How to Deal With Inactive Contacts in Salesforce.com

February 26, 2012 by David Carnes • Best Practices, How To, Salesforce.com • 2 Comments

Left CompanyOut of the box, Salesforce.com does not give us a way to flag Leads or Contacts as inactive, as ones that we should not market to or call any longer. Because we look to maintain accurate Account history and Campaign reporting, when a person leaves their company we don’t recommend deleting their Contact record or changing the Account that the Contact is associated with. Instead we suggest adding a checkbox called “Left Company” to the top right corner of your Lead and Contact Layouts.

This allows you to:

  • Add a filter to all marketing list Reports to exclude Leads or Contacts that have left their companies from new marketing initiatives
  • Use filters in Lead or Contact Views to focus on people who haven’t left
  • Add the Left Company field to the Search Page Layouts for Contacts and Leads so that your Users can quickly identify who’s gone
  • Edit the Account Page Layout’s Contact Related List to be reverse sorted on the Left Company field (Ascending), so that people who have left fall to the bottom of the list (see screenshot below)

Add Left Company Field to Contact Related List

We work with a lot of companies that have had Salesforce.com for five, six, seven or more years. This leads to a sizable amount of long gone Lead and Contact crud that builds up in the database, without a great way of dealing with it. When introducing a Left Company field, be sure to train your Users, explaining the overall benefit to the company (and to themselves) in flagging those who have moved on. Marketing will no longer waste their budget, and Sales won’t waste their breath!

Salesforce.com vs. Marketing Automation: Which Should I Use for Reporting?

February 17, 2012 by Prashant Kaw • Best Practices, Marketing Operations, Reporting, Salesforce.com • 2 Comments

What system should I use for Marketing Reporting? Salesforce.com or Marketing Automation

A lot of our clients use Marketing Automation tools like Eloqua, HubSpot and Marketo in conjunction with their Salesforce.com or other CRM system. A frequently asked question from them is: Which system should we be using for reporting – Salesforce or Marketing Automation?

The Simple Answer

The simpler answer is, pick one and build good process and behavior around it. More often than not this system of choice ends up being Salesforce.com since it contains Opportunity and Sales data for closed loop reporting. Also APIs allow Salesforce to pull in the Marketing Automation data related to campaigns and user responses.

There are various benefits to using Salesforce for reporting over Marketing Automation.

  • The reporting is more flexible than the Marketing automation tools. With the ability to use custom objects and create custom report types the sky is the limit.
  • Salesforce typically has more users that allows you to share information across the organization using reports and dashboards.
  •  Marketing Automation reporting is often limited to out-of-the-box reports which are not ideal for every business. While these tools also have APIs, at this time they are better at pushing data to Salesforce than pulling from it.

The Not So Simple Answer

The weighted answer to the above question is, you should get the report from the system that best answers your business question. If you are looking for marketing campaign centric reports based on responses to an email or blog post, you might get better answers from your marketing automation software.

Some Areas to Use Marketing Automation Software for Reporting Over Salesforce

  • Web traffic conversion metrics – Since most marketing has moved online these days traffic conversion is an important metric for many businesses and that data point rarely captured in Salesforce.
  • Most marketing automation tools will provide you with an accurate count of names acquired or touched in a month whereas that can be a challenge in Salesforce which splits names across Contacts and Leads.
  • Pulling every touch point with an end user into Salesforce can be an overkill for the Sales Team and if your customer base is highly active it can end up being costly to store all that data
  • Marketing tools are getting better (than Salesforce) at allowing marketers to track Marketing spend, helping them to calculate ROI of Marketing

 

The Key Takeaways

Picking one system or a combination or both can really inform your business. Whatever process you choose, please keep the following in mind:

 

  • Keep it simple – Reporting needs to be done often, so you should be able to repeat your process easily every time you do it.
  • Make it Scale-able – Whatever process you choose, it should grow with your organization’s needs.
  • Work on Maintaining Good Data – Reports are only as informative as the data. If the data is no good, no one will believe the reports and will undermine the whole purpose of reporting.
  • Apply the Learnings – Again reports are only useful if you’ve learned something and applied those learnings to inform your behavior or processes to improve business results.

