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

Salesforce Chatter

The new product…

Content (such as SharePoint, Intranets, Webex), Apps (Salesforce, Oracle, SAP), and People (Email, Facebook, Twitter) are all disconnected.

“We have to ask, why is there not a Facebook for the enterprise? Why is there not a Twitter for the Enterprise?” – Marc Benioff

“Salesforce Chatter – The magic of Facebook and Twitter brought to your enterprise” -Marc Benioff

Introducing: Salesforce Chatter – Join the conversation.

Sales Cloud 2

Sales Cloud 2 – the new version of the Sales Cloud from Salesforce.com

Just a couple examples of it’s capabilities:

- Create a .pdf of a quote and email it with Salesforce.com. Can create a proposal made up of these quotes and such. Deliver large content as a website.
- “Deal View” – see in an instant what is important to your users
- Each user can control their experience in real time by dragging and dropping – change the order, delete irrelevant information, etc.
- Coordinate meeting schedules across companies
-Single page report creation!!! No more 7 step wizard. Beautiful.

Salesforce.com Goes Social

Service Cloud 2 – can connect between the call center, Google, twitter, etc. Makes your tech support show up on Google, Facebook, etc.

Contact centers are disconnected from conversations, Oracle, SAP, amdocs, etc. where customers at using Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Basically all the service action (i.e. tech support) is done on Google, and the company is not receiving the benefit of that.

Support call – get call on Salesforce.com, get contact info instantly, then creates a case, search for the articles that relate to their question, every article can have video, pictures, html, step-by-step procedures. Customer support can relay it to them over the phone, on email, etc.

At Dell.com, a customer can go through the knowledge articles that the customer support rep can see. This information can be found at Google and search engines can see this. Immediate updates to the Dell.com website, using Salesforce.com. Yahoo Answers is where someone writes a question and the community answers, “crowd sourcing” the answer, as it is called. How do you do get a “Yahoo answers” on Salesforce? Salesforce Answers – also a Facebook app. Facebook data is then in the service cloud in Salesforce.com. This info is basically spread around the net. Likewise with Twitter, Tweet knowledge back out to a Twitter question when it is asked.

Awesome integration!

Service Cloud 2

Sales Cloud 2

Salesforce Keynote

Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com takes the stage…he invites anyone with issues about Salesforce.com to contact him directly, at CEO@salesforce.com. Dreamforce this year is huge: 19,000 attendees at Dreamforce.com, 60 countries, and 300 sessions.

Platforms are moving to the cloud. Companies using Salesforce.com have performed at 5x faster at 1/2 the cost.

Salesforce.com Foundation 1% of time, equity, and product. Marc Benioff urges corporate attendees to help non-profits in need.

Marc Benioff brought several others to the stage, including Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco, to chit-chat about Salesforce’s charity work.

No Software - SAAS

Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com

SAAS-Y

SugarCRM – Competing at Dreamforce

During the confusion at Dreamforce at an “official-looking” book called “Behind the Smoke Screen” was handed to me.

The book is SugarCRM’s satire of Salesforce.com. The first chapter is about “How to use Salesforce.com to close a time-sensitive deals” which is a Salesfore.com error message, stating that Salesforce.com will be unavailable for 8 hours. Interestingly, today at the Dreamforce Keynote by Marc Benioff, he stated that Salesforce.com was going to be using a new method of data updates, using a mixture of 2 data centers, trading from one to the other during updates, creating shortages of only 5 minutes, as compared to 5 hours.

Chapter 2 is “What Salesforce.com Knows about Cloud Computing”. The page is blank – cute.

Chapter 3 is “Customer Success” which states, “Sorry, this feature is not available in this edition. Please contact your sales representative to upgrade.” It’s true, Salesforce.com does have different editions for different needs.

Chapter 4, “Simple Steps to Creating Force.com Applications” is a maze leading to dollar symbols $$.

Chapter 5 is entitled “Investing in Innovation” which is a fake check to Oracle.

Chapter 6 is “About this Book” which says “You do not own this book or the information therein. If you would like an extract of the information, a massive CSV file might be sent to you within 60 to 90 days.

The rest of the book is empty pages. In fact only half the pages even have lines. Looking up this book online, I find that Sugar CRM has paid for 1,000 copies to hand out at Dreamforce. Considering the 19,000 that are at Dreamforce, that isn’t quite enough. However, the fact that even 1,000 were printed is kind of appalling, as the amount of paper that was wasted simply to satire Salesforce in less than 100 words is not very eco-conscious.

Touring San Francisco in Antique Cars

I will be touring beautiful San Francisco with Mr. Toad’s Today on the Postcard San Francisco Tour. Tomorrow is the wine tour

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.

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