Sales

When Hit or Miss Research Just Doesn’t Cut It in Business, You Need To Try Gist

Posted on October 14, 2010 by Jeff Grosse in Integration, News, Sales, Social Networking, Tools | 7 Comments

When Shane Mac at Gist approached me for a quick guest blog post on how I use Gist, I jumped at the opportunity. It’s easy to talk about companies and products that make your life better. Today my post hit their blog and you can certainly read more about it here. Just as a bonus feature for Salesforce enthusiasts, I figured I’d give you a couple more insights on why I like Gist.

A one-sentence description of Gist is “Aggregated intelligence of the people I do business and life with, stack-ranked in light of electronic and real-life communication.” Essentially, I look to Gist as my master contact list that knows the phone number and address of the people I know, but more than that, it pulls together what’s happening with them across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, websites and the emails I exchange with them. Gist also searches for news and blog posts about more than just people, but also the companies I track in Gist.

Getting ready for a meeting, I look to Gist to see what people I’m going to meet with have been up to. If I’m meeting someone for the first time, I use Gist to learn about them in one place. That leeds to more meaningful conversation and stronger business relationships. After meetings, I can also take notes for myself about the person or company and even use tags to find similar topics, people or companies in the future.

Finding Gist information is completely easy. I can always go to their website and look up both people and companies as well as view my dashboard of who’s most important to me according to Gist and according to me. Since it’s a website, I can get it from any computer. I’m not locked into one place. I can access the same information through a mobile app for iPhone, iPad or Android. Also available are Gist plugins for Gmail for Google Apps, Outlook or Lotus Notes.

And where else would you like to see Gist? Of course, you need to see it in Salesforce. You can do exactly that with almost no effort. Setup Gist as a Visualforce Component and then you can get the Gist of people and companies right on your Salesforce Account, Contact or Lead page. It’s that simple.

Instead of searching all over the Internet to help me build deeper business relationships, I let Gist bring the search to me. I rely on Gist and it’s proven itself valuable, day in and day out. It’s completely worth trying out. I’m also using Gist as a digital business card (on steroids). Check out the Gist on me.

Gist in 90 Seconds

Gist overview by CEO T.A. McCann from Robert Pease on Vimeo.

How to Prevent Your Accounts and Contacts From Aging Like Fish

Posted on September 1, 2010 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.

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Geo Got Me Excited on a Monday Morning

Posted on August 10, 2010 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.

New Salesforce Contact Manager Edition Makes it Affordable for SMBs to Get In the Cloud

Posted on September 1, 2009 by Jeff Grosse in News, Sales | 19 Comments

biz If you’re a small business and haven’t heard of Salesforce.com, it’s time you get to know them. It’s Salesforce that really pioneered “the cloud,” or running your business without a server, and today they’ve made it affordable for you to effectively manage your business contacts on an enterprise-class platform that’s accessible anywhere there’s a browser. And when your business grows, Salesforce can grow with you.

For years, large companies have managed their business relationships and processes using rather complex software known as Customer Relationship Management, or CRM for short. While businesses of all size need to manage this contact and relationship data, it was often the more expensive solutions which had the best ways of managing that data and adapt to unique business requirements. Then about ten years ago, a company called Salesforce.com got started with a goal of eliminating the need for companies to buy software and manage the complex project of upgrading it, just to get marginally useful new features. Salesforce had a goal of making incremental changes available to all their customers regularly (about three times a year), without disrupting business and without burdening the customer with all that hassle. What they found was, companies of all size started flocking to their business model. It make information easily, securely available to the right people, at the right time, to help make the right decisions in business.

As you can imagine though, there’s a cost to managing that infrastructure, developing new features, and making sure that upgrades go smoothly, while still coming up with new and innovative features that help businesses grow. And while many large companies like Dell, Japan Post, Avon, and Citibank have been able to leverage Salesforce to improve their business processes and effectively manage some of their most important data, other small to medium businesses were able to use lower-cost editions of Salesforce that allowed them many of the core features of Salesforce and grow into Salesforce as their businesses grow. Though each company may license a different edition of Salesforce, they all run on the same world-class platform that is reliable and secure.

