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If you were unable to attend the SalesForce.com ecosystem conference earlier this month, or if you attended but had simultaneous sessions you had wanted to attend so that you had to miss some, you can find videos for most of the sessions at the following link: DreamForce '09 videos.

Some highlights:
Formula Magic - create groups of roll-up summary fields then graphically represent their contents right on the record's detail page, or in list views.
New SFDC for Outlook - get a peak at the new Outlook integration utility coming soon.
Non-profit Starter Pack intro - Tips on getting the most out of the NPSP for non-profit organizations.
Donor and Member Managment - More tips for non-profit organizations
AppExchange Recommended Sales Apps - introduction to some great apps for sales managers to implement, such as: a business card scanning app; X Squared mass contact updated utility that updates all contact addresses when the Account's address changes (the company moves); Account News Feed; Landslide custom sales process manager; Engage B2B by Silverpop email behavior tracking for lead scoring and sales rep notification automation; and Sales Genius for email-to-website click tracking visible within SFDC.
Sales Process Productivity - For companies newly implementing a universal CRM system, with emphasis on 1) effective end user adoption and change management within a context of ongoing process improvement within phased roll-out; and 2) sales performance dashboards
Platform State of the Union - use a Visio-like graphical user interface to create approvals now and standard workflow in future releases. Also create database schema graphically, and have them actually generate custom objects instead of your having to use the current form field based system to design custom objects.

I welcome your comments on any of these videos or suggestions about others that you think are not to be missed. Now I'm glad I didn't race into SF for that 7:30am session I really wanted to catch, but not badly enough to get up that early. Now it's just a click away anytime I want to reference it.

Labels: CRM, Database, How-To

“Why do I know more about strangers on Facebook than my own employees?” asked SalesForce.com CEO Mark Benioff last week at Dreamforce '09.

Chatter is SFDC's answer to the business need for real time communication within dispersed groups that all happens within a private, secure, company environment. With Chatter, which will become a standard feature of all editions of SFDC early next year, every company employee will be able to create a profile highlighting their areas of expertise, publish status updates of what they're working on , and view updates of not only other staff's status but also events within the CRM portion of SFDC. Users won't all have to have CRM licenses to access Chatter, including the updates related to events within the CRM part of the system, which does require a SFDC license for record access.

I can definitely see how many companies will benefit from having this sort of collaborative tool. I can recall years ago when I was doing quality control at a large international company and would often wonder who to go to for information I needed to confirm whether data I was seeing was correct or not. It would have been great to be able to search profiles for expertise and work functions. There was also the one day each month where I was buried deep in number crunching and needed people in several roles to be super available to respond promptly to critical inquiries from me during that time, while others needed to basically not ask anything of me on those days. I would have loved to have been able to just put in my status update that it was "processing day" and to have trained everyone I worked with to know what that meant and how to respond. I could go on and on about the potential I see, just as I personally find plenty of good use for Facebook and Twitter in staying coordinated with important people in my personal life and informed of significant, but not quite email worthy events in their lives.

Chatter will also be available to non-CRM users of the Force.com platform within the version that is at the $50/user/month price point. It will of course provide no insight into CRM record events, since there are no CRM objects in that edition.

Labels: CRM, social_media

In a previous article I presented several cross-object workflow solutions, with the caveat that though it was possible to create the rules in SalesForce.com, they wouldn't get triggered across the objects automatically. To solve this problem, we have created Aspira XObject, a free tool that allows System Administrators to create "Relations" between objects so that when criteria is met on one object, workflow rules get run on another as if both were just edited.

The idea of creating the tool arose when I was working on a non-profit SFDC system optimization project and the client had an elaborate set of conditions between different custom objects where internship applications moved through stages dependent on actions being tracked on several other objects, such as the service opportunity being approved, the intern being approved, forms having been received, and so on. There was a web of lookups and workflow connecting the objects, but it wasn't working effectively because you had to know the application should be in a certain stage to go edit it in order to trigger the workflow that would update the field to the correct stage. This obviously made no sense; why use workflow at all if a user needs to know it is time to change the stage?

We created a coded solution at the time that cost them thousands of dollars, and then a few weeks later they came back and said, "This is great. Now can you make it also include this fourth object?"

It was clear a coded solution that worked one object at a time was not going to really solve their problem. They needed to be able to continue developing their cross-object application progress tracking system independently without having to go back to the developer each time.

Around the same time I started participating in a conversation on Twitter where people were lamenting the lack of immediate firing of cross-object workflow. I was then confident that a solution was going to have value to enough companies for it to be worthwhile developing it as an installable app. Thus Aspira XObject on the AppExchange was born.

