Shamrock CRM – Salesforce.com Consulting, Implementations and Web Development

Donor Management Software

For all of the nonprofits out there looking for Donor Management Software, Salesforce.com is an excellent option to consider and very cost effective (free).

I know that the term “Salesforce” does not necessarily relate to the goals and actions of a nonprofit organization, but try to push this idea to the side and think of it as only a term. This was the name of the company when they were initially created an geared towards for-profit organizations. A lot has since changed and the tool is highly customizable for ANY organization.

Salesforce does an excellent job with Constituent Relationship Management and Donation Management.

A nonprofit can easily utilize the tool to track/perform:
-Organizations that your constituents are affiliated with or employed by (track board members, employees, relationships, etc)
-Households that your contacts live in
-Individual donors, how much they have donated, their memberships
-Volunteers, their participation, their interests, etc
-In kind donations
-Fundraising events, the attendance, the revenue generated
-Group calendar events throughout your organization
-All emails/phone calls/meetings with your contacts
-Donations/grants/other forms of revenue per person/organization/date given/source/etc
-Mass emailings/mailings to various segments of contituents based off of any criteria that you can think of

You really can not beat this offering. Top notch donor management software provided free to nonprofit organizations.

Signup now for a free trial and contact me to learn more about how this can be configured for your organization.
Salesforce Foundation

Spring 2010 Salesforce.com Release is Here

The Salesforce.com Spring 2010 release is finally upon us and you are probably wondering what you can enable / setup within Salesforce.com to better streamline your business. I will briefly go through many of the top features (IMO) and let you know what to expect.

Real Time Quotes – This is a new feature that should have been around a long time ago, because most companies have already created their own quoting process by now and it will be difficult to convert to this new Salesforce functionality. Multiple quotes can be associated to one Opportunity, data can be synchronized between the Opportunity and Quotes, and PDF’s can be easily generated. I am really not too impressed by this, because there really are some excellent AppExchange products out there that already do this.

New Opportunity UI (User Interface) – This is actually pretty cool, but it is currently in Pilot mode and must be enabled. The idea behind this is that there are certain fields on an Opportunity, no matter what business you are in, that are vitally important, such as Stage and Amount. This UI places these fields directly on the top of the page and makes them highly visible and accessible. I like it.

Salesforce Mobile Lite for ALL Organizations, including Group – Congrats everyone! If you haven’t been able to access Salesforce Mobile before, you can now. Go to the BlackBerry and Iphone stores now and download and customize this app for your organization!

Rich Text Area fields – Once again, Pilot, but long needed in Salesforce.com. Contact your Salesforce reps for this.

Branded Event Invitiations – Salesforce has always neglected email marketing / email templates in Salesforce.com. You can now place your logos on outgoing calendar events, therefore branding them.

Entitlement Management (Service) – Salesforce is now making a BIG push for the service aspects of its product, ie. the Service Cloud. Entitlement management is a newly released feature, which will be highly beneficial for support companies that are actively managing Service Level Agreements (SLA’s). You can quickly identify if customers have support agreements, what level they are subscribed to, and the KPI’s that your customer support reps must adhere to. Workflows can be built to enforce these KPI’s and everything can be tracked with reports. There are additional components related to Entitlement Management to facilitate additional aspects, such as service contracts and milestones. This is a really big feature and is something that needed to be custom built and highly customized before. Let me know if you need assistance with setting this up.

Salesforce Answers – Just like Yahoo Answers, but built into the Salesforce platform. This will be built directly into your Salesforce community and will allow users to ask questions, answer questions, and vote on answers.

New Salesforce.com User Interface Design – Salesforce has been a little behind the times with their design when comparing their website to other SAAS / Web 2.0 sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. They have decided to upgrade their overall design. This will not be available immediately and will need to be enabled. It won’t be enabled by default. I hope this new design is faster. It seems that Chrome is not supported.

New Report Builder!!!!! Developer Only – This is going to be revolutionary. Instead of tons of steps in a report wizard, this will be one, all encompassing report builder that is easy to use for everyone, with an excellent preview mode. Developer mode only, which is saddening.

Custom Dashboard Tables – Outstanding! The table dashboard component now allows you to display 4 columns instead of 2. Previously, you could only display an Account Name and a Dollar value for an example. Now you could also display the Country field and Account #. This is a nice improvement.

