This month's Voice of the Customer post comes from Jeff Grosse.  Jeff is a Senior Business Consultant and salesforce.com administrator at a non-profit health insurance provider.  He not only manages salesforce.com applications but he specializes in improving application usability and user adoption.  His company currently uses salesforce.com Unlimited Edition primarily for sales and marketing.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

While I've only been working at my current company for a short time, I've been working with salesforce.com for the past four years as a system administrator and in that time, I've developed a complete passion for cloud computing.  The primary reason I gravitate towards the cloud is speed to value.  I've seen more value derived from salesforce.com applications, faster than any packaged or custom application I've even seen; hands down.  Trained and skilled people in business units can customized and maintain their complex business processes in Salesforce with little or no IT involvement; freeing up resources in IT to accomplish other important company goals and projects.  

The way that I see these skilled business unit people customizing and making Salesforce their own is through some great apps available on the AppExchange.  Users don't have to be experts in development to improve the usability of Salesforce.  Here are a few examples:

1.  Salesforce International Mapping Using Google Maps
Though I've only dabbled in Visualforce so far, that doesn't stop me from providing huge value to my users.  This app is extremely easy to use, highly accurate, and helps people not only see where Accounts and Contacts are physically, it also helps them them get directions, right out of Google Maps, right in line with Salesforce using Visualforce components.  This is a high value, free application that users can really use, every day and in total, requires no more that 30 minutes to install, configure, and roll out.

2. Sales Clarity
There's information hidden in your Salesforce Opportunities.  Do you know where it is, what it is, how to aggregate it and how to help Sales Managers have the best, most productive pipeline review meetings they've ever had?   Sales Clarity knows.  If you haven't tried out Sales Clarity, you should look it over and see what you're missing.  One of the best features of Sales Clarity is the trial experience.   A sales manager can try it out, seeing his own team's data, safely and securely without any modifications to Salesforce or even an installation from the AppExchange.  Sales Clarity won the AppExchange "Best Apps of 2008" award in the category of "Best Sales Forecasting App."

3. Conga Merge
If you want to easily output Salesforce CRM data from a whole lot of objects into a custom template with a single click, you need to see what Conga Merge is all about.  I may still rank as the creator of the most elaborate Conga Merge template to date.  Using Conga Merge, I made it possible for account executives, in one click, to generate a sales review report PDF, log this as an activity on the opportunity, add it as a file attachment to the opportunity, and email it to their manager if they chose to do so.  Behind that single click, Conga Merge gathered the data of 27 different Salesforce reports (including 2000+ fields and their representative values), merged the data into a standardized template with a consistent corporate look and feel, and delivered it to the user with essentially no need for training.  The users got the data they needed consistently, and every sales manager was working off the same standardized, albeit complex report.  I call Conga Merge my "Easy button".  Conga Merge won the AppExchange "Best Apps of 2008" award in the category of "Best Document Management App".

Each of the apps above offers fantastic functionality to business users that just "plugs into" Salesforce and flat-out works.  No complex projects, servers, milestones or even a request for IT resources are needed to put them in place and begin delivering value.  Sure, if I had the time, resources, and motivation to build those apps myself I could do it, but I'd have ask myself, why?  They've done the work for me so I can look like a rock star. 

Jeff blogs about salesforce.com at http://crmfyi.com and created a Salesforce video portal called "The Salesforce Channel" at http://www.salesforcechannel.com/ .   You can also follow Jeff on Twitter at http://twitter.com/crmfyi.