CRM Insights Blog

Importing & Exporting Data to Salesforce doesn't need to be difficult

Cathy Boudreau — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:53:00 GMT

If you're a Salesforce power user or a System Administrator, you've likely found yourself in the position of having to import or export data at one time or another. Whether you're importing new marketing leads, exporting data for advanced reporting or updating account and contact information, it doesn't need to be difficult. The Jitterbit Data Loader for Salesforce provides an easy and functional tool for doing just this... and it's FREE (Who doesn't love free?!).

The Jitterbit Data Loader is designed for the Salesforce Administrator so that you don't need to involve a lengthy IT process and tie up their resources. With this AppExchange tool, you can dramatically reduce the time and effort required to automate the import and export of critical business data from Salesforce, Force.com and your databases and files. Best part (besides it being free)? It doesn't matter whether they live on-premise or in the Cloud. Some features of this next generation tool include:

Free wizard-driven import/export tools with "Drag & Drop" mapping.
Advanced functionality - Scheduling & Automation, Management & Monitoring tools
Better Connectivity – Any flat file, any ODBC or JDBC database, any Salesforce edition

Need more information or interesting in trying out this tool? Visit the Jitterbit product page on the AppExchange.

Have you used Jitterbit? Need advice on getting started with data import? Do you have comments or questions you want to share? Sound off below!

Big Brands Changing the Customer Service Game: Get Prepared with CRM

Cathy Boudreau — Tue, 14 May 2013 20:45:00 GMT

Remember Peggy? He was that lovely customer service representative featured in several of Discover Card’s commercials that launched a couple years ago. Attempting to bring humor to the frustration of many customers who deal with less than pleasant bankers, Discover continues on their path to achieving higher customer loyalty by addressing the desires for humans to interact directly with other (pleasant) humans - not disgruntled CSRs or, even worse, robots.

Some big brands recognize and are addressing the ever growing dissatisfaction of their customers and the resulting decline of brand loyalty. While some companies invest in their customer base, other companies rely on marketing messaging alone to secure ongoing revenue streams. What this means for CRM is that customers are taking back the power and all companies (big, medium and small) need to invest in better service strategies and subsequent technology to support the cultivation and maintenance of brand loyalty.

According to an eHow Money article, brands and/or companies must place great value in not only their customers and but also in a smart CRM strategy to support the growing trend towards customer empowerment. With time, “as customer satisfaction and retention improves, the corporation’s brand image may begin to improve, as well. Customers will begin to associate the brand with good customer service, quality products and a personable approach. The CRM strategy’s focus on the customer will let each buyer know that their input is valued by the company. This can attract more customers and continue to create loyal customers to the brand.”

Your customers expect excellence when they interact with your company. Whether that’s onsite or even over the phone, if your CSRs sound disgruntled, if the process or questions are redundant in nature, or if there is any indication that the process is disconnected, your customers will begin abandoning your business in droves. DirecTV is a great example of a brand with a reputation for poor customer service let alone a pleasant customer experience. Still abiding by the 8-12pm technician appearance window, their processes are outdated or antiquated at best. Their customer base is also quite vocal on Pissedconsumer.com.

On the other hand, Time Warner Cable noticed DirecTV’s lack of investment in their customers and has recently implemented a more pleasant customer service process. Not only has TWC reduced their technician windows to a 1 hour, TWC technicians are required to obtain your feedback onsite before finishing their installation work. Shortly after your technician departs, you receive a phone call with survey questions about your technician that go directly to the company’s CRM database.

So, the point here is that not only should your company be diligently focused on providing excellent customer service, but if your company chooses to ignore the importance of pleasing your customers, your competitors are ready to scoop them up and hit you hard in the customer loyalty gut. If you want to see the evidence for yourself, check out this article on consumerist.com titled, “DirecTV is so bad it drove me to Comcast.”

Let’s switch gears for just a moment and address the social CRM aspect of customer service. Even though the big social networks (i.e.: Facebook, Twitter, etc..) apply elevated consideration for big brands seeking to secure specific URL’s and usernames based on brand recognition, there is striking evidence to support most big brands’ arrogance towards their customer base. According to a study by Acquity Group’s in December 2012 titled the Brand Ecommerce Audit, “71% of big brands are still leaving customer tweets unanswered. The study examined 50 of the United States’ best-known retailers highlighted in Interbrand’s Best Retail Brands 2012 report including Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Nordstrom, Urban Outfitters, GameStop and more for their multichannel customer service responsiveness. The overall results for Twitter were hugely disappointing....Facebook customer response numbers were only slightly higher...”

It’s quite chilling really, how these monster brands, with huge budgets, thousands of employees, expensive Super Bowl commercials and heightened priority status on the most powerful social networks in the world are literally choosing to ignore the very people that encompass the lifeline to their revenue stream. How many frustrating experiences will it take for customers to walk away from a brand? Do we even really want to know?

Bringing the scale down from global to local now, smart and upcoming medium (and even smaller sized) companies are emerging on the market scene with promises of better customer service - and, they’re following through on their promises. Establish a customer service standard, devise a policy for handling customer issues, have a strategy for cultivating brand loyalty, support your efforts with a reliable CRM system, attend to customer activity and comments on social networks, and genuinely work towards leaving customers with a positive reason to come back. It’s not a secret process, it’s just smart business. Big Brands Beware.

Social Media Challenge: Social Stalking & Transparency (April 2013)

Cathy Boudreau — Mon, 06 May 2013 11:18:00 GMT

Happy April, everyone! The weather in the Boston area has been phenomenal this spring. Usually it's my least favorite time of year here because the weather can be so erratic (70's one day, 30's the next -- no kidding), but we've been steady and sunny this year so far! Plus it doesn't hurt that the Red Sox are off to an amazing start this year (who would have thought?). But enough about the weather and the Sox... let's get down to business.

As you may remember from my post last month, I was on vacation for a week in April. I spent a better part of the week beforehand preparing -- tying up loose ends, scheduling social media posts, etc. The better part of the week after was catching up. I didn't have access to the Internet, email nor phone. Sounds a little barbaric, right? Well, I'm here to tell you... I recommend it! It was quite nice being unplugged for a week. With that said, I don't have a TON of "things I accomplished/things I learned" this month. In this month's blog I thought I'd take a slightly different approach and talk about two popular topics and how they bubble up on TV, commercials and real life: Social Media stalking and Transparency.

I really enjoy when a TV show takes on any aspect of social media. Which is why I found the April 17th episode of Modern Family brilliant. It basically picked apart the one thing that's bad about social media... stalking. In the show, Claire and Cam bought a house with the sole purpose of flipping it. When it didn't sell quickly, everyone was anxious. Luke, Claire's son, recommends a potential buyer (a teacher at school). Claire's oldest daughter, Haley, takes it to social media. She researches him online so the family can customize the house to his liking -- down to a doggie door for his beloved dog, a Blackhawks poster hanging in the living room, a kickboxing gym and even music he likes playing the background. The house showing goes extremely well and then falls apart (of course) once he realizes that the sellers know WAY too much about his personal life. Since this was a TV show, it was a slight exaggeration of what can go wrong when you social-stalk. But the show really rang true... How do you get information on a prospect or client via social channels and not come off a like a psycho stalker? You want to engage them in a conversation, but not scare them off. The same could be said about Inbound Marketing. I can see when a lead is revisiting our website... if they surf around 20 pages on my website, should I call them? What would I say - "Hey, I saw that you looked at several pages on our website... how can we help?" It's a very fine line and one I don't cross. If I got a call like that from a site I visited I'd be taken aback... I mean, the nature of a website is to get information... of course I'm going to look around at several pages! However, this is handy information for our sales team -- they can see exactly what the prospect is interested in and tailor a conversation around it (without mentioning that we know where they've been on our website).

My other topic is Transparency. I recently read an article by the Sales Lion on transparency in business (The Honest Economy: A New Way of Doing Business: http://www.thesaleslion.com/honest-economy-way-of-business/). Marcus makes some great points in this article -- being honest and forthcoming about your business will give you a leg up on your competition. I know that when I am on shopping on the internet and I come across a product or service I am interested in, I prefer when I can see a pricing structure. I'd like to know before I "waste" my time getting schmoozed by a sales rep if it's even in my budget. I'm saving my time and theirs. Not only that, but if there are two competing companies, I tend to put more stock in the one that's putting their info up on the website. They're laying their cards on the table and I can appreciate that. I know that for some businesses this may not make sense. We ourselves are in a tricky position where we offer consulting services. There are some services that are priced differently than others (based on project complexity, project size, etc.). Where there are many factors in play, we haven't figured out a way to present it in a non-confusing and concise way. (If you have any suggestions on how to conquer this, I'm all ears.)

I have a recent experience with transparency that really irked me at the time. We were on vacation in Cancun a couple of weeks ago and decided to do a "swim with the dolphins" excursion. We knew going in that we would not be able to take our own pictures. It was a no brainer that the dolphin center was going to capitalize on the photography. What I didn't know was how MUCH they would capitalize on it. It would have been nice if they told us up front the costs of the photos and/or video. Instead, they really get you at a weak moment after being with the dolphins (very cool) and then rob you blind for the photos. Now, you may think I'm just being cheap, but I'm not. For each photo they wanted $29/picture. Yes, you're reading that right. If we were to get one of me, my husband and daughter, that's another $90 on top of the excursion itself (naturally, they didn't take a group photo). But wait, I could have gotten all the pics and the video for a cool $350. Come on now. I'm not a stupid gringa! Obviously, this left a bad taste in my mouth. But if I knew the photo options/pricing going in, it would have changed my perspective right from the get-go. I would have thought, "OK, the prices are crazy, let's make the most of this!" versus "This is so amazing, the dolphins are incredible and it's a once in a lifetime experience...I must have a picture to remember the day!" and then being disappointed by the cost.

Final note on transparency... have you seen the new Oscar Meyer commercial? It's easily one of my favorites. The grandfather is waaaay too blunt/transparent with his comments. The gist of it is that sometimes being too transparent can be a bad thing... but the clear/transparent Oscar Meyer packaging lets you see exactly what you're getting. Point well taken... you want to be honest and up-front, but don't go overboard and be too blunt. If done right, transparency can be a win-win for both the consumer and the seller.

Check out the commercial --

That's all for this month! May is shaping up to be a busy month. We'll be planning another webinar, digging deeper into Google+ to see what it has to offer (I find that platform very confusing) and putting together a new offer or two.

Thanks for reading! Please feel free to sound-off in the comments below!

Making Use of Social Media Data with CRM

Cathy Boudreau — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:51:00 GMT

Anxious to interact more socially with their customers, many businesses in recent years have adopted some type of Social CRM system to better manage and engage in real-time with their prospects. And, due to the fierce adoption of social media by society at large, businesses are more or less forced into adopting a Social CRM process and reinventing the way they interact with their customers, as the customer service paradigm quickly shifts to a more customer-controlled model.

