C5 Insight: Salesforce

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Sat, 26 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Available 24/7, watch on-demand events about Microsoft SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, and Salesforce at C5Tube.com and check successaccelerators.com often for updated events and webcasts.

Application Data Integration – Part Three, Timing and the Rules

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:00:00 +0000

This is my third blog in a series concerning data integration. In my first two blog entries we overviewed some of the data integration hurdles as well as some of the common methods used to discover the net-change data that will need to be translated. Here in my third blog I’ll discuss some of the benefits of not integrating in real-time, but creating a batch job to perform the integration. We’ll also look at the Business Rules that may need to be applied within the integration process.

They say ‘timing is everything’. I don’t necessarily agree that it’s everything, but it is an important ingredient in the design of your integration. It’s always my first reaction to go ‘real-time’ with an integration project. Scoping and requirements gathering will then bring me to a place where a part of the integration may not work designed to run as real-time. Every business is built on processes that serve them well, or at least served them well back in the day. There are times when transaction volume will preclude using real-time methods for translation. Running the process, because of the volume, may have such an impact on the system, that user can not tolerate the sluggishness of the system during business hours. Perhaps there is a business process that does not make data available until after business hours. There can be any number of business process scenarios that would dictate utilizing a batch integration process rather than a real-time integration process.

Business processes are not the only consideration when designing your integration. The environment, and specifically the hardware that the integrated systems reside on, can play a key role in determining the integration process to use. For example, if your integration design requires polling a record set for the net-change data, that polling can effect performance. But to a greater extent, the record set that is returned will typically populate any RAM that is available, and if there is not enough RAM to hold the entire return record set, then it will occupy static drive space. Depending on how large the net-change record set is, that’s been returned, stealing all available RAM can seriously impact performance of the system. Conversely, you may have designed a multi-threaded integration process, such as utilizing a message queue as a pickup point for the extracted net- change data. Where running a multi-threaded process, you are able to translation a larger volume of data in a shorter period of time, but, that process will be very CPU intensive.

So, when developing your integration design, keep in mind that batch processing is memory intensive and multi-threaded processes are CPU intensive. Depending on the environment you’re working in, you may have the inclination to build one type of integration process, but the impact of that process would be too costly in terms of system performance and end-user satisfaction.

Ok, so you have one part of your integration setup, great. You’re integrating customers from your CRM system to your ERP system, fantastic. You turn on the integration, and not too long afterward, folks from the finance group are complaining that there are customers in ERP that don’t belong in the system. “What’d?, you say. I thought you wanted customers integrated in both system?”. The response from finance is that some of these aren’t customers, they are only prospects. Ah, so not all customers are the same in the CRM system.

This is a very typical scenario. The CRM system breaks down ‘customers’ into different customer types. Only ‘customers’ that have actually bought something are to be integrated into the ERP system. So, you need to be able to filter records in order to meet the requirements of this business rule . That filtering can take place in two different places, a) at the time of discovery of the net-change data or, b) during the translation process of the net-change data. If you have used a query to discover the net-change data, you may only need to add something to the WHERE clause of the query, to ensure that only records that meet the business rule criteria are discovered. If the application has it’s own net-change method, but cannot be modified to filter the records, you will need to build the filtering into the translation process rather than in the discovery process. There can, however, be some advantages to filtering at the integration process level. Let’s say that you only want purchasing customers being integrated into you ERP system, but you would like to see an aggregated view of all new customers that have been added to the either system. When you filter out the customers at the translation point rather than the discovery point, you have the records discovered in the net-change process, so, the entire record set can be used to create customer, by type, reporting.

Another. more complex example would be; sales orders being placed in the ERP system and then translated to one of several warehouse systems for processing. In this case, you not only have to filter the record set, but you also have to determine what translation processes will be used to ensure the sales order record is consumed by the correct warehouse system. As you can see, business rules will have a huge impact on how you might design your integration process. The entire solution may incorporate many different net-change discovery methods as well as many different data translation methods. Don’t get caught building a useless solution, wasting time and money. Dig deep into the requirements in order to develop the best integration processes for the given scenario your are working under.

As promised, this series is intended to be somewhat high level, but, I hope through some of the topics covered you have become a little more familiar with Application Data Integration. It can be tricky stuff to get your hear around; there are a lot of issues to consider. Not digging deep enough for the requirements can be very costly, not only monetarily, but also with adoption by your end-users if your integration is tied to a new business system implementation. Knowledge is power, so I hope I’ve charged your batteries a little.

Application Data Integration – Part Two, Net-Change

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 22:30:00 +0000

In my previous blog focusing on the hurdles of real-time, two-way data integration, I highlighted the hurdle of how to discover the data you need translated. In most cases, discovering the net-change data is all you want to translate on a real-time basis. Remember, a two-way integration means net-change data going in two directions or more (depending on the number of systems you’re integrating) at a rate determined by how many end-users there are on each of the systems being integrated. Business systems with a significant amount of end-users can create substantial volumes of net-change data.

In order to manage the volume of data flowing between systems, you must choose a net-change model to discover just the data that needs to translate. There are traditionally four basic models to choose from, one of which will discover the net-change data. They are not all equal though, so choosing will depend somewhat on the system(s) you’re working with and somewhat depend on the data model of the system(s) with which you’re working.