SOQL Enhancements – This is huge. Now, advanced SOQL functions can be used, such as GROUP BY, HAVING, AVG, MAX, MIN, SUM, COUNT_DISTINCT, etc. There are also many additional Date filters. Why was this not there before? Do you know how much time this would have saved all developers if this previously existed? I am very pleased with this. There are also ANTI JOINS and SEMI JOINS.

Debug Log Improvements – Debug logs have drastically improved, which is a small, but very nice improvement if you are working with APEX code.

Change Sets and Cloud Deployment (beta) – Great idea, but needs a lot of work. I have rarely been able to use this feature successfully, because of minor errors. It will allow you to deploy sets of code, reports, fields, layouts, etc from the Sandbox to Production and vice versa from directly within the user interface, instead of Eclipse’s IDE or the awful ANT migration tool. This is similar to SAP transports.

Multilevel Master Detail Relationships – You can now create multiple levels deep. ex. Project, Requests for Bids, Actual Bid Submitted, Review of Bid could be multiple master detail relationships.

My Domain – Receive your own subdomain name directly on the Salesforce.com servers. Limited release only.

Take a detailed look through the Spring 2010 Release Notes.

Let me know if you have any questions about any of the new features or if you need any information about how they might apply to you or how you could enable them.

Free Online Donation Processing for Nonprofits from Google

I did not know that Google did this until Today when I saw their blog post about free Google Checkout for Nonprofits.

It seems that Google will allow nonprofits to utilize their Google Checkout payment processing system for free. I use Google Checkout and I love it. The rates for payment processing are already competitive, but you can’t beat free! This system will allow you to accept online donations for your nonprofit very easily.

Also, Google Grants will allow nonprofits to advertise their organizations and service for free on Google AdWords if you qualify. That is great free advertising!

I know that this is not Salesforce related, but I deal with a lot of nonprofits and I feel that this is great!

Salesforce.com for Nonprofits Announcement

It seems that the Salesforce.com Foundation will now be “legally responsible for the product donation and discount programs” for nonprofits utilizing their Foundation grant. Here is their service announcement that they released Today by email:

Salesforce.com, inc. has undergone a corporate reorganization whereby it has transferred Salesforce service subscriptions with charitable organizations, charitable units within for-profit companies, and non-profit and public higher education institutions, to salesforce.org. Salesforce.org is a nonprofit public benefit corporation and an authorized reseller of salesforce.com, inc. Pursuant to the “Assignment” section of the Master Subscription Agreement between salesforce.com, inc. and your organization (the “MSA”), salesforce.com, inc. is assigning all of its rights and obligations under the MSA to salesforce.org, effective December 9, 2009. Beginning on that date, your MSA will no longer be with salesforce.com, inc. and will instead be with salesforce.org. Salesforce.org will continue, as salesforce.com, inc.’s authorized reseller, to provide the Salesforce online service to you in accordance with the MSA and your current subscription terms.

New Shamrock CRM Design

Hello all,

I was wanting to get your opinion of the new look and feel for http://www.shamrockcrm.com . It was recently redesigned and I am looking for any input you might have. Thoughts? Comments?

I have not redesigned the blog yet, only the main pages.

Dreamforce 2010

The dates are December 6-9. I wonder why it is so late.

Small Business Tips from Dreamforce

During the Dreamforce Breakout Sessions I luckily was able to catch a few notes. The presentations moved so fast I could barely keep up with the slides. However, here’s what I did catch from a session called “A Conversation with Small Business Leaders.”

Matt Williamson of Bronto’s tips:

1. Tips for Sales Meetings
– Together, take 30 minutes of quiet time to allow everyone to update their current opportunities and hot leads
– Go over opportunities together and update them together to spread information across employees and managers
– Hit submit on forecast reports together, this will give the forecasts a consistent time stamp and make the reports clearer

2. Zero dashboard – create a “zero dashboard” of neglected opportunities that need action.

3. Create automated reminder messages, such as “Don’t forget to call back this contact person for this opportunity”

4. Make good use of the Appexchange
– Take advantage of integrations with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and much more

Watch the Dreamforce Keynote Video

Here’s the link to check out the Dreamforce 2009 Keynote made by Marc Benioff: Watch the Keynote Now

Service Cloud 2 Detailed Feature Descriptions

Here are the fully detailed product descriptions for Service Cloud 2 from the Salesforce.com Press Release.

