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

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

Lead Management – Sales Lead Definitions

The Salesforce.com marketing bloggers have written a few interesting posts regarding best practices for Lead Management within Salesforce.com. They describe the definition of leads, the interrelation of Sales and Marketing when it comes to Leads, the true definition of “qualified leads” and more:\

Definition of a Sales Lead:
A Lead is a name, an email address, contact details, etc of an employee, someone you have met, someone you have talked to that MIGHT…just might…be interested in possibly doing business with you.

Leads are acquired in all different manners. You could be provided a list of email addresses from a trade show that you had a booth at. All of these emails would be “Sales Leads.” You could have received a business card from someone that you met at Wal-Mart that is interested in your business. You could have received a simple email or web inquiry from your website asking for a quote or asking for your hourly service rates.

The commonality here is that you do not know THAT much about these individuals and you are not sure HOW interested they are in your product/service/offering. You might not know if they even have budget allocated to do business with you or not. Leads are not necessarily “serious” business YET. Leads are essentially “pre-opportunities.”

Leads also allow you to separate the “junk” contact information from you Customer data that consists of truly paying customers. It allows you to quarantine bad leads from your good customers.

There can be “hot leads” and “cold leads.” Hot leads would be Leads that you have a good feeling about and would like to actively pursue.

There are different Lead Statuses. A New Lead would be a fresh Lead that has never been contacted. Contacted would of course mean someone has reached out to the Lead. Unqualified would mean the person does not have budget, is not interested, has bad references, etc. “Unqualified Leads” are bad Leads NOW, but could be re-marketable at a later time. “Qualified” leads pass your own internal qualification process to determine if they could really buy what you are selling. This qualification could be as simple as “we provided a quote, the customer responded favorably and asked more questions, they are now qualified and can be converted into an Opportunity.”

The above topics and ideas are not related strictly to Salesforce.com. Every company has Leads, whether you call them Leads or not. Let me repeat that…ALL companies have Leads in some way or another. Lead Management is a business process in the CRM realm. This is simply mapped into Salesforce.com.

Salesforce.com Marketing Best Practices

New “Quick Summary” of Shamrock CRM, like it?

I made a new “quick summary”, “about Shamrock Crm”, high level description page for our company.

Let me know your thoughts/likes/dislikes? The purpose is to catch your eye immediately and tell you exactly what we do and why we are good at it.

Take a look and let me know!
Salesforce.com Developers

About Salesforce.com

If you have been interested in trying out Salesforce.com for the first time, go ahead and set yourself up with a Free 30 Day Trial of Salesforce.com. You do not need to give any credit card details or anything.

Just click the button below that says “FREE TRIAL” and you will be good to go. Play around with the system and let me know what you think. Also, read through some of the details below related to Salesforce.com and its features.

Salesforce.com JavaScript to Override Buttons

This little snippet of code is written in JavaScript.  This piece of code is simply an example of what you can do by embedding JavaScript into a custom Salesforce.com button.

In this example, we have Opportunities and a related custom object called Shipments.  You sell a Product and you ship it, get it?

This button would be displayed on the “Shipments” related list on an Opportunity.  The button would be titled “New Shipment” and would replace the default button.

This button would check if a shipment for this Opportunity is currently “In Progress” and not “Shipped”.  If so, it will not allow the user to create a new shipment.  They should combine this new shipment into the existing one to save on transportation costs.

{!REQUIRESCRIPT("/soap/ajax/15.0/connection.js")} 

var result = sforce.connection.query("Select Id From Shipment__c where Status__c = 'In Progress' and Opportunity__c = '{!Opportunity.Id}' ");
var records = result.getArray("records"); 

//If there are no Shipments In Progress, redirect the User to the New Shipment page
if (records.length == 0){
window.parent.location.href="{! urlFor( $Action.Shipment__c.New, $ObjectType.Job__c,null,true)}&CF00N20000001B5jC_lkid={!Opportunity.Id}&CF00N20000001B5jC={!Opportunity.Name}";
}
//If there are Shipments In Progress for this Opportunity
else{
alert("There is a current job on the system - please complete this job prior to creating a new job");
}

Salesforce.com vs. GiftWorks? Which is better for Nonprofits?

Lately I have heard a lot of discussion from many different Nonprofit organizations as to whether to choose Salesforce.com or GiftWorks for their CRM needs (Donation/Grant/Revenue tracking, Donor/Volunteer/Constituent Management, Mailing Campaigns, Event Tracking, etc). I have used both tools and I have my own opinion (Salesforce all the way), but I found an Excellent post on the Web describing exactly what I feel about the differences between the two CRM systems.

“GiftWorks does not allow for much flexibility when it comes to injecting “business processes” in the way that SHOULD be in a CRM system. Leads, campaigns, donors, and contacts can be more effectively managed in Salesforce.com.

SFDC (Salesforce.com) does a much better job of building and managing relationships between contacts, organizations and donations. Also, Salesforce is scalable. It can grow with your organization to accomodate other business processes, such as expense management, HR and more. In addition, it allows for a relatively simple integration with other ERP systems such as Quickbooks, Paypal etc.

Another major plus for Salesforce is accessibility. GiftWorks is only now coming out with some type of remote administration capability but it is nowhere near close to Salesforce.com.

GiftWorks may be a good solution for some organizations right out-of-the-box, especially if you do not have the budget to customize Salesforce. But, if your organization is growing, and you are looking for a long term solution, I would take a serious look at Salesforce.com. Also, remember that if your organization is a 501(c)(3), you can most likely obtain a 10 license donation from Salesforce.”

So, if you would like to know more about how Salesforce.com works with other nonprofits, shoot me an email and we can chat!