Category: SalesForce.com

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SalesForce.com The Marketeer

SalesForce.com IdeaExchange

For all Salesforce admins out there – have you checked out the IdeaExchange yet? It’s a cool combination of Digg, Wiki and Product Management tool. Users can rate what features or bugs the want to see developed in the next release of the product, and then Salesforce can brag about doing the stuff that you asked for.

Kudos for a great implementation of new technologies, but did you really expect anything less from SF.com? Bonus activity – go and vote for my “Add RSS” request, add a comment, and tell me you did and I’ll send the first 3 people a $10 iTunes gift card.
I’m finally going to be able to attend one of the local meetings here in Boston at the end of the month, they’re also showing off a new development language of some sort. I tend not to get too excited about that kind of stuff until it’s survived for a year or two.

And of course I’m already wondering how cool SF will look on the new Apple iPhone…

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Productivity Booster SalesForce.com SEO and Paid Search The Marketeer

SalesForce.com for the Treo

About a month ago I noticed that with the exception of a “dummies” book there were very few print resources out there on the big SF so I decided to turn to the blogosphere. I stumbled across SalesforceWatch.com and found a post that they were looking for usability testers for the next release of Salesforce for the Treo.

Because I was an alternate I never got an NDA, but I’m not going to yap and betray Melissa, who gave me the guided tour. The one thing that I liked the most is already in the existing version – the ability to see the latest Opportunities that have Closed as Wins. It’s a cool system but I really need to upgrade my Treo 600 to take advantage of it. In other SF news I still have not been able to get the Google AdWords/Salesforce integration to work. My server only likes forms that use “Submit” and I need to use a different term if I want the SF snippet to work. More experimenting this week to see if I can get that to work. I’m also doing a bunch of hygiene with Ringlead and that’s working well.

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SalesForce.com

Boston Salesforce.com Meetup

Salesforce.com is holding an event here in Boston on Jan 23rd at the Hyatt Harborside. Here’s a link for more info, if you are going to be there feel free to send me an email, this is my first one and it would be cool to know somebody else going.

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Productivity Booster SalesForce.com

SalesForce – Holiday Cheer, Handling Pat

Things have been a bit crazy, I got back from Search Engine Strategies Chicago last night, I didn’t know about the Yahoo party in advance so I had no chance to network at all. I was hoping to find someone in a similar size company to trade best practices and war stories with. At least I did get to pick up some CheeseCorn, a Chicago must-have.

I have notes on my laptop with a whole list of topics but I’m not about to boot that up now. So here’s the latest SalesForce tips – we’re doing a holiday gift, some pretty cool mugs if I do say so myself. I’ve added a field in SF for contacts so the reps can check the box if they want them to get one. This way our admin can run a report and generate labels in one shot.

I saw another salesforce installation where a smart admin added a gender field to avoid embarassing situations with “Pat” or “Chris” this also comes up with names outside of your home country. CheeseCorn for Pat!

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Lead Generation Productivity Booster SalesForce.com SEO and Paid Search The Marketeer

Integrating Salesforce.com with Google Adwords

A stumbling block on the path to the holy land today, the code snippet we need to integrate SF.com with our Google Adwords campaign conflicts with some existing javascript we have on our custom web-to-lead forms. As I have no Perl skills to speak of beyond the “cut and paste somebody else’s stuff and pray it works” I’ve had to call in some bigger guns, i.e. Salesforce support level two and our own Ronin Coder. Perhaps there will be more luck tomorrow…

On the plus side, Joel delivered the web traffic today…

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Productivity Booster SalesForce.com The Marketeer

SalesForce.com One Click Login

Ok, this is not a best practice – it’s more of a security risk, but if you are in and out of SalesForce.com this will save you a lot of hassle. Here’s the link to setup on your desktop or toolbar:

https://www.salesforce.com/login.jsp?pw=[password]&un=[username with %40 instead of @]
for example, if your email was bob@bob.com your username would be bob%40bob.com

Please promise me that if you are going to use this that you will at least set up your laptop with a password at login so that when you lose it at the airport you’ve not giving away the keys to the kingdom.

In other news we are testing the SalesForce and Google AdWords integration. It’s not working. Something about 2 conflicting forms on the same page. A surprise project for this afternoon!

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Geek Stuff SalesForce.com SEO and Paid Search The Marketeer

What is The Google OneBox

I have been watching the Google OneBox and there was an article about it in today’s Search Engine Watch. I’d give a direct link but it’s a paid subscription service (and well worth it).

The OneBox is the space above the first entry of organic results (results on the left side of the screen). A couple of months ago I started noticing paid ads show up there and now they are putting maps, movie times, and book recommendations up there. My gut tells me we’ll probably see video up there very soon too.

One weird thing – it only appears to show up the first time, if you refresh a page you are on it’s gone.

In other big news I got notice that SalesForce.com is getting scheduled maintenence around Jan. 15 to get the first ’07 upgrade. This will have integrated Google paid search, but you can get that already if you dig for it.

Shoutouts to Christopher Penn for his ninja search info and Bryan Person for helping me get the feeds straight.

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Lead Generation SalesForce.com The Marketeer

Salesforce.com – Marketing Campaigns

So I spent a bunch of yesterday trying to do some more advanced stuff with Salesforce.com If you are into lead generation or supporting a Sales team this is the best thing out there. I worked with Act for more than 5 years and supported a 10-user Goldmine installation for another 4 years and SalesForce is the disruptive technology taking it to the next level.

We have a system that’s very close to end-to-end. Leads come in on the web, get emailed around and the records go into SF. I can track them by marketing campaign, but that’s about as far as I get. I’m either at the end of it’s functionality, or I need to get some training sessions. The individual is marked as in the campaign (say, white paper banner ad on Joe’s site). But this data doesn’t roll up to the record for the company they work for. So if Bob clicks on the banner and we end up selling to Charlie, I have a disconnect.

Yesterday I exported everything I could get my hands on and used Access to get around some of the reporting shortcomings. It actually got me to the data I wanted but it was way too much work, I need to begin automating it. Anybody with experience here PLEASE comment.

Gearing up for a ride home filled with podcasts and then chowing on the turkey…