The four methods are as follows, in best practice order:

Application Method – this method is the most reliable and system efficient. It relies on the system, or application, to find the net-change data and produce it in a format that is easily translated and consumed by other systems. Some of the advantages of the Application Method are;
a) It typically can support deletes. In other words, records deleted by end-users can be traced to the other integrated systems, and if the business rules permit, will delete those records as well.
b) It is more likely to produce the net-change data in the order in which it was changed. This could become important if the net-change data is being produced in logical but separate extracts. One example would be if the system that is producing the net-change data, splits a sales order into a header file and a detail file. The consuming system will likely have referential integrity rules that would not allow details to be consumed before the header.
c) It has, typically, very little impact on the producing system, providing an un-noticeable effect to the end-users.
d) Reliability is a key factor. If the application is running, then net-change is being discovered and made consumable for other systems.
Tracker-Table Method – Also known as the shadow table method, the tracker-table method is somewhat invasive, but is very useful in cases where the data model does not always supply a last modified date/time stamp on each record. The tracker-table method does just what it says, it tracks the records that have had a change made to them. It is invasive because it requires creating objects in the database of the system. The idea being, create a table with at least three columns (ObjectName, RecordId,ChangeType). This is the tracking table. Then, place triggers on the tables which you are interested in seeing the net-change. The triggers are designed to modify the tracker-table in the following ways;
a) If there is an insert on the table (a new record created), the trigger will add a record to the tracker-table with three values; 1 - the table name where the changes came from, 2 – the recordId that was created when the record was committed, 3 – an identifier of the type of action that was performed (i.e. I = insert, U = update, D = deleted).
b) If there is an update made on the table, the trigger will search the tracker-table to find the ObjectName/RecordId that corresponds to the record that was updated. When the match is made, the trigger then adds a ‘U’ to the ChangeType column indicating that the record corresponding to the recordid in the tracker-table, has been updated..

Now that the net-change has been identified in the tracker-table, a mechanism needs to be developed (or a third-party tool employed i.e. Scribe or Informatica), to poll the tracker table for records with an ‘I’, ‘U’ or ‘D’, then join the recordid to the base table and retrieve the record that was changed. Once retrieved, set the ‘ChangeType’ in the tracker table back to NULL. Then simply choose the frequency that you want to poll the tracker–table for ‘I’, ‘U’ or ‘D’.
Last Update Date Method – This method is non-invasive and can be as reliable as the Application and Tracker-Table methods. With this method you simply create a mechanism (or a third-party tool employed i.e. Scribe or Informatica) to poll the data-object for records that are new, or have an last update date/time stamp that is greater than the last time you polled the data-object. There are a few other caveats to the WHERE clause but, essentially that’s all there is to it. Here’s the kicker. The reason that this method is 3rd in the best-practice ranking is because it is dependent on the clocks being used in the comparison, being synchronized. If for some odd and perplexing reason one of your applications is getting it’s date/time from the desktop clock (or some other unreliable source), you would most likely end up with records falling through the cracks. You must make sure the clocks you are using to compared and stamp are reliable.
Comparison Method – If you must discover your net-change records, and none of the first three methods can be applied, this may be your last option. The Comparison Method (or snapshot method) consists of making a copy of the recordset in which the net-change data resides. Then at some point after that first copy, take another copy of the object and compare each row/column for the differences. This is an extremely laborious method, but at times, desperate men must do desperate things.

Lastly, what to do with concurrent updates to a record. End-user #1 in sales, opens John Smith’s contact record to add a new cell number. At the same moment End-user #2 in finance, opens John Smith’s record to update the billing address. With applications like Dynamics CRM, Salesforce and SharePoint, the application logic will manage the concurrent changes and will make sure both are recognized and able to be discovered as net-change, and translated. Other than that, it’s the ‘last out wins’ method.

In my next post in this series, we’ll take a look at working the business process rules and application rules, into the integration process, and, at what frequency should the integration run.

Application Data Integration – Part One, Overview

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:17:00 +0000

In some cases, if not all too some extent, integration between Dynamics™ CRM, Salesforce® or/and SharePoint® with your back-office system is the key to user adoption. Real-time, two-way data integration allows all segments of the business to access the very latest transactional data, and the information that the data contains. One example might be the keying of a ‘large’ order by a sales representative into CRM or Salesforce. Having real-time, two-way data integration in place, that order would go directly from the crm system to your ERP/MRP system for processing. That in turn will reduce inventory and alert the operations team, signaling the purchasing department that orders need to be placed to backfill inventory and, signaling the operation manager that they will need to increase production to fulfill the ‘large’ order. In some cases the integration of data can trigger an alert that will notify outside vendors directly that inventory needs to be replenished.

With access to current inventory levels within a sales rep’s CRM or Salesforce system, sales reps can make better informed customer promises with regard to when items will ship and/or if ordered items will be backordered. This greatly improves customer satisfaction and adoption of the new CRM or Salesforce system. Other advantages (among a plethora) is integration into SharePoint as well, where lists can be compiled to help make better business decision as well as having vital documents at your fingertips, which ever application you are currently using.

This is just one small example of how application data integration can improve adoption, and also improve the client’s business prospects. My purpose in this blog is not to discuss the business benefits of data integration, but explore some of the architectural hurdles in designing the real-time, two-way data integration processes. In a short series of blog entries, we’ll examine:

How data is discovered for translation

When to discover data for translation

What data to discover for translation

How to handle concurrent data modification

How to incorporate the client’s and the application’s
business rules into the integration processes

We will, by no means, cover all the detail that goes into data integration, but will cover, at a high level, some of the hurdles and how to overcome them. In some cases, there will be a choice of methods to accomplish a task, so, we’ll also talk about the best method to use in particular situations. Some methods are tool agnostic, some will highlight how a tool like Scribe Insight provides easy access to data and the business rules around the data. We’ll also see that many of the methods are application agnostic, meaning they can be applied to any system to system integration.

Data integration can be tricky stuff if it’s your first time tackling the subject. Whether you are implementing a solution, or just need to talk comfortably about integration, there are several things to be careful of, but having said that, like anything else, it’s just a matter of experience before your comfort level is one that keeps your knees from shaking and your palms from sweating.

Quick Tip: Track Meetings and Calls in CRM Without Typing

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 05:49:00 +0000

Do you see the person in the picture to the left? She is a salesperson. Why is she so happy? Because she is using her CRM system right now, while she’s talking on the phone. And it’s taking her less time than ever before. And her manager is getting the reports that he wants at the same time! And she gets her work done in CRM when she would otherwise have “down time”? How is all this possible you ask? Read on …

We frequently hear complaints from sales users that they don’t like having to take the time to track meetings and phone calls in their CRM system. Many sales people feel that this just takes away from the time that they can spend in conversations with prospective customers. While it is critically important that sales people are disciplined about tracking relevant activities in CRM, there are some helpful shortcuts available to save some time – or to make use of “down time” while driving or waiting for a meeting.

