The Official Salesforce Blog
The Official Salesforce Blog - July 2009
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Best Practice series: What’s WIIFM got to do with data quality?
Jul 29, 2009WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) is the mantra of sales people and marketers. To get prospects to consider your product, you better know what that product can do for them. How it solves their problem. Makes their lives better. Helps them sleep at night.
When it comes to CRM, there’s lots of research that shows that lack of user adoption—that’s consultant speak for people saying “no thanks"—is one of the main reasons CRM projects fail. The last Best Practice post "Adoption" included ways to measure adoption and tips for motivating people to use the app.
This post is about fixing one huge reason why people resist getting on board—the data is confusing, incomplete, or misleading. Ask them why they’re not using the app and they’re not likely to say “data quality.” But look at what’s causing their frustration with finding information, or knowing which information is “right,” and you can bet there's a problem with data quality.
The bottom line: Bad data is bad for business. Bad data makes people think there's not much in it for them. Do your business—and your users—a favor and make sure your data is clean, stays clean, and contains those special nuggets of information that make people love CRM.
Oliver Demuth, the author of this paper, also had this comment: "It's critical that you train your users in how they can contribute to data quality. If everyone contributes, everyone benefits from accurate data."
Has bad data affected your project and what have you done to fix it? And will the advice in this Best Practice help? -
CRM Admins: Recent Webinars and New Demo Series!
Jul 27, 2009Administrators,
Are you interested in getting salesforce.com certified? Check out this certification prep session given by Chris Piper, salesforce.com Training & Certification Mgr. It highlights sample questions, exam formats, and tip for passing.
Want to be an Admin Hero? Check out this webinar featuring a fellow customer from Granicus who showed his cool proposal generator app he built using Force.com.
When: August 5, 2009
Time: 11 am - 11:30 am PDT
Where: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/join/443069464
Hope you can make it!
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Cloud Developer Challenge Deadline Extended!
Jul 27, 2009Since many of you have told us that you needed more time to complete your app, we're extending the deadline for the Force.com Cloud Developer Challenge, by a whole 30 days - to August 31st 2009! We hope this extra time will help you raise the bar on your cloud app. Remember, you have a lot of support to fall back on — check out the developer challenge discussion board and the challenge page.
The submission process is simple and quick—use the submit application form with your Developer Edition account details.
Don't forget, we're still giving out t-shirts (while supplies last) to anyone who submits an application. We also have a MacBook Pro, and Apple iPod nanos and touches to give away. If we like what you've done, we may also contact you about using your story to inspire the rest of the cloud developer community.
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Vaporizing Doubts
Jul 24, 2009In a conversation earlier today, someone asked me when I thought there would be no remaining reservations about the cloud. When, I was asked, will everyone stop saying "This has to be in my own data center" or "I only want this behind my own firewall"?
My first response was based on lives and times. "Let's do a thought experiment," I said. "If the typical enterprise IT decision maker is, say, 36 years old, and if anyone who was 12 years old in 1998 has had the Internet as part of their life for as long as they can remember, when will enterprise IT leaders all be people who are totally accustomed to on-line banking? To Web-based email? To Facebook? To a workplace where people use salesforce.com, Concur Expense, and Google Apps?" By simple arithmetic, that day will arrive in 2022.
Then I decided to check myself with something closer to pure math. "I don't know what per cent of the market is still nervous about the cloud today," I said, "but I'd predict that the number will be no more than 2/3 as large next year, and 2/3 of that value in the year after that." Like any exponential decay, this never gets all the way to zero, but let's ask how long it takes before 99% of today's objectors are asking "How do I get this done in the cloud?" instead of asserting, "This can't be done in the cloud."
Logarithm of 0.01 to the base 2/3 is 11.4, which means that 99 out of 100 of today's cloud objectors will be past their tipping point by December 1st of 2020.
Neither of these is a rigorous projection. I'm not Hari Seldon. But these are two completely independent estimate methods that agree to within about one year of each other, and that makes me feel as if there's some reality here.
Further, working backwards, the same math would suggest that half of today's cloud skeptics will be open to persuasion (if perhaps not actual converts) before Tax Day in April of 2011; that 3/4 will have reached that state of mind by Christmas Day of 2012.
The trailing quarter of that group will need to have some pretty compelling reasons, it seems to me, to explain why they're still making massive capital investments to enjoy a slower pace of improvement and a longer time to value on their IT initiatives. Why not ask, "How can we make the cloud as good as we need it to be?" An answer that begins with "When, for how much?", will be much more interesting than one that ends with a period after "We can't."
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More Than The Sum of Clouds' Parts
Jul 23, 2009At the Glue Conference, this past May in Denver, the agenda included a rapid-fire series of mini-keynotes called "Post-It Notes" that were strictly limited to fifteen minutes each.
