The Official Salesforce Blog - Sales

• AppExchange Apps to Drive Sales Performance

  Aug 28, 2006

  Darren blogs on the Salesforce Analytics blog about 2 new apps that "are designed to help improve sales productivity and performance and (of course) both use dashboards and reports."

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• Mobile Customer Relationship Management Survey

  Jul 31, 2006

  More and more, organizations are arming their field sales representatives with mobile access to CRM and SFA applications. With one-touch access through a variety of handheld devices, mobile sales representatives can now access real-time information including product availability, order status, and competitive intelligence to use at the point of interaction.  What best practices are being employed by organizations classified as best-in-class, and how can their lessons be leveraged by organizations just beginning their mobile CRM initiative?  To get answers, become part of Aberdeen's fact-based benchmark report by taking their Mobile customer relationship management Survey.

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• Quick Win to Reduce Channel Conflict

  May 3, 2006

  Deal registration is a PRM (partner relationship management) strategy used to reward partners for early registration of approved deals. There are many ways to make this a reality using Salesforce.com. One cost effective way is to use web 2 lead. This feature offers an extensible way to capture partner deal registrations and extend your enterprise to your partners.

  Here is a link to a customer that is benefiting from a salesforce driven deal registration program: Click here for F5 Networks Web 2 Lead Deal Registration Form.   You can see the types of questions this company requires its partners to answer in order to have their deal registrations approved. Using custom fields, page layouts, record types, web 2 lead, workflow, assignment rules, and reports/dashboards, this company is able to reduce channel conflict, increase channel revenues, and improve partner loyalty.   Here is a sample dashboard showing the result of partner deal registrations. This dashboard demonstrates the benefits of having an integrated SFA and PRM system.  If you're interested in some guidance or support to set up your own deal registration program feel free to contact product management at Salesforce. 

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• Creating Fiscal Period Formula Fields in a Custom Fiscal Year Org

  Mar 7, 2006

  If your business’s fiscal year is not based on the Gregorian calendar but follows a different structure consisting of fiscal weeks, periods and quarters deviating from the regular calendar year, you can set up your fiscal year structure using the Custom Fiscal Year (CFY) feature in Salesforce.

  For example, your company may run on a “4-4-5” structure and a 13-week quarter may be represented by three periods of four, four, and five weeks rather than by three calendar months. Or may be your fiscal years consist of 13 fiscal periods consisting of 4 weeks each.

  As specified on the CFY enablement page in setup as well as in online help and release notes, a side effect of enabling the CFY feature for an organization is that you will not be able to use the fiscal period columns (Fiscal Year, Fiscal Quarter, and Fiscal Period) in opportunity, opportunity with product, opportunity with schedule reports or opportunity list views otherwise available in non-CFY organizations.

  Here is the tip: Using the formula field capability in Salesforce, you can create custom fields on the opportunity object that can calculate the fiscal year, fiscal quarter, fiscal period or a combination of these for you. These custom fields can then be exposed in all opportunity reports and list views and you can also filter by values in those fields. If you were using the fiscal period columns in opportunity reports prior to enabling CFY, you can recreate the columns via this formula field approach to retain reporting functionality that you may have been used to.

  

  
  

  
  

  
  

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• Partner Visibility App Launched by Sigmatrak

  Feb 21, 2006

  Point of Sale (POS) data is the holy grail of channel management. Sigmatrak has successfully solved this age old mystery with their B2B messaging appliance. Their equipment improves the accuracy and consistency of data that is passed between trading partners.  Now, the data that is processed, is integrated with Salesforce and is mapped to partner and customer accounts. Using Sigmatrak and Salesforce.com together, empowers sales and channel executives to know exactly what their partners are selling and who they are selling to.  Channel sales activity is analyzed, inventory levels are tracked, and rebate claims are reconciled.  Click here to take a test drive or install this AppExchange application. I really like the service monitor feature which demonstrates, on a Google Map, the locations of the messaging appliance within a partner community. It really brings the idea of a channel coverage map to life. Imagine having this powerful data and appliance inside your Salesforce.com system?

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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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