Not only does social media change the relationship between companies and their customers, but this change also influences the way businesses look at their traditional CRM operations, as well. While traditional CRM typically manages the sales, marketing and customer support information; it is very business process centric. Social CRM takes into account the dynamics of the community-based environment. Where CRM is process focused, “sCRM” is focused on conversations and people thus giving power to the customer. These changes typically trickle down into several aspects of the business, which leads to the necessity of better managing social activity and collecting information regarding these social interactions.

Utilizing a Social CRM allows businesses to collect robust demographic and behavioral details pertaining to those interacting with your business online. From contact information, profile details, comments, and the like, businesses have the opportunity to take a deep dive into the intimate details individuals share online. But, once this data is collected, what the heck to you do with it? According to IBM, “business place significant value on the role of social media when it comes to supporting sales, marketing and customer service goals....Many business professionals are gaining greater access to their company’s social data but are not quite sure what to do with it.” How can businesses who collect this data measure and analyze it in a way that is more meaningful and supports intelligent business decisions moving forward?

From the Qualitative Perspective: Lead Generation Data

Developing processes to connect with members of your business’ online community is a key step in developing more personal relationships with potential customers. Social CRM processes can:

Connect sales representatives with people who “like” your Facebook page
Scan for negative comments about your product or service and automatically open support tickets for customer service
Make suggestions for potential customers via expanded networks (i.e.: “friends of friends” or “connections of connections”)
Send communications to customers via social profiles with special offers or unique offers based on specific social media networks
Engaging with people on their preferred social networks
Asking for recommendations from your customers to be displayed on the social network
Performing specific keyword searches to find prospects who may be candidates for potential business based on their specific interests, as displayed on the user profile

All the while, the CRM system will track these customer interactions, specifically speaking social here, and will document each touchpoint for a more positive customer experience. Feeding this qualitative data into the CRM system can help your business identify key influencers online, assess brand or product sentiment from the perspective of the customer, as well as determine if your business is engaging properly with your social customer base.

Again, according to an IBM study, “traditional CRM strategies are not equipped to address this new social medium. They are designed to manage the customer relationship via traditional channels, usually from the company’s perspective...In today’s environment, where the customer is in control, Social CRM strategy is emerging as an approach for managing the dialogue, not the customer.” Measuring this dialogue is qualitative, not quantitative.

From the Quantitative Perspective: Analytics

Your business’ social media strategy and plan is running and humming. Sales, marketing and customer service and working together and customers are more and more pleased with doing business with you. But, the question remains, how does one measure the impact? Still, the ongoing challenge for most executives is establishing an ROI strategy and evaluating the associated risks. Alternatively, if an ROI strategy exists, then the challenge really comes down to developing a methodology to measure social media ROI.

Social CRM, when integrated with your analytics tool is the first step in ensuring data collection from generating website traffic from social media sites. If you’re familiar with Google Analytics, here’s why you need to look at specific metrics:

Overall traffic & unique visitors: The most obvious metric, but also the foundational benchmark for the other metrics
Traffic by source: Smart marketers will have segregated and budgeted for each silo or marketing channel. Understanding which of the sources produces the best return on marketing “effort” is essential, especially if you A/B test. If one source is outperforming another, then perhaps focusing on the better source will reduce the time and money needed to generate the leads and revenue your business is looking to achieve.

Referral visitors
Organic search visitors
Direct visitors
Paid visitors

Brand searches: This category indicates how much brand awareness is generated through content and other various awareness pieces your business produces and publishes
Prospects generated & conversion rate: Typically, your social channels will generate “referral traffic” to your website where conversion takes place. Measuring the referral traffic and how many names come through will help determine how effective particular offers on social sites are bringing in leads to the core asset (the website)
Cost per prospect:The most important metric, related to the overall ROI strategy.

Understanding who your prospects are, where they come from and the probability of conversion is the entire reason executives justify the use of social media, even if forced to adopt social media as a means for communicating with their customers and prospects. Feeding social data into your existing analytics program is one way to drill into trends, identify behaviors and adjust paths to conversion for an optimal customer experience.

When companies understand the need to reinvent their customer relationships, they think about CRM in a new light and begin building a strategic and operational framework that provides both structure and flexibility. Whether or not you’re looking to measure ROI or simply to manage and document each touch-point with your customers online, make sure your business looks at both qualitative and quantitative metrics surrounding both the dialogue(s) and the customer(s).

What are your thoughts on Social CRM analytics? Leave a comment below or tweet us live @harvestcrm!

The Salesforce Opportunity Push Counter

Cathy Boudreau — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:08:00 GMT

If you're in sales management or sales operations, you may find it handy to know just how many times a sales rep has "pushed" back the close date to a new month. Let's face it ... you can't trust a forecast if an opportunity keeps rolling from month to month.

Salesforce Labs has a handy app on the AppExchange called "Opportunity Push Counter". This simple counter tracks how many times an Opportunity has been pushed back. This push count field would be a great metric to track on a dashboard!

One reviewer on the AppExchange listing said, "This is SO much easier than having to run Opportunity Field History reports to track down the changes in Close Dates! Absolutely wonderful!"

This app works in the Enterprise, Unlimited and Developer editions and Free (my favorite word)!

Check out some screen shots below of the Opportunity Push Counter app.

Comments or question on the Opportunity Push Counter? Sound off below in the comments section!

How to Know When to Switch CRM Systems

Cathy Boudreau — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 12:25:00 GMT

The phrase “Spring Cleaning” is all too familiar this time of year. Typically used in reference to purging the home and paving the way from winter to a fresh start, business should implement the same mindset around this time of year, too. Whether it’s updating outdated processes or simply re-energizing the team, spring cleaning your business (and perhaps your CRM) can equate to huge long-term advantages.

In this particular blog, we are going to address CRM spring cleaning. How does a business know it’s time to upgrade their CRM system, clean it, or even switch to a more robust technology?

There are too many orders/processes and your team simply cannot process them quickly enough to service your clients or customers in a timely manner.
Clearly, there is a lack of workflow efficiency. Most likely the current CRM your business is using doesn’t fit the unique needs of your business/processes. Perhaps there is an opportunity to revisit the original setup to determine if any add-ons can help automate your processes further. Alternatively, the CRM system you’re using might be too complex or too simplistic to generate the output necessary to service clients and customers. In fact, if your business is experiencing a clog is the service pipeline, this huge red flag needs to be addressed.
You’re sitting on “legacy technology” in an effort to save money and be lean.
Data about your customers or clients is currently stored in multiple locations. The sales reps are using ACT while the marketing department continues to leverage Excel to plan out a years worth of marketing and lead generation initiatives. Sure, saving money by using older systems that still “somewhat” work will continue to keep the bills paid. But, if your business is invested in long term success, then investing in relevant up-to-date technology will suit you well. It’s no secret that the initial buy-in for software such as Salesforce or MS Dynamics can put a hole in your bank account, however, if you want your customers to be happy and continue doing business with you, then you’re going to need to consider making the switch.
Your sales reps are spending too much time NOT selling.
Originally, Salesforce CRM was designed primarily for sales departments and executives to better monitor and stay in touch with their customers. Over time, the software has evolved and expanded to incorporate other departments, too. However, if your sales team is spending too much time trying to get organized to sell, then your business is probably losing revenue associated with these sales opportunities. CRM systems that are well tuned for the unique needs of sales departments can increase their chances of closing sales with more automated processes (like calendar alerts, or automatic email reminders, for example) to ensure a more efficient sales day for each rep. No, this type of automation does not replace human beings, but rather sets the stage for more successful conversions and ongoing customer service.

If you’ve answered YES to any of these 3 problems, now is the time to consider making the internal change for long-term success. It’s easy to make assumption that you either need to toss what you have and re-do or stick your head in the sand and think everything is ok. If you’re unsure if your CRM system is underperforming, then talk to an experienced CRM consultant. When we have clients come to us saying that their CRM has gotten stale, we perform a thorough review of your system and discuss any current issues/pains that you are experiencing. Afterwards, we write up a report on recommendations. Sometimes it’s for additional enhancements; sometimes for a new system. Read more about our CRM Relaunch Services!

Planning on doing some CRM spring cleaning for your business? Tweet us your questions @Harvestcrm or leave a comment below!

The Social Media Challenge – Episode 3 (Mar 2013)

Cathy Boudreau — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 17:21:00 GMT

Happy April! Spring is slowly (and by slowly, I mean S-L-O-W-L-Y) arriving in Massachusetts. On a positive note, it looks like we may be done with snow for the season! Plus the Red Sox won their season opener so all is right in the world. J

Back to the matter at hand…my March challenge. When we last left off (I sound like a soap opera), my goals for March were to do more listening, implement a lead scoring plan with HubSpot and get a new website offer together. Two out of three got done. Here goes:

Social Listening

I did indeed subscribe to Mention.net to help me “listen” after doing a 30 day trial. As I’ve mentioned before, I like it because it looks at videos, images, blogs, Facebook and Twitter for your keywords. It still makes me laugh when my notifications go bezerk because of everyone tweeting/retweeting the same content. I have an alert set up for Social CRM terms and, oddly enough, that is by far the most active alert. We social marketers love to share!

I do have a few “wish list” items for the application... Namely, I would love some Salesforce Integration! I actually spoke with one of the co-founders a few weeks ago and he said it was something they are looking to do. Fingers crossed.

I also have been attempting to participate in the LinkedIn Groups more often. What I like about the LinkedIn Groups is that sometimes you get a new perspective on an issue, a great tip to try or even validation on a point you’re making. What I don’t like is that people find it easy to tear someone apart. Yes, there are some boneheaded answers out there, but is that a reason to start an argument about it? No. Just ignore it and move on. It’s easy to get into an “altercation” on the discussion forums which is mainly why I tend not to be as active as I should. I can’t understand why people are so rude…would they be that rude to someone’s face? <end rant>

Lead Scoring

When HubSpot released HubSpot3, they changed their lead scoring. Before, there was a default lead score in place. I had gotten kinda used to that. Was it effective? Probably not. Since our lead flow isn’t enormous, I generally have a sense of what’s going on (a positive spin on not having hundreds of lead conversions? Haha). I look at a lead notification email (the emails that get delivered when a lead is visiting our website again) and then check out the lead in HubSpot to see how many pages they’ve visited, how many times they’ve visited, etc. I also look in Salesforce to see if there’s any activity. If there is, I alert the sales rep that the lead is poking around at the following pages. If there’s no activity, I get a sales rep involved. Clearly this wouldn’t work with a large amount of leads.

I took some time and researched the lead scoring module, how to do it, best practices, etc. I quickly realized we don’t have the right data to make this truly effective. I think the lead scoring would work best if we had different types of offers that pushed people down the funnel. Right now, all of our offers can be considered Top of the Funnel (TOFU). If we had some Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) and Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) offers, I could score it in such a way that allowed me and my sales reps to see when a lead had downloaded a BOFU offer and therefore was “hot”.

In the meantime, I implemented the most basic lead scoring that includes # of form submissions, # of pages they viewed and how many times they’ve visited our website. For good measure, I also added points if they wanted to opt-in to our Newsletter distribution list.

It’s not perfect, but I will tighten this lead scoring up as I develop better offers.

