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It is a common misunderstanding that cross-object workflow is not possible in SalesForce.com CRM. It is extremely limited and in my experience tends to only work the way I don't usually need it to work, but there is some cross-object functionality.

Say for example you have created checkbox fields on both Contact and Account records to mark them as Active or not. One might logically want the Account to be marked as "active" whenever any related Contact record is. Unfortunately, the workflow formula you need will only allow you to mark the Contact record as "active" whenever a related Account is. Not too helpful.

I will teach you the method, then leave it up to you to find useful applications in your work. To perform the above workflow between Contacts and Accounts you would do the following:

1. Go to Setup/Create/Workflow&Approvals/Workflow Rules and create a new rule.
   
2. Start with the Contact object, because you will be updating a field on that object, and you cannot do field updates across standard objects.
3. Under field criteria, choose field "Account: Active" and operator "Equals" and value "Yes"
4. Hit Save and next (after naming the rule of course and making sure it is set to trigger upon creation, edit, etc. as you desire)
5. Create the workflow action "new field update"
6. Enter the naming you desire and set the field to update to be the field called "Active"
7. Specify the new field value of "yes"
   

You can also create the workflow rule that uses this field update by using "formula evaluates to true" instead of "criteria are met" under the rule criteria. The advantage of doing this is that sometimes more objects are available through lookup relationships when using the formula rather than just the drop-down lists of fields.

Here are a couple of examples that may actually be a bit more useful to you. These come from SalesForce's help files:

Update Case record based on values on related Account record:

Send email alert when Case is created related to certain Accounts, based on field values on the Account record:

A final note from SFDC help files on when and how you can use field updates with workflow rules:

"For standard objects, workflow rules can only perform field updates on the object related to the rule. The exceptions are that both Case Comments and Email Messages can perform cross-object field updates on Cases. For all custom objects, however, you can create workflow actions where a change to a detail record updates a field on the related master record. Cross-object field updates only work for master/detail relationships."

I welcome your sharing of other useful cross-object workflow rules you have been able to create among standard SalesForce objects. This is hopefully an area that SFDC intends to build out further in future releases. For example, I think a lot of people would love to be able to update status fields on Contact or Opportunity records whenever certain Tasks are marked as "Completed." I can think of dozens of helpful use cases for more cross-object workflow. Right now we are pretty much dependent on very limited native functionality and Apex coding to go beyond that.

Important Addendum: I was remiss in leaving out an important caveat about doing cross-object workflow. Note that even though the rules will work across the objects, you won't actually get the ones on the resultant object to fire until it is edited. It doesn't matter what change, if any, is made to the record, but the rules won't evaluate on object A simply because object B was edited, even if it is the new criteria on object B that cause it to meet object A rule's criteria.

AspiraTech has developed Aspira Xobject as a solution to this problem. Using Aspira Xobject, which is available for download on the AppExchange, you can connect any two objects so that workflow rules on one get evaluated whenever the other is edited. Check it out.

Labels: CRM, How-To

Whether you are training your staff to utilize a newly implemented technology and the related business process improvements, or training them to more productively use the software you've had for years, there is no better investment than in increasing the skills of the people you are already paying to do a job. If training is effective, it results in a remarkable ROI. You keep paying them the same salary, but they get more work done, and the information produced gives you more insight into your business performance, which then allows you to do a better job as a manager.

The big contingency here is, "if training is effective." What exactly is it that makes the difference between a training that lifts your business's performance and training that just wastes time and money?

Attributes of Successful Staff Training

• Small group training allows each participant time to interact with the instructor and other students.
• Training is delivered using a dynamic format that includes 1) instruction, 2) hands-on practice for each participant, and 3) the Socratic method of questioning to stimulate creative interaction with the material being taught.
• The instructor focuses on making sure students understand both the "how and why" needed to truly master a subject.
• The course syllabus and trainee manual are created specifically for your company, so that staff learn how to use their own system with their own business process, rather than being taught from a boilerplate template and then told to ignore parts of what they see.
• The instructor has a personal style that is upbeat and friendly, with a dash of humor. This will ensure that your employees enjoy learning and have favorable associations with the subject matter. That emotional component is often overlooked, but is vitally important for retention and application ability after class ends.
• Training may be remote or on-site, but the instructor's facilitation of the class makes sure everyone is keeping up and involved. Remote technology is reliable and makes it easy to understand exactly what is being demonstrated, and allows students to take control of the mouse and keyboard to demonstrate their skill acquisition as the class progresses.
  
• The cost of the training is reasonable so that management does not feel they need to ration access to it.

