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

Arrived in San Francisco

I have a nice view of Coit Tower from my room.

Marc Benioff and Salesforce on CRM Magazine

Wow. This whole month is based on SFDC.

Dreamforce 2010 – 6 days and counting

Keep your eye on this blog for up to date, live blogging excitement! Can’t wait!

Whoops…sorry, typo. Dreamforce 2009, not 2010.

Best Practice Tip – Keep it Simple

It’s so exciting when you are installing a CRM tool like Salesforce.com, because you want to throw in all of the bells and whistles, cool functionality, workflows, approval processes, systems integrations. You want everything to be absolutely perfect before you let a single user into the system to poke around.

Building a complicated system from the start is a Bad Bad idea, unless you have an amazingly devoted future user base. If you build the system with overly complicated processes and system limitations/restrictions, you are going to frustrate the poor users, confuse them, upset them and make them not want to use the tool. If this happens, you will be paying for licenses and will not be getting the benefit of the CRM system that you purchased, because your user adoption will be poor.

My tip from many Salesforce implementations is to keep it very simple from the beginning. Let the users play around from the beginning. Let them understand the basics of the tool before you do anything crazy. Let them track the basic information for their contacts and opportunities and wait for them to request more once they realize what it can actually do. Treat this as an evolutionary rollout. Add functionality in phases and educate the users every step of the way.

Doing this will create dedicated users, quality data, and the highest possible ROI on your CRM investment.

All Companies have a sales process, even yours

I speak with many companies about their business processes and many of them feel that they have broken out of the mold with their businesses. Many companies believe that if you have not worked specifically with the Financial/Bio/Tech/Comm/Health/Nonprofit/etc industry, you will not understand their complicated business/sales processes. In my opinion, if you have a strong expertise in CRM and with many varying global firms, you can easily adapt/mold organizations from any industry into the CRM umbrella of processes.

Every company…every company, whether they are a for profit organization, a nonprofit, a government agency has a sales process. Even if they do not sell a product, per se, they still have a sales process…guaranteed. If your business model is simply to collect donations from constituents, you still have a sales process. You still actively cultivate your potential donors (campaigns/leads) and convert them into true relationships (accounts/contacts) and over time you have different stages in which you contact them, demonstrate your need, give presentations, take them to lunches, hold meetings/trade shows/events, and finally “close the deal” and win your donation (opportunity/quotes/proposals/orders). That is essentially a sales process with different terminology.

Sales Process

When implementing Salesforce.com, you need to look past the labels that are given out of the box. Forgo the word “Opportunity” if you do not understand what the term means. Try to understand the underlying meaning of the term, think about how your business would fit within this idea/process and mold the tool and your process into one aligned unit. An Opportunity, as an example, is the possibility to bring in revenue. You have a certain probability of bringing in x dollars. This could be from sales, services, donations, grants, membership fees, tax rebates, etc. If you need to rename Opportunity to “Revenue” to make more sense, go for it.

Salesforce.com was built with the best practice in mind for all industries, so trust them that it is built correctly, learn what everything means and you can truly unleash your inner sales process

What is Sales Automation?

Salesforce Automation (SFA) is a buzzword that is thrown around quite a lot. SFA is not CRM. It is a component of Customer Relationship Management.

All companies have some form of sales process that they utilize, whether it be uber sophisticated or very simple with small sales. All of these sales processes will have some kind of inefficiencies to them that could cost valuable time and money. Salesforce automation is here to assist with that.

The purpose of Sales Automation is to:
1) Increase Sales (duh)
2) Decrease Costs to Make Sales
3) Increase Management and Operation Sales Visibility

So, how does it do this?

Increase Sales Volume:
Salesforce automation, as provided by Salesforce.com, is excellent at putting the most important and most relevant data right in the face of your sales reps. If they should be focusing on medium sized sales of product X in Florida, you do not want to overburden them with all data from all products being sold in China. You want to keep it simple and focused on their daily operational tasks, which are primarily communicating with potential leads, and managing open opportunities.