One very helpful tool for tracking these activities comes from an unexpected source: Google! Google has a free service called Google Voice. The service is meant to be a helpful tool for routing calls (you can setup your Google Voice number to ring multiple phone numbers so prospects can reach you at your mobile, home or office number – you can even easily set it up to ring a land-line while you’re on vacation if you don’t have mobile service). Google Voice also enables you to capture, and transcribe, voice mails. Google Voice can send your voice mail messages to your email address automatically. This voice mail transcription service is what you can use to save some time capturing meeting and call notes.

To take advantage of this, you can call your Google Voice number between meetings. This can be while waiting for a meeting, from your car (of course you wouldn’t dream of doing this while driving … right?) or anywhere else that you have some “down time” and a mobile phone signal. Call your Google Voice number, record your notes, and hang up. Be sure to annunciate clearly – Google Voice transcription isn’t perfect and can sometimes lead to entertaining, or embarrassing, mistakes. Google Voice transcribes the message and sends you an email. When you’re back on Outlook, simply track the email (which includes the transcribed call notes) and regard it to the appropriate record in your CRM system. You’re done! That takes a lot less time than opening CRM, finding the customer record, creating an activity, and manually typing all of the notes.

If you have a talented CRM partner, they can setup a workflow for you that can automatically convert your tracked email into a phone call or appointment activity for you – so your notes will not only be tracked, but they will also appear as the correct activity type in CRM.

What will you do with all of the time you save?

How Management Undermines the Successful Implementation of a CRM Solution (Part 1)

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 19:00:00 +0000

We have all heard, and many of us experienced, that many CRM solutions do not provide the value that those investing in them expected. There are multiple reasons for this. Over the coming weeks, I’ll share some of the often overlooked reasons and hopefully provide some insight into how to avoid these traps. I’ve lived through (barely surviving!!) nine different CRM implementations, during my last 15 years in sales and sales management. While my current role is tied to helping others avoid these mistakes, everything in this series is taken directly from my observances from “the inside”, while I worked for the company implementing the CRM solution.

First I will re-state the most over-used cliché’ in IT. “Technology is never the problem. Poor requirements are always the problem”. I’ve said that myself many times, but in reflection, it just isn’t true.

Developing extraordinary requirements that are followed precisely during development of a system, in no way guarantees a successful solution. People have to use the system!! Sounds obvious, right? You knew that. Everyone knows that. That’s why we spend endless hours debating “the carrot vs. the stick” approaches to getting the sales reps to use the CRM system. But…. (insert drumroll here) How much time and effort is spent debating how we will get management to use the system? Below is a real world scenario that happens daily in organizations of all sizes. I’ve personally lived through it at three different firms. The consistency of how things played out at all three firms is almost eerie. The steps are in chronological order as the typically occur.

1. Management of the firm decides a CRM solution is needed, so they can know what is going on in the business at any point in time. (You’ve heard it. I’ve heard it. That’s what they always say!)

2. The firm goes through the process of selecting, designing and implementing a CRM system. Let’s assume for this discussion that they do an excellent job.

3. The next several months the management continually requests updates on:

Whether or not the sales people are “using that system we spent so much money on?
Who’s not using the system? This question is followed by an emphatic “I want names!”
Are all the opportunities and customers entered into the system?
Are we going to meet the deadline I set for having all of the information in the system up to date? "I just had someone check and there is one opportunity that I know closed yesterday and it isn’t shown as closed in the system", they say.

4. Sales feels the pressure and begins doing a pretty good job of using the system.

5. Many sales reps and sales managers begin seeing the power of the tool and begin using it beyond the minimum requirements management has put forward.

6. Everything is settling in fine. The system is really looking like a success.

7. Management sends out an urgent email to all sales employees stating, “I need your forecast by the end of the day. Please fill out the attached spreadsheet and have it back to me by 4:30. This is not optional”. (The subject line of this email is almost universally “FIREDRILL!!!”)

8. Sales people and sales managers frantically scramble to get their information out of the CRM system and retype it all into the spreadsheet provided in the email.

9. Approximately 24 hours pass.

10. Sales managers and sales reps gather in small groups in the hall, or chat on the phone and the comments are pretty consistent:

“Everything they asked for is in CRM. Why don’t they go look at it”
“They beat us over the head with that CRM system and THEY don’t even use it!”
“They told us the main reason we should use the new system was so “we would never have to have firedrills like that again. I actually believed them!”
“Why should I take the time to enter all my information in the system if no one is going to look at it”
“Now you understand why I was the only one who held out on using this CRM stuff. I’ve seen this a hundred times before”

11. Over the next month or two, steps 7 through 10 repeat three or four times.

12. Usage of the system starts to diminish.

13. Sales managers start going back to “the old spreadsheet” as a way to get the forecast from their team. It saves them time because their boss will want to see it that way. They have to either choose this option or tell their team to keep using CRM and take the brunt of manually putting 10 different reps’ forecasts into a spreadsheet that doesn’t even have the same fields as CRM.

14. Another 6-12 months pass

15. A new sales rep joins the firm and asks his manager, “what do we use for CRM here”. The sales manager responds, “I’ll send you the spreadsheet”.

16. CRM dies.

And it wasn’t because of poor requirements OR bad technology.

The moral to the story: Sales reps adopting the system and entering all of their information is not synonymous with successful adoption of a CRM solution. Someone needs to use the information that is there!

P.S. It is very important to note that I have used the term “management” as the major culprit here and not the term “sales management”. That was intentional.

Salesforce Tip: Map a Lead Field to Two Places

Fri, 13 May 2011 18:30:00 +0000

On a recent Salesforce implementation, we identified a need to map a single lead field to two different fields - one on the contact and one on the opportunity.

My initial thought was to create a trigger to fire on lead conversion that would populate the second field. However, I always try to look first for a non-coding solution. Which brought me to the fairly simple idea of creating a second field that would use a workflow field update to copy the value of the original field. The new field would be hidden from the users, but would be used for the sole purpose of mapping to the second destination field. I thought I'd found the perfect "clicks not code" solution ...

until I realized my field was a lookup field, a field type that can't be updated by workflow. Drat.

