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

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

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!

Salesforce.com Winter 2010 Logo – Snowman

I was hoping that they would choose the gingerbread man for the Salesforce.com Winter ’10 Release, but they decided on the snowman. Get ready to see this little guy for a long time

Salesforce.com Programming Documentation

In case you ever want to dabble with any Salesforce.com programming and code development, you will need to know how the different languages are formatted, how certain objects are configured, how to make various calls and commands and more. You will also want to see tons of sample code.

Here are some of the most important links to bookmark when you are developing within Salesforce.com. These are actually GREAT technical resources. Much better than most other systems allow.

Force.com API Developer’s Guide
Force.com APEX Code Developer’s Guide
Force.com VisualForce Developer’s Guide
Force.com Metadeta API Developer’s Guide

Free CRM Magazine Subscription

I don’t know if you guys know about this or not, but the people at destinationCRM.com provide you with FREE subscriptions to their CRM Magazine. I am a subscriber and this is really a great read every month.

Subscribe for free here to CRM Magazine!

Sales Leads – Automating Your Leads

The next installment from Salesforce.com’s marketing blogger team relates to automating your Lead Flow. Once you have identified what Leads really are and how they relate to your business, you need to incorporate them into your Salesforce environment and automate the distribution.

They go over 4 tools to do this:
Web-to-Lead forms
Web-to-Lead forms allow you to add an input form on your website for potential customers to fill out with their contact information, company information, product interest, etc. Once the customer fills in this data and submits the form, the data will automatically be inputted into your Salesforce.com as a Lead for you to sell to. To see an example of this, look at the bottom of Shamrock CRM. Web-to-Lead forms are very flexible.

Lead Assignment rules
If you have a lot of Leads being entered in the system and you have multiple sales people that these Leads should be assigned to, Lead Assignment rules might be an excellent option for you. Lead Assignment rules would allow you to say that “any Lead where State = Florida, Assign to Jim.” This removes a ton of manual work that you might possibly perform already.

Another option for this is Round Robin Lead Assignment or Lead Sprinklers or Lead Assignment based on a rating structure. These require some code, but are excellent.

Lead Auto-Response rules
Lead Auto-Response rules allow you to respond to the Leads automatically with pre-defined email templates based off of that Lead’s specific details. This allows you to quickly get information to these users, so they do not sit around waiting for a response. These are essentially workflows.

Lead Scoring
An example of Lead Scoring would be the “Hot/Cold” rating system in combination of potential revenue estimates in combination with other criteria. An example can be seen here with my Lead Activity History Report.

Salesforce.com Marketing – Best Practices in Lead Management pt 2