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

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.

Salesforce Chatter Demonstration Video

Here is a great video demonstration of Salesforce’s new Chatter functionality.

Salesforce Chatter Video on YouTube

Dreamforce goodies

Look at some of the goodies.

Play Time for Dreamforce

Free drinks and the Black Crowes at Dreamforce!

The Basics of Salesforce Chatter

Look out next year for Salesforce Chatter!
“The Collaboration Cloud”

A few examples of what Salesforce Chatter will do:

- Will have a new user interface for Salesforce.com
- Employees can talk to eachother
- The apps can talk to you – new opportunities can talk to you
- Content can talk to you – “SAP order has been filled” as a status update
- Can add personal profile, complete with followers
- a directory of employees in your enterprise
- Groups, linked by opportunities
- Twitter, Facebook updates

All the content on Salesforce Chatter is all based on the security model of Salesforce.com, so your enterprise’s information is still safe.

Mobile Chatter apps will be available for iPhone, Blackberry, etc.
Sales Cloud 2 is also built on the Chatter app, so Sales Cloud 2 will also be integrated.

Chatter Demonstration