CRM FYI

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.

The bags are almost packed.  I’m nearly ready to go.  Before I pack up the laptop for the trip, I thought I’d pass along some info on where I’ll be and what I’ll be doing at Dreamforce, just in case you’d like to find me among our newest 15,000+ friends.

New Attendee Orientation

Tuesday night at 5 PM in N134 is the New Attendee Orientation led by Tom Wong.  I’m going to be giving a few tips to the new attendees there and if you haven’t been to Dreamforce before, you really should plan to attend this session.  I’m not saying you should attend on account of me, it’s all the other stuff you’ll get out of it that I guarantee will be worth the effort to be there.

The Dreamforce TweetUp

Held in the Expo Tuesday at 6 PM, there will be a meeting of a whole bunch of Twitterers who have never seen each other in person before.  I’m excited because though I’ve been on Twitter for more than 2 years, it’s only in the last year that I’ve found it to be an invaluable business resource.  Yes, I said a business resource.  Come find out why Twitter is home to slew of activity about the Salesforce community.  If you don’t use or understand Twitter, stop by and see why you should consider trying it out.

Wednesday AM Keynote

Without a doubt, this is the keynote everyone goes to see.  I’ll be seated in the Press/Blogger section, madly Tweeting away.

“Increasing Speed to Value with the AppExchange”

Wednesday evening at 6 PM, I’ll be in the Campground Theater giving a half hour talk / Q&A about AppExchange apps that give some great value at no or low cost.

Speakeasy in the Cloud

My blog sponsor, Appirio, is pretty well known for the parties that they’ve thrown at the last few Dreamforce events and this year will be no exception to that.  This year, it’s being held at the Old San Francisco Mint.  If you don’t have an invitation to this event, there’s a waiting list you can add yourself to.

Birds of a Feather

Thursday at lunchtime, I’ll be found in the Insurance Industry area of the lunch room, specifically meeting with other Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliates who use Salesforce.  I’m really looking forward to meeting those folks.

Cloud Crawl

Salesforce threw a mighty fine gig at Temple nightclub last year and once again, I’m going back.  This one is Thursday night and will likely be a pretty late night.

“There’s an App for That; Boost Sales with the AppExchange”

This is a Sales track breakout session Friday at 9:00 that I’ll be on a panel for.  I’m sharing the stage with some great sales people who have found some incredible value from the AppExchange apps they use.  Come find out what those apps are.

Between all that stuff, I’ll be attending breakout sessions, stopping by as many of the Expo exhibitor booths as I can and hitting some other parties from great companies like Model Metrics, Informatica, Reside, InsideView, Genius, and others.  To add more content to the blog in the coming weeks and months, I’ve got numerous interviews planned with some interesting executives.  You’ll hear more about those later.

And now, I’m off to finish zipping up the suitcase and get some sleep.  If I’ve never met you before, I hope to meet you this year at Dreamforce.  If we’ve met before, it’ll be great to see you again.  And if you’re not able to make it to Dreamforce this year, fear not.  You can put Dreamforce 2010 on your calendar right now.  It’s December 6-9, 2010 and it’s once again in San Francisco.  I look forward to making your acquaintance there.

Momentum 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 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.

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 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?

Dreamforce is the annual user conference of Salesforce.com, and even though it doesn’t start for another seven months, now is the time for a great deal on passes to this year’s conference.  The dates for Dreamforce 09 are November 17-20 this year, and it’s held in San Francisco.

Just contact your Salesforce Account Executive before the middle of July when registration for Dreamforce officially begins and you can pick up passes for just $599 each, half off last year’s regular price of $1,199.  I have to say that even at $1,199, it’s a great bargain for all the information you can take in, all the people like you that you can connect to, and all the insight into the next features coming to a cloud near you.

Unsure if you want to go or if you’d get anything out of it?  Check out some of the keynote sessions from last year and any of the 250 breakout sessions held last year.  I haven’t heard much of any details about the conference yet, except that they’re expecting 11,000 people this year, and they’ve changed which days of the week the conference is held.  I’ll certainly give you more info as I get it.  WIll you be one of those 11,000?  I hope so.  The experience is truly worth it.  

It’s days like this that you can hopefully see a great reason to at least pay attention to Twitter, even if you don’t yet have an account there and participate.  This afternoon, I was adding notes to an internal support case on my ever-so-faithful Salesforce.com Case tab.  I hit Save, and it started chugging…..and chugging….and eventually, just got hung.  My first reaction was to fire up Tweetdeck (IMHO, the best Twitter interface out there) and I looked at my continual search of all Tweets, worldwide for the word “salesforce.”  And sure enough, right there, users started asking the same question to the world, “Is Salesforce.com down for you?”  We saw immediate validation that we all experienced the same problem.

