Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

As a Technical Marketing Engineer, I use Salesforce.com (SFDC) to provide marketing approved solution briefs, links to videos, and presentations to our sales engineers in the field. They can access the materials from anywhere and I can manage version control.

Pros:

SFDC is a great tool as an up-to-date content repository and tracking tool

It's easy to find materials and preview for relevance before downloading

The system provides pretty snappy responses time uploading and downloading materials

Cons:

The ramp up time takes awhile to get everyone using it instead of just handing off materials as an attachment

Making registration for users easy is important otherwise the slow-to-change folks might never log on

In business the fittest survive. And if you want to go beyond surviving to thriving, you have to get the most out of your processes and systems. Given the ubiquity of Salesforce, how do you make sure you’re getting more out of it than your competition? Here are 5 rules for driving outstanding results from Salesforce.

1. Assure Data Reliability

   Assuring data reliability is easier said than done. Here are the nuts and bolts behind this rule.

   • Data consistency is king. Therefore, you need to design with as many drop-down fields as possible rather than leaving it open ended. Each of these fields becomes your standard Saleforce lingo. Otherwise you end up with a jumble of data that you can’t consolidate. For example, if you have an open text field titled “Product Type”, some reps will enter “Enterprise License”; others may say Enterprise, misspell it or abbreviate it.
   • Requirements rule. If you want a piece of data on every record, require it. When you set up a requirement in Salesforce, your call center associates cannot save a record unless they complete those fields.
   • The right rights. Not everyone needs to be able to do everything in Salesforce. And you can make sure they only do what’s appropriate by looking at profiles and roles assigned to each user. Only allow them “write” access to data that’s critical to their job function and “read only” rights to other data.
   • Garbage data? Don’t load it. Scrub and de-dupe your data before any mass data loading.


2. Design for a Positive ROI

   Of course you want a fantastic return on investment (ROI) and are designing your Salesforce implementation with that in mind. But what are the steps for getting there?

   • Design your business process with as much workflow automation as possible, assuring maximum efficiencies.
   • Measure your historical sales or service data, and evaluate your return against the same business processes prior to implementing Salesforce. This gives you information on what you might need to tweak, and also lets you know what’s working.
   • Take advantage of the power the Force.com platform offers you through customizations, and by integrating Salesforce with existing third-party databases within your organization.
   • Design dashboards and reports that enable you to assess your sales pipeline and provide a 360 degree view of your business.


3. Make Sure Users…Use It

   It goes without saying that if your users avoid using Salesforce, your investment won’t pay off. You can’t just say “it’s here”, and expect everyone to clamber on board the Salesforce train. There are four best practices to facilitate user adoption.

   • Training, training, training—no one likes to use a system that’s foreign to them. They want software that makes their lives easier. Overcome this hurdle with step-by-step training.
   • What’s in it for me? Just as you have to sell the benefits of your products and services to your prospects, you have to sell the tools you expect associates to use by letting them know how it’s going to make their work lives better. Don’t talk in broad generalities – employees want to know exactly how their work day will be better than it was before.
   • Money motivates – develop monetary or gift incentives for associates who use the platform in way that’s consistent with your vision.
   • Listen, learn and enhance—users may find areas for improvement. If you listen to them and enhance and update the systems as necessary, you’ll improve productivity and buy-in.


4. Design Dashboards for Decision Making

   When it comes to Salesforce, the devil’s in the details. Salesforce give you basic visibility to your business, but its true power comes from enabling you to dig deep and uncover new, unexpected insights. It may be a tedious process, but take the time to get into the nitty-gritty and define all the metrics that can heighten your decision-making powers.

   Create custom fields in every object for each metric you want visualize in dashboards and use in reports. For example, if you use a sales-touch cycle, be sure to have a drop down field that includes the touch-cycles process so you can run reports from that field.



5. Plan for the Future…Beyond CRM

   Salesforce has come a long way from its customer-relationship-management (CRM) only days by providing the open APEX code for third party APP developers. Now, the sky is the limit with the FORCE.com platform.

   Because of this, Salesforce has divided functionalities into separate clouds--Sales, Service and Marketing. With APEX code and Visual Force pages you can customize Salesforce and create custom applications with the help of a developer. If you can dream, it can be done. And if you plan it right, it will be done.

In the company I work for, QuestBack, we always strive to implement and adapt new enhancements and functionality that is released in Salesforce. Whenever we can streamline and move business processes to this platform, it increases our Salesforce.com ROI in addition to providing all employees with fewer separate systems and places to log in. A while ago, I was asked by the management team if Salesforce could replace our current intranet solutions.

