This year Salesforce.com, at their annual Dreamforce conference, had a dedicated keynote just for small and medium businesses. We are reminded in the video at the bottom of this page that Salesforce didn’t become successful initially by landing large enterprise customers. Quite the contrary, their success started by establishing a beachhead with small and medium…
Since 2005, I’ve personally helped 100+ businesses migrate to Salesforce. Along the way I’ve learned that small and medium businesses face some unique challenges. In no particular order, here are my top five challenges facing SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses) when implementing a CRM. #1 SMBs are time constrained Small business owners and their team…
People that know me know that I love Salesforce. I consider myself to be a “super fan” not only of Salesforce.com, but also of their CEO Marc Benioff. Though there were some incredible announcements made during Dreamforce ’12 and “amazing” demos, we all know the real excitement this year centered around Marc Benioff’s shoes. Though…
Dreamforce ’12 is only a few days a way. We arrived early to see San Francisco, the host city of the Dreamforce X (the 10th annual Salesforce event). As we walked the streets outside the Moscone Center on Saturday the 15th, workers were buzzing putting up window clings, hanging banners and unloading trucks with forklifts….
We were recently asked by one of our Dallas clients to help them get a new inside sales group off the ground. They wanted us to provide some best practices on how to setup and mange this new team using Salesforce. This group would be selling primarily on the phone looking for new business and…
A question that I hear frequently from my clients, and in the Salesforce Answers Community, is (1) “how do I know if my email got through” and (2) “did my client open my email?” There are a few places to look on the Lead and Contact record to find this information as well as two…
Salesforce.com launched the AppExchange back in 2005 (can you believe it’s been that long!). At that time BusinessWeek called it the “eBay of business software.” In 2006 there had been 16,000 installations initiated. The AppExchange circa 2007 (you’ve come a long way baby!): By late 2011 the AppExchange hit 1 million installs. Now as I am writing…
I had an interesting request from one of my clients today, and I thought the solution would be a great quick blog post for other Salesforce Administrators. The request was to enforce Users to create an Opportunity during the Lead Conversion process (for marketing reporting). You can accomplish this with a Lead Validation Rule. Remember…
It’s been a few years since the Salesforce circus had made a stop in Dallas, but now they are back. In 2010, almost two years to the day, the message was around Service Cloud 2: “The Next Generation of Customer Service.” On that day the wake-up message was that your customers want information on their…
From time to time as an Administrator you’ll need to take a string of text and parse out a few things so that you can use the information elsewhere. The other day I was working with a client that required me to take a single Latitude / Longitude coordinate and separate the string into individual…