Implementing this will prevent sales from slipping through the cracks. If you manage all of your sales opportunities in your head, you will forget things, or slip behind on active communications with customers. This will provide more collaboration and cross selling with other sales reps in the area. So someone else is selling their product to this customer in your regions? Hold on, because we can compliment that product with this service! More sales!

Salesforce.com provides many ways to do this:
-Quick links directly to pre-filtered views showing exactly what the Sales Reps need: Top 10 Opps, Hot Leads, Open Opportunities, Neglected Opportunities (past closed date, but not closed), Neglected Customers, etc. Click these links and they will only show THEIR data and nothing else. Clean and simple.
-Activity management will maintain all data for all communications with your customers. Managing 20 customers and can’t remember when you should contact them next or what you last spoke about? Easy with SFDC. This also helps with knowledge retention within your organization.

Decrease Sales Costs:
Please don’t force sales reps to do too much busy work when they could actually be in the field with customers. Needing to create reports, pull together tons of data about clients, working on administrative/non-sales tasks simply wastes time, decreases customer satisfaction and costs you sales revenue.

Salesforce.com will allow you to quickly pull together mass mailing campaigns without tons of overhead to build the filter criteria. A few clicks of the button and sent. On to selling again. SFDC allows mail merge and email templates to have predefined layouts that pull together data automatically from multiple sources to build documents and mailings.

Don’t want your sales people to have to re-cold call customers that you have already dealt with, because your contact data is way out of date? Salesforce keeps all of this current so that you know the decision makers and your relationships with them

Increase management visibility:
Providing lightning fast and accurate visibility of the strength of the organization is a valuable asset for management. If the sales pipeline is skinny, they can quickly know to create new strategies to bring in new sales. They can easily tell who the high performers are in the organization and reward them/punish the under performers. Plus, pretty charts will always make the VP of Sales happy

Customer Portal – Project Bidding Application

I justed implemented a pretty cool application using the Customer Portal that is essentially a website to bid on projects, similar to sites such as GetAFreelancer.com, Elance.com, and other project bidding sites.

This is the basic breakdown:
1) The Salesforce user finds clients that would like to advertise their project that they would like to be bid on by potential resources.
2) Once they cut a deal and the client pays the Salesforce user to advertise, the SFDC user would create a Project record in SFDC. This would be linked to the client’s Account and Contact, tying everything together.

Account/Contact < Projects

3) The SFDC user would then convert this Contact into a portal user with a specified Client profile (providing specific sharing privileges).
4) The SFDC user would then set this user as the owner of the project so they can have full visibility of the project that will be bid on by Partners.
5) The SFDC user sets the project to “Accepting Bids” and a workflow (trigger) fires that finds ALL portal users with a “partner” profile and creates a “Request for Bid” record for all of them. A workflow then triggers and shoots off an email to each one notifying them of the new project to bid on.

Account/Contact < Projects < Request for Bid

6) Partner customer portal users login to their portal and they can see all project, via a sharing setting.
7) Partner users associate a Bid record to the project, a trigger fires that counts the total value of all of the Bids and the number of Bids, and the Project owner is notified of the new bid. Formula fields are set on the Project to give average bids, maximum bids, etc. All of this information is rolled up in dashboards to show the entire system’s metrics as well.

Account/Contact < Projects < Request for Bid < Bid

Client portal users login to their portal to view the activity with their projects and they can choose winning bids, thus triggering additional workflows.

It is setup with sharing settings, etc to only allow clients to see their own projects and associated bids. It also only allows partners to view their bids and no one else’s.

It also send out weekly dashboard reports to the users to view overall market activity. Very cool application and a great application of the Force.com platform!

Anyone else build any fun customer portal applications?

Salesforce.com Dreamforce Helpful Links

Hey everyone,

To save you a little bit of time, I am throwing together a bunch of helpful Dreamforce links for you:

Main Dreamforce Site – Most Exciting Event of the Year!
Register for Dreamforce – Don’t Miss Out
How to sell your boss on Dreamforce – ROI documentation and templates
Build your Dreamforce Agenda – See what they have to offer
Dreamforce Keynotes – Always Exciting
Tracks and Seminars – Sales/Marketing/Service/IT/Developers/Different Industries/Nonprofits/etc
Get Salesforce Certified – Great for your resume
Listing of 300+ Expert Speakers – Wow
F.A.Q. – You’ll find your answers here

The Global Gala – With the Black Crowes!