 

 

Photo credit: indabelle

Coaching Your Sales Team in Salesforce.com – Demand What’s Next

February 16, 2012 by David Carnes • Best Practices, Salesforce.com, Tips • 0 Comment

Opportunity Next StepOne of the best, and least utilized, OOTB (Out-Of-The-Box) features within Salesforce.com is the Next Step field on Opportunities.  It asks each Opportunity Owner for a simple phrase or sentence that identifies what is the next step in closing the deal.  In coaching Sales reps, we love to see the Next Step field displayed on all Views and Reports, and even made required on the Opportunity Layout… or better yet, required (via Validation Rule) to be updated upon each change of Opportunity Stage.  This provides sales management a way to help steer their sales execs on the path toward their best-practice route to closing deals.

And besides, if a rep can’t clearly identify the Next Step, is the deal really still in play?

Opportunity Next Step

How to Add Dazzle to Your Salesforce.com Dashboards with Visualforce

February 13, 2012 by David Carnes • Reporting, Salesforce.com, Tips • 0 Comment

Here are some ideas to add dazzle to your Salesforce.com Dashboards:

  • Add a photo of your recent sales contest winner.
  • Post a video of the winning foursome from your partner golf tournament.
  • Show a photo of your sales trainer, along with a link to a podcast of recent sales training.
  • Display summary data from another system entirely.
  • List out definitions of acronyms or ratios used on the Dashboard.

Visualforce Dashboard ComponentSalesforce.com allows us to create Dashboard Components that are Web pages, called Visualforce pages- anything that can be put on a Web page can be put on a Visualforce page.  Beyond that, with Visualforce, we are able to interact with Salesforce.com data AND the API- so with some Apex coding talent, we can pull in and format data from other systems.  As long as you keep the footprint of the Visualforce page small enough to fit within a Dashboard Component, you can display whatever you want.

To achieve the screenshot below, I created two Visualforce pages- one in which I embedded a YouTube video (cutting the video’s dimensions in half to fit my Dashboard), and the other in which I simply pulled in an image of (who else?) myself as the Q4 Sales Winner.  Then I added two Visualforce Components to my Dashboard, pulled in my visualforce pages, added header text, and set the preferred Component heights.

Dashboard with Visualforce Example

When pulling Web content like this into a Visualforce page, you can call images, videos, etc from another source on the Web (providing that you have some control of the content to know it will be there for as long as you need it) or by uploading the content into your Salesforce.com system as a Static Resource.

Android Users Can Now Access Salesforce.com and Chatter

February 10, 2012 by David Carnes • Salesforce.com, Tips • 0 Comment

Salesforce Mobile on Android D-R-O-I-D!!!

With the Spring ’12 Release of Salesforce.com come a few important changes to the Mobile offerings of Salesforce.com.  Notably that Android is officially in, and Windows Mobile is out.  If you are a Salesforce.com User, you can download these apps from the Android Market.  Installation is simple, and after logging in the first time, you create a simple 4-10 character passcode to use instead of your normal Salesforce.com passcode.

For those of you not already taking advantage of Mobile Lite, it is a FREE way to access Salesforce.com data from your iPhone, BlackBerry and now Android device.  While it isn’t customizable, Mobile Lite lets your users access and update Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Cases, and Solutions- and view Dashboard charts.  It integrates with your device’s OS to allow calls and emails to be initiated, and noted as Activities. The paid Mobile add-on allows for full customization, and access to Custom Objects and the Content Module.

Chatter Mobile is also now available for both Androids and Android Tablets (with OS Version 3.0 or higher).  In a slight departure from the simplicity of administering Mobile Lite, a system administrator must first check a box that allows Androids to access Chatter Mobile.  (Set the Android as an Authorized Device under Setup/Mobile Administration/Chatter Mobile/Settings.)

Salesforce.com will continue to be available to Windows Mobile users who already had installed the app, but not available to any new users.

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