Today, Salesforce has made available it’s most affordable edition of Salesforce yet, still with the key core of CRM that all the bigger companies use, but at a price that small business can manage. Here are the details.

Salesforce Contact Manager Edition is designed for 1 or 2 users to effectively track business relationships using the core of Salesforce known as Accounts and Contacts. It’s priced at just $9 per user, per month and here’s what else you get. There’s built-in integration to Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, or any other email system. You get a reporting engine to easily see what data you have in Salesforce and slice and dice it as you want. You also get built-in integration to Google Apps like Gmail, Google Talk, Google Spreadsheets, and Google Docs.

Contact

And if you’re thinking that all that sounds good, but it must be too complex to customize and make it work the way your business works, it’s not hard at all. Salesforce Contact Manager Edition is designed with easy to understand videos, tips, tricks, and how-to’s to make you successful immediately, without having to read a book, learn about programming, or anything difficult.

GettingStarted

And what happens when your business grows and you need more users to access it or you need more complex applications to manage your sales leads or forecast your sales pipeline? You just call Salesforce and upgrade to another edition with the features you need. There’s no need to hire a consulting company or form a six month project to move up; Salesforce grows with your business.

One of the amazing things is, as Salesforce comes out with new features, you’ll see new functionality added to Salesforce and you’ll always be on the newest release. You’ll always have access to your data. You’ll always be able to customize Salesforce to meet your unique business needs, and you’ll always know your data is safe, with a company that’s trusted by some of the biggest organizations in the world. Small or large, Salesforce is meeting the needs of business.

And now, you can give it a try without even spending a dime. There’s a 14 day free trial of Salesforce Contact Manager Edition that you can sign up for and after that, it’s just $9 per user, per month. There are many new videos on YouTube to help launch your success on this new edition of Salesforce. There’s a community website for you to learn more about Salesforce, get to know other users of Salesforce around the world, ask your questions, get best practices on managing your data, and even give your input on the features you’d like to see added to or changed in Salesforce. There will also be new applications and enhancements to Salesforce available to you from the AppExchange, Salesforce’s own “iTunes of Business Applciations.” And if you want to find out how much more you can do with Salesforce, consider attending Dreamforce coming up this November. It’s where you’ll learn what 12,000 other people are transforming their business with the power of Salesforce.

Trazzler, a startup focused on helping travelers answer the question, “Where should I go?” was an early adopter of Salesforce Contact Manager Edition had this to say about it. ”At Trazzler we are using Contact Manager Edition to manage thousands of business contacts, each segmented by category, company size, and geographic region. Contact Manager Edition has enabled me to experience the benefits of cloud computing first hand,” said Adam Rugel, CEO and founder of Trazzler.

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

Posted on March 3, 2009 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.

Sales 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:

Sales Universe
Sales lead
Qualified prospect
Need identification
Proposal
Closing
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;

The rep walks in the room; show that reps revenue forecast
The manager and rep start drilling into opportunity status; show the high level details of the opportunity, revenue, company, contacts, products, stage, etc
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
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.

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

See 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: dreamforce07, force.com, salesforce.com, crm

Faceforce; Social Networking Reaches Into the Enterprise

Posted on September 12, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in AppExchange, Integration, Marketing, Productivity, Sales, Social Networking | 25 Comments

Today, I got to look at what I first thought was an unlikely match of my two favorite platforms; Salesforce.com and Facebook. It’s called Faceforce and it augments your Lead, Contact, and Account data in Salesforce.com, helping you build deeper relationships with your customers and prospects.

When I first heard about this mashup, I wondered what value one would offer the other. I like both platforms and though I use both daily, I didn’t see how one would benefit the other. After seeing the apps work together, I understand more of the value and significance of this mashup.

How it works is you first need a login to Facebook. Then you install the Faceforce application into your Salesforce.com org from the AppExchange. You just need to add the S-controls created by Faceforce to your page layouts for Leads, Contacts, and Accounts. That’s literally no more than a two minute process for all three. Select the Faceforce application from AppExchange drop-down and click on the Faceforce tab.

