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

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Data Mining

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

Posted on September 24, 2007 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!

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Dreamforce 07 Breakout Sessions Begin Showing Up Online

Posted on September 20, 2007 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.

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Connect the Dots – Not Just Child’s Play, It’s Relationship Analytics

Posted on May 10, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in Analytics, Data Mining, Social Networking | 2 Comments

Want to make a connection with someone at a prospect, but you don’t know who to go through?  It’s the age-old problem of making the connections you want through paths you don’t yet know.  How do you do it?  

Suppose I want to meet Dave Girouard, VP and General Manager of Google Enterprise.   What’s my best method of getting to him?

If I go in through LinkedIn, I see that I’m three degrees from him.  I can go through six of my connections to get to one of his connections to get to him.  Sounds good so far.  But who should I go through?  Who carries the most weight getting me in?  Did one of these people go to the University of Michigan with him?  Did someone work with him at Accenture?  It’s hard to tell.  I can’t draw any conclusions like that from what I have.

In comes Cogito, Inc., an on-demand relationship analytics company that can take hundreds of thousands of pieces of data about every person between me and Dave and assess the best path for me to follow.  It can take LinkedIn, Hoovers, Zoom Info, and hundreds more public sources and put them together for me graphically, without me hardly lifting a finger.  Cogito calls it Social Network Analytics.  “If somebody knows somebody else, however that might be, we can tell you how strong that relationship is, no matter how highly separated the relationship is,” says Coleman Barney, President and CEO of Cogito.

And if that wasn’t cool enough, imagine drawing those paths from you to your Contacts and Accounts in Salesforce.com.  Imagine seeing a thumbnail pathway from you to your prospects right there in Salesforce.  Find your best way to key influencers using the data you have, along with everything else that’s out there.  That’s relationship management to the next level and that’s powerful!  And for $10 a month, it sounds like instant ROI.

To find out more, check out Robert Scoble’s interview with Coleman Barney from Cogito. 


 

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