You can download the free version on the AppExchange if you are in Enterprise, Unlimited or the non-profit edition of SalesForce.com (must have workflow rules to use it). With the free tool you can automate any workflow that is on standard objects. If you need to automate the firing of rules on custom objects, that extended application is available for a fee that is just a fraction of what a custom coded solution would cost. Hope your company finds it useful.

Labels: CRM, Recommended_Apps

I'm not a fan of Dell at all since my problem-ridden experience with my last computer purchase from them, but I am a fan of SFDC. I think one can consider it a consolation prize that when one gets a Dell (as a business purchase at least) it will come bundled with an introduction to what is truly a great CRM tool. I have many times turned small business owners I know on to SFDC, and they are always impressed by what it can do for them. Many of them are just not aware of the entire CRM technological space. I guess they are often not considered profitable enough to market to. Glad to see that is changing in a big way with partnerships like these. Here's an excerpt from a good article on the news:

Dell to Peddle Salesforce.com’s Widgetry
— Dell, itself a user, is gonna pitch saleforce.com’s on-demand CRM widgetry to American SMBs on its web site under a deal announced Monday. Dell, newly service-minded, will offer to integrate the stuff into customers’ existing set-ups along with Dell servers hawking data migration and physical and virtual appliances. Dell means to handle Salesforce’s Contact Manager Edition as well as three different levels of CRM services Group Edition for up to five users, Professional Edition and Enterprise Edition.

Labels: CRM

Disclaimer: I really like SalesForce.com as a CRM choice. I have therefore come to know it best, and to expect any other CRM to deliver the functionality and dependability that I have come to expect from SFDC. I don't care if something else costs less if it is unreliable or short on features.

That said, I also love supporting the little guy and prefer open source over closed systems in general. I'm a Firefox user, not an IE person, for example. So I wanted to love SugarCRM and have an option I would be proud to offer clients who can't afford SFDC prices. How unfortunate then for my review of SugarCRM to reveal it to be way too buggy and annoyingly planned to be able to recommend.

First let me say the things I like about Sugar. I like that you can change how your user interface is arranged whenever you want. You can simply change the theme shown in a dropdown field on the home page to change colors, arrangement of the object tabs (horizontal or vertical), and more. You can also create new home page views that mash together various components, such as lists of all your Opportunities, Accounts, Leads, etc. with graphical charts based on reports. In SFDC you get similar customization ability, but it is pretty much limited to just one view of the home page. You can't name a bunch of configurations, save them all as links, then switch from one to the other at the click of a button whenever you want.

I also love that Sugar includes an integrated project management component, though I couldn't get it to actually work. But to get to the downside later, let me just say that it is nice to not have to hunt for, install, and pay for an add-on, such as DreamTeam's $40/usr/mo pricey though excellent app. Sugar starts up day one with the feature there, and you can see Gantt charts at the click of a button, if you crave that sort of view of tasks on a project.

Of course, the thing most to love about Sugar is the price. You can get it for free if you want to download the community version and install it on your own web server running PHP. You then have to maintain it yourself, but there are a lot of IT people who know PHP, so if you have in-house IT with those skills, you will probably be fine. If you want an on-demand solution within the SaaS model, Sugar offers several options, each of which is less expensive than SFDC. For the Professional Edition of each, you pay $30/usr/m with Sugar and $65/usr/m with SFDC. For Enterprise Edition it's Sugar $50/usr/m and SFDC $125/usr/m. (In a later article I will review Zoho CRM, which is even cheaper.) Comparable Sugar editions also contain more features than the similarly named SFDC edition. For example, Sugar's PE includes workflow and campaigns at no extra charge.

A year ago there would be a long list of important functions available within SFDC that are simply missing in Sugar. Not so any more. Sugar has pretty clearly been copying SFDC like nobody's business. They even use the exact same list of picklist/dropdown values sometimes, such as for Opportunity/Sales Stages. Now it seems to be less a matter of having the function listed as included and more a matter of getting it to work.

Take the project management feature I mentioned earlier. I created an Account, created a related sales Opportunity record, and then created a project off that Opportunity. Great. But then when I added tasks to the project record, I simply could not get them to show on the Gantt for that project. It clearly says the task is related to the right project when I create or later edit the task, but when I go to the project the tasks don't actually get related. How is anyone using this?

This is in an area where I have no expectations coming from SFDC, because SFDC has no native project management. I just want it to work. But an area where I do have expectations set by SFDC is when it comes to working with Opportunities and Products. I expect the system to do things for me, like calculating the Opp Amount based on which Products I've added. Sugar doesn't do that. I also expect it to allow me to create an independent Price book from which I can pull products for any Opportunity. Sugar has me create each product as a unique entry related to a specific Opp, like Opportunity Products within SFDC. Nowhere did I find an actual price book that could be set up by admin or management staff then accessed by users.

