Make your Salesforce Project More Successful by Inviting a BA to the Party (Or Thinking Like One)


Today I welcome my good friend, Garry Polmateer as a guest blogger at CRMFYI. Garry is not only a Salesforce community rockstar, but he's planned and executed some great Salesforce implementations,

A Little Help from My Friends


In a demonstration of community and collaboration, Mike Gerholdt and I have created a blog post / demo video of utilizing inline Visualforce to display rich text info in standard page layouts without

Chatter-vantage #1 - No Need to Rush the Stage


Salesforce has created a conference attendee experience using Chatter that blows away all other conferences. Their Dreamforce Attendee Portal allows attendees to connect with speakers before, during

I Need You; to Join The Salesforce Channel Community


If you follow me on Twitter, it's hard to miss my regular status updates like,  "21 videos were posted to The Salesforce Channel today," but what's that all about? The Salesforce Channel is a website

Calling All Heroes! You Belong at Dreamforce


Earlier this year, I wrote about being a hero to your users, and the gist of it was that through social media, you can surround yourself with fantastic people who will make you a hero to your users. I

AppExchange

How to Prevent Your Accounts and Contacts From Aging Like Fish

Posted on by Jeff Grosse in Analytics, AppExchange, Chatter, Integration, Sales | 7 Comments

Some things get better with age. Some great examples of this are wine, cheese, and a well made violin. Other things don’t age so gracefully, like a salmon sitting on your kitchen counter…for a month. Over time, without proper maintenance, your Accounts and Contacts within Salesforce are going to stink, much like that fish.

People move from one company to another constantly. Their title may be Director of IT today and tomorrow it’s VP of IT. These changes are challenging to keep up with. Who do you go to for this information? Many of the lists you purchase for prospecting are already getting stale but to even find out how good the data is, you have to do all the work.

What if Account and Contact updates were fed to you? What if a simple dot of red or green next to each Account and Contact told you how up to date your data is? What if changes to YOUR Accounts and Contacts were proactively pushed into your Chatter feed?  That’s what you get with the new Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM.

You may know Jigsaw as the website where you can go to get the contact information of 22 million people at more than 4 million companies. Now you can get everything in Jigsaw natively within Salesforce.

Every time you look at an Account; every time you look at a Contact, you know if the data you’re looking at is current. Red tells you there’s an update available. Green tells you you’re in sync with Jigsaw.

Now updates to your Accounts and Contacts just roll into Chatter in realtime. You know when updated data is available. You can quickly click right on in, compare what’s in Salesforce and what’s in Jigsaw, accept any changes and save the record.

How clean is your data today? I’m not talking just the rudimentary, “Does it have a phone number or does it have an email address?” kind of questions. Is your data current? Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM comes with built-in analytics to evaluate what you have today and recommend changes. On top of that, could you possibly see a shorter sales cycle and a higher win rate if you had current data? Jigsaw helps you evaluate that with analytics.

Good data in Salesforce means each phone call or email happens right away because your sales team doesn’t have to go out and research such basic information. And how much more effective will they be when they proactively approach their prospect and ask them about that recent promotion? That personal touch  makes them look “in the know” about who they work with.

Pricing for Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM starts at $29 per month per user and is available today. Check out the images below. You can learn more at http://enterprise.jigsaw.com and be sure to follow @Jigsaw on Twitter.

[nggallery id=1]

Geo Got Me Excited on a Monday Morning

Posted on by Jeff Grosse in AppExchange, Force.com, News, Sales | 5 Comments

This morning, I discovered a new AppExchange app that quickly became the second-most exciting thing I’ve seen on a Monday morning in quite some time. (The top most exciting thing this morning was trying out my new french press coffee maker at work (shown at right))

The app is called Find Nearby Accounts, Contacts, and Leads and it provides you the means of geolocating all your Accounts, Contacts, and Leads using Google Maps in a completely easy way. The installation took five minutes. Configuration took another ten minutes (really only on account of watching some helpful videos provided right on a setup tab for the app). Soon thereafter, I was geolocating all my records like a mad-man. Well, truthfully, the Geo-code tab took care of that whole thing for me, but it was completely easy, user-friendly, free, and best of all, the end result was a pretty fantastic app.