A video of those presentations, on various topics including data portability, identity portability, and my own talk on service connectivity, is now on line with the charts synchronized side-by-side with the video: my talk begins at the 40:50 time mark (the slider appears when you hover the mouse on the frame), if you want to jump ahead, but all of the talks were good and the fast pace makes for high signal-to-noise. Enjoy.
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Redrawing the Map of the Cloud
Jul 15, 2009With over 1,000 people attending, Cloudforce Singapore literally redrew the map of global cloud computing for the enterprise. Our new data center in Singapore makes a powerful statement about both our regional commitment and our planetary capacity to engage with customers anywhere.
Some attendees told me that they were genuinely moved by the east-meets-west fusion of a traditional lion dance with the leading-edge capabilities of the cloud. The live demonstration of new Service Cloud capabilities passed the test proposed by Gehm's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law, that "any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced": like the best close-up magic, even when I know exactly how it works, the Service Cloud and the Force.com development experience both pass the test of "might as well be magic" every time I use them.
Our breakout session on Custom Cloud techniques, opportunities and tools actually had to use an overflow room with remote video feed: the intensity of interest in cloud development productivity, integration with other IT assets and even with networked devices, and rapid delivery of high-function applications is an international phenomenon.
The Cloudforce journey continues: join us soon at an event near you.
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Singapore Data Center Now Live
Jul 14, 2009Here's a guest post from Claus Moldt, our vp of service delivery:
I'm pleased to announce that our Singapore
Along with our two North American data centers and our production-class development lab, the new Singapore
Our geographically-dispersed, mirrored data center infrastructure provides near real-time replication, seamless disaster recovery, a dedicated, path diverse network backbone, no single points of failure and a carrier-neutral network strategy. What this means is that customers can focus on running their businesses, instead of managing infrastructure.
Supporting the data center infrastructure will be a new Network Operations Centre (NOC) headquartered in Singapore
Marc Benioff and Craig Weissman, our Chief Architect, recently presented an overview of our service infrastructure at one of our Cloudforce events. It provides a great introduction to benefits of multi-tenancy, our real-time cloud computing architecture, and more. Check it out here.
- Claus Moldt, vice president, service delivery, salesforce.com.
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The UFO and the Dragon: Cloudforce Rocks!
Jul 14, 2009It doesn't feel as if five weeks have passed since we were greeting 500+ guests at Cloudforce Eindhoven, held in the UFO-inspired Evoluon Centre in that high-tech city that I describe to friends as "The San Jose of the Netherlands". Even so, many of the same team members are now a quarter-planet farther to the east,
polishing their welcome for what may be an even larger crowd at this afternoon's Cloudforce Singapore (with some unique planned program highlights that I hope will yield great photos).
What we're seeing is enormous global interest (click the link to see Google Trends measurements) in the business opportunity, the innovation leverage, and the proactive response to unprecedented worldwide economic stress that the cloud computing model can deliver.
In just those five weeks since our Eindhoven event, we've also held Cloudforce Munich; we've discussed the role of cloud computing in global technology markets at the Fujitsu Labs of America Technology Symposium in Sunnyvale: we've told regional CIOs about the urgency of the cloud at the CIO Forum & Executive IT Summit in Cleveland, met with cloud service providers and prospective cloud entrepreneurs at this summer's SaaS University conference in Chicago, and briefed a room full of technology and business analysts at a private meeting earlier this week in Beijing. And those are just the events of which I have some personal knowledge: there have been many more, and of course the best Dreamforce ever will soon be upon us.
With the whole world wanting to know, it's in the interest of everyone who has anything to do with IT to have a clear understanding -- and be able to convey in compelling terms -- why the cloud is so important, and why it's more than just the latest label for doing your IT somewhere else. We're adding our voice to that conversation, for example with a growing library of video clips that we hope you'll find useful to view and to share. Tell us what more you think needs to be said -- and also, of course, to be done.
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An Expert's Guide
Jul 13, 2009Check out the latest book from David Taber, Salesforce.com Secrets of Success: Best Practices for Growth and Profitability, now available for sale. The book focuses on real-world best practices that David has pulled from his experience working on dozens of deployments. The salesforce.com deployment is covered in detail with results-focused tips across a number of departments including sales, marketing, customer service, finance, legal, and IT.
More details can be found here.
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New Salesforce Ad – Let Us Know What You Think
Jul 10, 2009Our Creative Team is working on a new ad and we want to get your feedback. Is this new ad something that would resonate with people who aren't familiar with salesforce.com? Does it embody what salesforce.com is all about?
If you're interested you can also take a look at the comments people have left on the Salesforce.com's Facebook Page or the IdeaExchange on this same topic.
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