On the admin side, I was annoyed by the handling of picklist/dropdown values. I think of each field in terms of what object the field is related to, regardless of what type of field it is. There is a difference to me between a Type field on an Account versus an Opportunity versus a Case. I don't expect to have to go to one location to find all of them, but in Sugar you do. You edit most fields on an object-by-object basis, but dropdowns are treated specially. They are all accessed in one central location. I could get over this, not expecting every CRM to have made the same decisions as SFDC, and willing to accept I better include the name of each object within the name of the field if it is a dropdown if I want to be able to find it later to edit the value options in the list. However, the thing is also buggy.

I tried at least 4 times to make changes to the Sales Stage field to either add a new value or edit an existing one, and each time it said it was saving my changes, but clearly did not. When I went to the separate page for editing the Sales Probability (an unnecessary step in SFDC, since the two fields are edited together there), my changes from Sales Stage are gone. When I then go back to Sales Stage, sure enough, not saved.

There are other little things that are just annoying if you've been spoiled by SFDC usage. For example, when you create a new field, instead of entering the label first the way you want users to see it (written out with spaces, etc.) and then having the system translate that into the form it needs to work with the field so you don't have to, it goes the other way around in Sugar. You supply the version formatted for the machine and then you also supply the one formatted for the user. Another example is, when you want to edit a page layout you have to do it twice, once for what the record looks like when it is being edited and again for what it looks like when it is being viewed. Now if you are going to frequently be making those two views different, I guess this is a great feature to have. I've never had it nor missed it in SFDC, but if I did, maybe I'd consider it a benefit instead of a cumbersome and unnecessary chore.

In general I found SugarCRM to be buggy. They have added a lot of features recently to make it more like SFDC (Self-Service Portal, etc.) but it just isn't reliable. Take a look at the frequency of patch releases in the announcements section of their support forum and you'll get an idea of just how buggy, but trying SugarCRM yourself is probably the best proof. Give SalesForce.com a try also, then let me know what you think between the two.

Labels: CRM

Confession, I avoid Apex like the plague. I don't want to know it myself, and don't expect any of my clients' in-house SFDC Admins to want to know it either. Yet whenever an Apex solution is created for them (by someone else at AspiraTech, never me) the client is forever dependent on a developer to maintain that functionality for them as their business process and related needs change over time. That is just not the way I like to work. I am all about teaching a person to fish instead of just giving them a fish. I love the ongoing relationships I have with my clients, but I want those relationships to be focused on my assisting them with additional solutions, not just tweaking the ones they already have because they are unable to adapt them themselves.

So I look for solutions that are provided within creative use of the standard user interface, VisualForce pages (which I then teach them to maintain), and AppExchange applications that have any needed Apex baked in.

One of my favorite Apps is Form Assembly. Though the product was originally created as a standalone website form service like Survey Monkey, it has grown to be something far more powerful than that with its SFDC integration.

With Form Assembly you can update any object in SFDC through your company's website. Want to collect feedback from your customers and have it added directly to their Contact record? Create a form using FA. Want to have forms on your website generate new records on a custom object you created, such as event registrations? FA feeds directly into custom objects. How about those pesky "Stay-in-Touch Requests" that send Contacts to a form to update their contact information, but then submit the form results to you as an email, requiring data entry to get the new info into their Contact record? Once again, FA to the rescue.

FA even offers PayPal integration, conditional fields (which SFDC does not offer), and calculated fields. I could go on and on about the many things I love about the app, and one of the best is its amazingly affordable $34/user/month price tag. Remember, the only user who needs the FA license is the one who will be creating the forms.

Honestly, the only thing I can say against FA is that they have made the puzzling decision not to make free trials available for even a week. I was therefore unable to demonstrate any of the SFDC integration for you in screenshots. The only trial I could access is one hosted on their site that is not integrated with SFDC, and even then you only get 2 hours of access, beginning as soon as you click the "Test Drive" button in AppExchange.

Come on folks. What do you think we are going to do, create a bunch of forms week one then not buy the service? It's only $34 per month! And it's such a great product, of course customers will want more than a week's access --though not us developers; hence our need to be able to access it to test use cases for our clients before putting them live in their systems. Give developers ongoing access without the ability to host forms on any site other than FA's and no ability to receive data from some critical field, like email, if you are really afraid of folks stealing access. And give the general public full access for just a week so that they can try it out without having to spend any money up front.

Apart from the irrational paranoia of the vendor, it really is a no-lose product, one every SFDC user should really consider implementing. With Form Assembly you get cross-object action without needing any Apex. One form can feed into multiple objects, creating needed records that are interdependent at the click of a "submit form" button. Skip the Apex and get Form Assembly.