Attributes of Poor Training

The easiest way to describe poor training is to simply note that it is the absence of the attributes describing successful training. Classes are so large that students are forced into a "spectator" role instead of being interactively involved in the training. Course material is generic instead of focusing on how your company actually uses the technology on the job. Presentation is formal and technically "snobbish," with the instructor trying harder to impress with his knowledge than impart knowledge to the students. On-site trainers teach at the students instead of collaborating with them to create a successful class; remote trainers have poor understanding of the cultural background, idioms and conversational style of their students, preventing an entertaining interaction that flows naturally. High training costs lead managers to choose these poor training options to get more staff trained for the same price.

The Bottom Line

Just as training can be the best investment your company ever makes if it is done right (e.g. invest $75 per worker and get enough increased productivity out of 6 of them to no longer need to hire a new worker), it can also be a complete waste of both time and money if done wrong. And the worse result of poor training is that it may lead you to undervalue training in the future, if you relate the lack of productivity increases to the value of training in general rather than correctly attributing it to the poor training you received.

How do I know all of this? Well for one thing I have a MA concentration in Adult Learning Theory. That gives me a strong theoretical understanding of what I'm aiming at when I start a training engagement. But what has really given me the ability to understand and deliver successful trainings is experience.

I've done it wrong and I've done it right, and I've learned to understand what I need to do to spin gold out of hay. I've worked as a full-time computer trainer at a back-to-work program, taking people who had never used a computer before and training them for jobs that relied on software expertise and enough business process competence for them to know when and how to use the right software solution. And I've worked with executives and sales professionals who are leaders in their fields, helping them to apply their expertise through the use of technology that will make them even more successful going forward. I know from experience that no matter what level you are starting at, there are certain attributes the training you receive must have if you are to achieve subject mastery.

These days I focus exclusively on SalesForce.com Training. It is my favorite software, bar none. In fact, I've stopped offering other types of training except when my company implements CMS website systems or QuickBase database applications and I'm teaching the new users and administrators how to master those systems. SalesForce training is the only type of training I offer to clients my company did not do any implementation or redesign work for. But whatever type of training your company needs, be sure to ask the right questions to ascertain whether the trainer you are about to hire is one that delivers effective training.

Minimal Questions to Ask

• How many years of training experience will my trainer have?
• What written materials will participants be given after class and will it be tailored to my business?
• If the training is to be remotely delivered to my dispersed workforce, where will the trainer be located and how much experience will they have with American communication styles?
• What percentage of class time will be devoted to student demonstration of knowledge achievement?
• How will the trainer respond if students stumble upon areas of business process inefficiency during the training?
  

While there are probably other good questions to add to this list, these 5 should never be omitted. The correct answers to these 5 questions will tell you if you are about to waste valuable staff time and money or make a winning investment in worker productivity. Great training can not only teach your staff to be more productive in how they use technology to fulfill their responsibilities within your current business process, but also help you identify areas that can be improved. The more mastery each worker has, the more they can contribute the insights that come from their unique position.

It is also important not to underestimate the value of getting a group of workers together and allowing them to trade information and feedback as they use a system together that they normally use solo. At AspiraTech, we focus on this sort of comprehensiveness. We know when the training is heading in a productive direction that wasn't anticipated, and make space for that; and we know when it is veering into matters that are best left for another time, and make just enough time for managers to note that, before directing the training back on track. Whatever trainer you use, you will benefit from their having a wealth of business knowledge in addition to technical knowledge about the software you are learning.

We know what great staff training can do for any company. Hopefully this article has helped you clarify your next steps, and you are now ready to take them. Here's wishing you the greatest success with your business performance improvement initiatives.

Labels: Training

If Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was a revolutionary trend in business paradigms, Social CRM is the natural evolution that is upon us now. If you sell a product or service, or care about a cause you want to promote, you have simply got to be on Twitter. I have Twitter accounts both for my consulting business and for my non-profit volunteer work. I see dozens of new site visitors each day that arrive through tweets I post on Twitter, and you could too.

SalesForce.com CRM (SFDC) is the next part of that equation. With SFDC I can see which visitors submitted a form on the site and track them all the way through won opportunities if someone contracts for consulting services. I can then continue to service clients through a custom object I created called Projects and through Cases after service is provided. And of course, all of this is tracked in numerous ways by SFDC's campaign, reporting and dashboard features, so that I can increasingly make better decisions about how to most effectively let people who need what I offer know that they can get it here.

Toucan integrates these two powerful SaaS business technologies, so that you can not only take advantage of Twitter's marketing and PR power, but do so from within SalesForce.com. Just as you should be integrating your paid Google Adwords campaigns directly into SFDC, you should of course be integrating your free Twitter campaigns into SFDC also.

