Increase the value of your Salesforce investment

May 5, 2022 6 minute read

Team Upland

Leverage AppExchange to meet your unique business needs

Written by Jim Rudden, Chief Marketing Officer

Salesforce is rightly praised as the company that led the migration of business applications to the cloud. Starting in 1999, there was a new way to run your business applications – no disks and CDs, no servers required. Sign up, log in, and start doing work. We all now live in the business applications world that Salesforce imagined 23 years ago. But there was an equally groundbreaking innovation that Salesforce introduced seven years later in 2006 – the Salesforce AppExchange. Two years before the world would learn about Apple’s App Store for the iPhone, Salesforce introduced a marketplace where you could select trusted, compatible applications to extend the Salesforce platform. The simplicity was revolutionary. It must have left an impression, because the AppExchange is widely rumored to have been a strong influence on Steve Jobs and the Apple team as they conceived of and launched the App Store for iPhone in 2008.

Upland was an early believer and advocate for the Salesforce AppExchange. In fact, two of our products, Altify and Qvidian, were among the first apps available at the launch of the AppExchange in 2006. Sixteen years later, we remain a big believer that the best way to meet your specific business process needs on the Salesforce platform is to find a great app in the AppExchange. For iPhone users, the App Store provides a great comparison – or Google Play if you are an Android user. Everyone understands today that each of us will install third party applications on our phones for our specific needs and interests. The App Store and Google Play store give us the confidence that we can install any app, that it will work, and that it will extend the basic functionality that our phone provides. If you are not applying the same mindset to your Salesforce instance, then you are missing the opportunity to really tune the platform to your specific business processes.

That’s why every business leader should know about Upland because we’ve taken the guesswork out of optimizing your Salesforce instance for critical sales and customer experience processes. For sixteen years, our curated library of products has been delivering purpose-built capabilities to maximize the efficiency and impact of the Salesforce platform. When we ask our customers why they choose to extend Salesforce through products like ours in the AppExchange, we hear three common answers: specialized functionality, eliminating silos, and fast time to market.

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Evolve from organized to specialized

Salesforce is more than just a place to organize customer data and monitor activity. If configured correctly, it runs the core processes that drive your business – from selling to servicing customers. Often, these core processes need to be customized to meet your specific needs, and that is most typically where companies hit the limits of the core or base Salesforce platform capabilities. How do you push past those limits? Get the right add-on tools.

For example, let’s talk account planning. Upland’s Salesforce-native account planning tool helps orchestrate, track, and answer the key questions that drive any sales strategy: What will reps sell? To whom will they sell it? What is the right sequence of actions? We add unique capabilities to Salesforce that allows our customers to:

  • Uncover the “whitespace” in existing accounts
  • Gain insights into decision-makers and their business drivers
  • Map lines of influence within target accounts
  • Build opportunity plans that guide sellers and increase win probability

Short of looking over your sellers’ shoulders, the only way to ensure your sales teams stick to your unique sales strategy is to meet them where they are and surface timely guidance directly within Salesforce.


Upland Altify is a Salesforce-native application that allows sales leaders to ensure their entire sales team receives continual coaching that aligns with their organization’s sales strategy.

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The key here, of course, is that every business and thus, every sales organization, operates differently. The right product, like Upland Altify, allows you to deliver guidance personalized to your sales strategy directly to sales teams.

Remove lingering system and data silos

Beyond codifying methodologies, it’s also valuable to layer tools onto your Salesforce instance that make your teams more effective at what they already do.

Let’s take customer service calls. In an ideal world, every support call is:

  • Routed to the right agent
  • Resolved quickly (the first time!)
  • Personalized for the caller
  • Logged in a CRM

Often, the only thing holding most teams back from smooth sailing support is the gap between their CRM and their telephony infrastructure. Linking the two, with a CTI add-on, like Upland InGenius, can slash the amount of time agents spend on clicks and data entry, as well as give them customer insights and AI-generated coaching, all of which allows them to deliver the same quality help in far less time.


Upland InGenius connects your CRM and CTI to streamline contact center operations without sacrificing quality.

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By simply linking Salesforce with a business’ existing telephony infrastructure, we’ve seen enterprises increase their Net Promoter Scores by as much as 50%. These businesses didn’t overhaul their legacy systems or their support teams; they simply recognized that their Salesforce data could be seamlessly connected to their agents’ telephony-based workflows.

Fast time to market

We have a saying here at Upland: grow where you are planted. This applies to many areas, but when we are talking about a customer’s existing Salesforce instance, this means leveraging the solid, effective foundation you already have and elevating critical processes with applications that deliver the specialized functionality you need. Great AppExchange products plug right into your environment and should deliver fast time to market for the specialized capabilities you seek.

Of course, it’s easier said than done—or it would be if we at Upland hadn’t shouldered the burden of wading through the scores of available Salesforce apps for you. (The same goes for other foundational platforms like ServiceNow and Microsoft). Through the years, we’ve acquired and standardized a select list of proven products specialized to the processes at your organization.

Each addition to our growing product library represents proven technology that has delivered real results for years. These tools aren’t speculative, experimental, or stand-alone. Each one fits seamlessly into your existing Salesforce environment with the goal of enhancing, not rewriting, your business strategies—and doing so fast. Plus, they are all Upland products, meaning there’s only one additional provider to do business with.

We have been here from the start.

We have believed in the AppExchange model from the start. If your team operates out of a strong Salesforce instance, you’re already primed to take the next step to see a greater return on your existing investment of time, resources, and hard work with native, proven apps that allow your business to stand apart. Just as you would customize your phone with applications based on your everyday needs, it’s time to do the same with your Salesforce instance. It’s as easy and uncomplicated as that. We are here to help.

Reliable products. Real results.

Every day, thousands of companies rely on Upland to get their jobs done simply and effectively. See how brands are putting Upland to work.

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