Disclosure: As one who recommends, consults, releases products for, and technically lives in the “Cloud” – a nice way of describing software that doesn’t live on your computer but rather “out there” – I have a clear interest in its success. Additionally, I just like a balanced perspective so others can be well informed and make educated, responsible decisions.
Enter Lockergnome’s piece today titled, Five Reasons Not to Trust the Cloud in which Chris or one of his trusty minions lays out these five reasons: More…
A conversation with a client recently led to this discovery:
“Everything went great on the call and they wanted a proposal. So, once we hung up we put together an agreement and emailed it over. The client had to head out that day and we haven’t been able to track them down since. That was two weeks ago and this happens all the time.”
Life today is filled with interruptions and many get in the way of completing even what we are committed to and enthusiastic about.
One might consider overcoming these interruptions the duty of all professionals but assisting your clients in overcoming them with you will delivery higher revenues and satisfaction from your clients.
The key window I am focusing on here is the time between the verbal commitment and then actual project agreement that leads to a check. More…
I recently did some work with a precious metals company that had some very unique compliance requirements that in part also occur with many financial services firms.
The issue relates to disclosures. In a real estate transaction you have lots of disclosures but they are written and reviewed prior to or during the visit to the Escrow office.
What happens when many of these need to be conveyed over the phone and then archived for future reference? What if they also need to include order specific information such as pricing or quantity information? Additionally, how do you insure that updating the compliance script in the future won’t overwrite previously saved versions that are only valid if kept as they were read originally?
The last requirement is the most important and challenging one to implement, especially in light of custom information to be included within the text to be read to the client. More…
Sometimes the flexibility of Salesforce.com can be intimidating. Whether potential buyers, admins, or users, wrapping your head around all the various tools available to you and imagining how you might used them can be challenging. Sometimes it is the most simple example that starts the wheels turning and leads to a real use case in your business.
I hope this is one of those simple examples. Please let me know otherwise below.
Workflow is a feature of the Enterprise Edition of Salesforce.com that provides a lot of that powerful but daunting flexibility.
I am going to focus on a simple but valuable way to use Workflow to make your data more consistent and readable. I will then show a few screen shots as examples of the setup process and then offer a few additional ways this could help you. More…
When it comes to business, using flexible tools in the wrong place can make your profitability flexible too. Every business does it for at least a short time but the successful will proactively innovate to avoid the high cost it brings with growth. Here’s a short test to see where you are on the scale.
The Test
- Do you have at least 2 versions of the same form and have difficulty getting your team to use the right one?
- Do you let your sales reps come up with their own method to manage leads?
- Do you only hear of a deal once it’s been signed?
- Does your staff complain of too much “admin” or “overhead” time?
- Do you have an employee that manages docs and spreadsheets regularly?
- Do clients complain that their expressed needs were not met or items were forgotten?
- When a sales rep departs, is their little hope of finding, not to mention working his in progress deals?
- Does your sales manager have little visibility into your sales pipeline (i.e. accounts, deal size, win rate, discounting)
- Is there little historical data available without significant manual labor?
- Do you often have to search through numerous docs and emails for account related info?
Each ‘yes’ answer on this list is shaving hundreds of dollars from your profitability for each employee!
The flexibility of these tools is very helpful at times, especially when doing one-off tasks or exploring a process. However, when you are looking to grow and add on additional resources as needed, this flexibility puts too much creativity into the hands of each person and leads to an organization headache with lots of confusion. Especially if the situation isn’t changed before the next growth spurt.
The worst time to change is when potential customers are knocking down your doors.
The Solution
Most businesses make the decision to move away from this flexibility toward a manageable system when they are small and want to grow. Profitable growth is very challenging in general and without a simple, consistent system to manage the increase of very important information, it can be stunted.
My recommendation to any business that answered ‘yes’ to at least one question above is to consider starting with Salesforce.com Group Edition. With a free 7 day trial and just $8 or so per user per month for up to five users, you can see quickly the benefits of having a common system for all your team.
