By Julia Chang

In his work in CRM consulting, Yacov Wrocherinsky has seen some disasters. One of the most recent was a large manufacturing company that spent millions on a high-end CRM system, only to realize two years later that it wasn’t providing accurate forecasts. “In the old days, people used to select a system based on a decision by the higher-ups, invest millions, and if the project didn’t meet expectations, they would write it off,” says Wrocherinsky, founder and CEO of Infinity Info Systems, a New York–based sales technology consulting firm. “Today, expectations are different.”

That’s because companies now are much smarter about CRM. They want faster implementation that produces value more quickly. And vendors have done a good job of mastering the basic features and making their offerings available at price points for companies of all sizes. But that doesn’t make the process of implementing a CRM strategy any easier—especially since CRM is now expected to be part of broader business strategy.

One thing’s for sure: CRM is at the top of managers’ minds. In a survey of S&MM readers conducted by consulting firm The Alexander Group, 35 percent of sales leaders say they will work to improve CRM in 2007, making it the third most important operational priority for the new year. Not sure if you’re going about it the right way? Follow these five steps to make your CRM strategy stays on point:

1. Set Clear Business Goals
By far, the biggest mistake companies make when it comes to CRM implementation is “not thinking through what customer-facing business outcomes they want to achieve,” says William Band, principal analyst for IT research firm Forrester Research, based in Cambridge, Mass. “You don’t want to start using the technology without thinking about if you want to improve your cross-sell, up-sell, or call-center [capabilities]. You have to think through what business metrics you are trying to improve.” Otherwise, how else will you measure success?

When Toshiba America Medical Systems (TAMS), a diagnostic imaging company based in Tustin, Calif., began a new CRM strategy, it first identified its business need: How to overcome flat growth. In the late 1990s, TAMS was losing customers as fast as it was gaining them, while the industry as a whole was growing about 10 percent.

After extensive customer surveys, TAMS realized the problem lay in its support and service. “We just didn’t have a good understanding of what customers really valued and what they wanted us to do,” says Cathy Wolfe, director of marketing services.

In order to improve service, the CRM system had to let reps know when a service problem was rearing so they could nip it in the bud. Now, TAMS surveys customers at the start and midway through their relationship with the company. The results are fed into a database managed by its Cognos CRM system, which uses the data to send e-mail alerts through Lotus Notes to managers when a customer is showing signs of dissatisfaction. “It’s an early warning indicator,” Wolfe says. “If you don’t know about it, then you don’t have the chance to address it. [Otherwise] you could have a customer mad for a period of time, bad-mouthing you, and you’d never know it.”

The result of the CRM implementation? Since 2001, the company has enjoyed about a 25 percent year-over-year growth rate and has seen its name rise to the top in several independent customer-service rankings.

2. Assemble a Crack Team
If it involves the customer, it doesn’t involve just sales—marketing, customer service, the call center, accounting and even back-office operations merit consideration when forming CRM strategy. Although the stakeholders can vary by company, most experts suggest representatives for Team CRM come from the following: sales, to provide end-user input; marketing; IT; an executive who can translate the CRM to bigger business strategy; accounting or finance; and dedicated administrative or sales support, if any.

It also helps, Wrocherinsky says, if the group includes a champion who has the respect of his peers and can spread the CRM gospel. It can be someone who is tech-savvy, but it can also be a “difficult or skeptical candidate,” he says, “who once you convert, helps other people see the light.”

Picking the right people as part of the team is essential, since these folks will be responsible for making sure budget, timing, and cost expectations are realistic, and will spend the most time with the vendors in the setup process. And make sure someone on the team has some decision-making authority, or the project could get stonewalled or mired in bureaucracy.

