Salesforce | Andrew Sinclair

Administrative pre-work for any major Salesforce development project

November 15, 2010 By Andrew Sinclair 9 Comments

As a Salesforce consultant I like to add value to an orginization through their use of Salesforce, but that quickly gets complicated when my first recommendation is to cleanup Salesforce, before any significant feature development can take place.

It’s always a challenge when the client wants new features to drive efficiencies and increase adoption, but they’re stuck in a situation where they need to crawl out of debt first. My recommendations to clean up Salesforce – and keep it clean – are the following:

1. De-duplicate Salesforce records
Dupes not only make finding records hard, it causes users to lose trust in the system, killing adoption. When users don’t trust the system, it’s pointless to enhance your Salesforce instance. With a little time, this can be easily fixed using DemandTools. While this will take time and money for the DemandTools licence, it’s well worth the investment.

2. Purge fields that are no longer used
Your text field labeled “2008 promo campaign” is no longer valuable (and shouldn’t have been there in the first place). These fields clutter page layouts and reports, and will ultimately lead to bad data. If there is data in these fields that you need to keep, find other fields to push this data into, and remove or delete the field.

3. Delete or deactivate unused workflow rules
If you have a great deal of active workflow rules, look these over to be sure they are still doing something of value. Before additional functionality can be added, we must be sure that we don’t run into workflow rule excepts creating complex errors that need to be debugged.

4. Clean up or simplify your security and sharing model
Over time we create profiles, add field level security, tweak our security sharing rules. While these are necessary, it becomes very easy to trip over complex security models. Again this can create complex debugging activities if your security model is too complex.

5. Verify if validation rules are still required
While validation rules are implemented for good reasons, over time the data that they protect may or may not be useful anymore. Audit these rules to ensure they add value, otherwise you will trip over these rules as you introduce enhancements or new data sources.

6. Implement some of your high demand nice to haves
While it might seem strange to include the introduction of new features in a list like this one, delivering those features which are low(er) effort but deliver value quickly, is a great way to win support from users and other stakeholders. I just hope you’ve been keeping a list of these, because asking users now, will lead to chaotic feature creep.

7. Stop adding fields so Marketing / Sales / or any other department can track and segment records
I’ve seen standard objects with 20-30+ fields that no longer serve any purpose. Many of them were originally created because of some obscure request by sales managers or marketing people to track a campaign. These fields confuse sales people, and cause them to miss critical fields. In the long run, these excess fields lead to poorer data not better.

When faced with requests for these fields going forward, think of other ways that allows the user to track what they want. Often the association to a campaign, a creation date, or setting field history is enough.

8. Remover or archive unused reports
Let’s face it, end users just want to get to the data they care about, and get out. Take an inventory of the reports that are actually used, and start to remove those that are not. These unnecessary reports make report lists very long, and clutter the UI. At the very least move them to some kind of archived folder.

Filed Under: Salesforce Tagged With: salesforce

Some simple advice for Dreamforce first timers

November 8, 2010 By Andrew Sinclair 5 Comments

I’m excited to be making my 3rd flight from Toronto down to Dreamforce, which I think makes me marginally qualified to give some advice to a new Dreamforce attendee. In my view the conference has four key areas that any first timer needs to be aware of 1. Keynotes 2. Breakout Sessions 3. Networking 4. The campground and cloud expo.

The Keynotes:
Simply put the keynotes are big, packed with new demos, and are virtually guaranteed to go longer than they should. The opening keynote will show you the direction of the company but don’t expect any of the announcements to become reality for 6-9 months minimum. The general session with Bill Clinton is sure to leave you inspired, and the second keynote can be a toss up, I still have memories of the mass exodus during the Dell keynote, and last years awards presentation.

My advice is to go to all the sessions (you have nothing else to do anyway) but get there EARLY. There are 15,000+ people heading to the same room, which means long lines! I suggest you line up at least an hour before the start time. Otherwise expect to watch the keynote on a screen – possibly in another room. I try to sit no more then 20 – 30 rows from the stage to make the keynote more engaging.

Breakout Sessions
These sessions vary substantially in both focus and assumption of pre-requisite knowledge. To ensure you get value from each of these sessions, don’t just look at the title; read the abstract and the suggested experience level. I’ve sat through amazing sessions, but I also had to walk out of a session that spent 20 minutes talking about the existence of the Appexchange. So use your best judgment and take into consideration your interest and experience level.

Also, check out the chatter feed each session in the attendee portal, it’s giving me great insight into which are the must attend sessions. Lastly, ensure you pre-register for any session you want to go to. The crowds are big, and 15,000 people trying to make it into a room with 100 chairs doesn’t work.

Networking
With around 15,000 attendees there is no better place to network with executives, managers, developers, administrators (and just about any title you can think of). But, the shear size of the conference means attendees are walking in large crowds making meaningful networking very difficult. I strongly suggest you look into any activity that shrinks this crowd so you can have a meaningful one-on-one conversation.

I suggest you arrive early for the birds-of-a-feather lunches (these fill up fast), and find people to chat with at breakfast and lunch. Most importantly, there are dozens of small and large events taking place in the evenings of the conference. Search Twitter, Eventbrite, Google and the Expo hall for these events. Bonus: Most of them are open bar!