So, I did need a bit of coding in order to update the second, hidden field with the value of the original field. I created a very simple trigger to set the value of the second lookup field to match the first.

trigger CopyCampaignSource on Lead (before insert, before update) {

for (Lead l : Trigger.new) { l.c5_Campaign_Source_Opp__c = l.c5_Campaign_Source__c; } }

Would I have been better off going with my first instinct, which was to create a trigger to fire on lead conversion?

In hindsight, maybe. But, this method was still simple and effective, and I think it's always worth it to explore non-coding solutions first - especially knowing that most implementations will ultimately be maintained by non-developers and, therefore, should be as admin-friendly as possible.

7 Steps to Successful Client Scorecards

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 23:30:00 +0000

Which clients should we focus more time on? Are there any clients that we should consider firing? How can we find new clients that look like our best current clients? Do we have clients that should be more profitable?

These are the questions that many B2B firms are asking themselves as they think through how they should prioritize their client list. So read on for some of the how’s and why’s of establishing a client scoring system.

What is a Client Scorecard?

Client scoring is a way to develop a consistent client scorecard (or client report card) for every client that a business serves. The scorecard serves a number of purposes, including:

Identifying best customers, and providing them with a higher level of service
Identifying worst customers and, in some cases, discontinuing service to them
Finding past customers who have a great score but are now inactive, and re-activating them
Identifying prospects that are similar to your top customers for acquisition efforts
Identifying lost high value customers, and determining why you lost them and how you can improve your performance

Every sales and marketing manager will tell you that it costs many times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain or upsell an existing one. Client scorecards are all about leveraging your hardest won and greatest asset – your current customer base!

“It is 5-10 times more expensive to gain a new customer than it is to retain an existing one.”
-Gartner Group

But sometimes the best way to define something is to define what it is not...

A client scorecard is not the same thing as lead scoring. Lead scoring focuses on the likelihood of converting a non-customer into a customer, whereas client scoring focuses on the value of existing customers. Maybe we’ll talk about lead scoring in a future post.
A client scorecard is not limited strictly to active customers. Client scorecards can include both inactive customers (in fact, this can be one of the most important segments for evaluating client scorecards) and prospective customers. In the case of prospective customers, your scorecard may be more focused on (dis)qualifying prospective customers that are showing the signs of becoming the kinds of customers you do not want in your portfolio.
A client scorecard is not the same thing as client profitability. Profitability is an important factor, but profitability may not tell the whole story about the value that a client contributes to your business.
A client scorecard is not limited to objective data. There are many subjective drivers of business value that should influence your scorecard.
A client scorecard is not a “score.” Although one output of a scorecard may be a single score, keep in mind that there are many components of a scorecard that should be evaluated – a high score or a low score do not tell the whole story about a client relationship. For example, many of the data points for new clients (or even prospective clients) may be unknown – resulting in a lower score until these items can be evaluated.

7 Steps to Successful Client Scorecards

Like all projects that are worth investing in, a successful client scorecard project requires far more than the CEO taking a Saturday morning to write down the attributes of a good client – and handing those off to IT to add to a CRM system. Sadly, most businesses tend to take that approach – and end up wasting time, making their CRM systems unnecessarily complex and generating scorecards that no one uses.

1. Get Your Team Involved

The people who work with your clients every day already have a good idea of what makes and good client and what makes a bad client. The agenda for the session is pretty straight forward:

Put your clients into lists of good and bad – focusing on longer-term clients so you have a good understanding of how the relationship has evolved.
Discuss what the characteristics of the clients in each group are – the goal here is to define what makes one group different from the other (most businesses are surprised at some of the findings at this stage)
Determine at what stage of the relationship this information can be known and which role (or which system) will capture it

For this meeting, you should use an outside facilitator and a proven methodology. The reality is that most meetings of this type are ineffective because as soon as one person shares an idea, the rest of the group begins to evaluate the idea and respond to it – creativity is stifled, politics come into play and the results from the session are weak.

You will want to get beyond the basics (i.e. profitable customers are all good; unprofitable customers are all bad) and get to some of the leading indicators of profitability; you will also want to recognize that some “hidden variables” can make even your most profitable customers undesirable (i.e. requiring an extremely high level of service, a brand that may damage your own reputation, an approach to your team that is demoralizing). Most businesses also need to recognize that profitability can be an elusive calculation, so subjective variables can play an important role.

2. Evaluate Public and Private Data

You should do some analysis of both internally available data (such as from your accounting or CRM systems) and external data (such as data available from D&B) to see if any of this plays a role in differentiating your top customers from your bottom customers. For example, you may find that certain industries tend to outperform others; or you may find that you tend to do better with private or public companies. This can be a very important source of scorecard data because it doesn’t require your team to do extra data entry to create the scorecard. For larger enterprises, predictive modeling methods can be used as part of this evaluation.

3. Talk to Your Clients

Conduct interviews or surveys with your customer list. They are likely to tell you things about themselves that your own internal team did not identify. This can be an important source of information that helps you qualify prospects or new customers. This early qualification can help you focus your resources on the prospects that are most likely to convert into long-term, mutually-beneficial relationships.

4. Define the Criteria

Now comes the hard part, you need to winnow the list of criteria down to a minimal amount of new data that your team will need to begin to track. The more information that you can get from internal or external systems (see item #2, above), the better. But you should expect to require your team to capture some additional information on their own. Remember that a successful scorecard system incorporates both objective information (i.e. hard numbers that you are likely to be able to pull from other systems( and subjective information (i.e. opinions of team members that will need to be keyed into the system). Ideally, you will limit the items that your team needs to key in to a list of 5-10 items.

5. Capture the Data

Now comes the hardest part – you have to actually start capturing the data.

