Whether you are a first-time founder of a startup or a serial entrepreneur, if you are here, it’s quite clear that you are hunting for ideas for your next venture, ideas that will be beneficial for your business in the long run. Here’s one for you, create an app for AppExchange, the marketplace for all third-party apps that integrate into the Salesforce platform. Salesforce is the fastest-growing saas-based CRM with over 3600 apps present on AppExchange, that are installed to enhance different operations on Salesforce, all you need is the idea, on which you can build your app. You can base your idea on the number of useful categories such as sales, IT and administration, customer service, marketing, and many more.

If you are a startup or new to this whole Salesforce experience, then we aim to make this process easier for you. We understand that coming up with fresh ideas for a Salesforce ecosystem that is prominent, intuitive and has practical implementation is a lot at this stage. Since you are looking for ideas and obviously interested in Salesforce, here are ten you can use to build custom Salesforce apps around.

IT and Administration Apps

• Automation App

Building an automation app for taking care of repetitive and routine tasks can be a perfect solution for saving up the time and effort of a company. It will automate all the tedious tasks into the workflow by copying and moving data for users. You can add the support for integration to most used web apps such as Google sheets, Gravity forms, Evernote, Gmail, Mailchimp, Wufoo, etc. So users can connect Salesforce to these web apps they use and automate their common tasks in the pipeline. 

• Data Backup and Recovery App

No company that is dealing with a cloud-based CRM would want to lose their data.  A user-inflicted data loss due to user error or malicious intent isn’t covered by Salesforce’s service-level agreement. In Fact, an official Salesforce help page recommends using AppExchange backup solutions.   

A data backup and recovery app can come in handy in providing automatic daily backups, comparing, recovering, and replicating the user’s Salesforce data. Making the app capable of restoring data and metadata at any level of granularity will be a huge benefit. Additionally, your app should be able to replicate dev orgs for anonymized data testing, development, quality assurance, and user acceptance testing.

Marketing App 

• Email Marketing & Mass Email App

An email marketing app will sync data and contacts on the Salesforce platform with the app for seamless and targeted email marketing. It could help in keeping a customer’s preferences up to date by automatically managing subscriber opt-out. Few features that will make an email marketing app whole are:

• Managing email opt-in and opt-out settings
• Using steps to subscribe or unsubscribe contacts and leads from lists automatically
• Managing storage of data and information on Salesforce 
• Viewing and tracking email statistics directly within Salesforce

Sales Apps 

• Lead Assignment and Routing App

A fast and accurate lead assignment is essential for boosting up conversion rates of any company. One can make the most of their valuable leads by assigning them to the right reps. Building an app around the idea of automating lead assignment and territory assignment for any sales model can get you the start you need. You can implement Round Robin and Load Balancing architecture into the app so users could distribute leads fairly and efficiently. 

Account-based marketing is another feature that could be incorporated into a sales app to match leads to existing accounts or contacts based on the company name, email domain, location, or other fields. For routing features, a geo-based and skills-based routing can be added right into the app’s environment so that it can send leads to team members with the right set of language skills and area codes. 

• Document Generation and E-Signature App

A document generation app could be a lifesaver for users who don’t want their files and documents outside the Salesforce cloud. With a dedicated app for document creation, one can securely automate document generation and delivery within the platform. Users could conveniently create and share documents like quotes, invoices, proposals, statements, account summaries, contracts,  and reports. You can also add support for e-signature so a company can let its customers electrically sign forms and e-docs. Some of the advanced capabilities that will refine the capabilities of the document generation app are:

• Support for both standard and custom object
• Classic as well as Lightning ready
• Point and click template editor for non-programmers
• Salesforce1 and chatter integrations

Collaboration App 

• Project Management App

A highly customizable project management software that tracks the status of programs, projects, milestones, tasks, and reports can be a highly useful app for a company’s CRM.  It will simplify project and task management while eliminating the repetitive manual process. Users can create a project template for various project types and import those templates later for automatically creating projects in Salesforce. You can add features like Gantt charts, project calendars, and scheduling of milestones and tasks for keeping track of a project. 

Human Resource App 

• Recruitment App 

A recruitment tool is a crucial app to help recruiters and hiring managers of a company. It will let them track their company's job postings on employment websites and evaluate job applications. It will also work as a platform to track available jobs, candidates, their work experience, preferences, and comments from interviewers all in one place. Another task it could do is automatically analyze a candidate's demographics to determine the recruiting pattern of the new hire. Monitoring the job seekers who have applied for open positions in the company, and determining their current status will get easier with an automatic recruitment tool.

Customer Service App 

• Telephonic App

A Telephonic app for Salesforce allows companies to connect their CRM and cloud-based business communications seamlessly. The sales teams and call-centre agents can make inbound and outbound calls directly from Salesforce dashboard with click-to-dial on leads, contacts, or account records. The app’s integration with Salesforce CRM can provide users with features like automatic call logging, call scheduling, and real-time analytics. Whenever the team receives an incoming call, they can see the caller’s account information to get a quick 360 view on incoming callers. This will improve customer communication and retention, workforce productivity, and call efficiency.

Finance App 

• Time and Expense App

A simple cloud-based time tracking tool for employees and contractors can make a useful app for businesses. It will allow them to keep their data well organized for payroll, expense tracking and billing purposes. A time tracking tool will be capable of tracking both billable and payroll time seamlessly and simultaneously. This way employees could track their time from any computer or mobile device, they can also track their expenses and upload the receipts directly from their phones. The recorded data can further be exported to Quickbooks, their accounting platforms, and in spreadsheets.

Analytics App 

•  Data Management App

A data management app can create a productive workforce and drive growth across an organization by efficiently managing their Salesforce data in one place. Users can view and update their data on the dashboards with an easy and customizable grid interface. The features like inline editing, multi-tab grids, and mass updates, just like in a spreadsheet, can be added into it. One can use conditional formatting for quick visual interpretation of data and to drive behaviours. Cleaner management of data improves efficiency, pipeline management & insight through analytics.

With the help of this well researched and curated list of ideas for Salesforce apps from every category and a reliable Salesforce consulting company, you don't have to look anywhere else. For now, you can move forward with these ideas and start working on one that resonates with you the most.  Any app you develop should help an organization to navigate through Salesforce while improving elements like workflows, data management, reporting, hiring, and projections. You also have to make sure that your app supports both versions of Salesforce, i.e. Classic and Lightning. 

Based on your app features and needs, many such things have to be kept into consideration before jumping into the development phase. Evon has played an important role in customizing Salesforce apps to provide tailor-made solutions and meet a company's needs. With our Salesforce development services in India, we have consulted many businesses with their app projects. Therefore, we will take you up on your project ideas as well and help you build a custom app for Salesforce in every step of the way. Reach us out today to get assistance on your Salesforce app-related needs and queries.