Labels: CRM, Integration, Recommended_Apps, SaaS

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

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

I just came across the below article that I enjoyed so much I decided to repost it here for your enrichment as well. I am also seeing social CRM as the wedding of two powerful concepts to deliver a business success solution in the most economical and effective way currently available. Bill makes some excellent points:

"Social CRM - The Start of Social Selling - Learn It! By Bill Rice

Has CRM software gone Social too? Jeremiah Owyang, a Forrester Research analyst and author of Web-Strategist.com, believes twitter future could be a Social CRM.

There is no question that Twitter's popularity is growing over night with thousands of people and companies joining daily. Many companies have taken notice of the growing number of people on twitter and recognizing it can be a way to connect to customers and grow their business's. These companies are joggling around Twitter and wondering how to implement this tool into the business plan. The concept of Twitter being used as a CRM is very fitting and presents itself well to many companies!

This concept is a long way from the discussion people are having about what a big waste of time Twitter, Facebook, and other like social networks are. This is the third time in less than a weak I have come across discussions of this concept. That being Social Selling!

Sales is inherently about relationships, building trust, and referrals. The familiarties that the Twitter world would know as they are following, friending, and retweeting? Yes! These concepts are what builds sales! It was only a matter of time before social media became a sales tool.

Social networking will become a natural part of CRM software, and faster than most think. This is not happening because of companies like Salesforce.com are sticking it into their software. No, simply because that is the why consumers are shifting how they communicate online and because consumers want to be contacted in this way.

The time for companies and their sales force to start adapting to the new way to approach sales has started. Get your sales team building more trust and improving the relationships they have with your consumer. This result will always lead to an increase in sales and more referrals that companies can build upon! If you are in sales, it is time to get your social CRM software and start Social Selling!

Here are some keys to get you started!

* Get on Twitter and Facebook--build an audience
* Be natural. This attracts people that will want to buy from you
* Monitor and be responsive to requests you can help with
* Get all your existing clients into your social network

Do you agree with the effect that Social Networking is shifting the way we should approach Sales? If so what else should the new class of social sales people be doing?

Raise your sales performance with Lead Management Software. Use Social CRM to start Social Selling!

Article Source: Social-CRM---The-Start-of-Social-Selling---Learn-It

Labels: CRM, Guest Bloggers, social_media

As of today, SalesForce.com is offering it's platform for free to companies that need just the platform (not SFA). You will be able to create up to 10 custom objects per user and one website with up to 250,000 page views each month. All this for free, indefinitely.

To get started go to SalesForce.com Free Edition, or to learn more first, read their official press release.

Labels: CRM, Database, SaaS

I've been comparing email marketing options and Predictive Response (PR) is looking like the best option for SalesForce.com users. The level of integration with the CRM simply can't be beat by such vendors as Vertical Response and BridgeMail. I am even more convinced PR must have a pretty tough package to beat given that earlier this week when I was exchanging messages with a BridgeMail representative the conversation abruptly came to an end when I politely asked him to clarify the business case for their service over PR. He has not responded back since.

On the other hand, PR's responsiveness in making the case for their service over BM was in keeping with my general experience of how they operate. These are people you can reach at 7pm on a Friday evening, and who will be happy to help however they can. Based in CA, with apparently all their tech support based there also, they offer a great product delivered with great support.

The two things I like most about PR are 1) the integration with SFDC, so that you don't have to maintain two sets of lists when SFDC is already a list management system; and 2) the ability to continually refine email marketing campaigns based on recipient behavior. You can see which links they follow in any email you send, which pages on your webite they then visit, which links on those pages they click, how long they watch any video, and so on. And it all funnels directly into SFDC, so that you can report on it right along with all your Opportunity data. And of course, it all feeds back to your campaigns' ROI as well.

Another element Kevin at PR pointed out to me is that PR is campaign based, not list based, in how it "thinks" about marketing. With a list based system like BridgeMail, if someone signs up for your newsletter mid-month, the only way you can send them that month's newsletter is to resend to the entire list. With PR, you simply add them to the campaign and SFDC keeps track of who within the campaign has or hasn't been sent which newsletters. So you then just send to the ones who haven't already received it.

The entire "drip campaign" approach of PR is a marketing winner. As you get feedback on what is working or not for given INDIVIDUALS, you refine your methods of marketing TO THEM. The system moves them from one campaign to another based on their behavior. Making it more and more likely they will like what they see enough to make a purchase or engage a sales rep about a possible purchase (i.e. convert to an Opportunity).

You may note that this review talks a lot about Predictive Response in comparison with BridgeMail, without mentioning Vertical Response. That is because VR merits an article all its own, which will follow next week. As a preview though, expect PR to stack up quite favorably in my view. It is simply the best email marketing package for SFDC users that I have come across. If you know a better one, please bring it to my attention.

Labels: CRM, marketing, Recommended_Apps