This blog was originally posted on blogs.salesforce.com by Matt Wolf. You can follow Salesforce on twitter at @salesforce. 
Have you ever noticed how efficiency and communications can break down in the summer when everyone is on vacation? Business inevitably slows when you have to pinch-hit for a vacationing colleague who left you to fill in. But, if you use apps from the AppExchange, covering when others are out of office can be stress-free because all of the tools and information you need are easily accessible in the cloud.
Apps from veteran AppExchange partner BigMachines take the headaches out of creating accurate quotes from contracts no matter how complex they are or who is out on vacation. Instead of using numerous, distinct, and outdated spreadsheets to configure products, pricing, and discounting rules manually, leverage BigMachines' on-demand cloud app to synthesize inputs and create and manage all your product configuration, pricing and quoting needs easily. Quotes generated by BigMcahines are developed faster and are accurate 100% of the time. BigMachines extends CRM capabilities to streamline the entire opportunity-to-quote-to-order process, and their platform has been built for rapid on-demand deployment using the familiar salesforce.com CRM interface. BigMachines is an AppExchange customer favorite. It has won AppExchange "Customer Choice" award for Pricing and Quoting five years in a row. BigMachines provides powerful CPQ capabilities to make Salesforce work harder for you including:
- Guided selling and proposal generation
- Product configuration
- Quoting, with links to automated pipeline forecast
- Complex pricing and discounting
And, if you are a growing, mid-sized business, check out BigMachines' 100% native Force.com CPQ solution, BigMachines Express. It's simple, fast, and familiar!
Sometimes when someone is out of office, the one who suffers is the customer. With Five9, you won't have to worry about that. Five9 improves your communications with customers and prospects bringing you advanced capabilities to maximize employee productivity. Adding Five9's integrated voice to your Salesforce email, chat, and social channels will help you relax this summer. Five9 will provide a unified experience for consumers during the moments that matter even when team members are out of the office. This means you do business right, even when someone is at the beach - even if that someone is you. The Five9 Virtual Contact Center offers the reliability of an enterprise-class solution, the business flexibility of the cloud, and advanced technology including:
- Inbound interactive voice response (IVR), automatic call distribution (ACD), and computer-telephony integration (CTI)
- Outbound predictive, power, progressive, and preview dialer
- Automated inbound and outbound blending
- Workforce optimization (WFO) tools
When someone is out of office, it often means their projects get put on hold. Not so if you have stellar project management.Milestones PM by Salesforce Labs give you just that for free. One of our most popular project management tools, Milestones PM makes it easy to manage projects and tasks seamlessly even when someone is out. Track projects, milestones, tasks, blocked tasks, overdue tasks, time and expense budgets and whole lot more. Milestone PM has a simple interface, Chatter integration and detailed reporting capabilities including:
- Gantt charts with tasks and milestone drag functionality
- One line task creation
- Email integration with comment threading and attachment handling
- Template creation, export and import
- Reports and dashboards
Manage your workload more efficiently this season with these useful apps from the Salesforce AppExchange. We guarantee they will free you up to enjoy more of your favorite summertime activities! Download our free ebook, The Six Key Elements of Addictive Apps, and learn more about how to build great apps for your business.
Have you ever noticed how efficiency and communications can break down in the summer when everyone is on vacation? Business inevitably slows when you have to pinch-hit for a vacationing colleague who left you to fill in. But, if you use apps from the AppExchange, covering when others are out of office can be stress-free because all of the tools and information you need are easily accessible in the cloud.