-Salesforce Knowledge: Salesforce.com offers the world’s first multi-tenant knowledge base (http://www.salesforce.com/crm/customer-service-support/knowledge-base-system/) that is fully integrated with CRM and designed for cloud computing. Salesforce Knowledge delivers one multi-channel knowledge base for agents, customers and partners. The core Service Cloud 2 knowledge base delivers the same benefits available to any application built on the Force.com platform, including rapid deployment, immediate results, simple customizations, automatic upgrades and more.

-Salesforce Answers: For years, customer service centers have been limited to knowledge articles produced by company employees and have not benefited from the explosion of consumer wisdom that exists across the Web. Utilizing Service Cloud 2, Salesforce Answers will deliver a unique online experience that helps companies leverage the expertise in the cloud for their customers. Salesforce Answers will enable companies to start the conversation with a unique online customer community, crowd-source knowledge and leverage Facebook.

-Salesforce for Twitter: In today’s Web-driven world where there is an expectation of real-time interaction, Salesforce for Twitter and Service Cloud 2 give companies an easy way to join the real-time customer service conversations happening on Twitter by enabling them to search Twitter in real-time, monitor service issues on Twitter, join Twitter conversations, establish a Twitter support channel and deliver real-time knowledge.

-Five-Minute Upgrades: Salesforce.com is unveiling another revolution for the cloud computing industry with the new five-minute upgrade. The five-minute upgrade represents an incredible technology achievement demonstrating the power of the Force.com platform and infrastructure. Never before have companies been able to take advantage of the latest technology innovations and evolve their customer service at the rate they are able to with Service Cloud 2. Salesforce.com is the only company able to provide its customers with five-minute upgrade technology because of salesforce.com’s real-time, mirrored data centers and multi-tenant infrastructure.

-Cisco and Salesforce.com: Salesforce.com and Cisco have come together to deliver a complete contact center in the cloud. The Cisco and salesforce.com Customer Interaction Cloud brings together salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 with Cisco Unified Communications. The solution empowers small and medium sized companies to run their customer service completely in the cloud. Salesforce.com and Cisco share a vision of moving technology into the cloud and leveraging social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google to deliver services to their customers where they are already collaborating.

Sales Cloud 2 Detailed Feature Descriptions

Yesterday we gave the short summaries. Here are the detailed product descriptions from the Salesforce.com Press Release.

-Salesforce for Twitter: Twitter provides a free platform for users to answer the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less and broadcast the answer to a community. Salesforce for Twitter will help sales and marketing professionals increase their pipeline and sales by helping marketers convert Twitter conversations into customers and make it easy for sales reps to tweet back to interested prospects. Marketers can run Twitter campaigns that capture interest on Twitter and then measure the return on their investment. Sales reps can also send and track tweets to customers or prospects right from a contact record.

-Real-time Quotes: With real-time quotes, sales reps can now use the Sales Cloud to automatically populate quotes with relevant customer data. Sales reps can generate and send sales quotes with just a few clicks, as power sellers do on eBay.

-Cloud Scheduler: The cloud scheduler will allow companies to schedule meetings with colleagues and outside customers and partners. The cloud scheduler will also allow users to set up meetings from within a contact record with drag and drop simplicity. Built on the Force.com platform, users will be able to automatically find available meeting times and schedule business meetings with colleagues, customers and partners by sending a meeting invite as Evite users do.

-Mobile Content: Sales Cloud users can now view any document accessible through the Salesforce CRM content library, like presentations and spreadsheets, on their mobile phone. Not only can users view the content, but they can also send the content to prospects and customers directly from their mobile device. The new mobile content feature makes accessing content on a phone as easy as finding and watching Youtube videos on a mobile device.

-New Charting and Report Builder: Companies now have even more control when it comes to building and analyzing their dashboards and reports. New chart types, color options, and data hovers make it even easier to get fast insights from dashboards. Users can also now drill into specific subsets of chart data by clicking on chart sub-sections, like a specific wedge of a pie chart. Building reports will be faster and more intuitive with the new reporter builder, and users will be instantly brought to the underlying report data, like users of Google Analytics. Users can create reports with drag and drop ease and preview the report and corresponding charts in real time – drag in a new column or field and instantly see the impact on reports and charts.

-Partner Connection Finder: The partner connection finder lets Sales Cloud 2 customers find new partners to connect and share information with in real time. Customers can now easily find new partners who are also salesforce.com users and start sharing leads and opportunity data as easily as sharing photos with friends on Flickr.