So what does it do?

You add a few fields to your Page Layouts in Salesforce like “Find Nearby” and “Mapping Status.” If the address has not been mapped before, simply click Locate Account (or Contact or Lead) next to Find Nearby and it will geocode it for you. Then filter your results by whether you want to see Accounts, Contacts or Leads and within what mile range of that initial account. The result set can then be dragged over to the Driving Directions section. There you can quickly order the people and places you need to see and quickly generate Google Maps of how to get from one to another.

For the sake of challenging the system, I selected 16 accounts that I wanted to go see. I didn’t put them in any particular order and literally, 20 seconds later, I had directions for the 1755 mile trek I’d need to take to visit all 16 of those customers.

Another feature within that map is a green plus sign on each Account, Contact, or Lead which quickly helps me create a calendar event to meet with them, right in Salesforce. It couldn’t get much easier.

You can also add a “Map” button to your List View Layout and create a map of any grouping of Accounts, Contacts or Leads that you can find using a List View.

While there were some apps available on the AppExchange before to help you geolocate records and even very nicely get you directions, this is the first time I’ve seen something so deeply integrated, easy to setup and completely free. I kid you not that I was up and running in under 20 minutes. That’s the power of a great set of APIs from both Salesforce and Google. The AppExchange makes it easy to install it, and I have to hand it to Iman, the guy who hosts the six videos showing how to configure and use the features of the app. Iman’s work was not only really useful, but he’s now set a great standard for setup help that I hope other AppExchange partners will use as well.

This app got my mind thinking of all the other things I might want to use this for in the future. Maybe it will spark something with you too. One of the things I appreciate most abou the AppExchange is seeing what others have done and imagining how to take it further with my company. It could be something little or something huge, but it makes me think.

To see the magic, check out these short demos.

Be a Hero to Your Users

Posted on by Jeff Grosse in AppExchange, News, Social Networking | 4 Comments

This week I had a chance to write a guest blog post for the Salesforce AppExchange. I chose to write about utilizing networks to become a hero to your Salesforce users.

It’s not hard, it really doesn’t take that much time, and in the beginning, you can even start out by just listening in. No matter your experience level with Salesforce, you’ll gain a lot, just by listening on on some of the channels I mention.

Have a look and I welcome your feedback either here or on the AppExchange blog.

With a network, you don’t need to have all the answers to be a hero to your users.

Salesforce Service Cloud 2 Introduces Knowledge, Answers, and the Greatly Anticipated, Native Salesforce for Twitter

Posted on by Jeff Grosse in AppExchange, Customization, Force.com, News, Productivity, Service and Support, Social Networking | 11 Comments

Service Cloud 2Momentum keeps growing in the Service and Support realm at Salesforce.com.  What started as humble beginnings back in 2005 as relatively simple case management is now expanding to be the most comprehensive Service and Support offering yet; the Salesforce Service Cloud 2.  With 8,000 companies already using the “current” Service Cloud platform, Salesforce has cemented their commitment to continued innovation, putting time, money, and developers behind building the best service offering available on any platform and for any business.

Service Cloud 2 consists of three parts, Knowledge, Answers, and Salesforce for Twitter

A core piece of the Service Cloud 2 is Salesforce Knowledge.  Just a year ago, Salesforce saw ahead of the curve and made a strategic acquisition of Instranet, a comprehensive knowledge management company that had some great technology, but still relied on single tenancy and complex software and hardware management.  Service Cloud 2 is the fully “in the cloud” version of that acquisition.  Re-tooling a technology and entirely integrating it to existing products usually takes years, but just one year later, Service Cloud 2 is able to fully utilize Visualforce, Apex code, and all the other benefit already available on the Force.com platform.  When asked if former Instranet customers were interested in switching over to the cloud, Alex Dayon, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Salesforce said, “They’ve been pushing us the hardest “

Companies work hard to try and share knowledge across their organization and to their customers, but most of the technology to do so is complicated to design, deploy, and maintain.  Whether your business process is simple or deeply complex,  Salesforce Knowledge allows for rapid deployment, easy sharing of information to as few or as many people as you need, extremely simple customization, consistent innovation and upgrades, as well as being on a trusted, secure infrastructure that has been proven reliable.

