The Official Salesforce Blog - Management Strategy

• Five Ways to Prepare for Winter '08

  Oct 18, 2007

    The Winter '08 release is just around the corner--as an administrator, you probably can't wait to get your hands on all of the popularly requested features! We've put together five simple steps for you to follow in order to get ready for the changes coming your way so you can maximize adoption and take your success to the next level.
  
  1. Learn

  • Read over the Admin Preview to familiarize yourself with the new features being delivered.
  • Check out the feature detail pages on Successforce for a quick reference on particular features or product areas you're interested in.
  • Dig into the Release Notes for a complete guide to

  2. Play
  

  • There's no better way to learn about the new release than by rolling up your sleeves and getting hands-on. Be sure to sign up for our pre-release program where you can get your very own test environment to play with before the release goes live in your Salesforce instance.
  • If you create some great custom apps, objects or s-controls, you can package them up and publish them privately to the AppExchange. Once Winter '08 goes live, you can easily install them to your production instance.

  3. Assess
  
  For the major features of Winter '08, we recommend that you identify 3 must-have features for your company. Maintaining this narrow focus will enable you to better execute on your CRM vision. To identify these must have features, consider these questions:

     

  • What is the CRM vision for your company? Which features empower your organization to bring this vision to the next level?
  • What are the main pain points in your business process? Which features would alleviate these pain points?
  • Do you have customer-facing organizations or processes that are still not on Salesforce? Use this new release as the compelling event for extending your success to the rest of the organization.

  4. Implement

  • Revisit the salesforce.com Rollout Guide for ideas on creating a successful implementation process.
  • Consider engaging Professional Services for more complicated features or simply an adoption assessment.
  • Be sure to dig into the Release Notes for detailed implementation notes.

  5. Communicate:
  
  You'll want to be sure to communicate to your end users the changes that are coming their way. Salesforce gives you several options:

  • Send a mass email to all your users by clicking Setup -> Manage Users -> Mass Email Users
  • Create announcements on the home page by clicking Setup -> Customize -> Home -> Home Page Components -> Messages and Alerts
  • Consider End User Training for key influencers.

  Be sure to keep checking this blog for updates and other release news!

     
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• Peer Performance Dashboard

  Nov 21, 2006

  Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to dust off some old posts that many Salesforce customers might have missed the first time around. This one was originally posted in January 2005 but I think it's every bit as relevant today...

  

  At salesforce.com we have a two tiered sales team, one which qualifies leads and the other which closes business. One challenge with this model is finding a good metric to compensate the inside sales team or the team that qualifies the lead.
  

  In this dashboard you can se that we track three numbers. The number of converted leads which reach 20% provides a leading indicator to make sure the rep is on track and building enough pipeline. The next is the number of closed deals which creates incentives to work all leads and do what they can to build momentum. And finally, the amount of closed revenue which makes sure they work the big leads more aggressively than the small leads.
  

  The second goal of this dashboard is to help the sales manager make apples to apples comparisions. Each rep takes time to get up to speed yet most of the reports that are run don’t take that into account. For each incoming class of reps we have created a peer performance dashboard. This gives me some sense of how long it takes for reps to ramp and it shows which reps are most deserving of being promoted.

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• AppExchange 101 Webcast: Everything You Need to Extend Your CRM Implementation

  Jun 5, 2006

  Join us for a FREE AppExchange Webinar — Live on June 14, at 11:00 AM PST. AppExchange is the first and only online marketplace for sharing applications. It makes finding and deploying new on-demand apps easy. Many of the apps in the AppExchange are free and all are pre-integrated with Salesforce. There are more than 250 apps to choose from including applications for every department like sales, service, HR, finance —and more. Find everything from project management to recruiting to email marketing and beyond. Learn what you need to know to get started with AppExchange. Plus, get all your questions answered in a live Q&A. Register for our free AppExchange 101 Webcast now.

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• Salesforce.com on iTunes

  Apr 4, 2006

  Today we officially launched Salesforce.com on iTunes, with over 75 sessions of downloadable audio content. Users will find a wide variety of tracks including customer best practice sessions, roundtable discussions, and presentations by well know thought leaders.

   
  
  The goal is to connect customers with product experts and peers working on similar business initiatives. With Salesforce.com on iTunes you can browse through a catalog of tracks sorting them by date, topic, or speaker, just like managing your own music library. While many people will choose to listen to these sessions at their desk, you can also download them to your iPod. If you’ve got a long commute or are traveling on business, load a couple up and see what you think.

  Here are a couple of sample sessions.
  

