Top 5 Reasons to Move From Your Custom Build to an AppExchange Solution
It might be time for you to switch from your custom build on Salesforce to an AppExchange solution. Read on to find out why.
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CHAPTER 1
Maintenance
1. Maintenance
Maintaining and documenting a custom developed solution is expensive. Even if it seems cheaper at first, there’s other hidden costs you might not appreciate.
With any custom build, time and money is being diverted from your company’s core objective. Resources that could have been better spent on a SaaS solution vendor’s specialist tool.
Why give your competitors an advantage?
Even if your maintenance costs are low, your business is still losing money because your ‘Build’ is not being enhanced, while your competitors are using a purchased solution from a vendor that goes through multiple feature releases a year.
The end result? Added value to your competitors with each release, all while your custom build remains untouched, or gets reactively changed as you scramble to make up for lost ground.
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CHAPTER 2
Shared Best Practices
2. Shared Best Practices
With so many apps on the AppExchange, there’s something for almost any business requirement. And one of the best things about choosing a respected vendor’s SaaS solution is that you may benefit from thousands of other companies’ best practices.
Trust the experts – this is their full-time job!
It takes specific knowledge and abilities to design an expandable, performant solution. Take stock of your organization’s skills for leading strategy and implementation, as well as continuous commerce product and feature modifications.
Custom build solutions are often an afterthought, or at least ‘just another’ project for someone to manage internally. Can your organization compete with a solution that has been created by experts in their field?
Many AppExchange solutions are built on the Salesforce platform, allowing your company to benefit from Salesforce’s cloud-based CRM’s holistic customer view and robust data, ensuring more informed customer interactions, excellent technical support, and scalability.
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CHAPTER 3
Risk Management
3. Risk Management
The detailed knowledge of your custom-built tool is often held by a limited group of employees in your company and is rarely extensively documented. So, what happens if one of those essential employees leaves to work for a competitor?
You’re left with a mission-critical tool that you can’t improve, and you might not be able to fix it if something goes wrong. Worse, because your own tool never improves over time, adoption in your team plummets, ultimately costing you far more than switching to a current vendor-based solution would.
Legacy knowledge for a legacy solution
Consider how much technical support you have on staff. Do they have the time and resources to devote to the creation and ongoing maintenance of your company’s platform, such as software updates and bug fixes?
High developer turnover is common in IT departments, making it difficult to maintain the required level of support and jeopardising the custom-built solution. Internal developers, on the other hand, aren’t required when you buy a purpose-built solution, which eliminates the danger of churn.
CHAPTER 4
Opportunity Cost
4. Opportunity Cost
Because technology is constantly evolving, a vendor’s SaaS solution’s very existence and prosperity is dependent on them inventing and adding best-of-breed technological R&D into their solution, which your team benefits from on a daily basis.
When you rely on a custom-built solution, however, the reality is that continuous enhancement to your custom tool is rarely a business priority, which means your team is trapped in the past, using outdated interfaces, and missing out on the most efficient ways to get things done.
Purpose-built solutions provide more robust functionality, faster implementation timeframes, reduced development and maintenance costs, and less disturbance to internal operations, all of which contribute to a higher and faster return on investment. And that’s before you consider the up-to-date functionality which will come as standard.
Take advantage of expert teams
Developing an advanced project management solution necessitates highly specialised knowledge.
Internal resource that understands and can execute on the full commerce environment is essential for a custom-built approach. When you purchase a purpose-built solution, you are purchasing a fully-staffed development team to implement, support, and manage your solution.
Within the Salesforce ecosystem, purpose-built solutions will ensure that your company gets the most out of its investments. You can keep focusing on your primary revenue-generating activities while benefiting from e SaaS solution’s already-live features in a significantly shorter time frame. It’s a win-win!
CHAPTER 5
Hot Hand Fallacy
5. Hot Hand Fallacy
The hot hand fallacy is the theory that a person who has a successful outcome has a higher likelihood of success in subsequent tries, such as shooting baskets in a basketball game, but this is not supported by science.
Companies that use a custom-developed tool are frequently in the same boat. Some stakeholders get enamoured with the present tool, perhaps due to sunk expenses, rather than considering the entire value that a vendor’s high-quality SaaS solution can provide to the company.
Software is never ‘finished’
Software is always being updated, upgraded and improved. Do you really have the resources and time to put into continually developing a new application?
Every year, Salesforce issues multiple updates that will impact your custom code. To reduce disruption, AppExchange vendor solutions are tested and updated in advance of these releases.
It’s crucial to think about these changes, the people who worked on them, and how they’ll be maintained in the future. If you don’t have the time to devote to updating a bespoke application with new releases on a regular basis, you should look for a solution in the AppExchange.
CHAPTER 6
Conclusion
Still considering a bespoke build?
Remember to consider both the short and long term by assessing the current issues you face, as well as how your customer, business, and market needs are likely to develop over time. Will your custom build solution meet your requirements today? And tomorrow? Are you able to swiftly and easily update your platform if necessary?
If the answer to any of these questions isn’t an emphatic ‘yes’, then it might be time to move away from your custom build solution.
There’s also a great Buy or Build guide available at Projects on Salesforce to help you decide what makes the most sense for your organization.
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