered there. The InVisory score, a proprietary scoring algorithm, assesses all 4,000+ apps based upon 12 factors such as feature robustness, nativity to the salesforce platform, ease of integration, market sentiment and product innovation. Review the detailed profiles to assess other key features such as Lighting readiness, app limits, etc.
Connect with Peers with the Invisory Communities
Not considering purchasing a new app right now? Then check-out the InVisory Communities. Within the communities, members can post or contribute to various topics via a discussion board format. Members receive points for contributing, and can use those to win high-value rewards.
Where Do You Access the Marketplace?
Consider how we’d all like to have more hours in the day and how we are continually searching for ways to maximize our Salesforce investments. Also consider how invaluable impartial advice, like the InVisory Score, can be when making a purchase decision. This could be just the solution to maximize your impact and efficiency at your organization.
Making this all even better, the marketplace is free to join. There is nothing to lose, you can test drive it for yourself and incorporate it into your discovery and research efforts. Or if you’re looking for a neutral forum to ask Salesforce specific questions, post and review responses from the InVisory Community.
To join you simply have to create a brief profile at InVisory.
Author
Patrick Cronan is the founder and CEO of InVisory. Prior to founding InVisory, Patrick held leadership roles at Salesforce, Gartner, FiscalNote and Thomson Reuters. It was during his experience at Salesforce that Patrick came up with the idea for InVisory and launched the business.
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