3. Do an IT Audit
For Bob Ritter, there’s one simple rule to the tech side of implementing CRM software: Meet or exceed the requirements. The CRM vendor will tell you what the parameters are for the operating system, network, hardware, software, infrastructure, etc., but there are other hidden IT roadblocks. “Maybe someone hasn’t rebooted their workstation in six weeks and their resources are a mess, or the drive is up to the gills with garbage from the Internet,” says Bob Ritter, president of 1stdirect.com, a CRM reseller and consulting firm in East Fishkill, N.Y. “When you’re putting a mission-critical application out to everybody, you have to make sure the foundation of the infrastructure it is running on is healthy.”

When it comes to choosing the actual software, there’s always a basic checklist to mind, before you even get to customization. Is the software easy to use? Will it link to mission-critical applications, such as e-mail, back-office functions or accounting software? (This is especially important to consider with hosted CRM.) Is it scalable? Make sure your cost analysis includes such areas as licensing, maintenance, configuration, training and data migration, Ritter says. And it doesn’t hurt to do a little detective work on your vendor’s business model, because you want to make sure it’ll be around for the long haul.

When it comes to security, the biggest concern used to be whether hosted software was vulnerable to hackers. Since that fear has largely been assuaged, the security concern these days is securing data on the road, says Richard Smith, vice president of CRM strategy for Green Beacon Solutions, a CRM consulting firm for mid-market companies based in Watertown, Mass. Part of CRM’s value is the convenience it provides when integrated into mobile devices. But laptops and BlackBerrys get stolen and lost, so the cost of securing data on the road should figure into your tech investment.

4. Fine-Tune the Features
Determining exactly what features should figure into your software will probably be the hardest and longest part of implementation, but one of the good things about this step is that it forces a compan
y to face how it does business and uncovers needed changes. “It’s an excellent time to revisit the business process,” Ritter says. “Are there ways to break up your data more efficiently? Are territories properly balanced? What communications do you want to merge or manage? Are you trying to fulfill a virtual request more efficiently?”

Running a pilot project helps avoid future pitfalls. When Johnson Controls, an environmental controls company based in Milwaukee, acquired HVAC supplier York International in 2005, one of its first priorities was integrating the new company into its Saratoga CRM system, which is used by about 2,200 employees. York’s service organization was integrated relatively easily; it was mostly a matter of eliminating duplicate accounts, merging databases and training the York service folks.

But York’s systems installation unit was another story. “Their business was different enough from our installation business that we didn’t believe the same CRM screens and business flow could work for them,” says Bill Hable, director of market planning, research and systems for Johnson Controls. “They are different in how they go to market, who their primary contact is, and they go through different routes [to prospect].” A CRM pilot ran in the spring in three district offices so they could tweak the views and fields that this particular unit needed. The new system is set to roll out the first six months of this year. “I didn’t want to hear first impressions,” Hable says. “They used it for three or four months so we could get a good idea about how they do business and what had to be changed.”

Large companies often require a lot of CRM customization, but even small firms should tweak solutions to their needs. Donna Keller, senior vice president for Financial Advisory Consultants, based in Naples, Fla., worked with 1stdirect.com to install GoldMine CRM software. Keller says she tried out about six versions before finalizing the solution that her company will roll out early this year. Keller’s firm has about 10 employees, but nonetheless needed a more uniform process to qualify prospects, move them through the sales cycle, and communicate with them the way they preferred. “Our [old CRM system] did it in a more manual way, but I was looking for something more automated so each client got the exact same experience,” Keller says. “There are a lot of moving parts that go into the process, and we needed to be able to handle all the intricacies.”

5. Encourage—or Enforce—Usage
Now that you’ve laid out your business goals, picked internal champions and designed the software of your dreams, here comes the hard part: Getting your staffers to use the system. Managers can take a carrot or a stick approach, Smith says, but the key is “reinforcing that there is one version of the truth: The report that gets driven out of CRM. If managers start letting the best sales reps submit numbers in Excel, it breaks the model.”

