A concern I hear when moving into the cloud is “what if I want to make a change later to another CRM, how do I get my data easily out of Salesforce?” Or, “our IT department has a policy that they retain a local backup of all our business systems.” The good news is that…
One of the questions most asked of a certified Salesforce.com consultant is what is your rate for Salesforce consulting and what fees can I expect? I can only speak of what I’ve observed in the Dallas market for Salesforce.com consulting rates, but the spectrum starts at $150 an hour for freelance consultants up to $300…
I recently needed to identify duplicate Contact records in a Salesforce.com org that contained over 40K Contacts. The amount of duplicates were not horrible (~5% of their Contacts) considering the sales reps had not been trained to watch out for actions that would spawn duplicate records. However the situation was bound to get worse without…
In our never ending quest to reduce duplicate records in Salesforce, before you convert a Lead into a Contact, as a best practice, you will want to (1) check for other Lead records that may already exist for that person, and (2) check to see if the Contact already exists in Salesforce prior to converting…
Now that Platform licenses are available, I suspect that a lot of companies will “flip” Users from a full Enterprise license down to the Platform license – it just makes economic sense when you can do it. Be aware that when switching a User from a full Enterprise Edition (EE) License (Enterprise Sales Cloud or…
If you have ever seen me train new Users on how to work with Salesforce.com you’ll hear me say at least a half dozen times “Search before you create!” Inevitably your Users are going to create a duplicate Account or Contact in your Salesforce instance. Don’t panic. Salesforce has some easy-to-use wizards that can help…
What is Cloud 2? Marc Benioff publicly launched Cloud 2 in April of 2010 with much fanfare. But what the heck is it? The thrust of Benioff’s presentation was that in this age of Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter – the traditional enterprise data model is disconnected from the conversation with the customer. “Why isn’t all…
It’s the home stretch. You’ve been slogging down the playing field gathering requirements, configuring Salesforce.com, organizing data and importing records, creating reports and dashboards and the only thing between you and go-live is end user training. Guess what? The next ten yards are probably the most important to your project’s success. If your users don’t…
Ok, you don’t really “hijack” or “hack” into anything in Salesforce.com, but this is how you can take over a User account of someone that has left the company and their account is inactive. The below assumes that you have an extra license, or at least one you can borrow for a moment. So how…