Of the tweets you've posted over the last month, which ones generated the most traffic to your website? Which tweets generated the most sales? Which tweets led to the shortest sales cycles? If you don't know the answers to these questions, you need Toucan and SalesForce. (If you don't already have SFDC, you can get a one month SalesForce.com Free trial here.)

Twitter is free, and Toucan is pretty close to free itself. If you have up to 25 SFDC users you can get a 1 year license for only $150. That's $150 for everyone, not per user, and not per month.

Instead of reiterating the same how-to material Toucan makes available themselves, I'll just point you to a couple helpful links:

2 minute Toucan intro video - Toucan for SalesForce Intro Video
Request the password for a 7 day free trial - email to
Get It Now link on AppExchange for after you receive the password - Get Toucan for SFDC

With the password you will receive a link to a two page configuration guide that includes helpful screenshots and step by step directions. I tried skipping that (rarely read directions on anything), but got stopped at my first step trying to just muddle through. So I suggest you take the 10 minutes to read the guide they send and just do it right the first time.

The only thing I found missing in the guide is that after you are done doing everything they list there you will want to add your Twitter ID under "Settings" within the Toucan app. That instruction is also not found within the user documentation they will send you a link to. You can't actually tweet anything through SFDC (like the initial message in a new campaign) until you enter your Twitter ID and password under Settings, as shown below:


The folks at Toucan are also very nice, and ready and willing to help at the drop of a hat. Give it a try and let me know what you think. I may also add to this post in another week, after playing with this longer and seeing the stats for the week.

Labels: CRM, Integration, marketing, PR, Recommended_Apps

Even if today's posting of leaked Twitter confidential information that was accessed through Google Docs has filled you with apprehension about relying on that platform for any sensitive parts of your business, hopefully you are not hesitant to use some great low-threat features like Google Calendar. SalesForce just put out a very straight-forward and instructive how-to video on integrating your Google Calendar into SFDC, and having it display on your home page instead of the SFDC internal calendar.

With this feature, if you have 20 employees sharing a Google calendar, but only 10 using SFDC, you can still see a calendar within SFDC that represents the entire company's calendar.

Link to: Google Calendar Integration How-To video

Labels: CRM, How-To, Integration, SaaS

Many businesses think of search engine optimization (SEO) as strictly a part of marketing, and in a way it is. The key understanding they miss, however, is that marketing doesn't wait to begin until you are at the stage of website promotion. It begins during the first stages of website design.

Think of your website as your business's public face. You get to pick the features you want on your face to create the most accurate impression you can for people who are first introduced to all you have to offer solely by looking at your face. What do you want your face to convey? And what if they could only find your face by searching for faces that have those specific features?

It is common to think of website architecture in terms of the content you want to share with visitors. You want them to see your products and services. You want them to know where you are. You may want to convey your pricing structure. Most websites out there are designed with these sorts of goals in mind. But no one searches for "products and services," so why name a page that way? What do people search for that would make it likely your products or services would fit the bill? Well that's what you need to name that page!

And likely we are talking about multiple pages, rather than a single "products and services" page, regardless of what you might name it. That will allow you to target your site's appearance for different possible searches even more, and attract more traffic.

Future articles will focus on how to discover the right search terms to structure your site's page around. For now I want to fully get across just how important it is that you structure your site around an SEO methodology from the ground up. In fact, we specialize in site redesign even when the graphics and user interface of a site are great, simply changing the architecture of the pages to be more search engine friendly.

Though there is debate in the SEO world as to whether Google and other major search engines still use page urls as part of their ranking criteria (we believe they don't), there is no doubt that they ALL use page content, particularly the page Title, as a major part of ranking criteria for any term. In other words, that page of your website is much more likely to come up in searches for a specific word or phrase if you put that word or phrase in the title of the page. This is why most search engine traffic comes in through pages other than the site's home page.

The home page is usually too general to attract the specific keyword orientation of search engines. Yet many companies continue to focus their marketing efforts on their home page, as if that was the most important page on the site. In terms of how pretty and attractive your "face" is, yes, the home page says the most about that, and you do want a visually appealing home page. But the home page needs to focus more on creating a favorable visual impression than in presenting substantial content. In terms of content, less is definitely more when it comes to the home page. But when it does come to conveying content, convincing a visitor that you have the products and/or expertise they seek, the secondary pages of the site are where the action is. And that is where SEO website architecture comes in.

Make SEO the framework of your site and you will find it is dependable, expandable, and able to accommodate your business's needs even as your business grows to include new offerings. The best marketing investment is the one you can make once and build on limitlessly for free, rather than having to pay for clicks for a lifetime. (However, pay-per-click marketing is an important adjunct to SEO, and we will also look at that in a future article.)