The carrot approach is to show salespeople the value of using a system, and your CRM evangelists are essential to this. Sometimes this takes more patient training or one-on-one coaching to prove the system’s benefits to your reps. But don’t be afraid to enforce a hard deadline by which data must be in, call out folks who aren’t following the rules and recognize big wins that get plugged into the system. “People don’t want to be shamed, and if they know they’ve closed a big deal and the forecast always goes out noon on Friday” they’ll be more inclined to become CRM converts, Smith says.

And then there’s always the biggest stick: No CRM use, no commission. “Everybody suddenly gets clear on things when there is only one way to get data into the accounting system,” Hable says. “I’ve seen guys who hate computers, but if [using CRM software] is how they get their commission check, they are experts in two weeks.”

Sidebar: What Customers Want

According to the Forrester Research survey “How to Select a CRM Software Vendor” of 19 large North American and European organizations, the following CRM software criteria are considered the most important:

1. Companies expect CRM software to make its users more productive. High usability encourages adoption.

2. Analytics tools are needed to better understand customer behavior and inform decisions based on customer data.

3. The ability to support a centralized customer master data management system is critical to getting a 360-degree view of the customer.

4. Many companies reported they had started working to improve their contact center, but then moved on to focus on sales and marketing. They have stated that “CRM is never done,” and work continuously on ways to improve customer interactions.

5. Companies wanted software with applications that encourage strong and flexible workflow capabilities.

6. Technologies that can be easily adapted and customized to the business environment achieve results more quickly.

7. Any software must accommodate large numbers of users and support global business.

8. Vendors without industry-relevant capabilities likely won’t make it to many companies’ shortlists for consideration.

• Turn Challenging Questions into Sales
• How to keep people from putting the seat back on airplanes.
• Determined to Succeed but Still Failing: Why?
• Avoid Getting Your E-mails Deleted
• How to Take the Sales Out of Selling
• Warming up to cold calls
• Crafting an Opening Sales Statement
• The Right Voice-Mail Message Will Get You Through
• The Importance of Individual Sales Goals
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Sales Processes

I was happy and surprised when I logged into LinkedIn today and saw that they had changed the GUI. LinkedIn has only been making small changes that I know of and this latest update is nothing short of remarkable! The new interface is completely different and seems to be made with AJAX now. The layout is outstanding and customizable.

I love LinkedIn. I have written a few other posts about it. The most read is Cleanup your LinkedIn Profile. The changes that have been made make LinkedIn a real business tool. Not that it wasn’t before but it was clunky to navigate and it just didn’t work aesthetically.

From the LinkedIn blog here are some of my favorite updates from LinkedIn’s latest release.

LinkedIn System of Navigation

Customizable widgets panel

They also provide a video on the great updates and features.

• How to keep people from putting the seat back on airplanes.
• Free Channel Sales Playbook
• SOCOM Sales Update
• Four Great Advantages To Working at Home
• Top 50 best sales articles
• Office Lingo - What does it all mean?
• 15 sales posts you want to read
• Free Conference Calls
• Great sales resources
• Don’t be that guy

Free Conference Calls

I schedule dozens of phone calls during the week that need multiple people on the phone. Talking to executives at the same time that are traveling could be a daunting task. Having a conference number can get all of the executives on the phone and not spend a dime for the service has helped me out a lot over the years.

FreeConference.com frees you from the hassles and expense of traditional call conferencing with simple, convenient, and reliable service at little or no cost. For small businesses, large enterprises, individuals, community and nonprofit organizations, and anyone who appreciates high quality at low cost, FreeConference.com offers a variety of solutions to fit your conferencing needs.

Free Conference also has a plugin for Outlook. Now you can easily schedule conference calls just like you set up meetings—right from Outlook. Send invitations, manage your preferences, review your account information and even create recurring conferences, using all your existing contacts and meeting management tools. Outlook Conference Manager will automatically integrate pre-assigned conference information onto your calendar and into your emailed invitations to conference participants. It does everything but dial.

Personally I like the service. As I said I use FreeConference several times a week and I have never had any issues with quality. Here are some additional testimonials from their website.