Salesforce Knowledge

Salesforce Knowledge is priced at $50 per user, per month and is slated for general availability in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010. (a few months away)

Salesforce Answers takes the knowledge of the masses and allows you to build on it and reuse it.  Most of us look to a search engine to solve a problem much sooner than pick up the phone.  The answers they find though might be dated and it’s often hard to know which answers are right.  Salesforce Answers helps you build knowledge through the people who talk about your products.  In turn, when your customers find the answer to their questions, they can be published to your knowledge base immediately and you gain millions of content writers.

Salesforce Answers

One of the most interesting features of Salesforce Answers is it’s built-in integration to Facebook.  Now your company’s Facebook fan page can utilize Salesforce Answers right out of the box and millions of people have another way to join in the conversation and contribute.

Salesforce Answers is currently in pilot and should be generally available in the first half of fiscal year 2011.

The third piece of the new Service Cloud 2 is Salesforce for Twitter, a free integration between Salesforce and Twitter to monitor your brand, and join in the conversation that’s already happening.  Whether you realize it or not, people are probably talking about your products, your industry, and even your competitors.  How will you be prepared to respond to what’s being said?  Salesforce has a way.

Salesforce for Twitter

Salesforce for Twitter features

  • Search Twitter in real time – Don’t waste your time looking for service issues, let Salesforce find them for you.
  • Monitor service issues on Twitter - Once you find something that needs attention, capture the conversation, see what others say, respond to it yourself, and join the conversation.
  • Establish an Enterprise presence on Twitter – Show your interest in the people who are interested in you.  Resolve service issues before they escalate and engage your customers before your competitors do.
  • Give your customers a direct channel to support through Twitter – Setup your own channel for customers to directly “Tweet to Case.”  Customer issues are immediately turned into cases to resolve and build a reputation of listening and response.
  • Integrated push of “Tweets to Knowledge” – Don’t miss capturing a solution. Once resolved, publish the solution to Salesforce Knowledge.

Salesforce for Twitter Is available now from the Salesforce AppExchange.  If you’re interested in more information on Salesforce for Twitter or the Service Cloud 2, follow Salesforce on Twitter @salesforcenews.

Salesforce is proving that they “get” Service and Support.  With the Service Cloud 2, they are building an arsenal of tools to engage customers, track those relationships, resolve their issues, share information, increase brand loyalty, and improve customer satisfaction.

If you’re put back by the thought of how much it costs to use these tools, you probably ought to look at what the things you’re doing today are costing you in software licenses, hardware maintenance, unhappy customers, and frustrated employees.  I guarantee you thousands of companies are going to adopt this technology, pay the price, get the ROI, see repeat customers and grow their business.  Will it be you or your competitors?

A click away from $2.5M more revenue per team?

Posted on by Jeff Grosse in Analytics, AppExchange, Productivity, Sales | 3 Comments

Randall Isaac, CEO of Bluetide Management is my guest blogger today.  I’ve known Randall for a year and a half and his company specializes in unearthing data hidden in CRM that affects decision making and bottom lines.

MoneySales process makes a dramatic improvement on revenue performance, yet the majority of sales managers don’t use it effectively.

 

I am an unabashed fan of CSO Insights’ annual poll of sales executives. As opposed to research from many top analyst firms that is so academic I wonder if any of them have ever carried a sales bag, the survey data from CSO makes want to scream ‘right on – finally real sales challenges are being talked about’! 

Here is some selected data from their latest survey of 1,800 senior sales managers; 

  • 89% of sales managers feel sales process provides real positive impact to sales results 
  • But 60% of sales managers don’t use sales process 
  • Formally managing sales process makes a huge difference; managers who formally manage vs. those who ‘informally’ manage report 5% higher win rates. 
  • CSO pegs the incremental revenue associated with this better win rate at an astonishing $2.25M per year, per 20 rep team. 
  • Now the clunker: only 15% of sales managers say that their CRM provides impact to revenue results. 