One of the biggest challenges with any database, especially when they are easy to use for your whole team, is keeping the data accurate. The most common problem is duplicate data due to the variance in spellings, abbreviations, and other ways that information can be stored with a slight variance in syntax or specifically how it is written.
Salesforce.com definitely falls into the category of an easy to use database and the great potential of getting your entire team directly involved with the data can quickly change your data from a couple varieties of lettuce, each in their own bag to a large tossed salad with few or no ways to discern duplicates, the data of record for conflicts, or organize and separate the lettuce out again.
There are great solutions like RingLead that can proactively check for duplicates when entered and even help you sort them out quickly once saved. However, pricing is based on which features you use and the total number of records. I checked pricing on just the de-duping feature called Declone Data Cleansing for less than 3000 existing Accounts and Contacts and the price came back in excess of $1000 annually. (Their free trial enabled me to test their system on de-duping my Contacts with names ending in A – C which was a nice way to get a few records done.)
Due to the relational nature of Salesforce.com, various records like Tasks, Cases, Campaigns, and other information may be connected to a Contact or Account so keeping the Master Record, the one that is most accurate, and deleting the rest is not the best solution as any connected data either gets deleted or becomes orphaned.
The solution is Merging and Salesforce.com includes very simple wizards for merging up to three Contacts and Accounts at a time. Merge Contacts by clicking “Merge Contacts” button above the Contacts related list when viewing an Account. Merge Accounts by clicking the Accounts tab and then clicking the “Merge Accounts” link at the bottom under “Tools.” More…
As a Digital Coach, I leverage Basecamp in my business and coach others to do so as well. It helps managers better manage and everyone executes better because they know what is expected by when in a simple, easy to understand fashion.
One of the underused elements of Basecamp is it’s ability to render tables for columnar data. I used this when detailing out field, page layout, and formula changes prior to implementing them in Salesforce so they can all be seen at a glance and updated in a Writeboard before ever hitting the Salesforce.com admin portal.
Basecamp renders visual tables very well with the help of Textile.
However, there are many other reasons tables are generally useful. One example is sorting by a specific column. You cannot do this in Basecamp but you can in OpenOffice Calc or Excel. However, if it was easy to go back and forth between them then using the best of each when needed would be feasible. This is what I will be illustrating.
I prefer the former so this tip will be using OpenOffice.
I want to create a table in Basecamp but rather than create it as text and insert the pipe (“|”) symbols, etc. as I go, I start with a new Calc doc and drop in my column headings and fill in the rows.
OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet
More…
During both of my last two online coaching sessions, my client has asked me about the way I have setup my own web browser, Firefox.
Specifically, they wanted to know how I could have over 20 open Tabs at once and still remain sane. The ability to have multiple pages in your browser be seen as Tabs instead of unique windows has been in Firefox for a few years and came to Internet Explorer and Safari more recently. Each Tab indicates a unique web page and with all of the various on-demand apps, sites, and pages I make use of, having 20 open pages seems to be the rule nowadays, not the exception.
Tree Style Tab Add-On for Firefox
I am one of those people who “get’s nervous” — my words — when I have many things open and cannot easily discern or navigate them. This is why I moved to the Mac and this is why prior to this Add-On I would only have as many Tabs as I could horizontally stack and still read, usually about 4-7, depending on page titles.
So, try this in your Firefox and let me know how it helps you.
Tree Style Tab Add-On for Firefox.
Additionally, here are a few additional tips for Firefox:
We’ve all seen our email inbox explode as a project starts out and all the team gets going. Your inbox starts to look something like this soon after the project begins:
Re: New Website Project
Re: Fwd: New Website Project
Re: New Website Project
Re: Re: Fwd: New Website Project
Re: Call Your Mother
Re: New Website Project
Re: Re: Fwd: Re: New Website Project
Re: Fwd: Re: New Website Project
Offer: Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
And this is just the first 30 minutes! In my experience, using email for this sort of communication is the norm. All the information and data related to the project is sent via email:
- Questions related to the project
- Updates on the status of the project
- Attached documents related to the project
- Deadlines for the project
- Reference materials for the project
More…