I did run into a few issues setting up lead scoring and had to call Tech Support. A few things I learned about it:

The “plus” sign at the end of a row is considered an “and” while the “Add another rule” is like and “or”.
There is a Lead Score field in HubSpot but, oddly enough, that wasn’t being populated. However, the lead score WAS being synced to Salesforce? Weird? Yes…. I thought so too. What was more aggravating was that I couldn’t build a list in HubSpot based on the lead score. I couldn’t build one in Salesforce, either because the information was not being stored in a Salesforce field (it was just calculated). Good news… a few days later, this seemed to be working where I can now see the lead score in HubSpot! HubSpot must have fixed this JUST for me.
One word of caution. Once you set up the lead scoring rules, it takes a little bit of time for HubSpot to go through all your leads and score them so it takes a while to verify whether you have lead scoring rules that work.

A random thought on HubSpot -- I am well aware that I’m sporting a minor obsession with HubSpot. I came across an article the other day of someone else who is also drinking the Kool-Aid which made me feel better: http://www.savvy-inc.com/blog/bid/280613/Inbound-Public-Relations-and-Why-I-Drank-the-HubSpot-Kool-Aid

Offers for the website

Ok, I had 3 goals for March. This was the one that didn’t get done. You’d think that 3 goals would be completely do-able, but apparently not. The good news is that I have 2 offers in mind already and am constantly writing notes for both of them. The bad news is that I haven’t found time. Not much more to say about this!

Miscellaneous Notes

Facebook made changes to their news feed for companies in March making it more difficult for Facebook content to be seen by your followers. Quite honestly, I don’t love Facebook as a business page. It was hard enough to be seen in the first place (if you don’t interact with the business, they fall off of your feed), and this update makes it more challenging. It bothers me that if someone takes the time to FOLLOW your company page that they still might not be seeing your content. And now, with Facebook giving more weight to visual content, I think that will be tough for small/mid-sized businesses. Some businesses struggle to keep fresh with written content and now they’ll have to produce pictures, infographics and videos to “compete” on Facebook? I just don’t see it happening. For more on this update, you can check out HubSpot’s article on it: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/34243/facebook-update-gives-users-more-control-over-news-feed-what-marketers-should-know.
A handy tip I learned in a HubSpot webinar this month: Many people post on the hour. HubSpot always posts at 25 past the hour so that their info misses the “on the hour” rush. Also, I JUST read an article last night that HubSpot launched a tool that analyzes the “shareability” of your tweets: http://blog.hubspot.com/hubspot-launches-free-tool-analyze-tweet-shareability. I haven’t checked it out yet, but it looks cool (P.S. You don’t need to be a HubSpot user to use this).

Questions for the readers

Since I’m trying to increase my social media prowess, I figured I’d bounce some questions off you:

Have you participated in Twitter chats? Which ones did you find handy? What it total chaos?
Is anyone using the Salesforce for Social Media tool? Do you love it? Hate it? If you’re using it successfully, I’d be interested in chatting more about it. I tried it and just couldn’t get into it but I see the benefits of using it!
Hootsuite/Salesforce integration… anyone using it? Pros? Cons?
Have any of you done any Social Media promotions? Were they successful? I’m considering one, but I have mixed feelings on them. We ran a Facebook promotion a couple of years ago and it was a bust. We got some followers, but mostly folks that were in it to win something.

Next month

I hesitate to set anything in stone for April since it’s a short month for me…I’ll be on vacation (soaking up the sun and margaritas in Cancun) for a week. I know next week I’ll be busy tying up loose ends before vacation and the week I return, I’ll be crazy busy for a couple of days catching up. With that said, here goes:

A new offer – I have to at least start something!
Google + -- I want to check out this platform and get a better feel for it.

One last cute thing to share this month – only slightly related to Social Media. I have a 9 year old (almost ten, going on 24) daughter who wants to be on Instagram. She has a little marker board on her bedroom wall where she likes to post love notes to us or questions. Here’s the latest:

As you can see, I may have a social media marketer on my hands. Or perhaps a sales person (the “I will love it (so will u)” cracked me up. Of course, this will interfere with my husband’s plans of her being an engineer like him! Note – the answer was “no” to the Instagram question. I took the easy way out and let my husband be the bad guy.

That’s a wrap on March! Pray that my head doesn’t explode upon my return with all the content that will be posted while I’m away!

CRM vs Marketing Automation - What's the Difference?

Cathy Boudreau — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 11:18:00 GMT

Last week on our CRM insights blog, we discussed pro tips on enhancing Salesforce CRM - which got us thinking about the capabilities of Salesforce in reference to its marketing automation functionalities. While Salesforce boasts several nice marketing capabilities within its software, there are notable limitations for marketers who rely solely on CRM as a marketing management tool.

When it comes to CRM software like Salesforce that offer native marketing automation or lead generation features, or alternatively, the ability to enhance marketing functionalities with Apps and add-ons, the question most frequently asked is, “why do I need both?” The truth is that no matter how many apps you add, or how customized you make the CRM there are significant limitations on marketing functions.

Marketing automation tools exist primarily to increase workflow efficiencies and generate revenue faster. However, most people who hear “automation” tend to view the tool simply as an email automation tool. Well, yes, it is that, but there is more to this tool then just set and send. Marketing automation software allows marketers to:

Send the right email messages to the right people at the right time via scheduling
Track visitor behavior and build a database that the sales team can leverage - knowing where a customer is in the sales funnel or buying cycle can equate to huge advantages during the actual close
Connect email messaging to specific landing pages, and even create those landing pages with best practices for a higher probability of conversion
Avoid sending disconnected messages to customers. With the behavior tracking information, your marketing messaging is more relevant, and therefore more interesting to your prospects
Target customers not just on demographics - but rather target customers based on behavioral demographics

Therefore, marketing automation platforms and CRM systems can translate into real advantages for companies who use both platforms to complement one another.

According to Marketo, there are 5 main categories that depict the differences between CRM and marketing automation tools:

	CRM	Marketing Automation
Business Goal	Track opportunities and pipeline, manage contact and account information	Develop customer relationships, automate marketing programs, measure marketing ROI
Departmental Focus	Primary sales and sales management, some marketing	Primarily marketing and marketing management, some sales
Communication Style	Individual communications (sales rep to buyer)	Communications to groups and segments (may be personalized and triggered 1:1)
Architecture	Database-oriented, transactional queries	Workflow-oriented, highly detailed behavioral data, analytical queries
Pricing	Number of user seats	Number of contacts

What most CRM software (like Salesforce or MS Dynamics) excel in doing for sales, marketing automation tools equally help marketers bridge the gap between the departments so that the sales reps are more likely to have successful closes due to more insightful information about their buyers and where they lay in the sales funnel.

Now, depending on your particular vantage point or role, the purpose of the CRM and the marketing automation tools varies in definition. According to Adam Needles @Silverpop, a marketing automation solutions company, he addresses the strategic goals of CRM vs marketing automation from various perspectives within the organization:

From an overall business perspective, CRM is more focused on aggregating knowledge about existing customer accounts and managing new-customer pipelines; whereas, marketing automation is more focused on orchestrating one-to-one communication with early-stage prospects and on scoring/routing new prospects to manage subsequent marketing and sales actions.
From the perspective of sales/marketing roles, CRM is focused more on new sales, account management and service, and it is the system your sales team is most likely to spend their time in; meanwhile, marketing automation is focused almost exclusively on the marketing team and on the front end of demand generation.
From a technical perspective, CRM is more of a database, but it does enable some minor execution of communication activities and certainly has basic rules processing to automate account management functions; meanwhile, marketing automation is much more of an execution platform — with robust rules processing and enterprise-grade email/digital-communication sending capabilities — yet it also does help store and track critical marketing data, particularly prospects’ organic Web behaviors, as well as actions with content offers and downloads in response to nurturing emails.

Understanding the varying definitions of CRM and marketing automation is helpful when deciding which tool will actually help the overall needs for the business. What we are NOT doing is advising one tool over the other, rather, we encourage each organization to assess the needs of the sales and marketing departments before deciding on which tools are necessary to get the job done. In most cases where marketing departments manage large volumes of inbound and outbound initiatives, being prepared with the right marketing automation tools can make all the difference.

Whether or not your organization needs a marketing automation tool will depend on factors including:

Size of your organization
Campaign and outbound marketing frequency
Lead generation volume
Website complexity (ecommerce platforms)

On the other hand, marketers who rely on CRM alone to manage their marketing initiatives limit their abilities to conduct full scale marketing initiatives to bring leads into their sales team.

Email volume limits
Limited email automation
Email sender limits (no dynamic signatures)
No end-to-end activity tracking (scalability)

Another great point to note here is that if your business is keen on supporting the marketing team beyond CRM, here is a blog we recently published about the opposite approach: Should Marketers Use HubSpot for CRM.

At its essence, marketing automation software allows for more relationship based marketing with more quantifiable results. Just as CRM systems track and manage the pipeline of sales and forecasting, marketing automation can actually help executives and upper management measure and improve ROI with a more robust system of marketing record. Yes, this feature helps keep marketing departments accountable, but it also allows for better measurement, testing and optimization of all marketing initiatives and campaigns. These details can help organizations compare the exact cost per acquisition (CPA) and other metrics to increase revenue over time.

One last note - whether or not you’re looking for a CRM or marketing automation solution for your business, it’s important to understand that these tools are not a solution to fix whatever problems may exist within your sales and/or marketing departments. These tools will magnify your current state and efforts. So before you purchase a technology like CRM or marketing automation, be sure to invest in smart plans and strategies rather than simply software as a fix.

Does your business leverage a marketing automation tool? What’s your experience with it and has it helped reach your revenue goals? Leave a comment below or tweet us now @harvestcrm!

CRM Best Practices: Preparing Data for Migration

Cathy Boudreau — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 20:30:00 GMT

Whether you are implementing a new CRM system, migrating from one to another or even doing a data integration project, special consideration should be give to your data. The importance of good data quality should not be underestimated since poor or incomplete data can lead to a low acceptance of the CRM application.

One of the first and most important steps in any data processing task is to verify that your data values are correct or, at the very least, conform to some a set of rules. The remainder of this articles is designed to give you some best practices around cleansing data.

Pain Points

We know that preparing your data can be a source of pain. Cleaning data for migration into the CRM system is not always an easy process and can be quite time consuming. Most of the time, this requires a resource that is familiar with the data and has the fortitude to “fixing” it.

Key Questions

Before handing off your data to be migrated, you should ask yourself the following questions:

Have all the duplicates been removed?
Are naming conventions consistent?
Is the data complete?
What defines a winning record in the case of duplication?
Has the owner for each record been identified?