This is where most scorecard projects fall apart. Either they require too much manual data entry that is time consuming for employees that already have enough to do. Or they require a herculean effort to integrate data from disparate internal systems. Or both. There may be no way to completely go around these issues, but here are a few suggestions:

Keep it Simple: The temptation is to jump right in and develop a “dream scorecard” in the first stab at this type of project. Keeping the scope of the project simple will save you a tremendous amount of time and frustration.
Understand the Scope: Even if you can’t keep the project simple, it is important to fully understand the scope of the project so you will know what you are getting into. Most projects of this type fail simply because the organization loses interest in making it a priority long before it is ever completed.
Piggyback on Other Projects: In large enterprises, there are almost always multiple projects going on with a goal of unifying information across different systems. Rather than starting a project dedicated to the scorecard, see if you can piggyback on an existing project that may already be gathering much of the same information.
Automate What you Can: The more effort you can keep off the backs of the individuals who will have to use the scorecard, the better. Automation can come in two flavors: (1) automate capturing scorecard metrics that are already available elsewhere – so no one has to re-enter data; (2) provide process mapping and automation for data that needs to be gathered manually – this can include an annual process, updates made at the conclusion of each project, etc. Modern BPA (business process automation) tools built into CRM and other tools can handle much of the heavy lifting in this area.
Provide Ongoing Training and Support: I cannot overemphasize this point. It never ceases to amaze me how many businesses put a tremendous amount of time into the IT part of projects like this – and almost no time in getting their team up to speed on how they need to participate.

6. Collaborate

“If you build it, they will come,” may work in the movies, but not when it comes to rolling out client scorecards.

You will need to ensure that the salient information from the scorecards is distributed to the individuals who will need it. And you will need to ensure that referencing the scorecard becomes a part of your corporate culture. This means that scorecard data needs to appear on your internal portals, dashboards and on many of your client related reports. Discussing the scorecard needs to become part of the every day conversation in your sales, service, accounting and customer management conversations.

7. Train, Support, Improve, Repeat

Your scorecard project will require plenty of care and nurturing. You will need to constantly monitor the business process you established for creating scorecards to ensure that the team is following it. You will need to work with the team to ensure that the scorecard management process is not too time consuming (this is particularly true during the early days after the initial launch). In addition, the criteria for your scorecards will need to be reviewed and updated periodically as the economy, your customers, your competitors and your understanding of the marketplace evolve.

Next Steps

Developing a client scorecard does not have to consume a tremendous amount of time. With proper planning and session facilitation a mid-sized business can launch client scorecards in just a few months; larger enterprises may take longer. If you’re using modern collaboration, dashboard and CRM tools, you can significantly simplify the process of maintaining scorecards for your team. Take the first step of facilitating a session with your team to get started.

CRM Overview - Salesforce.com

SuperUser Account — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 19:35:30 +0000

A quick overview of Salesforce.com - all of the basics in less than 4 minutes!

Get Social: More Options for Following Us

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 08:40:00 +0000

Some Background

At the beginning of 2010, our two companies (StreamLogic and Customer Connect) merged to become C5 Insight. One company focused on Microsoft SharePoint and cloud application development. The other company focused on CRM (Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com) and sales and marketing strategy.

When we merged our blogs, we started to receive feedback that we were providing an overwhelming amount of information. Our blogs included high level strategic and best practice information, as well as detailed technical tips for developers and administrators. They also included information on all of the different solutions that we support. So most of those who were following us found that they were getting some information that wasn’t useful for them. In addition, options for following us were limited to email or RSS feeds.

Something had to change!

The Social Channels

So we decided to take a page out of our own Social CRM playbook (it was a typical case of, “the cobbler’s children are the ones with no shoes.”) At a later date, we’ll share details about Social CRM and our specific strategy as a separate blog. For now, suffice it to say that:

We took feeds from our: Blog Site, On Demand Video Site and Live Event Site.
We then parsed them out by role and solution type.
And we made them available across the most popular social channels.

Voila – a lot of blood, sweat and tears for us delivered a much more relevant way to consume the information that you want. And it’s all free to you (we guarantee that you’ll get your money’s worth).

If you want to learn a bit more about Social CRM, check out this video.

Current C5 Followers

If you’re currently following one of the older C5 Insight feeds, we encourage you to look at the new options. You will find that you can filter what you’re receiving to just the information that is most relevant to you. Plus, some of our old channels will soon be discontinued – so take the time to sign up for one of the new ones.

www.c5insight.com/follow

The Free Giveaway

Another exciting bit of news at C5 Insight – we have just completed authoring a book, “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Administration Bible.” There’s even a special appendix on advanced SharePoint integration. To celebrate the book and our new social channels, we’re giving away 5 free copies of the book.

Where do you sign up? I’m glad you asked. We’re going to give away the 5 free copies by randomly drawing from a list of all of our followers once we reach 200 new followers across all of our social channels (or on March 21, 2011 – whichever comes first). So be sure to sign up to follow us by March 21!

Or, if you’re in a hurry to get the book, go ahead and click the image to order it from Amazon.com. If we draw your name as a winner, you can get a signed copy to treasure for generations to come!

So, be sure to sign up for the social channel of your choice today!

www.c5insight.com/follow

A few pointers about Salesforce for Outlook

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 21:36:00 +0000

We've recently had a few questions from power administrators about how to enable Salesforce for Outlook for their organizations. There are two basic steps: - First, the administrator needs to create at least one Outlook Configuration by going to Setup > Administration Setup > Desktop Administration > Outlook Configurations. Additional configurations can also be setup, if groups of users within the organization should have different settings. - Users can then download Salesforce for Outlook by going to Setup > Personal Setup > Desktop Integration > Salesforce for Outlook. Salesforce for Outlook is significantly different than the previous product (Connect for Outlook), so there are a few important things to keep in mind: For full instructions on using Salesforce for Outlook, go to the Help & Training section in Salesforce. HOWEVER: if you simply enter Salesforce for Outlook as your search terms, you'll get a confusing ...

Chatter Super Bowl Commercials: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 20:48:00 +0000

Salesforce debuted two Chatter commercials during halftime of the Super Bowl last night. The buzz leading up to the big game was pretty intense ... with most of us pretty excited (albeit surprised) at the idea of the $3 million dollar ad spots. If you missed them, click here and then here to check them out. So how did the ads fare? Let's break it down ... The Good: If you’ve used Chatter before, you know that the product itself is great. If you’ve used Chatter before, you know that the commercials – especially the first one – did a pretty accurate (though speedy) job of portraying the type of collaboration that happens between users. If you’ve used Chatter before, you may be excited to know that unlimited licenses are available to any business (not just Salesforce customers) at no charge. If you’ve used Chatter before … Do you see the trend? If you watched those spots without any prior knowledge of Chatter, would you have any idea what they were about? Would you have any desire to visit the website to lear ...

