With salesforce.com successfully deployed, executives have access to accurate information allowing them to evaluate their company’s performance without sifting through out-of-date spreadsheets. For Managers, Salesforce dramatically increases visibility into the activities of their reps allowing them to direct their attention where it’s needed most. It’s also an extremely valuable tool for creating structured, scaleable processes, which in turn increase efficiency and allow you to deliver an unparalleled customer experience.
 
Real-time visibility across your organization
Salesforce empowers business users to create their own reports and dashboards. Each dashboard can contain up to 20 elements providing an at-a-glance overview of your entire business.

Run your business like a well oiled machine
Salesforce allows you to capture consistent information and define scaleable, repeatable processes. With workflow you can automate things like assignment rules, approvals, alerts and escalations. 

Reps need an application that makes work easier, not more complicated. With Salesforce.com successfully deployed, reps should view it as an indispensable tool which they log into daily, accessing critical information, manage their activities, and collaborate with colleagues. 

Gain a consolidated view of your customer
Quickly look up an Account and see a complete listing of contacts at that account, activities, open tasks, sales opportunties, and cases. Whether you’re working on a project team or taking over a new account, in an instant you can find out just where things stand.

Prioritize activities and make sure nothing falls through the cracks
Reps should have a handful of views and reports which they rely on to manage their day. By sorting on key data points and building personalized dashboards they can prioritize their day and ensure sure nothing falls through the cracks.

Pipe in information from a variety of sources
Salesforce.com can be set up to pipe in relevant information from a number of different sources, including your corporate website, 3rd party data providers, or back office systems. The greater the information flow, the more valuable Salesforce becomes.

Improved cross-departmental collaboration
The more people who use Salesforce within your organization, the greater the network effect. When handing off a sales, support, or billing inquiry, a rep should have confidence that the task they assigned will be taken care of. Since all the background history is visible on account record, very little explanation is needed. The use of tasks and activities also gives visibility into the current status and how the issue was resolved.

Tools to increase productivity
Reps that discover sticky tools such as email templates, mass email, and email tracking, discover that they are much more productive using Salesforce. Populating up-to-date marketing collateral, mail merge documents, and FAQ’s inside Salesforce also leads to increased adoption.

Adapt Salesforce to the way you work
Salesforce.com offers online, offline, and wireless access so that your critical business information is always within reach, whether you’re working from home or on the road. Salesforce also offers seamless integration with Outlook, allowing users to work more productively in the applications they use most.

Our goal is to make all Salesforce.com administrator’s heros within their organizations. In a successful deployment, administrators work closely with each of the business units and identify new ways to increase operational efficiency and drive stellar user adoption.

Find ways to be responsive and wow your users
Since Salesforce is easily customizable a good administrator will seek out opportunities to be responsive to users,  adding or removing fields on the fly, or adjusting page layouts to reflect the way people work. They can also take advantage of image fields, formula fields, and free components from the AppExchange to go beyond what users thought Salesforce was capable of.

Track your organization's CRM success using adoption dashboards
Adoption dashboards give you the ability to track user logins, call activity, and data quality, providing tangible metrics to measure the success of your deployment. This is a powerful bargaining chip when trying to enlist the support of managers and executives. 

Get inspiration and answers to questions from the salesforce.com community
Salesforce.com has a thriving community where you can find other customers solving similar business challenges to your own. Successful Administrators regularly visit Successforce.com to participate on the discussion boards, download best practice resources, and read up on advice from product managers. They also play an active role in their local user group and attend the annual Dreamforce User and Developer Conference in San Francisco.

Since salesforce.com is delivered as a service, Developers and IT should feel like a weight has been lifted from their shoulders. That’s not to say however that they should be disengaged. Salesforce.com is much more effective when integrated with your other business system and with AppExchange, Developers and IT can consolidate many of the homegrown applications spread across the enterprise. For example, project management, bug tracking, and recruiting, can all run as AppExchange Apps. With one data model, one security model, and one user interface, IT can reduce complexity and gain even control. 

Integrate Salesforce with your other systems
Salesforce.com’s AppExchange platform is built on the latest standards in Web services integration and there is a thriving community of developers sharing ideas on the AppExchange Developer Network.

Extend Salesforce with custom applications
In under an hour you can replace the chaos of emails, spreadsheets, and desktop databases with your own enterprise application that has all the collaboration, reporting, and data sharing advantages that are inherent in salesforce.com’s on-demand model. Browse applications on the AppExchange directory or build it yourself using AppExchange builder.

Transform IT budgets from infrastructure to innovation
Many CIOs are trapped spending their entire budget on keeping the lights on. Salesforce helps shift the focus to high-value IT projects where they can impact business performance.