Solutions

Don’t stress out! While data cleansing is an important and potentially time consuming job, it has to be done and is manageable. We have tips on how to make it easier:

Develop and agree on rules that determine what stays and what goes
The people that are closest to the data should be working on it.
Conduct data quality analysis (Pivot Tables)
Check for missing data and fill in where possible
Find out “rules” for specific fields in your CRM application. For example:

Salesforce is very sensitive to bad email addresses. Spend the time to validate that they are formatted correctly or they will error out upon loading
Salesforce wants a person’s name to be formatted in First Name (“Cathy”) and Last Name (“Boudreau”)… not as one name field (“Cathy Boudreau”)
Salesforce has no Suffix name field. Add the suffix to the end of the last name

Build reports and test summaries
Work with others that understand the data. It’s important to have a firm understanding on the data and how it’s related. Sometimes the person working closest to the data may not be the one with the “structural” knowledge of the data.
Make sure key stakeholders sign off
Save backup copies of data

See? That’s all there is to it! Now get to work! On a more serious note, if you find the data overwhelming and still are having a tough time on figuring out where to start, call your CRM consultant (like Harvest!). They will know where to start and can help guide you.

Have you undergone a major data migration project? How did it go? Do you have any advice or things that worked/didn’t work? Things you wish you did differently? Let us know in the comments below!

Pro Tips for Successfully Enhancing Your Salesforce CRM system

Cathy Boudreau — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 20:41:00 GMT

Even the best, most well-planned Salesforce implementations requires a pilot phase of testing and refining to produce the optimal CRM system for the organization. However, far too often, organizations struggle with determining the importance and priority of customizations and/or modifications to enhance their Salesforce system post-implementation. So, in the immediate months following a Salesforce rollout, the time is critical to decide which tweaks, changes or enhancements need to be made, as these decisions can affect both employee adoption rate of the new CRM system, as well as the overall goal of implementing a new CRM system.

If your organization is rolling-out a Salesforce CRM, we recommend the following progressive tips for ensuring or improving user adoption.

Gather user feedback and categorize appropriately
Determine if Salesforce CRM features are being underutilized
Increase user adoption with Apps from the AppExchange
Determine if substantial needs still exist (i.e.: data integration) – Phase 2 Project
Call in the big guns (expert CRM consultants)

Gathering and Categorizing User Feedback

Post-implementation of Salesforce CRM, we highly recommend gathering user feedback during the rollout phase as fresh perspectives may shed light on enhancements that would result in a better user experience, higher adoption rate, and most importantly, a more efficient workflow process.

In addition, we further recommend categorizing this feedback appropriately into 2 categories: Enhancements or Features. Features include any “hard-wired” capabilities offered by the Salesforce software, like Workflows or Dashboards, while Enhancements refer to customized add-ons which can be found in the App Exchange interface, for example LinkedIn for Salesforce or Gmail/Google Apps integration. Knowing the different types of feedback allows executives to appropriately prioritize if enhancements need to be made as well as which customizations will help achieve the goal of the system.

Determining Underutilized Salesforce Features

Typically, a lack of user training results in low usage of features offered in Salesforce, so make sure your rollout plan includes a training schedule - both for users and executives. For more information on CRM training, read our recent bog article titled Helping Employees Adopt CRM.

In addition, Salesforce administrators should regularly access the usage reports in Salesforce to determine exactly which features are being overlooked by the users.

Enhancing Salesforce with AppExchange

Much like iTunes, the AppExchange is a marketplace dedicated to helping Salesforce users enhance their CRM system with beneficial Apps/add-ons to increase employee usage and efficiency. Recently, Harvest Solutions conducted a webinar - specifically addressing AppExchange, how to use it, how to determine the best Apps, and when it’s necessary to seek assistance with the Apps/add-ons. For example, say your organization uses the Gmail interface for email communications. Cirrus Insight allows you to save your Gmail into Salesforce history.

For a quick glance, here is a punch list of apps we recommended in our recent webinar to enhance your Salesforce CRM:

Cirrus Insight (GMail and Salesforce integration)
LinkPoint 360 (Outlook and Salesforce integration)
Logger by Salesforce (Log activities from a mobile device)
RedHot News (News articles in Salesforce)
DemandTools (Data quality & deduplication)

Keep in mind, not all apps are created equal. You may need to test and refine or do a little homework on which apps will truly help improve your Salesforce CRM usability. If you are new to Salesforce AppExchange, or if you’re just looking for some advice on which Apps/add-ons to choose, Harvest Solutions can help your business decide the best way to enhance your Salesforce CRM system. Give us a call, or contact us online. We frequently help organizations select which add-ons make sense and which ones they can do without.

A Phase 2 Project

Considering a Phase 2 project may be necessary if it’s been determined that you would get more functionality if the Salesforce CRM was integrated with a back office system (i.e. your accounting system). This is not typically a simple job and should be done with the guidance of an experienced consultant and should be approached with the same process that you did for the initial implementation. Since this type of work can be costly, you should discuss the goals you want to achieve and whether the end-result is worth the money you will spend. For example, we mentioned above data integration. If giving users access to customer accounting/invoicing information would make them more productive, then undergoing an integration project might be your solution.

Calling in The Big Guns

If you’re still scratching your head wondering why your end users are still NOT adopting your CRM system, it might be time to reach out to the experts for a Salesforce Relaunch. A variety of factors can point directly to re-launching your CRM as a solution rather than simply scrapping and starting over. If for example, your business processes have recently changed, the current Salesforce setup and configuration may not fit in-line with those new processes. Whatever the case may be, consultants can look at what your business processes are, assess any current issues with your system, evaluate the structure of the current configuration and offer recommendations on how to fix/revive the CRM.

Keep in mind...just because your CRM system is live, doesn't mean it should remain stagnant for the rest of time. User’s needs change. Business processes change. Your CRM system and business processes should be reviewed periodically to see if there is room for improvements. Some can be quite easy and inexpensive while other are much more time consuming.

Do you have a Salesforce enhancement success story? If so, we'd love to hear from you. Please leave your comments below or tweet us @harvestcrm now!

The Social Media Challenge – Episode 2 (Feb 2013)

Cathy Boudreau — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 18:56:00 GMT

Wow! February went by in a blur. I know it was a short month, but that seemed ridiculous! Ok, let’s see where we left off. Last month was my “inaugural” month as the Social Media Manager. Overall, I think it went pretty well and I tasked myself with 3 activities for February:

Do more listening and monitoring on our social channels – especially LinkedIn and Twitter.
Research other monitoring tools (suggestions are welcome)
Continue to expand my use of HubSpot – next up: look into Lead Scoring and how it might help our company.

A quick summary on how I did on those three tasks – One – I don’t think I did much more listening and monitoring… more on that later. Two – I did do some research on monitoring tools which is why my listening/monitoring didn’t necessarily increase. Three – I did continue to use HubSpot, but didn’t get into lead scoring. That’s definitely going on the March to-do list.

OK, let’s take a deeper dive.

Monitoring and Listening

I do struggle a bit with this simply because there is SO MUCH content out there. I know, I know…I need to quit whining. As I reported last month, I did a 30-day free trial of Mention which I really liked because all it did was monitor. You set up your keywords and off it goes monitoring the major social platforms, news blogs, images, videos, etc. You could even “train” it to learn the kinds of posts it can ignore. It produced a lot of information, but I found if I took an hour or so to go through the daily emails over my morning coffee, I found some good stuff! My free trial ended in February and I quickly hit my quota for the free tool so I was flying blind for a good part of the month.

Naturally, once my free trial was up, I went on a search for other monitoring tools to see what was out there. Here’s what I found:

HubSpot has a Social Prospects tool but quite honestly, I don’t like it. It only searches in Twitter, Yahoo and YouTube. You can’t “train” it like you can with Mention and it didn’t send you daily emails or give you any notifications.
Google Alerts – I did set up some alerts, but again, these were not robust. I set one up for “CRM Training” and have gotten a handful of alerts over the past few weeks (none of them were valuable to me). Compared to easily 3 dozen daily alerts from Mention – this wasn’t cutting it.
I also checked out Sprout Social, Social Motus, Netvibes and Hootsuite. None of them did what I wanted… just monitor and listen for my keywords. Yes, these tools did that, but they did plenty of other things, too, which leads me to my next point.
There are a TON of social tools out there. For all aspects of social media – social listening, social analytics, social posting, etc. It’s dizzying! And naturally, they all overlap, do similar things, etc. I still insist that I do not want to have to use 5 different tools to do my job. HubSpot still comes the closest to doing what I need… it does about 90% of what I need. Which is why I was only looking for a monitoring/listening tool (like Mention). I decided that I will sign up with Mention and spend $20/month on their tool.

HubSpot Use and Website updates

I continue to use HubSpot religiously (I am totally drinking the Kool-Aid). We maintain our website through HubSpot so making changes is easy. There have been lots of odds and ends that I’ve been wanting to fix and this seemed like the month to tackle some of them.

I added Calls-To-Actions (CTA’s) to my blog footer. This really couldn’t have been any easier (go to Blog Options and add your CTA to the footer). I added two. Guess what? It actually pulled in some leads. I’m always shocked when website visitors do what I want them to! So just from the simple task of adding those 2 CTA’s to the blog footer, I converted 3-4 more leads. I know – 3-4 doesn’t seem like a ton of leads (and it’s not), but our website is NOT a lead generation machine like HubSpot’s website. We don’t produce hundreds of leads a month. So I was happy with just the 3 or 4 leads. Especially since that was just in a 2 week time span.

The question I have about HubSpot is if I have the same CTA on a bunch of pages, how can I tell which page the lead originated from? I have to think there has got to be a way; I just haven’t found it yet. It’s probably staring at me right in the face. I think I will post to a HubSpot group in LinkedIn and see if I get any answers. If any of you know, I’d love to know, too… sound off in the comments please!

I also did a fair amount of work on lead nurturing… now called Workflows in HubSpot3. I had a couple of lead nurturing campaigns running, but they were just not adequate. So I jazzed those up with links back to our website, to our landing pages, etc. Based on my lead visit notifications in HubSpot, it’s starting to work. I can see that a lead converted and then a few days later, they visit the site again – to the pages I directed them to! I love that! People are doing what I want… finally!

Since we get Lead Visit Notifications from HubSpot, I like to “stalk” the lead, see where they’ve been on our site, etc. If they have visited several pages or downloaded another offer, I get one of my sales people involved. This is exactly where Lead Scoring will come in handy. I just need to take some time to figure out how I want to score the leads, etc. It looks easy to set up, it’s just the thought process up front that will take some time. It’d be nice to have it automatically send out and email to a member on our sales team saying, “Hey, this lead seems to like us… call them!”

By the way… for all you non-HubSpot users – HubSpot produces emails that tells you when a lead (someone who has submitted a form on your site) is visiting on your site again. Then you can go into HubSpot and see exactly where they have been thus allowing you to see their interest in your product/services.