The first time in, Faceforce will ask you to log into Facebook and add the Salesbook application to Facebook. This is the hook that allows the two apps to talk to each other. Once you’re back on Salesforce, you can Search for New Links to find people in your network that are found in Salesforce. Once you match up your contacts to their Facebook profiles, you’re ready to ready to update Salesforce. Before you do that though, if you have Salesforce contacts that you’d like to invite to Facebook, there’s a link to invite them into your Facebook network. Once you’re finished, you’re ready to see more about your contacts.

Now in Salesforce, if you look at a Contact that you’re friends with on Facebook, you can see their Facebook profile right inline with their Salesforce contact record. It even allows you to perform regular Facebook actions such as Send a Message, Send a Gift, Write on Wall, Message, view their Full Profile, and even the curious Poke.

At the Lead level, the S-control will search Facebook for the lead and show possible matches. If that is the person, you can link them to into the lead so you have access to all their Facebook data inline with your lead data.

At the Account level, the S-control will display all the Facebook connections you have with that company and allow you to take numerous Facebook actions, right from the Account record.

The mashup was built by Clara Shih, an AppExchange Product Manager at Salesforce.com in collaboration with Todd Perry, a software engineer at Facebook. She did it because she too is a huge fan of both platforms, but more importantly, she demonstrated a way of mashing up two products, that were never made for each other. Yet, as a user of both platforms, you can now connect the dots, having more information at your fingertips, inline with the applications you use everyday to build deeper relationships with your customers and prospects.

I don’t expect every company to adopt such a mashup, though the tremendous influx of new Facebook users 35 and older in the last months have certainly taken to the concept and are hungry to build their networks. If you’re looking for information on your customers and prospects, you can’t ignore what’s available through Facebook.

What Clara is doing with Faceforce is only going to spark more ideas of how to make use of data available to us. I’m interested to watch what she and others do to enhance this type of integration. We’re bound to see more like it.

I haven’t gone through nearly as many features as are in Faceforce. If you’d like to see a demo of Faceforce, Clara provides a short Flash demo of how Faceforce works. If you’d like to try Faceforce for yourself, you can install it from the AppExchange. Her next experiment will see what you can bring from Salesforce into Facebook. Kudos to Clara for helping us get a taste of the possibilities.

Technorati Tags: faceforce, salesforce.com, crm, facebook, mashup, salesbook, appexchange

If a Customer Complains About Your Company on the Internet and You Donâ€™t Notice It, Will Anyone?

Posted on May 29, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in Analytics, Integration, Marketing, Sales, Service and Support | Leave a comment

John Ragsdale, of the Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA), writes about a new service called TruCast by Visible Technologies that brings visibility to what your customers or anyone is saying about your company across the Internet and blogosphere. What I find potentially even more interesting is that this tool not only identifies what is being said about your company, but it brings into view the overall sentiment of their posts and even maps out their sphere of influence across social networks.

TruCast enables you to

Keep a pulse on what people are saying about your brand, products, or services.
Respond to individual posts to address angry posters before they gain enough momentum to reach a large audience.
Use information gleaned from consumers to improve your product, or create a new product to satisfy an unforeseen need in the marketplace.
Stay ahead of emerging trends in the marketplace.
Identify current and emerging influencers.
Start buzz about a product, service, announcement, or initiative.
Learn more about your most vocal critics and fans.
Tailor your message with the help of data on opinion leaders.

When it comes to Marketing awareness and knowing what people are saying about your company, this seems like pretty valuable information. On top of that, what if you were tracking those who are big proponents of your company or brand and became aware of their sphere of influence across the Internet?

Now, what if you tied TruCast to Salesforce and set that kind of sales intelligence before your account executives? Use the positive proponents of your company to boost customer reference programs and find champions within each industry you serve. Find out about discussions that are negative and do what you can to approach those issues.

Bottom line, it does matter what people say about your company. Now how are you going to find out what they’re saying?

You can read John’s thoughts on it here.
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