Campground and Cloud Expo
Don’t miss the Campground in the expo hall. This is your chance to talk to a customer success manager, and if your lucky signup for a customer success clinic. Dreamforce is like drinking from a fire hose, so the ability to talk one-on-one with a Salesforce expert is extremely valuable.

If you’re newer to the cloud computing space, the Expo hall is a fantastic place to learn about the tools and trends of cloud computing. So don’t just look avoid eye contact while scavenging for free pens, find some time to talk to the vendors and get demos. At the very least they will help you understand what’s possible, and ensure you have an idea of the solutions available when you get those “can we do this with Salesforce?” questions. Bonus: with a simple scan of your badge you’ll get a free pen! (just don’t take up too much of the booth jockey’s time, they will quickly get impatient if they suspect you’re not a qualified lead.)

There are many other things to look for like food, the city, tweetup’s and more, but this is just a starting point. I hope these tips help! Let me know if you have any other ideas.

Filed Under: Salesforce Tagged With: Dreamforce

The Salesforce.com and marketing automation road map

November 3, 2010 By Andrew Sinclair 1 Comment

The other day I was talking to a fairly new Salesforce.com customer and the topic of how companies typically evolve in their implementation of a marketing automation road map, after doing some quick thinking here’s what I came up with:

1.Contact and data migration
At its very core Salesforce.com is a contact list, it’s a place for you to store all the information you’ve collected on the people you sell to, and the people you hope to sell to. This step involves the painful process of migrating organizational data into a centralized database like Salesforce.com. There’s nothing sexy about this stage, as it usually involves the manipulation of spreadsheets in Excel, exporting data from secondary systems, and manually entering information.

2. Sales tracking
Given the fact that you wouldn’t be in business if you didn’t have sales, the second step is to start tracking your sales process. This is where the out-of-the box Salesforce.com tools really shine. But creating a tractable sales pipeline takes work, and be ready to rapidly iterate how you create this.

3. Contact segmentation
The third step is to start using your new centralized database to begin sending communication to your customers in a bit more intelligent way. The data now allows you to make very basic segments like high value customers, low value customers, and prospects. This stage usually involves the integration of an email server to pull the data directly from Salesforce.com

4. Lead management
Step four involves the inclusion of your lead generation process into the mix. At this stage it’s common to have leads pumped directly into Salesforce.com from your website or other sources. With leads automatically entering Salesforce.com you can start the beginning of a marketing automation program. For example, this can be a thank you email sent to the new prospect or an alert to the appropriate sales person.

5. Basic action on email click stats
Step five in the roadmap often involves auctioning on the data that your are now tracking in Salesforce.com. Up until this point the click stats that have been tracked in Salesforce.com have been an interesting thing to look at, but haven’t really driven work flow. The first step in acting on this data can be as simple as generating a follow-up list for sales people based on the click activity of an email blast. For example, a list can be generated from all the contacts who clicked your big “buy now” button in the email that was just sent out.

6. Full Marketing Automation
As your organization evolves, you will quickly start to understand that customer information should trigger relevant communication. When this is finally realized, organizations typically embark on an entirely new process of implementing a robust marketing automation system. This means creating steams that you will direct prospects down based on their demonstrated intent. For example a prospect who downloads a whitepaper, they will receive a follow-up email relevant to the whitepaper. If the prospect takes action on the call to action, the lead is automatically routed to sales, if they don’t, a secondary follow-up communication is triggered.

7. Lead and Contact Scoring
As companies define the work flow they would like to process leads with, the next obvious step is to start quantifying this into a lead score. This allows both sales and marketing to quickly understand the point in the sales cycle a lead is, and action accordingly.

The above stages asimply based on my observations and hands on work, I suspect each of these stages have sub-stages, but that’s a post for another day.

Filed Under: Marketing Automation, Salesforce

Campaign reporting in Salesforce.com

November 3, 2010 By Andrew Sinclair 1 Comment

One of the biggest challenges facing marketers who turn to Salesforce.com to manage their campaigns is reporting on their effectiveness. If you’re doing this, you will likely run in to on of two problems.

1. If you simply use the correlation of ‘responses’ to actual revenue you will double count a large amount of revenue. For example: if you run two campaigns and a contact that goes on to spend $100 is included in both, both campaign records will count this $100. Meaning it looks like you generated $200 in revenue.

2. If you use the campaign influence tool, the campaign imminently before the creation of the opportunity record will receive 100% of the credit, implying the other campaigns were ineffective at generating revenue.

Simply put, there is no easy way to associate a variable amount to a campaign.

The only solution I’ve been able to find is to create custom fields in the “campaign member status record” which will allow you to add some kind of entry beyond simply stating a member status value as “responded”. It’s not perfect but it allows you to assign a weighted value to this field. For example campaign 1 gets a value of 5, and campaign 2 gets a value of 10.

Then you can do one of two things.

1. Export a report with all of these campaign member status and opportunities – you can do this with the campaign influence report. You will then be able to pull these values created above allowing you to do some kind of manual manipulation in Excel. For example, the Opportunity has 3 campaigns associated to it … one has a value of 2, one is a 3, and one is a 5. You can then used these numbers to say 20% goes to campaign 1, 30% goes to campaign 2, and 50% goes to campaign 3.

2. Using triggers, workflow and a series of custom visualforce pages you could custom create an application to do this reporting.

I would suggest option 1. It’s not perfect, but it’ll work. Let me know if this makes sense.

Filed Under: Salesforce