Miscellanous

Since the remainder of my points are just a mish-mash of random thoughts, here goes:

Pinterest – This social channel is growing on me, but honestly, I have not figured out how to harness it to generate leads. I’m considering adding new boards for each of my co-workers where we can post our own interests. For example, if I had a “Cathy” board, I’d post about Boston sports, Spartan Race, chocolate, vacation ideas, margaritas… I digress. It might be a good idea to make us a bit more human/personable. Will it draw in new leads? Probably not, but at least it will show some personality.
I am really tired of hearing “the experts” telling everyone to create more content. Yes, I know content is king and it helps to generate visits and leads. But there’s already so much content out there. Maybe we could put a caveat on it: “only produce content if it’s worth reading, you’re interesting or you’ll make me laugh”. Oh wait… it’s not all about me. But can it be? :)
I struggle with how long to spend on Social Media each day. I know I obviously need to spend time on the channels, but I also have other job responsibilities to do! How long are you all spending on social media… what’s the breakdown of time for how long you monitor, schedule posts, create content (content!) and analyze your results?
Pet peeve – Everyone tweeting the same thing. Do any of you find it annoying that when you’re on a webinar, for example, and there’s an event hashtag and EVERYONE tweets the same thing? Even worse when the presenter tells you a comment is “tweetable”. How useful is it for everyone to tweet the same thing? To me, it’s boring. I get why people do it, but you figure that people in the same circles all follow each other, etc.
We have a YouTube Channel with about 13 or so videos on there. I love our videos! They’ve been up for a good 18 months at least and they are still generating new views. It’s a little crazy (in a good way)! What I need to figure out… how to generate leads from those viewers. Any ideas?
We have a lot of different focus areas – CRM, Social CRM, Business Analytics, Social Media strategy, sales & marketing strategy, etc. Right now I post about all of those topics throughout the week. Any advice on whether I should stick with one topic for an entire week or should I continue to mix it up?

My goals in March:

More listening… I should be back on the Mention app making life a bit easier.
Figure out a lead scoring plan. I have to remember that it doesn’t need to be “perfect” right off the bat. It’s ok to try something and tweak it after figuring out what’s working or not!
Create at least one new website offer.

So, that wraps up my February summary. It started off as a slow month and took off like a bullet in the end. How did everything work out for you in February?

Sales Managers – Get Your Sales Team to Adopt CRM

Cathy Boudreau — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 15:02:00 GMT

According to a recent LinkedIn poll, 52% of sales managers say that sales reps aren’t using CRM like they want them to. Unfortunately, too many organizations still continue to struggle with getting their sales teams to adopt new processes, specifically CRM.

The path to CRM adoption involves selling CRM to sales teams. Even though some sales pros have seen the light, others continue to revert back to old, more comfortable processes, such as excel spreadsheets and calendars, to name a couple. In fact, only sixty-six percent of enterprise buyers have only around half of their teams using enterprise software, according to a SandHill.com/Neochange survey. Fewer than 10% have effective usage levels above 70%. According to our calculations, the accounting department is not happy.

On the other hand, most sales managers quickly see the importance and value of a CRM system. Yet, their sales team members tend to view the CRM system as a burden, a distraction, or even a way for the sales manager to micromanage their work. In reality, the true value of a CRM system only reaches its fullest potential when the entire sales team uses the CRM and everyone understands the ROI potential both personally and for the business.

Here are 5 strategies for sales managers looking to get full adoption of the CRM system within their sales department:

1. Lead by example. While this might sound too obvious, think about your current processes. Are you using the CRM just like the rest of the team? When you generate reports, are you using the CRM system or another program? Does your CEO have his/her own license, too? By using the CRM from the top-down, you’re showing your sales team (not just telling them) how the CRM enhances your daily workflow - or even better, how much time it saves you.

2. Stress organization. CRM systems have many automated capabilities, such as reminders for follow up communications. Since most sales pros do most of their work at the early part of the day, wouldn’t it be ideal to have your schedule of calls pop up first thing in the morning? CRM can do that. Unless the sales team knows how efficient the CRM makes their schedule, they will continue to work with old processes that are comfortable and safe.

3. Training with incentives. Use a formula that already works. There is no mystery behind motivating sales teams with incentivized programs. Apply these same tactics when rolling-out a CRM system and reward team members for CRM success. In addition, the sales manager could deploy more peer-to-peer incentives by offering one large “prize” once the entire team has adopted the CRM.

4. Keep it simple, stupid. There is nothing more annoying than being set back. You’ve lost time and energy. Especially, don’t set your sales team back with a new process. Make sure you’ve created a CRM system for your sales team that simplifies their workflow. Ensure easy integration of existing data into the new system, and make sure you’ve laid out the steps for the transition. Also, while customization is a key component, don’t assume you need to go “add-on crazy” in the beginning. If you take your time devising a plan for roll-out, your sales team won’t have an excuse to view the CRM as a burden.

5. Give feedback. Sales managers need to use the CRM tool to not only tell their sales teams what they're doing wrong, but also what they’re doing right. In addition, sales managers can gain insight to what might be opportunities for improvement. If you approach your sales team with the intent to use the CRM to help them be better sales professionals, adoption rates will increase.

Let’s not forget the Big Kahuna here - recurring sales. CRMs collect more insightful data (typically via marketing) which assists sales reps when calling on leads. Customizing touch points with clients or customers is a much more intimate way to connect with your revenue sources, paving the way for more successful sales opportunities.

Even still, there will always be sales reps that feel a CRM system is a way for executives to micromanage the sales process and pipeline. We need to change the perception from the bottom-up that CRM is an investment for the sales team to be more efficient and to keep the pipeline flowing. Sales pros are full of energy, motivation and dedication. Don’t let a CRM system damper it.

Quickly log Salesforce activities on the go!

Cathy Boudreau — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 21:15:00 GMT

Looking for a fast and easy way to log Salesforce activity while you're on the go? Check out Logger by Salesforce Labs. With this application, you can log your activity in as little as 10 seconds, take notes, check-in and more! You can even use your cell phone's voice commands (Google voice for Android; Siri for iPhone) to make the entry that much quicker!

With Logger, you can spend more time selling and less time updating your activities (boring!). Here's how it works — select the Contact, Account, Lead or Opportunity you are visiting, then tap on one of six buttons: Check-in, Follow-up (task), Note, Call, Email, or Map. Features include:

Quick access to your Contacts, Accounts, Leads and Opportunities in Salesforce.com
Log emails and calls
Check-in to your Contacts, Accounts, Leads and Opportunities
Create tasks
Take notes
Optionally share your activity on Salesforce Chatter
Available as an open source project on github - http://bit.ly/gitLogger

While Logger is an unofficial and unsupported application, it still is fantastic! Plus, it's free and available for both Android and iPhone. Of course, you must have an account with Salesforce to use this app.

Interested in learning about other cool apps that can help power-up your Salesforce System? Check out the Amplify Salesforce with Add-ons (recorded webinar)!

Should Marketers Use HubSpot for CRM?

Cathy Boudreau — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:38:00 GMT

Back in 2012, HubSpot launched their latest, re-envisioned version of their marketing software tool to help marketers better customize their initiatives and to gain a better understanding of their customers behaviors online. As always, we here at Harvest Solutions advocate HubSpot as a tool for marketers, but we digress when marketers solely use HubSpot as a means for CRM.

Primarily, HubSpot’s features allow marketers to monitor their inbound marketing efforts online. From launching emails to posting social status updates, it’s an added bonus to us marketers when we only need to log into a one-stop-shop interface to get our jobs done and collect real-time analytics about customers. But, this only covers half the process involved as the goal of the organization is to make the cash register ring.

Before getting too detailed about the awesomeness that is HubSpot3, we present an interesting point from Jeffrey Russo’s position on marketers and CRM, where he believes that marketers tend to fall into 2 general categories. To quote Russo:

“A small proportion of marketers are CRM pros who know everything about the systems their sales teams use and get a ton of value out of the data their CRM system contains.
The second, and much larger group consists of marketers who knew very little about their CRM system. In their organizations, marketing and sales data are usually two separate universes, and as a result, they are missing out on huge opportunities to market and sell better.”

Expanding on Russo’s second category of marketers, there tends to be a natural disconnect between most sales and marketing teams. In fact, both sides have even managed to further navigate away from one another, whether using different tools, or simply not sharing critical, helpful information. If marketing really wanted to make nice with sales, then they need to learn and appreciate the CRM used by sales to keep everyone’s paycheck flowing. And, if sales wants more help from marketing, then maybe spend a little time helping the marketers understand the CRM.

For example, let’s say a new visitor came to your website and viewed pages X, Y and Z. They spent about 3 minutes looking around, then filled out a form to “get more info.” Marketer A collects this data and turns it over to salesman A for follow-up and potential close. 10 days later, salesman A converts the business, and whaa-la.

Well, while this example sounds great in simple form, a deeper dive unveils the reality of a disconnected process. For sales, if the CRM and the marketing system (HubSpot) are integrated, only then does the sales team have access to valuable lead insight - such as where the lead came from, or even which pages the visitor viewed. This information gives the sales rep a good place to begin the conversation when calling into the lead, not to mention a more personalized touch. For marketers, if HubSpot is the tool of choice for CRM, how is marketing going to know if the sale was actually closed? And if it wasn’t, then there would be little to no insight for adjusting the original marketing effort to ensure successful future marketing. In reality, what the HubSpot platform excels in doing for marketers is to see which efforts are working and which one’s aren’t. However, using HubSpot alone for both marketing and CRM can render long-term negative effects and a disconnected workflow for both sales and marketing.

HubSpot3 is a-w-e-s-o-m-e. Can’t say it enough. Marketers should rejoice at the opportunity of more intelligent data and analytics to make them even more awesome marketers. However, from the executive, c-suite vantage point, all these nifty features mean nothing if there is no connective tissue bridging the muscle to ROI.

While this is a position on why organizations should integrate HubSpot with CRM and not simply use HubSpot as the end-all-be-all CRM solution, it’s also a lesson on sharing and communication. Go ahead sales and marketing, hug it out.

The Social Media Challenge – Episode 1 (Jan 2013)

Cathy Boudreau — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 14:10:00 GMT

As you may know, I stepped into an expanded role at Harvest Solutions the first of the year. I am now the Social Media Marketing Manager. I am responsible for creating and analyzing Harvest Solutions’ social media strategies while also monitoring, developing and engaging our social communities. For the past 2 years, we outsourced this position where I quietly learned the ropes and picked up some tips. While I wasn’t completely new to the social media arena, it is the first time that it is solely my responsibility. I thought it would be fun (and keep me honest) to write a blog series on what I’ve accomplished each month and lessons learned. I apologize in advance to the length of this article… January was a busy month!

My first goal was to get my feet wet. I didn’t set out to land 15 new customers in the first week via social media. I knew that was completely unrealistic since building a community takes time and effort. With that knowledge in place, my first plan of attack was figuring out what I needed to do RIGHT NOW versus what could wait another 3-4 weeks.

