As a business development lead, my job is to ask prospective clients questions and evaluate if we, as an agency, can help with their marketing efforts. I speak with small businesses and Fortune 100 companies and see my share of business strategies (or lack thereof). It still amazes me, however, how many times I learn that companies, regardless of size, are still not using a Client Relationship Management (CRM) tool.
This question comes up quite often in my discussions with small to medium businesses: Does Big Data matter to you?
Big Data has been perceived as a large enterprise focus area while small organizations think that they can sit on the sidelines and wait. You hear of companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon and IBM focusing a lot of resources toward capturing and utilizing Big Data. If you're sitting out until you think it's relevant for small business, then you need to get started today because it's relevant now.
In this customer-centric age, the only thing worse (actually exponentially worse) than having no dedicated system for your customers, better known as Customer Relationship Management systems or CRM systems, is to have a CRM that doesn't work the way you intended it to! You may have made massive investments, including money and time. You may have implemented the best CRM for your organization and, yet, slowly but surely you can see it's failing to live up to your expectations. Sounds like a complete nightmare, doesn't it?
Business owners, the executive team and sales management can get very excited about implementing a CRM into their sales process. The thought of elaborate reporting tools and enhanced data collection and the promise of increased efficiency can blind them. They often forget how their sales teams and support staff will react to the thought of significant change. There are fears of "Big Brother" watching every move, extra administrative work to do, and the loss of their feelings of relevancy. I have seen all of these in play with companies that did not think it through. Here are a few things to consider that will make your CRM implementation projects run more smoothly.
Today's ever-changing technology landscape offers tools and tactics that can make your business more effective and efficient. The excitement of having a new tool or toy like a CRM platform can help with analytics, observations and trends but it can overshadow a very important question, which is, "How is this integration or CRM implementation going to effect my company's culture?"
One of the most time-consuming aspects of any CRM implementation for any enterprise is the selection of the CRM system itself. In my experience, I have seen stakeholders spend considerable time (months to years) analyzing one option after another, sifting through the subscription plans on offer. In fact, if you are a rookie, the sheer plethora of options available to you will whirl your mind.
Engaging a managed technology service provider has often been viewed as something for large organizations who have a lot of cash to spare. However, technology outsourcing is slowly finding its following amongst organizations of all sizes and industry, courtesy ever-changing business dynamics and innovation. I am often asked, why and when to outsource in-house Salesforce services to a managed service provider. The answer, though involves explanation, is simpler than what you may have initially thought.
Well, not quite literally! Salesforce 1 Lightning is a new-age Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering from Salesforce. Billed as the fastest, quickest way of dishing out cross-device, responsive applications on the Force.com platform, Lightning is a collection of new and re-branded technologies that simplify and deliver the whole lifecycle of building apps, integrating data and automating business processes, at the speed of light!
Essentially, Salesforce 1 Lightning comprises of Lightning Connect. True to its name, Lightning Connect enables you to connect to external sources and legacy systems and access the data within real-time.
Salesforce introduced its new component framework Lightning in its winter’15 release, targeted at building apps, integrating data and automating business processes at a very fast speed. In this blog post, I am going to talk about the Lightning Process Builder, Salesforce’s workflow and process automation framework.
Maintaining your Salesforce org is quite a Herculean task. Not only do you have to ensure the access to correct relevant data to all your users, you are also responsible for maintaining the integrity of your org data to avoid any delay on projects due to configuration rework and thereby managing the overall costs. In this blog post, I will talk about 9 best practices that ease your job as a Salesforce administrator.
As a SFDC developer, you are expected to create magic with every line of code that you write! Your code is expected to be clean, optimized, and all of this within the time-frame set by your Project Manager and/or client! Easier said than done! Getting a perfect code in place, which adheres to all the best practices laid down by Salesforce is much like an art that is perfected with a lot of practice over time. Notwithstanding that fact, here are 10 quick-fixes to get you started on the right course, which help you stay within the governor limits and enable you to better the performance of your code without much ado.
At last, and much to the delight of the sales users, Salesforce finally went big on Territory Management with its winter 2015 release! The Summer 2014 release had Salesforce introducing its 2.0 beta version. With the winter 20 15 releases, Salesforce has gone a step ahead and stabilized what had been a lesser known and relatively unexplored area for your sales teams.
What is Territory Management 2.0?
The reason why Sales Managers and the CMOs./CTOs investing in Salesforce are so excited about Territory Management is that it enables them to see and process their Salesforce data just as they would structure their actual sales territories. Imagine organizing your sales responsibilities in different clusters so as to reduce the sales cost, provide more robust service to the customers and measure the performance of your sales team more effectively all under a single roof, called “Territory Management.”
Originally, Territory Management enabled you to grant users access to accounts based on criteria relevant to your business. Territory Management 2.0 goes several notches higher and helps you model your sales territories into a logical but flexible structure that connects your sales teams to the accounts they sell to. Having introduced territory types, territory models, and territory model states, Salesforce now lets you create and preview multiple territory structures and strategies, ensuring you always implement the one that works best for you. Your sales managers can then use custom reports to assess your territories for desired effectiveness.
If you are a sales manager, sales head of your organization, or basically have anything to do with sales and territories within your organization, and you are still unsure about adopting this amazing feature, we are going to give you 5 reasons why you should change your mind now.