This post is based on a talk I gave at Salesforce’s Social Enterprise event in Oslo in April 2012. See the slides from this presentation here.

Chatter – great for collaboration, but…

Over the last years, Salesforce have launched lots of interesting functionality when it comes to building up a social enterprise, including Chatter that enables collaboration and communication directly within the CRM platform. Being aware of this, the management team challenged me to explore whether this could be used as a replacement for our corporate intranet. While a lot can be solved with out-of-the-box functionality in Salesforce (Chatter, CRM Content for Document management, Chatter profiles for employee directory etc) , we discovered a number of shortcomings when using it for a more traditional intranet:

• Lack of news and article functionality - While Chatter is all about posting status updates, questions and attachments, we needed a place to post more traditional, longer texts, e.g. management news and updates that could contain pictures, links and other elements within the same article.
• No front page – Chatter is all about feeds and push notifications. We have the need to have an intranet front page, where editors can sort and select top news and articles and where we can have links to important functionality (both within Salesforce and external systems) in addition to be able to show important metrics (e.g. dashboard components for total sales etc.)
• Lack of placeholders for static content – Our company have a wide variety of static content, e.g. routines for bug handling, travel expense guidelines, HR policies etc. We needed functionality to store this (not as documents and attachments), but rather static HTML pages (“Articles”) in a tree structure based on departments (e.g. Sales, Admin, F&A etc.)
• Missing blog functionality – Related to the above, we want to empower employees and departments to produce more extensive content than Chatter updates allow.

In addition to this, we miss something that could tie all the great elements together, e.g. one point to click to get a total overview of employees, news, feeds, documents etc.

CRM + Intranet= Like?

We often see that intranets are a system detached from all other business systems in the company, a simple placeholder for static information and some corporate news.  But does it have to be like that? More than 80% of of our employees are already working within Salesforce everyday, with sales, customer support, billing or marketing. Why not blend these tasks with the more traditional intranet information? By linking information from Salesforce, like information on closed deals, marketing campaigns and Q&A’s from support with news on the intranet and cross-team Chatter collaboration, you truly unleash the power of the two information sources. In addition to this, you may see that merging these will be mutual beneficial for adoption of the two systems.  

Closing the gaps

Before starting, I did a lot of research on the web to see if people have been doing similar things within Salesforce. As far as I could see, not much have been done in this intersection between Salesforce and more traditional intranets. Some good discussions on Linkedin and the other great Salesforce communities provided us with good ideas on how to progress, and we connected with Fluido Ltd. to discuss the technical requirements and what it would take to meet our requirements.

We are currently in the progress of developing and rolling out our new corporate Salesforce-based intranet. We want to blend the out-of-the-box functionality with our company specific needs and we need to develop solutions that closes the gaps discovered in the above paragraph. The fundamental idea will be to develop one intranet homepage that displays all relevant information and links for the employees. Supporting this, we have developed Chatter-enabled objects for news, articles and blogs.

Key features of the front page will be:

• “News for all” section with news available for all employees, e.g. Management updates or other corporate news.
• “News for you” that is news based on your role in the organization (as defined on the user profile). This ensures that employees only see relevant information, e.g. sales news for sales reps or Norwegian news for all employees in our Oslo office.
• Chatter feeds will be visible on the front to make the front appear more dynamic and updated, in addition to providing the user with the latest news from any object he/she subscribes to.
• The right menus populated with real-time updated Salesforce data. In our example, we extract information about Global Sales current quarter, recently closed deals and top Sales reps current quarter.
• At the bottom of the front page, we have external feeds from our media monitoring service, twitter feeds in addition to a corporate calendar (Salesforce object).
• In addition to all this, we will take the standard Chatter functionality into extensive use: Chatter profiles will be used as the corporate employee directory, Chatter groups will be used for collaboration for teams and groups and Salesforce CRM Content will be used for all documents, including any customer facing material that will be tagged with extensive meta data to ease sales reps job of finding relevant and updated documents.

Moving forward

This is a work in progress project, and we are currently working with the great guys at Fluido Ltd. to develop the Visualforce pages and structures needed to put this in place. In addition to this, we are working to extract information from the old intranets and place them in the new information structure (with Chatter groups, news, blogs and static articles). The next point on the agenda will also be to create a Chatter/Collaboration roll-out strategy, which I will save for my next blog post to discuss.

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