I’d like to offer my opinion on how this data all ties together. 

What is Sales Process?

The Wikipedia definition of sales process 

“A sales process is a systematic approach for performing product or service sales. The reasons for having a sales process include seller and buyer risk management, standardized customer interaction in sales, and scalable revenue generation. 

Specific steps or stages in a sales process vary from company to company but generally include the following steps: 

  1. Sales Universe 
  2. Sales lead 
  3. Qualified prospect 
  4. Need identification 
  5. Proposal 
  6. Closing 
  7. Deal Transaction 

From a seller’s point of view, a sales process mediates risk by stage-gating deals based on collection of information or execution of procedures that gate movement to the next step.” 

Why are so few managers formally using Sales Process? 

The last line of the definition is about information that sales reps collect at each sales stage and the procedures that they engage in to move opportunities forward is what sales people do every day. The Role of a manager is to bring that activity in line with sales process. CSO Insights found that there is a dramatic difference in sales performance based on how a manager achieves this; formally and regular reinforcement drives far better performance than simply informally talking about it. 

The naysayers will say “CRM captures sales activity in the form of Tasks and Events (for those not familiar, think MSFT Outlook’s Task and Calendar features for sales people), so what’s the problem?” 

Well, here’s where the whole system breaks down. The role of a sales manager is defined by huge pressure, lots of hours away from family travelling, and too much to do in too little time. They do not have time to click around the CRM to try to find their reps’ activity information. A fly on the wall of any sales forecast review meeting taking place right now anywhere in the world will very likely observe a sales manager inspecting and guiding sales activity with their sales reps verbally. In other words, CRM is not participating in the fundamental sales manager function of managing the team’s sales activity! Voila – millions of sales dollars are being dropped…because of too many clicks! 

The solution is for CRM to think like a manager 

The dilemma is that once a company has realized success and is going down a certain path, it’s really hard to change. Salesfore.com has gone through exponential growth and has a wide diversity of customers. Whenever they add a feature it’s really important to satisfy the widest possible audience. That must make it hard to bring it all down to solve a specific business problem for a specific user role. 

Sit in a forecast review meeting, watch and listen to the dialogue and things become very clear. CRM needs to support consolidation of information onto the user interface so that it flows with the meeting; 

  1. The rep walks in the room; show that reps revenue forecast 
  2. The manager and rep start drilling into opportunity status; show the high level details of the opportunity, revenue, company, contacts, products, stage, etc 
  3. The manager wonders if the reps’ activity lines up with proper sales process: show the task activity associated with the opp. Ie., formally manage process 
  4. The manager wants to guide the rep back in alignment with sales; enable on the spot task creation and editing so the manager doesn’t have to wonder if the rep has captured the guidance. 

The point is that these are all actions that CRM already supports, but doesn’t present. A little user interface design can save a ton of clicks..and turn them into millions of dollars! 

 

You can find out more about Bluetde Management at their website.  http://bluetidemanagement.com  Their flagship product, Sales Clarity gives you a whole new realtime view of the data buried in your CRM.

Salesforce.com CEO, Marc Benioff Earns a “Bozo?”

Posted on by Jeff Grosse in AppExchange, Competitors, Force.com, Integration, Tools | 2 Comments

bozoI found it interesting to read Bill Snyder of Computerworld put Salesforce.com CEO, Marc Benioff in what Snyder calls, “our Bozo Hall of Fame.”  He walks the reader through the drama that unfurled about a year ago when Salesforce.com began some type of talks with Zoho’s CEO, Sridhar Vembu about bringing the Zoho productivity suite to the Salesforce AppExchange.  Snyder attributes the “award” to Benioff for how the whole process went down and eventually fizzled to nothing.  What adds to the intrigue of this story is the timing of Salesforce’s strategic alliance with Google over the past year.  Though we don’t have many details from the article, here’s kind of what I’m kind of thinking went on.