Get Your Head in the Clouds – with Cloud Computing

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:03:00 +0000

Cloud computing has been the subject of much conversation (and hype) for about a year now. Our 4 City Tour (www.successaccelerators.com/4city) focused on this, as did some recent research with one of our partners (white paper forthcoming) and our partner Salesforce.com has long led the charge in the cloud computing conversation.

This past week, cloud computing took center stage at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington DC. From all indications, cloud computing will be the number one area of focus for Microsoft for the next 12 months (or more). So just what is cloud computing, why is it important to you and what is Microsoft doing that will impact it? Let’s tackle each of those questions in sequence.

11 Habits of Effective Activity Management

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 19:45:00 +0000

The failure to understand and execute an effective activity management process is a leading cause of poor CRM adoption. There are a variety of issues that can make activity management confusing and frustrating for users in ANY CRM system. In this posting, I've detailed 11 suggestions for improving your activity management process.

This is only a starting point. Proper use of Queues and Workflows - in particular - are areas that can also improve your activity management efficiency and results.

An Overview of Salesforce.com Chatter

SuperUser Account — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Social media tools such as facebook have made an impact on the business world. Those same concepts, applied to businesses internally, are about to cause a revolution in business collaboration. This video is an overview of how Salesforce.com's Chatter works.

May 2010 - Side-by-Side: What Makes Microsoft CRM and Salesforce.com Different?

SuperUser Account — Sun, 23 May 2010 23:16:36 +0000

A unique opportunity to see an objective comparison of the two most popular and most powerful CRM applications on the market today.

Upcoming Cloud Computing Event

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:30:00 +0000

I wanted to let all of our readers know about a cloud computing event that will be held in 4 cities along the East coast. I admit, it is my company that is hosting the “4-City Tour” but this really is a going to be a good way to see many cloud platforms at work.

Highlights:

    Parallel sessions on Microsoft CRM, Salesforce.com, SharePoint, and Unified Communications
    Integration luncheon showing a live demo of integration between CRM, SharePoint, and UC
    Exclusive research on the top cloud challenges from CFOs and CIOs
    Exclusive demos of SharePoint 2010
    Exclusive session showing Microsoft CRM and Salesforce.com in a live side-by-side comparison

Cities:

    May 4 – Charlotte, NC
    May 6 – Washington, DC
    May 11 – Raleigh, NC
    May 13 – Atlanta, GA

Demo Dynamics CRM, SharePoint and Salesforce.com

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 09:07:00 +0000

Looking for a fast way to get a demonstration of Dynamics CRM, Microsoft SharePoint or Salesforce.com? A new site: demos.c5insight.com has been setup for just this purpose. You'll find a variety of demos on the site for different types of users including:

* Fundamentals of CRM, Document Management and Business Process Automation

* Integrating SharePoint and Dynamics CRM

* Comparing Microsoft CRM and Salesforce.com

Looking for a demo that's not available? Post a comment in response to this blog and we'll try to follow-up on requests that we're seeing most frequently.

AllThingsCRM.com

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 01:21:00 +0000

There's a great online resource out there for those who are interested in getting more out of Salesforce.com (and out of CRM in general). What I like about it is that it focuses on generalized CRM principles - not just technical "how to" articles for a specific CRM technology. Read more for some quick recommended articles... The name of the site is AllThingsCRM.com - it should be on every CRM professionals list of RSS feeds. The site is sponsored by Salesforce.com and clearly has a lot of bias towards the Salesforce.com model of doing business and selling software. The connection to Salesforce.com is subtle and a little sneaky - it is easy to read the articles assuming they are unbiased unless you look closely. With that said, much of the content from the articles can be applied to virtually any CRM tool. The folks at this organization offer a huge variety of articles on all aspects of CRM and some areas that are even broader than CRM (such as cloud computin ...

Salesforce.com Chatter API

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:20:00 +0000

Announced only a couple days ago, Salesforce.com has plans to release Chatter. Chatter is a new enterprise social engine. I like to think of it as a combination of IM and RSS feeds into a single platform that's security controlled and handled inside the Salesforce.com Cloud. So, it's more secure and allows the organization to communicate freely internally without risking exposure of confidential information. Developers are going to like the new Chatter API. On the surface it seems to be fairly straightforward with only 5 different objects in the data model (User, FeedPost, NewsFeed/Object, FeedTrackedChanges, & FeedComments). Chatter will support adding content to the messages sent as well as sending messages from Profile/User, objects and feeds. The next release Spring '10 is slated to include User Profiles, Post, Comments, & Feeds, Subscriptions, and Chatter only licenses ($50/month/user). Future releases should include Questions & Answers and ...

Batch APEX

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:19:00 +0000

What is Batch APEX?

Batch APEX is a way to run code in a batch in Salesforce.com. It can be scheduled or called to run asynchronously. Batch APEX has three primary asynchronous methods: Start(), Execute(), and Finish() that handle all of the processing in the batch.

Batch APEX also provides a way to query the status of a Batch using both Visual Force an in the UI in Setup. It's a great way to handle mass data updates of up to 50 million records at a time.

Updates from DreamForce 2009 - The Bulk API

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:18:00 +0000

Have you ever had to move a lot data into Salesforce really fast? Well, unfortunately, I think a lot of us have been in that situation and the store in the past wasn't all that great. When I first started working with Salesforce, I wrote an API tool that would replicate the entire Salesforce object structure on SQL Server with picklists. It was a pretty cool application. I later extended it to bring down all the data as well, but was really disappointed when I realized how long it takes to pull down several hundred thousand records. So, I ended up leveraging Cast Iron and the Data Loader to solve some of my integration problems. The Data Loader was a real life saver, but it had some severe limitations. First, it was slow. One thing I used to do was split my loads into 3 to 5 batches and run each batch in a seperate Data Loader instance at the same time. While this works, it can get kind of crazy when there are a lot of files to load and spl ...

Salesforce.com - a new UI????