* “We just found out about the service today, and quickly set up and had our first teleconference with 6 people. It was incredible! Your service is the best option we’ve seen — we’re hooked!”
* “I stumbled on your Web site Monday, tested it with a coworker Wednesday, was thrilled by the automatically scheduled appointment into Outlook, and am eager to participate in our call Friday! I am extra pleased that I can do this all over the Internet and that we don’t have to wait for an operator when we actually dial in to call. Thanks for thinking of the little things that make my job easier.”

* “This is a wonderful service. I work with a small NFP group with a focus on children with a rare disorder. This offers us a forum for communication voice-to-voice that is invaluable. Thank you for offering this service.”

* “GREAT SERVICE! I LOVE IT! I’m amazed and thankful that this service is available to those of us looking for a simple conference calling solution - Without any loopholes or catches! Thank YOU!”

* “This has truly been a blessing to our ministry. We thank you and all of the investors for making it possible for God’s ministry to go forward. May God continue to bless you.”

* “You guys are great! This service is almost too good to be true. I will tell everyone I know about this service.”

* “Great Stuff, luv the service. It is very smooth and easy to use. Keep up the great work.”

* “Excellent Service! Thank you for having this available & so easy to use!!!”

Have you used this service or have any better options?

• How to keep people from putting the seat back on airplanes.
• Free Channel Sales Playbook
• SOCOM Sales Update
• Four Great Advantages To Working at Home
• The Emperor’s New Clothes
• Top 50 best sales articles
• Office Lingo - What does it all mean?
• 15 sales posts you want to read
• Great sales resources
• Don’t be that guy

SalesForce has done a good job keeping up with the needs of there corporate customers by adding new features and having a consistent update pattern that they make visible to SalesForce admins. But this is not why I love SalesForce so much.

Work anywhere

SalesForce as a CRM solution allows a mobile workforce to always be connected. The old school days of field sales people running their business off of spreadsheets should be trashed. Being able to access your company information from any connected device like a computer or mobile phone allows sales people and executives to review and update important data anytime of the day from anywhere in the world.

Customizing reports is easy

People at the top are always asking for reports. SalesForce makes this fairly simple. You can set reports up to be available to everyone or make them private. I only use a fraction of the public reports and mainly use them as templates to creat my custom reports that give me superior insight into what’s going on in my department. Having this information available makes getting reports to the executive team easy and painless. No more scrambling around trying to get a report together.

Never miss another follow up.

Part of being a great sales person is being able to juggle dozens if not hundreds of accounts at one time. Everything is a process within the sales cycle and dropping a few balls is not a luxury you can afford (literally). Creating follow up tasks and events for all of your contacts is a simple process to do and syncing this data to Outlook or your mobile device is seamless. I don’t need to be on my computer to know that I have a call in a few minutes, my iPhone reminds me like any other calendar client would. So wile on the road if I am driving from one location to another or sitting in an airport like I am currently, I don’t need to be on my computer to know when and who I need to touch base with.

What CRM do you use?

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got socom? T-Shirt (White) Show everyone you mean business!

• How to keep people from putting the seat back on airplanes.
• Free Channel Sales Playbook
• SOCOM Sales Update
• Four Great Advantages To Working at Home
• The Emperor’s New Clothes
• Top 50 best sales articles
• Office Lingo - What does it all mean?
• 15 sales posts you want to read
• Free Conference Calls
• Great sales resources

——————-

It’s a question almost as old as commerce itself: Is selling an art or a science? For years, technology companies have been trying to transform the former into the latter. And for years, the results have largely been disappointing.

Think of those days as Sales 1.0. We’re now in the era of Sales 2.0. Your bottom line may never be the same.

Remember the bad old days of sales-oriented technology? Customer relationship management systems that cost a fortune to install and crashed easily. Downloadable lists of sales leads filled with old or bogus data. E-mail marketing tools that targeted the wrong consumers. And on and on.

