Building your AppExchange Strategy with Connie Dea

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re speaking with Connie Dea, the Manager of Product Marketing for the AppExchange at Salesforce.

Join us to hear about how to develop an AppExchange strategy, manage things from the Lightning App Builder, and keep in the know with what’s going on with AppExchange.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Connie Dea.

The Rise of Appy

As the Product Marketing Manager on the AppExchange Team, Connie says that “I am purely focused on customers.” She needs to think through the strategy of what themes the team wants to highlight each quarter but also needs to get tactical in terms of actually executing those marketing plans.

Connie just recently celebrated her one year anniversary at Salesforce. Before that, she worked in a very different job as a consultant for financial services companies with Pricewaterhouse Coopers. “It was a great chance for me to master the skill of wearing different hats, which prepared me for Salesforce where there’s a lot of exciting things happening and we want to do it all at once.”

Before you ask, yes, Connie was involved with launching Appy. She’s been delighted by the response that they’ve gotten, and there’s more to come soon. As Connie put it, “Dreamforce is coming up in a couple months.” Stay tuned.

The Admin Batcave

As a Salesforce Admin, Mike liked to think of AppExchange as his Admin Batcave, “I could always go in and get some really cool apps, it really made me a rockstar in my organization.” From what Connie has seen, the community plays a major role in helping to propel people forward and put them in a position to learn and grow in their career.

Providing a light framework for how to be more thoughtful for picking the right AppExchange install to solve the business problems that you have at hand. “A lot of times an Admin’s job is to put out the fire that’s right in front of you, and so there’s time pressure to just pick something to solve it.”

With that in mind, Connie and Mike discussed how to develop an AppExchange strategy, touching back on the webinar they did earlier. The idea is to take a few steps back and think about some two key questions:

• What is the business challenge at hand?
• Who are the key people that you want to make sure are involved?

With that in mind, you can browse the over 3,000 apps that are on AppExchange and pick out some options. From there, Connie says that “one of the biggest things that we recommend as a part of this process is to install the app in a sandbox or developer org so you can see how the app will operate in your org without having to deploy it in production.” Once you have that running, go back to your business criteria and evaluate your options based on those requirements.

How to Stay Up-to-Date with AppExchange

There’s a lot of different ways to both get content that the AppExchange team has already produced and stay in know going forward. The easiest thing is to sign up for their newsletter, which you can do via a link on AppExchange.com. It’s a lightweight way to keep up-to-date with everything that’s going on.

If you’re looking to dig a little deeper, you’ll want to check out the AppExchange Content Collection at appExchangecontent.com. It’s the central place for all content, so there’s eBooks, blog posts, and even demo jam videos and recordings.

For more insights, make sure to follow Connie on Twitter (@ConnieDea11)

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