Twitter

My first step was to better familiarize myself with Twitter. I have a personal Twitter account, but honestly, have not been very active in it. I’m much more a Facebook kind of gal. So off I went into our @HarvestCRM account. I took the advice of many, many (MANY) blog articles - listen first then participate. So I started reading through the tweets, searching for people to follow and finding interesting content that our followers might enjoy. Before I knew it, people were following me back and even retweeting our content. All good signs. I quickly learned a few things about Twitter:

Watching your follower count go up and down daily is maddening.
I do not and probably never will understand the folks that follow you even though their Twitter description and recent tweets clearly have NOTHING to do with our business. I especially love the few that have nothing to do with CRM or our related fields and Follow us, then unfollow, then re-follow. It’s like having a 2 year old pulling on my leg trying to get my attention.
Or how about the profiles that still have the default egg picture and no profile description? Or perhaps just a link to their website? No, I’m not gonna follow you… I have NO idea who you are and what you’re about and if you expect me to go and click the link and use my valuable time trying to figure out who you are, you’re wrong. Just tell me.
I quickly realized that there is no way to make sense of your Twitter feed without some sort of monitoring tool to bring the “important” stuff to the forefront. There’s no way I could keep up with a Twitter feed that is producing 100 tweets every 15 minutes. I found a tool called Mention that allows you to select keywords to monitor and filter them by channel (Twitter, blog articles, Facebook, etc). It’s pretty handy but even that can be overwhelming at times. I have realized that there is a massive amount of content out there which led us to writing our own blog article on Managing Social Media Data Overload.
My one wish for Twitter? That it allowed me to log into both the @HarvestCRM and my @clboudreau account and toggle between the two. The Twitter app on my Droid allows me to do this, so why can’t I on my PC? Did I miss something? Yes, I know I could use a tool like HootSuite to manage both accounts, but I’m trying to cut down on the amount of tools I’m using.

Full disclosure… I don’t know much about Pinterest. I don’t have a personal Pinterest account and have done very little in there. However, our previous social media provider created a Harvest Solutions Pinterest profile for us, so here we are.

To be honest, I find Pinterest a little quirky and definitely need to spend some more time investigating what it can offer to a B2B company. Here’s what I learned so far about Pinterest:

The weirder profile bios/description, the better. I kid you not, I have come across some of the craziest profile bios such as:

"I have a unique, growing collection of bones." (What??? Should I be worried? Who’s bones are they? And no, I won’t be following your boards.)
“I’m into kinky sports.” (Ah… ok. I can’t imagine what your boards look like. Fifty Shades of Grey anyone?)
“I chew on straws.” (Seriously… does that help you get friends?)

I quickly learned that Pinterest could easily become a major distraction. People love to pin pictures of food, travel and crafts. One morning before sending my daughter off to school, I was checking out a new Harvest follower’s boards. She had board for amazing places to travel. I love to travel and my list of places is ever-growing. Before you knew it, my daughter and I were practically drooling over some of these places. I’m pretty certain that my husband will not be pleased to learn that the list just expanded. And I’m absolutely certain that my boss won’t be thrilled if I go down the Pinterest rabbit hole.
In the coming months I need to invest in some time to learn how to make Pinterest relevant to our company and our followers.

Tools I used this month

The one thing I quickly learned this month is that there is a HUGE amount of social tools. Each do something slightly different and many overlap with each other. I think my main problem at first was figuring out exactly WHAT I needed.

As I said earlier in this post, I’ve been trialing Mention.net to monitor social channels for our relevant keywords. And that has helped. That free trial is coming to an end shortly and I will see if I can “get by” on their Basic/free version. I also want to see what other tools are at my disposal.

The main tool I used this month was HubSpot. We are a HubSpot Certified Partner and have been using the tool for a few years now. The only problem? I wasn’t using it to its full potential. This new job gave me plenty of good reason to dive into the areas I had previously not used much. And guess what? HubSpot rocks. My one “complaint” about HubSpot is that there is SO much functionality in there (I know, that’s a good complaint to have). Again, for me the goal was – figure out what I needed to do and see if HubSpot could it. Here are the new areas I explored in January:

HubSpot has a new email editor. I had been happily using VerticalResponse, but I figured that email was included with our HubSpot subscription, I should use what I have. I started off the year promoting a webinar we ran at the end of January which included an email blast. That meant that I had to import my contacts from Salesforce. Other than adjusting to a new way of doing things, it was pretty smooth. And it was super helpful to see my entire list in one place, what pages they visited, if they converted on any one page, etc. AND that information seamlessly sync’d back to Salesforce so my sales reps could see it. Cool.
I’ve also been using the Social Media tool to schedule my blog posts and look to see which ones have been clicked on, retweeted, etc. That’s handy. And also the other reason I’m not ready to jump into HootSuite… I like having all of the data in one place.
HubSpot also has a social media bookmarklet. It’s a handy button that sits as a button on my browser toolbar so when I am reading an interesting article that I’d like to share, I simply click on that button and it opens up the HubSpot Social Media scheduler allowing me to publish to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, my LinkedIn Groups, etc.
I also have taken several of the online training classes that HubSpot offers. They are excellent and I strongly recommend them. They are broken down into 13 manageable classes and typically run between 30-60 minutes. The instructors really know their material AND they are constantly monitoring the chat pane to answer questions on the fly. Plus they send you a link to the recorded version and a way to get in touch with them if you have a question. They really do get back to you with an answer (I tested it out with a question I had). It’s a great service.
Lastly, I have become much more intimate with the reports in HubSpot. Maybe I’m just a marketing geek, but there’s something exciting about tweeting a link or publishing a blog article and seeing the website traffic go up knowing that you drove that spike in traffic.

Reporting/Analytics

Our previous social media provider gave us a monthly report. I was also doing some minor reporting on my side, but this month gave me a chance to merge the two reports together and report on what I knew our company would find useful.

Using mostly data from HubSpot and a little from the social channels directly (Facebook and LinkedIn), I created a report. I won’t lie… it took a bit of time. Figuring out what I wanted/needed to report on and then analyze what I was seeing took some time… all of it well-spent. I suspect that next month will be significantly less time now that I have the “template” in place.

I am happy to report that our traffic was up as were our leads from our website for the month of January. Woo hoo!

Goals for next month

This was a crazy month with just trying to get the basics under my belt. In February, I have a few goals to add:

Do more listening and monitoring on our social channels – especially LinkedIn and Twitter.
Research other monitoring tools (suggestions are welcome)
Continue to expand my use of HubSpot – next up: look into Lead Scoring and how it might help our company.

Sorry for the lengthy article! There was a lot going on in January and I wanted to share my experiences. Hopefully in the coming months, I’ll be a bit more streamlined in what I want to accomplish.

Feel free to post any comments and or suggestions. I love hearing about useful tools, tips that made you successful, etc!

State and Country Picklists in Salesforce are Coming!

Cathy Boudreau — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 13:42:00 GMT

The Salesforce Spring 13 release is right around the corner. There are many new enhancements to the product, but perhaps the one we are most excited about is the beta release of State and Country Picklists. In our opinion, this was long overdue! This new feature will allow users to select states and countries from predefined, standardized lists, instead of entering state and country data into text fields. This will allow for faster and easier data entry AND will help ensure cleaner data which is key for reports and dashboards.

This beta release of state and country picklists makes the picklists available in the shipping, billing, mailing, and “other” address fields in the Salesforce standard objects Account, Contact, Contract, Lead, Person Accounts, Quotes, and Service Contracts.

For the beta release, 249 countries are supported, as well as the states and provinces of the US and Canada. You will be able to access and use the new picklists in most places that state and country fields are available in Salesforce, including:

Record edit and detail pages
List views, reports, and dashboards
Filters, functions, rules, and assignments

In this beta release, there are some limitations with the State and Country Picklist. They will not work with:

Campaign Members
Translation Workbench
Salesforce to Salesforce
Salesforce Touch or Salesforce Mobile
Visual Workflow, packaging, or partner portals
Custom indexes or outbound messages

Implementing State and Country Picklists

Since the process of transitioning to the new picklists isn't a mere toggle button, an admin should carefully follow the following steps:

Configure the state and country picklists in the Metadata API. This step is optional but recommended. For more information, read about the AddressSettings component in the Metadata API Developer's Guide.
Scan your organization’s data and customizations to see how they’ll be affected by the switch. You probably need to convert data and update such customizations as list views, reports, and dashboards so they continue to work with the new data type.
Convert existing data. The conversion process lets you map the various values in your organization to standard picklist values. For example, U.S., USA, and United States all map to US. Note: New organizations include sample account and contact data that you should delete prior to implementing state and country picklists. Choose Setup > Data Management > Mass Delete Records. Then choose the option to Mass Delete Accounts or Mass Delete Contacts.
Turn on the picklists for your users.
Optionally, rescan and fix customizations that might still need updating so that they work with the new picklists.

To watch a video about this new feature and how to implement it, click on the image below.

To view all of the Spring '13 Release Notes, please visit: https://na1.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/salesforce_spring13_release_notes.pdf

Are you excited about this new feature? Got your eye on another feature in the Spring 13 release (like Chatter Tasks or an updated Salesforce for Outlook)? Sound off below!

Social Media and Data Overload – Is Content King or A Dictator?

Cathy Boudreau — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 15:30:00 GMT

You’ve probably searched for something like “social media overload” to find this blog. And, in an effort to get our point across, we hope you’ve found what you’re looking for. The proliferation of data, specifically if shared on social media, is practically an epidemic. Have we created TOO much information? And, with all the information available to us, should we be sharing it at the rate of overload?

The goal of this blog isn’t to create more content just for the sake of content. What we’re noticing more and more are the overwhelming data feeds and streams that constantly distract us. In reality, content is becoming a dictator and the Staples office supply company would have been better suited to create an “Ignore” button, rather than an “Easy” button.

Before Facebook became wildly popular, connecting with others socially online came from “chatting” on AOL instant messenger (remember “you’ve got mail?”), or even more so, through forums on the internet. And, in these beginning stages, social networks were relatively quiet because advertisers and marketers hadn’t diluted them - yet. What changed the game for businesses and marketers was when these social networks offered the ability to share information as a brand with people that share the same demographic qualities of their target audiences. As such, we as marketers found that creating content is the key to connecting and building relationships with these users.

Now that we’ve spent the last decade creating content and playing around in social media, where are we? We’ve written blogs, Tweeted those blogs, posted updates to Facebook and spent countless hours connecting with other professionals on LinkedIn. We shove more gigabytes of content out the front door of our businesses each day trying to capture every shred of the most desired commodity known to man – the attention of human beings.

(FYI since starting to write this blog, the @HarvestCRM Twitter news feed has 125 new posts.) Maybe we as marketers need to refer back to Kindergarten days and begin to treat others how we would want to be treated. Stop writing and sharing and posting content just to write and share and post content. Otherwise, you’re going to get ignored.

So, how do we (marketers and NON-marketers) weed out the good and bad info, and what can we do (as marketers) moving forward? Let’s start with the latter and discuss a good yardstick to measure quality content creation.