Going back even a little further than this story recounts, I remember having a discussion with Salesforce back in 2006 about Zoho.  At the time, we had a Salesforce product manager and a few services guys in our office to discuss a project.  Off the cuff, I asked if the product manager had ever seen Zoho CRM.  Since he hadn’t seen it, I decided to take a few minutes and show him what I’d seen in it by getting a free Zoho CRM license.  We walked through the app a bit and honestly, we had a good laugh about just how similar Zoho and Salesforce really were, once you strip away the on-screen formatting.  While you can’t say that Zoho had nearly the features that Salesforce had at the time, it was still striking how much it appeared that Zoho emulated Salesforce CRM.  The Salesforce guys kind of laughed it off as imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.

logoWe also found the Zoho CRM logo humorous.  Notice how the Zoho blocks are similar to the Salesforce “S Cube” logo which appears to now be retired.  And notice that the font of “CRM” appears to be strikingly like the signature logo of the company formerly known as Siebel.  What a coincidence?

Now fast forward to 2007.  The Google / Salesforce alliance gets it’s kickoff on June 5.  That alliance really started with Google Adwords and the launch of Salesforce Group Edition.  I’m going to guess that more than just AdWords talks had taken place during that year, though nothing more was released.  No doubt, talks about Google Apps were happening too 

Then, according to Snyder, sometime before Dreamforce 07, Salesforce asked Zoho to put development effort into integrating with Salesforce and offering it on the AppExchange.  Salesforce still had no office suite that was fully integrated to Salesforce CRM, so Zoho seemed to make sense.  Salesforce knew full-well that Zoho had a CRM product that would compete, but they wanted to see the office suite integration.  A later meeting between Salesforce and Zoho brought them to putting a stop to the offer to bring it to the AppExchange due to the competing CRM.  Salesforce then offered to buy Zoho out, though Zoho’s CEO refused.  Vembu wrote on the Zoho Blog on November 4 with the headline, “Mr. Benioff, Tear Down That Wall.”  Now if Zoho CRM had defined their company, I can see them being a little miffed at their flagship being absorbed (or annihilated) by a merger, but their many products defined Zoho, not just their CRM.  

Move forward to April 2008 and the launch of the full Google Apps suite, fully integrated with Salesforce.  That was a huge announcement which led to tons of possibilities and speculation.  While I know Google and Salesforce have become best pals, I wonder where that Google alliance would be today if Vembu had accepted Benioff’s offer to buyout Zoho.  Frankly, I’m glad Zoho walked away, but I wonder what Dreamforce 08 would have been like if Salesforce had it’s own office suite.

Though I can’t point to just when, I really thought I remember Marc Benioff being complimentary to Zoho in the past, on a quarterly earnings call when talk of office productivity suites came up.  Either way, now he gets to be complimentary to Google instead.

Regarding Snyder’s “Bozo” award, I can’t really say that I think it’s deserved.  Think of every corporate merger and buyout that happens.  If there are competing products in both the former companies, it’s not so unreasonable to expect the stronger one to win dominance and drive the other to obsolescence.  That’s business.  Not everyone will like it, but that’s the way it works.  Now he may be wishing that Salesforce had just let Zoho go out on the AppExchange as is.  But think about which one will drive more revenue to Salesforce.  Zoho on the AppExchange or Google Apps native in Salesforce? We know the answer, and that’s the way Marc Benioff has chosen to take his company.  Good for us.

An Easy and Effective Way to Get Your Targeted Message Across in Salesforce

Posted on by Jeff Grosse in AppExchange, Tools | Leave a comment

MessagingHow do you communicate with your Salesforce Users?  Email, newsletters, a “News” section within the Salesforce sidebar or Home Page?  Each can have it’s appropriate time and place, but how do you manage it all?  You want to target your message to the right teams, at the right time.  Especially when it comes to a change in process or functionality within Salesforce, you want to provide a way they can see that message easily, without having to dig too deep.  About four months ago, I bought an app off the AppExchange that has revolutionized how I communicate with my hundreds of Salesforce users.  It was extremely inexpensive and has more than paid for itself already. Here’s the lowdown on Home Tab Messaging, by Interactive Ties.