Fortunately, software firms that target small companies with sales tools have been getting smarter and smarter. Following pioneers such as Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) and NetSuite, a new generation of companies is offering easy-to-use, cheap (indeed, often free) technology that can supercharge the performance of your sales force–with minimal training and virtually none of the heavy-duty installation associated with the CRM systems of the past. With lead-generation and networking services, e-mail marketing products, relationship managing tools, and other bells and whistles, it’s now possible to turn a sales operation into a gleaming high-tech machine. Here’s a quick tutorial on some of the new tools and a nine-step guide to launching your sales force into the future.

1. Build a bigger Rolodex

The Products
Jigsaw, Ziggs, ZoomInfo, Spoke

How They Work
It’s said that a salesperson is only as good as his or her Rolodex. Fortunately, it’s now easy to have a much, much bigger Rolodex. There are a number of websites that invite businesspeople to upload and share their contacts with one another. The most popular is probably Jigsaw, which boasts 4.3 million contacts from professionals in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Subscribers can pay $25 per month to download 25 new contacts; you also can upload contacts from your own Rolodex in exchange for Jigsaw points, which can be accumulated and used for more downloads. Once you’re signed up, most contacts come with direct phone lines and e-mail addresses; if a contact turns out to have bad information, Jigsaw awards points to users who report the problem and docks the user who uploaded the info. Two other online services, Ziggs and ZoomInfo, allow users to pay to download contacts or add their own profile. ZoomInfo also provides sales data and listings of competitors within industries, a neat tool.

Other services are taking the kinds of lists traditionally offered by Hoover’s and InfoUSA (NASDAQ:IUSA) and putting them on a dose of steroids. Spoke takes big lists from providers like InfoUSA, enhances them by combining these lists with Web search data and user-validated list data, and adds it all together to create better lists. Spoke also makes it easy to slice and dice them by industry, geography, company, or revenue level. Ziggs is free; ZoomInfo is free for basic service, but advanced searches can cost as much as $12,000 a year.

Case In Point
As the director of inside sales at Bay Area e-mail security provider PostX, John Fales has long used the Web to prospect sales leads. But using Google can be time-consuming and cumbersome. And the lists provided by major providers were often filled with incomplete or outdated information. Then Fales heard about Jigsaw. The service made it a cinch to find multiple decision makers inside large companies and organizations. Fales says use of Jigsaw has sliced more than 50 percent off the PostX sales cycle. “We’ve been able to get into accounts very quickly as well as find a variety of potential players in a position to buy the product through the service,” he says. “It’s been consistently helpful. It would be very difficult to go back to the old way.”

2. Network more efficiently

The Products
LinkedIn, Ryze, BranchIt, CompanyClick

How They Work
The kids have MySpace and Facebook, and it’s hard not to be envious. In a matter of hours online, they’re building vast networks of connections–the kinds of networks that take businesspeople years of mixers and rubber-chicken dinners to create.

Unless you’re selling something like video games or skateboarding gear, you’re probably not going to have much luck marketing on MySpace. Fortunately, a number of social networking services geared toward small business have emerged. They promise to change the way we network forever. Palo Alto, California-based LinkedIn, for example, is often described as MySpace for businesspeople. You won’t find videos, MP3s, or other flashy media on the site’s bare-bones profile pages. What you will find are resumés, people’s professional affiliations, special interests–and lots of them. LinkedIn has nearly eight million registered users from more than 100 countries spanning 130 separate industries, including thousands of top executives.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20061201/sales-into-science_pagen_2.html

• Turn Challenging Questions into Sales
• How to keep people from putting the seat back on airplanes.
• Determined to Succeed but Still Failing: Why?
• Avoid Getting Your E-mails Deleted
• How to Take the Sales Out of Selling
• Warming up to cold calls
• Crafting an Opening Sales Statement
• The Right Voice-Mail Message Will Get You Through
• The Importance of Individual Sales Goals
• Be CRM Savvy

The personal edition is customizable so you can add logos, special links and setup email templates for mass communication. The reporting functionality is great. so if you want to get a quick graph of opportunities you are working on, or need to check when the last time you had a conversation with I have been using one for a couple years now and it has been extremely helpful when on the road and I needed to call Steve Jobs and didn’t have all of his contact information handy.

