If you ultimately have three departments that need to be live on Salesforce.com, you might want to look at rolling on each department one at a time rather than going live with all three groups simultaneously (big bang). A phased approach has the financial benefit of getting some productivity out of your licensing costs sooner…
*UPDATED 3-12-2013 to incude the new Force.com Light and Enterprise Licenses available in Spring 13 Release Force.com One App & Platform Licenses (no longer available to new customers after the Spring 13 release) There are probably a lot of companies out there today with only EE (Enterprise) licenses that should look at buying cheaper “Platform”…
What is the purpose of Leads and do I have to use Leads? Leads are a way to separate prospects (people you’d like to sell to) from business contacts (people you’re actively selling, have sold to, or are business acquaintances, partners or vendors). Think of a Lead as a business card that you’ve captured from…
In Saleforce.com you have two types of storage – File and Data. File storage includes attachments, items you’ve upload into the Documents tab, and Salesforce CRM Content. Everything else, including activities, is considered a record and counts towards your Data Storage allocation. A record in Salesforce.com uses about 2K of storage. So, 250K records =…
When do I “Convert” my Lead into an Account and Contact? What should be my Lead Status and Opportunity Stages? How many steps should I have in my sales process? When is a Lead “Qualified”? What are Sales Activities? I have yet to find a company that sells exactly like another. I know it sounds…
NOTE: This blog post was created in June of 2010 (a lot has changed since then) Marketo does all their training and on-boarding of their customers remotely – called a “Smart Start.” Eloqua in contrast has a “Smart Start” that is a week-long and is delivered face-to-face in either Toronto Canada or by your local…
NOTE: This blog post was created in June of 2010 (a lot has changed since then) I recently had an opportunity to look at Eloqua and Marketo in depth for automating mass emails (Q1 2010). We first started off with a Forrester report entitled “B2B Lead Management Automation Market Overview” dated 9/22/2009. Both Marketo and…
In my opinion, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay-per-click) or paid website traffic (banner ads or other listings) both have their place in a marketing budget. You need to do both if the Internet is part of lead generation or revenue strategy. Make no mistake, SEO is not free. It needs to be actively…
Google Adwords API to Salesforce.com is not perfect. In fact, it is not uncommon in my experience with a website that receives approximately a 1,000 Web-to-Leads a week for the Google API to miss (provide no data) for quite a few leads every week. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a nice way to jump-start…
What about training for the initial exams? The best place to start is with the Salesforce Certification site (AKA Trailhead). Find the link the link to the Study Guides to get an idea of what is covered with each exam. In the study guide there are some sample questions to test your existing knowledge to…