If you'd rather have someone who can apply their SEO website design expertise to your business's website immediately instead of waiting to develop that expertise yourself, visit our SEO Website Redesign page and learn more about what we do. Even if you choose to hire the help of a professional, you will still benefit from learning the basics of SEO yourself, if only so that you can understand the value and approach of the work you are contracting for.

Labels: marketing, SEO

I just watched a one hour demo of Vertical Response (VR) and have come away with mixed feelings about it. A number of my past clients have used VR before becoming SalesForce.com (SFDC) users, and that is how I first became acquainted with the VR email marketing application. They needed their VR account integrated into SFDC as part of their SFDC implementation.

Since they were clearly already sold on the app, they had very positive things to say about it, and this first gave me a positive impression of it also. The demo today revealed some great things about the app, but also raised a few issues, which a perusal of customer reviews on the AppExchange confirmed were issues for others too.

The Pluses:

• Low prices - Send 1000 emails for $15; 10,000 for $120; the price per email goes down the higher the volume goes. Non-profits can send up to 10,000 emails per month for free and everyone can start with 500 free emails to test the system.


• Free to install - Great idea to make the app free to install. That gives you the ability to play around with it and learn how it works, deciding if you want to work the way it works before you invest a penny. You only pay for the emails you send.


• Easy to install - There really isn't much to it. Just go through the standard AppExchange installation wizard then add a couple picklists to two page layouts.


• Nice template selection - It would take a lot of space to really give a comprehensive review of all the good things about the template selection. These are high quality templates, on a higher level than Constant Contact and other well known email marketing packages. That said, there are also some related Minuses I will get to next.


• Tight integration with SFDC in terms of using the lists already provided by Leads and Contacts, instead of having to maintain external lists and SFDC lists.
  


• Google Analytics integration creates a link between behavior within emails and behavior on the website when links in the email are followed.


• Numerous on-demand video tutorials on using the system: How To Do Everything SFDC
  

The Minuses:

• Only one SFDC user account can be attached to any given VR account. This means 1) all the images you upload are unavailable to anyone else; 2) you can't see anyone else's stats, even if you're the marketing director or a Sys Admin; and 3) there is no way to see a schedule/calendar of all emails to be sent by anyone at your company, only to see your own.


• It is way too cumbersome to save and use your own templates once you've customized one of theirs to be exactly what you want. You either have to redo all those choices each time, or copy the HTML of the template once you've edited it to desire, then paste that into SFDC as a custom HTML template there. Thereafter you choose the SFDC Template option (a small link) on the templates page in VR instead of choosing one of the VR templates.


• You cannot use VR to email market to members of purchased lists. Email recipients must have come to you through your website, someone who gave you their business card, someone who is a member or customer, or somehow has a direct relationship with you such that they would expect to receive communication from you. It is therefore more a relationship building email tool than an official email marketing tool. You can't do "cold-call" email marketing with them. This is enforced by their surveillance of your bounce and opt-out stats, and complaints. If they see anything unsavory, they will request your documentation of the opt-in of each member of your list and failing to provide this your account will be terminated.


• As a minor inconvenience, in order to send more than 30,000 emails at once, you must get approval by writing to [email protected] first.


• No native website analytics tracking within VR so that Google Analytics is not required. (Compare to ExactTarget, which includes native website tracking integration.)
  

In general I have to say that I like VR enough to not steer companies away from it if they feel they can deal with the above limitations. I even recommended it to one non-profit I help out immediately after watching the demo.

I'm still liking Predictive Response (PR) better, because of the extra analytic and automated drip campaign handling features of PR (see previous post, Predictive Response Delivers), but PR is also a little more expensive. Let's say you had 12 users in SFDC and send 50,000 emails per month. With PR you'd pay about $740 a month and with VR you'd pay $500. (Oddly, for 50,001 you'd pay $425, due to how the price per 1000 is tiered.) You can see the exact price you would pay for any number of VR emails going out at the following link VR Pricing. You type the number you would be sending into the "Pay as You Go" box. Monthly unlimited plans are not available within SFDC VR acccounts at this time.

Additionally, setting up PR is a little more complicated, though not ridiculously so, due to it being more tightly integrated with many parts of SFDC and your website. You also can't try it out for free and the tutorials are always by request, rather than on-demand videos (though there is a helpful intro video available here: PR Overview Video). With PR you put a little more in for setup, learning and monthly expense, but also get a lot more in terms of integrated management of the entire marketing campaign.

While Vertical Response might be more appropriate for sending a monthly newsletter, Predictive Response is more appropriate for actual sales & marketing campaigns, where you are trying to promote specific products or services.