Know your target audience. If you want to get out a message via social media, think before you post. Will this content actually be interesting to potential readers, or is the information unoriginal? If every single AC repair company posted a blog about how to lower your electricity bill in the summer, do you think those blogs will look much different from one another?
Know what you’re selling. How does your business (or the content you’re about to publish) differentiate from your competitors? Is the information you’re about to offer pose some new thought or game changer for the reader? Or, perhaps don’t sell your reader. Perhaps it’s a good time to take a more organic and real approach with your target audience and quit trying to establish relationships solely based on the fact they’ve given you money.
Think. Would you want to read what you wrote? Is your content thought provoking or remarkable? And, if it’s not, how will your “standard content” reflect on the intelligence of the author/company?
Give them something to talk about. Bonnie Raitt may have been before her time with this idea. Is your content remarkable and will the reader talk about this content? Will someone who reads your blog actually re-mark it for later reading or even share it with someone else?
Be relevant. If you’re writing about outdated processes or practices, immediately pull out your shredder and destroy. Stop wasting your time and others.

The truth is many marketers haven’t followed good practices in content creation, or even good practices in terms of sharing that information on social media networks. How does an online user weed out what’s good and what’s not so good?

Regulate the time you spend on social networks. Probably the hardest of all things you can do online especially when you stumble upon something of interest or find yourself deep into page 10 of a Google search. If you limit yourself to certain times of day for a predetermined period of time, you will find that your focus is better streamlined when you only have XX amount of minutes to find what you’re looking for.
Trim off the fat. You’ve got 1,789 Facebook friends, you like 97 business pages, you follow 834 users on Twitter and you’re connected to 500+ professionals on LinkedIn. Unless you actually know ALL of those connections, take about an hour for each platform and get rid of the connections you can do without. This exercise will help you better determine who’s important and who isn’t, as well as cut out some of the clutter on your news feeds. Not ready to say goodbye? Alright, well, then start by adjusting your settings per platform so that you can decide what information is important to you.
Pick 5-10 topics you’re willing to digest. Make a list of topics you’re interested in (personally, professionally or both) and stick only to reading those subjects. Just because HubSpot or Mashable publishes 100 articles a day doesn’t mean you need to read all of them.
Use helpful tools. There are so many, but one of the best ones we’ve found is Get Pocket. This is a great app that you can use on your computer or phone to store articles for later reading. If you’re too busy to sit down, browse and read, you can store these articles for a later time and dedicate your attention to reading only. It will help you with point #1 and you will better regulate your time. (Other tools of notable mention are Evernote, Google Reader and Flipboard, to name a few.)

We simply cannot avoid the fact that data overload is a terrible time suck, and it’s only going to get worse. If you want to make smarter decisions for your business, or smarter buying decisions, or just be smarter in general, get on board now as an even bigger data flood is coming. If you’re a marketer, be a better content creator. Or, if you just want to silence the noise, prepare yourself each time you embark on an internet surfing adventure.

What are your thoughts on data overload? Or, if you have any nuggets of wisdom to help people weed out the noise, please share with us by commenting below!

Social CRM | Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

Cathy Boudreau — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 16:43:00 GMT

Happy New Year! How are your 2013 resolutions going so far? Make it to the gym yet? Yeah, us neither.

Many people make New Year’s resolutions for personal and professional reasons, but what about New Year’s resolutions for businesses? Either way it’s difficult to change old habits. Even for businesses. However, while the time and effort required to successfully change or update a business process can be overwhelming, it’s not impossible.

So, the question is: how do businesses successfully change outdated processes and/or systems to ensure the health of the company long-term? The answer lies in circumventing frustration via implementation and education.

If your business is looking to adopt a new tool(s) to better enhance workflow, or a new CRM process to better service your customers or clients, here are the 4 key components for success:

A desire to try new approaches, tools and systems
An understanding of what tools and solutions exist, and which ones best compliment your business goals.
A plan for implementation
A transparent education and training program

Let’s take social CRM as a relevant example. In 2012, the opportunity of low overhead social media marketing alone led 90% of small businesses to activate social media profiles for their business. Once their online presence was established and their online conversations began to increase, some of those companies sought after a variety of social CRM tools to help manage these digital relationships and leads. Simple management solution, right? Well, then you might wonder why 69% of those businesses thought these new online networking and social CRM tools didn’t actually help their business.

According to a 2012 social media survey conducted by Beagle Research Group, LLC, “although [most companies] have made some attempt at involving social media in their business process, there is an apparent difference in many minds between social media per se and social CRM…[that] the slow rise in interest for social CRM and other tools that fully leverage the power of those channels indicates a resistance to fully embed those channels into business – at least without specific proof that they work.”

And there’s the million dollar word: Resistance. Adopting a social CRM system requires embarking on unfamiliar territory, and when we lack the knowledge (or the desire to learn) a new territory, we tend to automatically assign failure to the tool or process instead of ourselves. Ever heard of “user error?” More often than not, our resistance to new things is directly related to our lack of understanding the HOW (i.e., training, education, or fear of failure) or, even worse, the WHY (i.e., not explaining the benefits that the new process brings to the company).

In addition to end user frustration, resistance to new business processes can result in wasted time, effort and investment. We tend to revert back to old (and probably bad) habits even when our intentions for change are good. For businesses looking to change old habits, it’s equally as important to have a plan, especially knowing how easy it can be to revert back to old processes that just don’t work anymore.

Key Takeaways
For a successful company-wide adoption of a new tool or process like social CRM, the business must also invest in the appropriate amount of education and training necessary to reduce the probability of resistance and failure. Be transparent with your team, explain and educate on both the HOW and the WHY a business process is being updated or changed. The more comfortable your team is with a new CRM software or process, the higher the chance of successful implementation.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. [tweet this].
―Winston S. Churchill

CRM Best Practices: New Year, New CRM Success!

Cathy Boudreau — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 14:20:00 GMT

With the coming of a new year comes an opportunity to revitalize your team for CRM success. Whether you’re just embarking on a new CRM program, or looking for new ways to maximize your customers’ experience with your brand, now is a good time to re-evaluate your organization’s software systems to make sure all are functioning according to CRM best practices standards. If they are, then your CRM program is in very good shape, and may just need a tweak here or there to maintain its customer-centric focus. If they aren’t, use the tips below to determine the reasons why, and then make the concerted effort to change or redefine your practices to attain the CRM success you need to connect with your customers.

Define the vision, goals, and expectations – CRM success starts with a vision of what it is you want your CRM systems to accomplish. Along with a vision come goals and expectations for your organization and the systems themselves. Without these key ingredients, your staff is left to figure it out for themselves, systems get managed in a piecemeal fashion, and team members fall back into comfortable old habits instead of trying bold new initiatives to engage customers.

Collect the right information – An effective CRM system uses the data it collects to enhance the customer experience in some way, and as a result strengthen the customer-brand bond. CRM success depends on your ability to carefully consider all of the data available, but collect only that which can be utilized effectively to meet your vision. Look at the data you’re capturing, or want to capture, and measure that against your goals and expectations. If it does nothing to enhance the customer relationship, or help you meet one of your goals or provide a metric to quantify your expectations, throw it out.

Empower your people – Effective customer relationship management is almost impossible if your team members don’t have the authority and backing of senior management to make on-the-spot decisions in the interest of better customer relationships and CRM success. Requiring “approval from above” frustrates both the customer and the employee, and is contrary to the concept of timely customer response. Train your people on your CRM vision, goals, and expectations, and train them on the software programs as well as effective and complete data collection methods. Then give them the freedom to make decisions on behalf of the organization. Reward employees who demonstrate customer-focused thinking.

Settle in for the long haul – CRM success won’t happen in a matter of months. It takes time to collect the data needed to gain customer insight, and even longer to build the valuable customer relationships your business seeks. Businesses often set the stage for failure with CRM systems by expecting immediate results, and then falling back to production-based thinking when the CRM program fails to realize that expectation.

Use technology to enhance your CRM systems, not replace them – A well-functioning CRM system has, at its core, people. People make the customer relationship work effectively. Businesses often look to technology as a way to displace staff or collect more data, and in the process, ignore the fact that people are an absolutely essential part of CRM success, and that the technology is only a means to strengthen that success. Technology should be used to collect and analyze meaningful data, and provide staff with the information needed to engage the customer and build your brand.

Embrace continuous improvement – Your relationships with customers will continue to grow only if your organization continuously evaluates its CRM systems and finds ways to improve them. Customers are dynamic, and as such, your CRM program must evolve as well. You must continuously analyze your data to look for changing trends or patterns in consumers, constantly re-evaluate your vision, goals, and expectations, and find new ways to measure the pulse of your customers if you expect to achieve the highest levels of CRM success.

CRM Best Practices: A Guide to Maximizing the Customer's Experience

Cathy Boudreau — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:53:00 GMT

Effective CRM programs don’t just happen, they are designed and built, and reviewing existing CRM best practices can ensure your program gets off to a good start. Implementing a CRM program is not difficult; there are plenty of systems and vendors that can help you put one in place. But simply having a program doesn’t ensure success. You need a vision, buy-in, and objective measurements to determine whether your program is accomplishing what you want it to do – improve customer satisfaction and build your brand.

To help you assess your system against existing CRM best practices, here are some of the ‘core’ constituents of successful CRM programs.

Develop a vision and an enterprise-wide definition – From the very outset of system design, CRM best practices spell out the need to create a vision that the whole organization can support, and define the system in a way that is common to all departments and groups. The vision should describe how the CRM system mutually benefits both customers and business, so that each group within the organization can understand its role in making the system a success. A thoughtful and comprehensive vision will also allow the CRM program to evolve as the organization better understands its relationship with each customer and how to add value to each customer’s experience.

Have a success roadmap – Success roadmaps are also created at the very beginning, according to CRM best practices. Roadmaps to success identify the key components of the system –people, software, strategies, processes, and learned insights, among others – and their inter-relationships in defining and building a successful program as the business moves forward. Businesses that have effective CRM programs understand that technology alone will not improve the customer experience. The people within the organization, the strategies undertaken, the insight gained, and processes used to add value to the collected data all factor into the program’s success.

Have objective metrics to measure the program’s success – In order to determine if a CRM system is providing the business and its customers any value at all, CRM best practices suggest it’s important to review predefined metrics regularly. Such metrics should not be limited to ROI of the CRM system cost alone, however. It should include the other benefits a CRM system provides that indirectly impact the organization’s bottom line, such as product lines introduced through customer collaboration, cross-product sales dollars, reduced cost of customer management issues, and reduced cost of new customer acquisition, among others deemed valuable to the organization.

Integrate CRM with other applications – Businesses that excel at CRM best practices understand the importance of having a CRM system that complements all of the other applications in use by the organization. Email applications, financial systems, sales and marketing efforts, and, of course, customer management all benefit from a CRM system that integrates with business warehouse and application suites. CRM is much more easily integrated into an organization, and data is more centralized, when all groups within a business draw from and feed into the same database of customer information. This is also essential for those businesses that must comply with federal regulations or internal or business-specific policies.

There are plenty of other CRM best practices from which your organization can draw to improve its CRM program, but implementing these core concepts is a great place to start.

How to Turn 'Just a Website' Into a Lead Generation Machine

Cathy Boudreau — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 14:50:00 GMT

Your company’s website should be more than just a showcase of products or a list of services; it should be a lead generation machine to drive sales for your business. If it isn’t performing this one vital function, you’re missing sales opportunities and wasting valuable resources. An effective website will quickly and efficiently guide users to exactly what they want, with the ultimate goal of converting those prospects into sales. How effectively your website performs this lead generation function is a direct reflection of its navigability, simplicity, and ability to entice visitors to learn more about your brand.