Get this and the integrated Outlook toolbar and you can automate the syncing of the data so it is always current.

Download SalesForce for free here.

• How to keep people from putting the seat back on airplanes.
• Free Channel Sales Playbook
• SOCOM Sales Update
• Four Great Advantages To Working at Home
• The Emperor’s New Clothes
• Top 50 best sales articles
• Office Lingo - What does it all mean?
• 15 sales posts you want to read
• Free Conference Calls
• Great sales resources

If sales is the life blood of a company then leads are the oxygen that is being carried. (o.k. maybe a bad analogy, but you get it.) If your sales people are not managing their leads correctly then fewer sales will take place and bad data will dominate your CRM.

By default, if the CRM is being updated by lazy sales people with half data or no data, then marketing will have an even harder time communicating with them. huh…you don’t want marketing communicating to your prospects? You need to stop seeing marketing as the enemy and hold their hands for a moment and let them do what they do best, so you can close more deals. The sad majority of companies do not operate this way and the two departments have no idea what the other is doing and therefore they do nothing together. If you don’t think this is hurting your companies revenue, think again.

In a post by Brian Carroll called ‘Lead Generation meets the Bermuda triangle‘, Brian makes a point that should resonate to both sales executives as well as marketing executives.

A report by the CMO Council and Business Performance Management Forum found that companies could boost their bottom line if marketing and sales could just work together. Out of 800 senior marketing and C-level executives… 7% of respondents said their sales and marketing departments work together effectively.

Sales people are not measured by the data in their CRM. In most cases they are responsible for their leads and unless there is some crisis, no one else looks at them in any detail. This is another problem that compounds the issue. There should be some metric in place for the data in the CRM. When I worked for NetSuite, a hosted business solution, there were reports generated by management that would track the movement of leads and checks for the quality of data on a weekly basis. This may sound like a lot, but in reality it did not take much time because after the first few corrections, the quality of data was easy to maintain. You hear that…EASY. There really is no reason sales and marketing management do not hold their people to quality.

Nigel Edelshain of Sales 2.0 goes into more detail on this explaining that there should be compensation for sales people to add and maintain quality data. This is not a bad approach especially if you have a database overwhelmed with bad information. Get your people to clean it up so marketing can help by targeting specific groups and get you more qualified prospects.

If sales people can be convinced that by entering good data into the company’s CRM system, marketing people will help them “blow by” their quota for the year, you will be hard pressed to keep them away from the keyboard!

What do you think?

• Turn Challenging Questions into Sales
• How to keep people from putting the seat back on airplanes.
• Avoid Getting Your E-mails Deleted
• Warming up to cold calls
• Crafting an Opening Sales Statement
• The Right Voice-Mail Message Will Get You Through
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Sales Processes
• Eight Basic Selling Steps
• How to Make Winning Software Sales Calls
• How to Make Price a Non-Issue

by sheeshoo

Here are some best practices that I have come across in my years in sales.

1. Have one central bucket for ALL automated inbound leads. Most will be from forms on your corporate website. When you upload leads from events, they should all be put into the same bucket. This is done for many reasons. It reduces on confusion and it allows the sales people to pull their leads quickly and act on them effectively.
2. Require basic information from the leads. Name, company, email, phone number and where the lead came from. The “where” is the ice breaker for the first call. If you don’t know where you came in contact with the leads, the initial contact will be awkward at best. Any other information you require will be specific to your company. But get as much as you can from them without making them feel inundated with filling out too much information. 7-9 fields seems to work well.
3. Follow up on the leads fast. I mean within 48 hours after they are imported. Nothing will impress a prospect than a quick introduction. As a manager you should also be able to run reports on this activity. Track your new lead activities, don’t lose new interested prospects. This is the one hole that many companies overlook.
4. Have a real lead status that maps each step of your sales process. For example - New, Initial call, Contact made, Discovery call… you get the idea. Most CRM systems have customizable fields for this, use them.
5. Know when your leads have become opportunities. CRM systems have different ways of doing this. Before you get one, understand this process and map your lead management around it.
6. Above all track the entire sales process so management can see where the sales people are and make the report available to the sales people so they can track this as well. This way nothing falls through the cracks.