  

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• Partner Recruitment Mash Up with Google Maps

  Mar 7, 2006

  One of Salesforce's Partner Management subject matter experts, Todd Janzen, has created a day in the life for a channel manager trying to recruit more partners. (Thanks Todd!) This demonstration is available for you to review.  Click here to access the demonstration. Besides the business value of being able to more effectively and efficiently recruit more partners using Salesforce, Todd has creatively enabled a real cool feature. He's created a channel map showing the number of partners that have submitted an application to become a partner. How many of you have wished you could easily create a channel map or white space analysis? He created the channel map using Google Maps. Here is an example of how new partner prospect registrations show up on a Google Map.  Visit the Partner Management feature page for full details on Salesforce.com's Partner Management and Partner Portal solution.

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• Suggested Documents using Custom Formula Fields

  Oct 24, 2005

  “Do your reps ever complain that it’s hard to find documents in the document library? Do you want to cut down on training? Leverage custom formula fields to suggest resources based upon fielded information in the contact, opportunity, or account record.”

  Now you can deliver different content for your sales force based upon the different stages of their opportunity.

  

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• Partner Portal Demo

  Oct 5, 2005

  PRM and Salesforce's Partner Portal enables companies to cost effectively and easily increase revenues driven through partners. Companies can share leads and opportunities, enable deal registration programs, co-market, and communicate rebates and incentives to partners through the Salesforce Partner Portal. Channel Managers gain visibility to partner performance and sales executives finally have a consolidated pipeline representing both direct and indirect opportunities and deals.
  

  This presentation is available in Breeze (5 mins).

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• Build your own PRM program using Custom Objects?

  Sep 8, 2005

  Many of our customers today are leveraging custom objects to build PRM applications to manage, track and measure their partner programs.  Companies engage with their partners through sharing of Leads and joint selling with Opportunities. This part is straightforward and already managed through core Salesforce SFA and Partner Portal. Other companies are also enabling partner management processes through Salesforce’s Custom Objects.  Some types of partner management applications needed by channel managers worldwide include: co-marketing funds, special pricing authorizations, certification tracking, deal registration, certifications, and channel account planning.  The Dashboard inlcuded in this post shows how Custom Objects have been designed to support rebates, market development funds (MDF), and coop.  The dashboard is presented on top of marketing request and claim objects modeled against best practice PRM processes. 

    Now channel managers, inside of Salesforce, can easily track the marketing requests and claims submitted by their partners.  These objects are easily exposed to partners using Salesforce’s Partner Portal Toolkit.  Have you created PRM processes using these objects? Have you exposed these objects to partners? Share your PRM successes and questions.

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• New Process Maps: Events, Customer Acquisition, Account Management

  Sep 7, 2005

  Richard Hind, a Salesforce.com Sales Engineer from the UK created three new process maps. One for event management, one for customer acquisition, and one for account management. These are great to reference when mapping your processes to salesforce.com and training the team.
  

  These maps are availabe in PDF and PowerPoint .

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• PRM: Partner Portal in action

  Aug 16, 2005

  Companies today are realizing the benefits of PRM (Partner Relationship Management) by consolidating their direct and indirect sales and marketing activities. Companies are using salesforce.com to manage partners while they’re extending their deal data and sales tools to share with their partners through salesforce.com’s Partner Portal. To the right is an example of a Partner Portal. The company is fictitious to protect the innocent but the message is clear. Branding is easily customized to match corporate guidelines and corporate style sheets. The experience is tailored to meet the needs of the partner community. Leads, opportunities, documents and custom objects are shared for collaboration. A custom object was designed and launched to model the Market Development Funds (MDF) business process. There are many customers tare extending the benefits of salesforce.com to their partner communities. Share your PRM successes here.

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• PRM with Salesforce.com

  Aug 8, 2005

  I get asked all the time: how does Salesforce.com handle complex channel sales models and how does Salesforce.com enable PRM (Partner Relationship Management)? 

  The answer to these questions resides in understanding your partner requirements and business needs.  Segment your partner community to find out what's most important to each partner group.  While all partners are important, there are some that are more strategic than others.  Consider your partners' buying relationship; channel tier; geography; product specializations; certifications, etc when categorizing. How easily can you segment your partner community today and what tools do you have in place to track the segmentations? 

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• Lead Scoring for Increased Sales Efficiency

  Jul 15, 2005

  Lead Scoring associates a value to each lead based upon a weighted criteria. For example, a prospect that fills out a web form might have a higher score than purchased list. By giving a numerical value for each lead, reps can better prioritize their lead lists and focus on those opportunities with the greatest potential value.

  By creating a calculated field in salesforce.com you can design your own scoring plan. It might be as simple as scoring based upon lead source (as seen below), or it may include a variety of factors including product of interest, opportunity size, intent to purchase, and time frame. Some of this information might be captured at the time the lead is created, but calculated fields are dynamic so as the rep adds or verifies information the score will adjust accordingly.