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:17:00 +0000

Announced at Dreamforce is a new UI for Salesforce! This new UI will of course be optional, but addresses a number of issues with the current UI. What I've seen so far is impressive. It definately looks cleaner and does a better job of presenting data to the user. One of my favorite features was an enhancement to add a few indicators at the top of the opportunity (I'm hoping it will be available for all objects) to show the most important data about that record. In just a few seconds, you can easily see what's going on with the record. They call this new feature the "Deal View" and it will be customizable. The Related Lists have also been moved over to one side and make for a much cleaner interface and usability. For developers who've built custom UI to look and feel like Salesforce outside of the standard Visual Force pages are going to have some issues as well as those who've built Flex UI to match. However, standard Visual Force pages will easily adopt ...

Dream Force - Sales Cloud 2

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:16:00 +0000

So, what's new in the Service Cloud 2? Well, a lot of things are new, but I thought the big ones are the Real Time Quoting, Salesforce for Outlook, and especially the new Report Builder. Let's not forget Chatter which I'll touch on later. Salesforce released in Winter '09 the Real Time Quoting functionality that allows organizations to build a quote from an opportunity, print as a PDF and send along with other packaged content to the customer via email. Very nice feature and will definately have a net positive impact with many customers out there! This was a significant step forward for sure. The new Salesforce for Outlook is going to make a lot of folks real happy as it solves some of the old problems with the Outlook client integration. My favorite new features (beside's Chatter) has to be the Report Builder enhancements. Coming in one of the next releases is a new capability to design reports using real data pulled directly from the objects so you see in real time as ...

Dream Force 2009 - The Service Cloud 2

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:15:00 +0000

So what's new in the Salesforce Service Cloud 2? Well, for starters I was really surprised by the statistic quoted by Salesforce that 55% of the market is held by thier very own Service Cloud! That's huge, but then who would doubt that was the case with a solid platform such as Salesforce? There are a number of great features that have been in the Service Cloud for some time such as the CTI screen pops, integrations with Google Maps, etc., but this year, they really blew the wheels off this jet with the introduction of the new KB engine. For instance, the new KB's support rich media. What's more cases can be initiated in many different ways including a customer posting a question right over Twitter or Facebook. Salesforce has opened up a whole new set of channels for handling and managing cases directly over the internet that leverage the application platforms their customers are already familiar with and trust. There's a whole new functionality that is in the works that'll sup ...

DreamForce 2009

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:54:00 +0000

Wow! That word hardly describes the DreamForce event this year. SalesForce really did it up nice, although the food could have had a few more selections. SalesForce has finally passed the $1B mark in sales and it was clear by the attendance (19,000!!!!) that they've garnered a lot of support by businesses both large and small. I thought for sure the economy would have had a bigger impact on the event, and maybe it did, but attendance was exceptional regardless. One of the best signs I saw this year is that the Force.com and Sites message is really hitting home. What's more CIOs and CTOs are embrasing the technology and saving money. Marc Benioff touted the following from an IDC report - 54% savings ($), 5 times faster (time to implementation). Having worked with the platform and delivered in excess of 40 full lifecycle projects myself, I have seen similar results. What's more, a lot of companies are realizing how much more quickly changes can ...

What is all the Chatter about?

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:05:00 +0000

In short, Chatter is a social networking application that is built into Salesforce.com. It is structured to be an "internal social networking" application but can also be easily linked to public facing social networking sites. Some of the highlights: It can work very similarly to Facebook.com - you can post comments to the site and others in the organization can view the comments that their friends post. Visually, it looks similar to a Facebook page. Individuals can add comments to posts that they see on Chatter. But the real strength is that any record on any object in Salesforce.com can be Chatter enabled. What's more, it includes fairly sophisticated filtering functions. So (note: some of this is guesswork as I don't have a working copy of Chatter yet): A manager can get Chatter notices whenever one of their reps opens a new opportunity. An executive can get a notification whenever a case to a top 10 client is ope ...

Debugging APEX

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:54:00 +0000

Let's face it. Salesforce.com and Force.com are new kids on the block. They're growing up fast, and establishing their territory, but they've still got some maturing. Most languages these days have an interactive debugger. However, APEX is the exception. If you're new to APEX coding, I recommend you take a look at three things to help you overcome this hurdle: 1) Debug Logs, 2) Running tests in Eclipse, 3) Running tests in Salesforce.com. Since there is no interactive debugging with APEX, you've got to find ways to identify how far your code ran and what it did when it got there. One thing I do while writing code is to add debug logs to indicate the values I'm testing and to tell me that things ran up to that point. If you write good test methods, you should know what to expect at each point in your code. system.debug("checking value: " + myvar); When the debugger passes this point, a statement is logged with the value and if ...

Locking records down to editing in Salesforce

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:53:00 +0000

One common thing we run into in Salesforce.com is having to lock a record down to editing to certain groups once a certain stage or status is reached. There are two different schools of thought on the best approach to doing this. The first is to use record typing. For instance, let's say you're working on an opportunity and want to lock down the record so that changes can't happen after it reaches a Closed Won stage. The easy way to do this is to create a new record type "Read Only", create a new layout for that record type and then set all of the fields to Read Only that shouldn't be edited. Then you'd want to create a workflow that sets the record type based on the stage of the opportunity. It's all pretty easy, but you'll still need to address training issues at the start with users to be sure they don't create records with a "Read Only" record type. One other nice thing about this approach is that you can assign the noral record type that's Read/Write based o ...

Amazon S3 Integration with Salesforce.com

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:52:00 +0000

We recently had an opportunity to do some work to integrate S3 Amazon Web Services into Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com provides some sample code that was very useful in getting the S3 services to work. However, along the way I ran into a number of challenging issues that I'm sure many other developers have tackled. The first big issue was that we would be dealing with very large files, greater than 2GB in some cases. Unfortunately, the Salesforce.com web services can't handle large files (>100k) via their web services, but the S3 services can handle up to 5GB. Salesforce.com had some sample code that leveraged POST directly to the S3 service via a Visual Force page. This was all good, but it took a bit of work getting everything customized and working correctly. One of the most challenging parts was figuring out how S3 handles access because we didn't want our customer's files being shared with the rest of the world. There is a mechanism for controlling access, but if ...

