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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Social Networking

A Little Help from My Friends

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Jeff Grosse in News, Social Networking | 1 Comment

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine named Mike Gerholdt asked me a question via Google Chat that got me really curious how to find a solution to his dilemma. To get the full scoop on the situation and the solution, check out his blog post and my video. It’s not only informative on teaching non-developers how to use inline Visualforce, it’s a great testament to the community of Salesforce admins and developers out there around the world, ready to help each other.

If you’re not familiar with Mike, check out his whole site, Button Click Admin which is solely dedicated to helping business succeed with clicks, not code. He’s a great up and coming blogger who you really ought to be subscribed to, following, and interacting with. Aside from all that, he’s also got a really cute dog. This is Mr. TJ and he’s a Basenji. Mike and Mr. TJ connected through America’s Basenji Rescue so please take a second to check out their site and consider supporting them.

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.

The Day the Earth was Chatterized

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Jeff Grosse in Chatter, News, Productivity, Social Networking, Tools | 12 Comments

Can you think of a significant day in the history of software? I’m looking for a day that a single company changed the way millions of people do business and made them more productive. I’m guessing there have been a few; but honestly none of them quickly come to mind. From this point forward though, June 22, 2010 ought to stick in your mind as “The Day the Earth was Chatterized. “

Salesforce Chatter is a collaboration platform for business that’s as intuitive to use as Facebook, more contextual than email, more alive than SharePoint, and runs on a secure, private, and trusted infrastructure already delivering billions of transactions each week.

From the first public mention of the word “Chatter” by Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, to the day it went live for 77,300+ customers, only 216 days passed. And in just 125 days, the Chatter private beta went from 100 to more than 5,000 customers. During the beta, more than 100,000 people used Chatter, and polled recently, 90% of them would recommend Chatter to others. Words like “amazing”, “crazy cool”, “fantastic”, and “monstrous win” are how users describe the Chatter experience. That’s impressive for a feature that can be enabled and deployed in under one minute, with just five clicks of the mouse, with nothing to install; no hardware, no software.

The Veil on Salesforce Data Lifted
While Chatter and Salesforce CRM data are both available to everyone with a Salesforce license today, Salesforce revealed a new version of Chatter licensing which helps extend Chatter and even basic Salesforce data to all enterprise employees at a significantly reduced price. This Chatter-only license offers

  • Profiles
  • Status Updates
  • Real Time Feeds
  • Content and File Sharing
  • Groups
  • Ideas
  • Read Only Access to Accounts and Contacts
  • Limited Access to the Force.com Enterprise Cloud Computing Platform

Priced at $15 per user, per month, Chatter-only users will be able to utilize corporate data like Accounts and Contacts which have previously been completely off-limits without a full-Salesforce license. Additionally, each Chatter-only user is allocated up to 600 MB of storage space for Chatter content sharing while Enterprise and Unlimited Edition users get a storage bump from 500 MB per user to 1 GB. Professional Edition users get 600 MB of content storage.

Not that long ago, a single add-on license for Salesforce Content was $35 per user per month. Now all Salesforce users get Content included in their licensing and Chatter-only users get tremendously more than just Content was, and at less than half that original price.

While Chatter, file, and content collaboration is a great reason to get these new Chatter-only licenses, I can imagine a fair number of them will also be sold for the sheer fact that it allows read-only access to to Accounts and Contacts, some of the key data in any company.

Additionally, organizations will be able to share one custom application from the Force.com platform with their Chatter-only users.

As if adding Chatter to every Salesforce org wasn’t exciting enough, Salesforce also revealed that there are 30 new ChatterExchange apps available today to bring the Chatter add-on ecosystem to 60 apps. While every one of 160,000 customer designed apps are also Chatterized, these new ChatterExchange apps extend the usefulness of Chatter beyond what even Salesforce imagined. The thing I really like about the ChatterExchange is that this ecosystem is only beginning. Developer preview only began 99 days ago and already we see apps to Chatter when conference room lights are turned on, save and rate Chatter, auto-refresh group and individual status updates, bring in outside collaborators through Google Wave, map out where service reps are and reassign them on-the-fly, Chatter analytics and tons more. Considering Dreamforce 10 is still 23 weeks away, we’re going to see some fantastic new Chatter add-ons before the big show.

For information on getting started with Chatter, visit the new Getting Started page at Salesforce. There you’ll find easy to use resources like:

  • Admin activation guide
  • Sample email template for rolling out Chatter
  • Interactive user training
  • Use cases for Chatter
  • Customer case studies
  • FAQs
  • Customer testimonials
  • Customer survey results

Chatter customers really say it best.

Be a Hero to Your Users

Posted on February 25, 2010 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.

My Dreamforce 09 Game Plan

Posted on November 16, 2009 by Jeff Grosse in Dreamforce, Social Networking, Sponsors | 2 Comments

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.

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

Posted on September 8, 2009 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?

Bargain Hunters Rejoice! Get into Dreamforce 09 for Half Price; Only $599

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Jeff Grosse in Dreamforce, Social Networking | 1 Comment

DreamforceDreamforce 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.  

Salesforce Users Reach Critical Mass on Twitter and Validate the Extent of the Salesforce Outage Today Live

Posted on January 7, 2009 by Jeff Grosse in News, Social Networking, Tools | 2 Comments

BurstIt’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.  
Be sure to follow me on Twitter.  http://twitter.com/CRMFYI

 

 

Relive Dreamforce 08 in the Comfort of Your Home or Office

Posted on November 11, 2008 by Jeff Grosse in Dreamforce, Force.com, Productivity, Social Networking | Leave a comment

Look MaSalesforce 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.

Successforce 3.0 – Come and Join Us

Posted on September 22, 2008 by Jeff Grosse in Social Networking, User Groups | 1 Comment

successforceEver 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.

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