  To add a lead scoring field, create a custom calculated field on the lead page layout. There is a sample below but you’ll want to adjust it to fit your business.

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• Sales Process Map - Campaign to Customer

  Jun 28, 2005

  The sales process map is designed to show you how a typical two tier sales process might map to salesforce.com. This is a very useful tool to help document your own internal processes and ultimately train your team.

  This presentation is available in PDF.

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• Create Groupings Using Custom Formula Fields

  Jun 15, 2005

  The Summer ’05 release has already started to change the way I analyze data in salesforce.com, bringing forward trends that were once hard to distinguish.

  The first formula I’ve started using is a simple average calculation. For example, you might want to divide the number of employees by the number of users to calculate your penetration in an account.
  

  {!Number_Users} / {!Number_Employees}

  Note that that you'll have to substitute your custom fields when building this formula but it shows you the basic design pattern.
  

  This calculation is very similar to the way analysts do a Price/Earnings ratio so that they can get an apples to apples comparison.

  I’ve also found that I’m using custom formula fields helps with categorization. For example, on the account record you might have the number of employees but for reporting purposes you want to create buckets. To do so you can create a nested if statement that looks something like this.

  IF({!Employees} = 0, "",

  IF({!Employees} <50, "Tier 1",

      IF({!Employees} <= 200, "Tier 2",

       IF({!Employees} <=500, "Tier 3",

         IF( {!Employees} <= 1,000, "Tier 4", "Tier 5")))))

  With these two data points you can create a report to measure penetration at different tiers. I’ve left the stage, summary fields, and tier thresholds blank but it should be enough to spark some ideas for your organization.

  
  

  To learn more about how custom formula fields work, I highly recommend Getting Started with Custom Formula Fields presentation and the Custom Formula Field Blog.

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• Neff Rental Success Story

  Mar 14, 2005

  

  Steve Settlemayer, the VP of Sales and Marketing at Neff Rental, shares the steps the company took for successful user adoption - from first obtaining senior management endorsement, to involving top performers during the creation of the functional process, to building and communicating the value proposition for his reps.

  • Company Profile: Neff Rental
  • Life Before Salesforce.com
  • Why We Selected Salesforce.com
  • Our Project Plan
  • Current Status
  • Lessons Learned

  8 slides, 20 minutes (slides with Audio)

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• Data Quality Dashboard

  Jan 27, 2005

  One critical element of managing a team is watch over workload and data quality.

  The first of the three dashboards pictured tracks open leads. We have committed ourselves to a 24 hour response time so I know that if any rep has more than 50 open leads, we aren’t following up as fast as we should be. To make sure this is more than an idle threat, we spell it out at the top of the dashboard, “>50 Leads = Lead Router Turned Off.” Since this is their lifeblood, you can bet that they pay attention to it.

  The second dashboard depicts open tasks. It’s very easy for reps to get in the habit of setting tasks and never closing them out. This hurts collaboration in a significant way because when a task list becomes unrulely it’s very likely a rep will miss a new task assigned to them. It also means that someone at some point in time is going to have to delete the task for them. In any event, that’s why we decided to crack down and put in place a policy where in there should never be more than 100 overdue task.

  The last dashboard is an example of an exception report. When a field isn’t filled out or an account is assigned to the wrong person, you can put their name up on the wall of shame.

  All three of these elements are visible to the reps and gone over inside the application during team meetings to reinforce the desired behavior.

  
  

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• Team Challenge

  Jan 27, 2005

  

  When I was working with our inside sales team it quickly became apparent that there was a big gap between the top of the class and the bottom. With a large group of reps to manage I realized that the fast way to turn things around was through competition, peer pressure, and team mentoring.
  

  I paired up two senior reps who were consistently hitting their number with one junior person who was struggling. I then created a dashboard with all six teams and put in place a small spiff for the two teams who finished on top. With five sales days left in the month, all of the junior reps have made dramatic improvement. We’ll give it a try again next month and see if we continue to see progress.

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• Snag-it and Dashboards

  Jan 27, 2005

  

  There is a great screen capture tool called Snag-It which I would recommend to just about anyone. The closest thing I can equate it to is have a good pair of scissors at your desk. As a sales manager, one way I use snag-it is to create quick snapshots of a dashboard element that I want to bring attention to. I then do a quick annotation to emphasis what I’m seeing, and then I send it out to the team.

  For example, “Hey guys take a look, Conor hit his number today. Congratulations! Carly, Anish, Jen, Jared, and Dana are inching closer. Who will be next?”

  As a manager this is a great way to drive adoption because the reps realize that you are watching dashboards intensely and rewarding behavior accordingly.

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