Customer Portal Access

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:51:00 +0000

Every day I'm amazed by the new features in Salesforce.com. Over the past week, I've been working with a customer to get their Customer Portal setup and functioning. We're building some very cool functionality using the Force.com platform to expose some custom objects to their customers. However, we ran into a situation where sharing rules needed to be setup and the UI is just a bit more than we really like our users to have to take in. Sharing is a great feature, but the last thing anyone wants is to have a customer looking at someone elses data because a user didn't really understand what they were doing or was simply confused when they setup sharing. This is where APEX sharing comes in. The Force.com platform has a very cool feature where an APEX developer can write a class to handle complex sharing rules. When I read the documentation it's relatively easy to setup, but of course like a lot of Salesforce APEX trigger code, it's imperative that it's designed to work ...

Connecting Microsoft Outlook to your Salesforce.Com Test or Sandbox Instance

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 23:48:00 +0000

After downloading the Salesforce.Com Connector for Outlook I noticed that it was hardcoded to what SFDC server I could connect to. I needed to do some testing and struggled to find where I could change the URL. My end goal was to change the Server URL to point to https://test.salesforce.com/services/soap/c/10.0 After poking digging around in the registry I found a place that this could be changed. If you open your registry and go to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Salesforce.Com/SM” you will see an entry called “Server URL.” There you can change that link to point to your sandbox instance. Once you have done that you can re-open Outlook and type in your login credentials. Make sure that when you login you also add your Salesforce.Com token to your password. Hope this helps you save some time!

Salesforce.com and Microsoft CRM: Side-by-Side Demo

SuperUser Account — Sun, 24 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

An exclusive side-by-side demo of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com! If you're considering a CRM solution, this is a can't miss session. Be sure to the second version of this unique webinar - delivered in May of 2010!

Users can't access Visualforce pages?

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 23:47:00 +0000

A coworker came to me yesterday with a frustrating question - why can't non-system adminstrator users see a new Visualforce page that had just been created? Instead they see the "Insufficient Privileges" error. I remembered struggling with the exact same problem when I first started working with Visualforce. The answer is available in the Visualforce discussion boards, but is difficult to find. So, here is a quick summary: Access to Visualforce pages and Apex classes is determined by user profile. There are two ways to change the access levels. 1 - To view or change the access levels for a single profile, go to the view screen of the profile and scroll down to find the following two related lists: Enable Apex Class Access and Enable Visualforce Page Access. 2 - Or, set the access level for multiple profiles by going to the Apex class and Visualforce page lists in Setup. Click the Security link beside each class or page name and select the profiles that need ...

Integration and Outbound Messaging

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:23:00 +0000

Outbound Messaging in Salesforce.com is an incredibly powerful feature for doing integration, but it does have a few drawbacks. Before I get into the negative points, I want to point out some of the good. The outbout messaging feature has two capabilities which are extremely important for integrating Salesforce.com with other systems. First, it insure messages get sent immediately after the workflow fires, and second, it insures delivery of your message. However, during a recent integration I quickly realized that insuring delivery of messages meant that my receiving system HAD to consume them and return a response message confirming that the data was consumed. At one point during my integration development a large number of new records were added to the system for migration testing and all of these records fired outbound messages. (Think 1M records added or updated each taking about 1s to process.) Another issue I quickly ran into after we went live is that my integr ...

Are you using Email to Salesforce?

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:20:00 +0000

I recently did an informal poll of a handful of Salesforce.com users and realized that NONE of them were even aware of Email to Salesforce. Trust me ... it's something worth knowing about and, most likely, something you'll want to think about implementing in your organization. After enabling Email to Salesforce, you can add a Salesforce-provided email address to the bcc line of any email you send and the email will appear in the activity history related list of the correct lead or contact in Salesforce. What if there isn't a match? No problem - a task will be created instead, which you can then handle in Salesforce. To learn how to easily setup this functionality, just search for "email to salesforce" in the Help and Training section of Salesforce. And Outlook users can even take it one step further ... some simple code can added that will eliminate the need to add the address to the bcc line - instead, each time you send an email, you'll receive a message asking "Add to Salesforce?". C ...

Getting Started with Summer '08 ... Cross-Object Formulas

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:19:00 +0000

Check out your new orange creamsicle logo in Salesforce! I'll highlight some of the updates in the Summer '08 release in the next few blog entries. One of the highest impact features is the ability to create Cross-Object Formulas - meaning you can use parent record fields on a child record. FINALLY! Prior to this release, various workarounds had to be used ... such as creating workflow to copy a value over, embedding an s-control, etc. Now cross-object formulas will solve the problem. Some standard real-world examples of this functionality are placing the Account Number on the Opportunity, or creating a Discounted Amount formula on the Opportunity referencing a Discount Percentage on the Account. Here's a cross-object formula I just created for a client. They used a different commission percentage based on whether the account was a new or repeat buyer. So, on the commission custom object, I referenced the "# of Opportunities" roll-up summary field on the Account to determine whether or not t ...

Summer '08 is around the corner

Tue, 06 May 2008 23:17:00 +0000

Thanks to gokubi (a really great blog that I read often - it's written by a CRM consultant for non-profits, but has tons of good info for any Salesforce.com user), I just found out that the Summer '08 landing page and release notes are live! Multiday calendar events, inline editing on list views, filtered lookups, and lead conversion improvements are just a few of the many highlights. More info to come ...

What are you missing out on?

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 23:07:00 +0000

The last two Salesforce releases - Winter '08 and Spring '08 - were rolled out in rapid-fire last November and February, respectively. Maybe because of the large number of new features in each release, or maybe because of the holidays in between, I've just realized during conversations with a couple of different clients that many folks aren't aware of some of the great new functionality. With the Summer '08 release right around the corner, I wanted to provide a couple of quick refresher courses to make sure you aren't missing out on any of the functionality that's already out there. I'll focus on the Spring '08 release below, and will go back in time even more to cover the Winter '08 release in my next blog entry. (By the way ... there are many, many more features that were rolled out the past two releases and I don't mean to short-change all of the others, but the ones I'll cover are some that will give you the biggest bang for your buck in terms of low implementation t ...