Beautiful San Francisco

Dreamforce San Francisco 2009

Shamrock CRM to be blogging at Dreamforce 2009

That’s right! Shamrock CRM will be blogging live from Dreamforce 2009 this year. Dreamforce is a phenomenal event that is jam packed with tons of great seminars, events, knowledge transfer sessions, guest speakers, Salesforce AppExchange vendors, and much more. This is the perfect time to brush up on your Salesforce skills, whether they be related to IT, Sales, Marketing, Service or some other innovative use of the Force.com platform. Had an interest in learning about certain Apps? This is the place to be.

I will be hopping around between the IT Executive, Sales, and Marketing tracks/seminars and I will be at any/all of the Salesforce specific seminars. They are always excellent.

Should be a great time. I am looking forward to it. I am very much looking forward to beautiful San Francisco.

See you there!
Dreamforce 2009

Here is the high level agenda if you haven’t seen it yet:

Tuesday, November 17
8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Pre-Conference Training
9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. Salesforce.com Foundation Volunteer Event
6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. Welcome Reception in the Expo

Wednesday, November 18
7:30 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. Expo
9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. General Session: Opening Keynote with Salesforce.com CEO & Chairman Marc Benioff and Special Guests
11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. Break
11:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m. Expo
11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. Breakout Sessions
12:45 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. Birds-of-a-Feather Lunches in the Expo
2:15 p.m. – 5:45 p.m. Breakout Sessions
5:45 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. Networking Reception in the Expo
8:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. Global Gala

Thursday, November 19
7:30 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. Expo
7:30 a.m. – 8:30 a.m. Breakout session
9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. General Session
11:00 a.m. – 4:15 p.m. Expo
11:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Break
12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. Birds-of-a-Feather Lunches in the Expo
1:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. Breakout Sessions
2:30 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. Break
2:45 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. Breakout Sessions
3:45 p.m. – 4:15 p.m. Break
4:15 p.m. – 5:45 p.m. General Session

Friday, November 20
7:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Expo
9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Breakout Sessions
10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. Breakout Sessions
11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Breakout Sessions

Salesforce.com Winter ‘10 New Features

Hey everybody! The features for the Salesforce.com Winter 2010 release are starting to be decided upon and there seem to be a lot of good ones, right in time for Dreamforce in November! Here are a few to look at and think about for now:

Scheduling of APEX – This will allow you to have Cronjobs in Salesforce.com. Before, if you didn’t have your own server or Cast Iron, you could not schedule some mass processing task to perform on a daily basis. This will add a lot of functionality on top of workflows existing functionality. Great feature. I wonder how the governors will work with this.

Batch Processing – I believe that this is becoming widely available in Winter ‘10. It will allow you to mass process thousands of records at once to do large scale transformations and calculations at once. Salesforce must be ramping up their data center.

Mass Uploading of Content – Self Explanatory. Could be beneficial for new projects and data migrations.

Specification of how “Others” will be defined in dashboards – You can choose certain thresholds for how a record will show up in “Others” in a dashboard. We’ll see how this really works later.

Changing colors on dashboards – specify your own color schemas.

Compare User Profiles to view the differences – This is great, because it is VERY difficult to manage multiple profiles now.

Multiple Y-Axis Items Allowed in Charts – I guess I will need to see a real life example of this.

“Send From” with Workflow Emails – FINALLY! Instead of mailing from the person who last modified the record, this will allow you to specify an email to send workflow emails from.

Create Quote / Convert to Order / Convert to Assets – Whoa whoa whoa. Rewind. Is Salesforce really implementing some huge new functionality like this? Link

Dashboard drilldown to specified drilldown on report – Very cool

Help text for standard fields – Ok, this might be useful.

There’s more, but these are the most interesting so far. Take a look at the other ideas under consideration!