Home Tab Messaging is a set of s-controls that deliver a home page component that will house all your messages to users.  Where the power comes in is in how you can make those messages appear and to whom.  You can define an effective date and end date for your messages.  No more making a note for yourself to remember to publish a message when it’s time.  Your message will be shown exactly when you need it.  You can design your message from simple text or make it rich with HTML. You can give your users the power to delete the message from their screen, but they can always get back to the ones they’ve deleted by viewing them from the Deleted dropdown.  Finally, you can target your message to exactly who you want by adjusting the visibility of messages based on Salesforce Profiles.   Here’s how it works.

You can setup any user to be a message author with a quick checkbox on their User account.   As an author can manager all your messages in a single list.  You can then create a new message and either type away or write HTML and paste it in.  Choose the date you want the message to appear and when you want it to disappear.  Choose which profiles from the list need to see the message, and it will only be shown to those you wanted.  You can even see an Opt-Out list of users who chose to delete your message.   From a user’s side of things, deleting a message only keeps it from showing on their homepage message box.  They can easily view a deleted message again by just switching their message view from Active to Deleted.

While some people might look at this tool and just write it themselves using s-controls or Apex, the one time price-point of $500, makes it a really compelling buy.  A quick walk through the Google Checkout will get this app running for you in Salesforce in almost no time at all.  To be honest, it was almost instant ROI for me because I no longer had to write emails and figure out who needed to be included when I sent it.  The messages are shown on time and when they’re needed.  I put the Message box right at the top of the right column on the Homepage and people notice it.  They can browse the headlines and click into any message for all the details they need.  Check out the video walkthrough or try a quick demo as a user or as an admin right now.

Expense Reporting Just Got Sexy with Expense2GO for iPhone

Posted on by Jeff Grosse in AppExchange, Integration, Mobile, News, Productivity, Tools | 7 Comments

Expense2GO Trip DetailWhen you travel, why is it that in spite of the fact that you want your money back quickly, submitting your expense report is not the top activity on your mind? So far, for most of us, it’s because we’ve been stuck in a tedious processes of gathering receipts, taping them to paper, inputting data on either a spreadsheet or online app, then either dropping them in an envelope to Accounting. We put off submitting that expense report because it’s not fun and we have more valuable things to do with our time.  Model Metrics just changed the expense reporting game for us though. Weary travelers, get ready for the first and only expense report app you’ll likely ever enjoy. Get ready for Expense2GO.

Starting today in the Apple App Store on iTunes (v 7.7), you can download Expense2GO, the first native iPhone expense reporting app that lets you enter expenses on the go, online or offline and sync them securely to an expense management system in Salesforce.com with full workflow capabilities.

Model Metrics has built Expense2GO from the ground up on the iPhone platform.  They utilized the iPhone camera as a part of the app and integrated the whole process back to Salesforce.com and the workflow and approvals available from the Force.com platform.  From your iPhone, you can incur an expense and literally moments later, it could be approved by your boss and you’re on to more productive work.  At initial launch, the online interface for expenses will be a non-Visualforce application, but later this summer, the full Visualforce user interface will be released.

Part of the game-changing nature of Expense2GO is how you enter your expenses. As you get a receipt, take a quick picture of it with the built-in iPhone camera. Attach it to a visit or trip, put in a note or two and hit the sync button. It’s really that simple. But to say it’s that simple really doesn’t live up to the headline I gave it above, saying that expense reporting is sexy. To understand why I say that, you really have to see the video demo and the screenshots below.  It’s really quite elegant.

The benefits of Expense2GO seem huge.

  • Instantly digitize receipts
  • Online and offline data entry allows you to report an expense literally anywhere
  • Interface utilizes iPhone multi-touch to make data entry extremely easy
  • Security is built-in and enterprise class
  • Workflow is built-in, customizable, and approvals can be done through the iPhone
  • Integration through web services allows deep ties to be built to your back office
  • Entering an expense report is fun for the first time

The cost of Expense2GO is $10 per month, per user, regardless of whether you use Salesforce.com already or not.  Salesforce.com CRM licensing is not required.