If your website needs some help with lead generation, HubSpot all-in-one marketing software will be of benefit. HubSpot is a pioneer in inbound marketing techniques, and over 8,000 companies around the world use their software to attract leads and convert them to customers. They are experts at website design and integration, and provide solutions for underperforming and problematic business websites, as well as offer solutions to enhance the performance of moderately effective sites. With nine different modules included in the application suite, almost any business can benefit from HubSpot.

HubSpot improves website lead generation by providing a search engine optimization module for landing pages. The software helps users find and track effective keywords, diagnose and fix underperforming website pages, and follow inbound links to determine whether they are generating leads. Site designers have access to link-building opportunities and keywords that help build search engine rank.

Using the Calls-To-Action module, businesses can create customized content and offers based on the type of visitor – prospect, customer, or lead – that is accessing the site. Leads can be segmented so you can choose which offers to show them. You can change your CTA’s depending on the interests of the visitor, and modify CTA’s in blog posts to keep content fresh in high-ranking blog posts. HubSpot also offers A/B testing which makes it easy to determine which CTA’s are generating the most click-through activity and conversions.

A critical piece of lead generation is creating an effective landing page, and HubSpot software assists users in that regard. A variety of prebuilt templates are included with the software, and designers can build and test different page designs to find the most effective delivery scheme. The pages can be easily integrated with social media and email functions so that campaigns can be launched directly from the page.

Beyond website optimization, two other popular modules included in the HubSpot marketing software are blogging software and social media tools. The blogging software module is business-focused and designed to integrate with your other marketing programs. It provides SEO suggestions, and has an analytic function that lets you measure the effectiveness of each post in terms of lead generation. Social media tools let you engage customers and track interactions and activity. Both can be integrated into web pages to capture potential customers who may not yet be ready to opt into your main offer.

HubSpot software also includes modules for email marketing campaigns, lead management, marketing automation, and integrated analytics. The application is a complete marketing system that helps you get found on the internet, attract and convert leads, and measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Harvest Solutions is a HubSpot Certified Partner, and we can help you integrate the software, train your employees, and customize it as needed to fit your exact business needs.

CRM Tools That Help Measure the Impact of Social Media

Cathy Boudreau — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 14:44:00 GMT

Expanding your CRM program into the social realm can profoundly impact your brand, but having the right CRM tools available to measure the effectiveness of your SCRM systems should be a big part of that decision. Since the move to social CRM is typically made to further engage your customers, stay abreast of chatter surrounding your brand, gain market insight, and conduct an effective public relations program, having applications that let you gauge traffic volume, discover influencers, isolate key demographics, and track overall sentiment about your brand is essential. One of the most effective CRM tools for providing these analytic functions is Radian 6.

Radian 6 is a complete, cloud-based, social media monitoring system that provides a variety of modules for businesses that want to implement social CRM and monitor the activity using CRM tools. The system includes, among other applications, a Social Hub to monitor online conversations about your brand, an Engagement Console that allows you to engage in social commentary, an Insights module that lets you analyze where conversation about your brand originates, and a Mobile app so you can carry your social CRM application with you while on the road.

The collection of CRM tools that lets you monitor the health of your system is found in the Summary Dashboard module. This module generates a real-time snapshot of your brand as it is seen on social websites, and can be used to track social media campaigns, measure trends, and build a social media strategy for your business. It provides high-level overviews and drilled-down specifics for a variety of measurements depending on the depth required of the viewer.

Radian 6 captures and breaks down the social audience by demographic as one of its CRM tools for measuring social media impact. Participants can be categorized by age, gender, location, particular buying habits, or any other measure desirable for the business. Knowing who your audience is allows you to target marketing campaigns accordingly, as well as plan future marketing activities to attract a broader demographic.

The amount of conversation surrounding your brand – its volume – is another of Radian 6’s CRM tools. Current values and trends are tracked so you can see where you are now compared with previous periods. Volume data can be used in conjunction with marketing campaigns to measure “buzz,” or as a benchmark to tell you something is happening with your brand you need to be paying attention to, separated out by media type and source.

Knowing how social listeners feel about your brand is essential, since sentiment can change rapidly. Radian 6’s Sentiment section tracks positive and negative sentiment spikes, and provides a graph to see how your brand is trending over time. It also retains a snapshot of the last three positive and negative posts.

Another of the CRM tools used to measure social media impact is a section on influencers – the people or groups having the biggest impact in social media conversations. By knowing who they are, you can learn more about them and attract them into the fold or dissuade them from further commentary. A variety of different media channels are monitored for influencers, including video, blogs, forums, news site, Twitter, etc.

Finally, the Summary Dashboard in Radian 6 contains a section on content. The last of these CRM tools lets you know what people are saying about your brand by looking at the most used keywords, hashtag phrases, top-trending topics, and sample words from social traffic involving your business.

Managing the health and activity of the social conversations surrounding your company is essential to promoting your brand and influencing customer loyalty and sentiment. By knowing where you stand, you can mount effective marketing campaigns, and head off negative feelings before they begin to take root in the social community. The Radian 6 social media monitoring process is equipped with a variety of CRM tools that help you measure the impact of social media on your business.

The Google Talk Sidebar in Salesforce

Cathy Boudreau — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 14:04:00 GMT

You may have noticed that the Google Talk sidebar is no longer available in Salesforce. Why not? Google is constantly changing and evolving their technology infrastructure.

Since it's not active, you might as well go ahead and deactivate it. Here's how:

Click Your Name > Setup > Google Apps > Settings
In the "Activate Google Apps Services" list, next to the Google Talk Sidebar Component option, click on Edit.
Deselect the Active checkbox.
Click Save.

Disappointed that this tool isn't available anymore? Have you considered using Salesforce's Chatter Messenger? It's new as of the Summer '12 Release!

Have other questions regarding Salesforce and/or Google Apps? Post them below!

How Can CRM Software Benefit Wealth Management Firms?

Cathy Boudreau — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 14:00:00 GMT

The volume and complexity of information handled by wealth management firms for clients is staggering, and a CRM software solution provides an excellent way to coordinate and categorize that data to make sure nothing falls through the cracks for any customer in your care. From tasks as simple as updating contact information, to the intricacies of investment strategies and estate planning, CRM software lets your advisers see customer profiles in real time to get a complete picture of their current situation to address opportunities or needs. Whether you’re a small company managing a handful of clients, or a large firm controlling hundreds of investors’ portfolios, a CRM application can enhance your relationship with clients and expand your business.

The database provided as part of a comprehensive CRM software solution stores not only all of your clients’ personal and financial information, but can also house all of the other internal services and systems used by your staff to conduct business on a daily basis. Using a business-specific dashboard, advisers can instantly pull up a client’s entire profile to show investments, financial accounts, interests, and holdings along with all of the other services your firm offers. This 360-degree view affords financial planners the opportunity to look at a client’s information in relationship to your firm’s associations and activities, and find additional investment opportunities beneficial to both parties.

The analytics functionality available with CRM software makes it easy to sort and group information in every way possible to identify new strategies for servicing clients, identify and target new business, and see how the organization is performing financially. Group clients by investment type, total net worth, assets, or any other number of ways, and even drill down within each group to focus on individuals in specific roles. Analytical software can also help you identify and capture marketing opportunities for new and existing clients as well.

CRM software improves the efficiency of your advisers and office staff. Live chat features enable everyone inside the firm to collaborate in real time. The workflow system included with software expedites compliance procedures and the approval process to prevent delays. And for your business, financial dashboards let management stay on top of key performance metrics and client satisfaction ratings.

CRM software solutions don’t have to be expensive. By taking advantage of cloud-based CRM systems, you can get an application running with little investment in hardware or software required, and with no downtime or disruptions to your business. Also, by using a web-based application, your staff can have continuous access to your central database when they’re on the road using a smartphone or tablet, so customer relationships can be maintained beyond office walls. A well-designed and implemented CRM software system can improve your relationships with clients, expand your business through new sales and marketing opportunities, and keep your office running smoothly with advanced workflows and integrated email and calendar systems.

When your wealth management firm is ready to invest in a CRM software application, contact Harvest Solutions. They are experts at helping small- and medium-size businesses design, build, and launch CRM and SCRM applications.

CRM Analytics: Getting to Know Your Customer Better

Cathy Boudreau — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 13:00:00 GMT

CRM analytics create the bridge between your CRM program and your business’s bottom line. When thoughtfully built to provide meaningful data, CRM analytics provide an overview of how your business is performing with respect to key indicators. Aside from the financial aspects, however, insights into your customers’ needs, loyalties, satisfaction level, demographics, and habits are also available in CRM analytics software and programming. This indirect link to your bottom line can demonstrate how effective your marketing, sales, and customer relationship methods are performing in terms of converting prospects into sales dollars and keeping existing customers loyal to your brand.

CRM Analytics should include some advanced planning. Sit down with your group and figure out what reports/dashboards you need to see in order to make successful business decisions. Make sure that data is then being collected.

While collecting information through your CRM program, CRM analytics can show you the customer side of the equation. By tracking a prospect through the sales process, you can determine how your leads found you. Was it through a targeted marketing campaign, a landing page, a click-through page, or by some other method? Did the lead arrive as a result of a social media contact or site relationship, naturally, randomly, or by some other motivating factor? By knowing how your customers got to you, you can enhance your marketing and funneling efforts to bring even more to your business.

Using customer data statistics and sorting them in a variety of ways can also reveal a great deal about your customer base through CRM analytics. You can sort them by geography, age, the time of day they visited the site, income level, education level, types of products they’ve purchased, and a thousand other ways — if you’ve collected the data properly using your CRM software. Armed with this information, you can create targeted marketing campaigns and identify potential new leads for your sales team, ultimately improving business performance and increasing revenue.

Using the customer data and separating it appropriately in CRM analytics software empowers your teams to use predictive analytics to cross-sell other products to existing customers, rate prospects’ chances of being good leads, and generate specialized lists for marketing opportunities. The data can provide information for improving client service, strengthening brand loyalty in the process and also aid in customer retention.

The customer side of a complete CRM analytics solution contains information displayed on a graphical user interface that is easily learned and understood. The information contained in the interface is categorized in a number of ways: by workflow method, account, contract type, service date, dispute resolution, and a number of other listings. By separating the data in this way, the same customer information can appear in multiple places and be used most efficiently by any group that needs it. For example, the sales team may want to see customer data by contract type, marketing by account type, and customer service by dispute resolution type. All three groups may pull up the same customer’s information, but they would receive it in the way that makes the most sense for their needs.

CRM analytics provides invaluable financial business-specific data, but it also contains invaluable customer-specific data that can help drive sales and improve customer loyalty. Knowing your customers intimately empowers you to maximize each revenue stream and capture more market share through targeted campaigns and sales efforts. The customer side of CRM analytics can further enhance the financial side of your business.