C5 Insight: Salesforce - Business User

Check-out our on-demand events at C5Tube.com

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?

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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!

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 ...