I heard someone once say that Apple makes the sexiest looking rectangles in the world and it’s true.  Apple makes some of the simplest, yet most elegant designs in their products.  The iPhone demonstrates that and now there’s a way to leverage that elegance in a business process that nobody liked, until now.  Model Metrics is pushing the envelope with the interfaces they’ve built to Salesforce.  Along with the iPhone 3G enhancements that are breaking down barriers to corporate acceptance of the iPhone, Model Metrics is showing us that the iPhone is not just a good looking device, it can really be leveraged to solve a big problem for travelers.

To download Expense2GO, you’ll need iTunes 7.7.  Then head to the iTunes Store and search Expense2GO.  While you can download the app today, you won’t be able to run it on the iPhone or iPod Touch until the iPhone 2.0 sofware update is released on July 11.

Expense2GO SplashExpense2GO Trip DetailExpense2GO DetailExpense2GO CameraExpense2GO SynchronizeExpense2GO Settingse2go_6

Search: How Salesforce Finds All That Content For Us Across Their Sites

Posted on by Jeff Grosse in Analytics, AppExchange, Customization, Data Mining, Dreamforce, Integration, International, Productivity, Social Networking, Tools | 4 Comments

SuccessforceSuccessforce is the mack daddy source for info you need as a Salesforce user, developer, administrator, executive, or competitor.  (OK, you need some other bloggers too)  Not a walled garden, they’ve made Successforce open to all who want to read and even contribute to the content therein.  But how does Salesforce make it easy to find what you need?

GoogleThe answer lies in Google Custom Search Business Edition.  Ryan Pollock, a Product Marketing guy from Google wrote a blog post and did a short video interview about Custom Search with Salesforce VP of Developer Relations, Adam Gross.  Adam talks about how easy it was to integrate the Google Custom Search across all their pages and ensure we find what we need, regardless of what technology their assets lie on in the Salesforce back end.

Looking a little deeper into the pricing model, it wouldn’t be hard to see a quick ROI with an inexpensive service like Google Custom Search. 

Custom Search Business Edition is available in a number of plans:

  • Search less than 5,000 web pages: $100 per year
  • Search less than 50,000 web pages: $500 per year
  • Search less than 100,000 web pages: $850 per year
  • Search less than 300,000 web pages: $2250 per year

It’s good to know Salesforce sees it important to draw together all their resources for us, across so many sites.  Site searches are often neglected due to our experience of them providing us little or no value.  I wonder how many corporate websites could use a quick, inexpensive search makeover like this and see their customers find some real value from all the content they’ve spent millions producing.

Idea: Salesforce, you’ve got a “Who We’re Reading” section on Successforce pointing to many blogs, including my own.  How about adding our sites to your Google Custom Search Results?  There’s some good content out there people would get value in finding. Salesforce heard my request, and they’ve updated the custom search to include my blog and others; proof that they’re listening.  Thanks!

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Dreamforce 07 Breakout Sessions Begin Showing Up Online

Posted on by Jeff Grosse in Analytics, AppExchange, Customization, Data Mining, Dreamforce, Integration, International, Local, Marketing, Mobile, News, Productivity, Prototype, Sales, Service and Support, Social Networking, Tools | 1 Comment

Logo_videoSee the sessions you missed at Dreamforce 07.  They’re starting to show up on Google Video.  About 50 of the breakout sessions are available already and more will be added soon. 

To see what’s available now, search Google Video for Dreamforce and sort the results by Date.  If you’d like to know when new videos are posted, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for new videos with the Dreamforce tag.

You’ll also find some user submitted videos of the excitement of Dreamforce as well as some footage from the volunteer project run by the Salesforce Foundation held Saturday, September 15. 

As the keynote sessions are added, I’ll be sure to let you know as they are worth a second watch.

Technorati Tags: , , ,