Enough of Salesforce.com’s 1.1 million users are on Twitter and many of their first reactions were to do the exact same thing.  Unfortunately, today’s outage took out the http://trust.salesforce.com site as well so many were wondering how extensive the whole thing was.  Humor even came into play as people suggested it’s time for a worldwide coffee break.  Someone even mentioned that it would have been really cool if Starbucks had caught onto the outage quickly and offered a coffee special for people who mention that Salesforce was down.  I thought it was funny.

For the most part, Salesforce has been really solid and we’ve not experienced many outages for quite some time.  This is really a compliment to Salesforce making availability such an important issue.  The fact is though; it will go down again sometime again.  It’s just going to happen.

Here are my suggestions to you to be prepared for the next time.

• Check the Trust site.  http://trust.salesforce.com/
• Check Trust SaaS  http://trustsaas.com/ – They monitor the uptime of Salesforce servers as well as other services like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and Typepad.
• Try a Twitter Search – This URL finds all Tweets containing salesforce.com, salesforce, or sfdc.  You don’t have to have a Twitter account to look at all these Tweets and know whether people are experiencing issues too.
• Join Twitter and ask the question.  If you put “salesforce” in it, oodles of people like me are going to see it and respond to you.  If you post that you’re having trouble with Salesforce, include which server “your Salesforce” is on.  It’s in the URL of any of your Salesforce pages.  It’s either NA1, NA2, NA3, NA4, NA5, NA6, AP0 or EU0.  Participate in this one more facet of the Salesforce community.  

Salesforce has provided the Dreamforce 08 breakout sessions in record time this year.  Kudos to Erica Kuhl and her web services team at Salesforce tor getting them up so quickly.

Head on over to the Salesforce.com Community site and check out all the sessions you wanted to attend but couldn’t get to.  This year they have much better packaging of the content as the audio is synced to all the slides shown in the session.  Now you’ll see everything you would have gotten in the breakout (except for the speaker).

Didn’t attend Dreamforce 08?  No problem.  You don’t even have to log in to watch any of these great sessions.  Pick out your favorites and watch or even just listen while you’re doing your other work.  It’s a great way to get inspired and get more from Salesforce.

Ever wanted to make your voice heard in the Successforce Community?  Well, Salesforce gives you lots of outlets to express yourself, but do you ever feel confused by all the parts of the overall Salesforce Community site?  Wikis, blogs, user groups, Connect on Demand, forums, articles, ideas, guides….they are all a part of the community, but how are you making use of them?

Here’s your chance to get the ear of Salesforce and help shape the next generation of the Successforce site.  My good friends Erica Kuhl (Kuhlio) from Salesforce and Pete Fife (Fifedog) from Mirapoint started a new Facebook group that I’m absolutely going to be a part of.  It’s called Salesforce User Community 3.0.  We’re going to put our heads together and figure out how we can make the most usable, helpful, insightful, and dynamic community of Salesforce users.  We need your help too.  

Come on over and join the group in Facebook, and join us for a meeting at Dreamforce as well.  More details will follow and certainly we’ll have some phone meetings later on as well.  Put your thinking caps on now and get ready to share what works for you about the Successforce Community today and what you’d like to see changed.

Count on Salesforce to use their own tools to the n’th degree. They’ve launched a new Ideas portal that’s designed specifically for making Dreamforce sessions exactly what you want to learn about. They call it Help Create The Conference. It’s a new way they’re using their Ideas product for the conference and I think it’s a great idea.

Be sure to add the sessions you want and vote on those you feel passionate about. One thing to remember is that since you can’t possibly go to all 250 of the sessions, you’ll still be able to benefit from them after the conference. Almost every one of them is published afterwords on Google Video and Successforce.

There are two relatively new Salesforce bloggers that you should get to know.  If you haven’t already read their blogs, I encourage you to check out The Admin Exchange and Salesforce Times.

The Admin Exchange is written by Matt Evans, a seasoned Salesforce admin from the Chicago area.  Mat has been a speaker at Dreamforce before so you may recognize him already.

Salesforce Times is written by Vancouver’s own Adam Killam.  Adam is a Salesforce User Group Leader so some of you might know him from there.

Successforce 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?

The 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!

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