• Turn Challenging Questions into Sales
• How to keep people from putting the seat back on airplanes.
• Avoid Getting Your E-mails Deleted
• Warming up to cold calls
• Crafting an Opening Sales Statement
• The Right Voice-Mail Message Will Get You Through
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Sales Processes
• Eight Basic Selling Steps
• How to Make Winning Software Sales Calls
• How to Make Price a Non-Issue

• How to keep people from putting the seat back on airplanes.
• Free Channel Sales Playbook
• SOCOM Sales Update
• Four Great Advantages To Working at Home
• The Emperor’s New Clothes
• Top 50 best sales articles
• Office Lingo - What does it all mean?
• 15 sales posts you want to read
• Free Conference Calls
• Great sales resources

1. Go to your setup screen. The link is located in the upper right corner of your screen. When you get to the page it should look a little like this.

2. On the left section there is a link for App Setup. Click that.

3. Find the Customize your Contacts tab

4. Now go to Create a new custom link

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Here are the steps.

1. Set up a custom field. Read this if you need help.

2. Create a custom field of data type “text”

3. Create a field label of “Yahoo IM” and edit the the field name to say “YahooName”. use a length you feel comfortable with. I used 50. Click Next

*Now the text field is complete and can be added to the page layout. Next the fun part.

1. Set up another custom field.

2. Create a custom field of data type “Formula”. On Step 2 of the wizard, specify a return type of “Text”.

3. On Step 2 of the wizard reate a field label of “Yahoo” and edit the the field name to say “Yahoo”.

4. On step 3 of the wizard cut and paste this text into the box.

IF(LEN(YahooName__c)=0,”", HYPERLINK(”ymsgr:sendIM?” & YahooName__c, IMAGE(”http://opi.yahoo.com/online?u=” & YahooName__c & “&m=g&t=0″, ” “)))

*Now add a Yahoo IM screen name to a contact record. It’s better if you use someone that you know is online. If all goes well when you add the IM you will see this.

I know that other IM’s ust have APIs that can be used. If you know of any, drop me a line. (koka101 at gmail dot com)

• How to keep people from putting the seat back on airplanes.
• Free Channel Sales Playbook
• SOCOM Sales Update
• Four Great Advantages To Working at Home
• The Emperor’s New Clothes
• Top 50 best sales articles
• Office Lingo - What does it all mean?
• 15 sales posts you want to read
• Free Conference Calls
• Great sales resources

When prospecting or in the course of general due diligence, the more you know about your lead the better. LinkedIn has over 10 million registered users. Chance are if you are dealing with a company executive, they have a LinkedIn account. Searching LinkedIn can give you some interesting facts as well as give you better insight to ‘who they really are.”

I used to pull my lead in the CRM that was either uploaded from a trade show or a person asking for more information and cut&paste the name into another tab that had LinkedIn up already. (Yes, tabbed browsing is much better!) This worked fine. I didn’t know any better so I adjusted and made it work. Now LinkedIn is looking for specific information right out of the contact record and all I have to do is click the link. Here’s how.

1. Go to your setup screen. The link is located in the upper right corner of your screen. When you get to the page it should look a little like this.

2. On the left section there is a link for App Setup. Click that.

3. Find the Customize your Contacts tab

4. Now go to Create a new custom link

5. Click on ‘New’ and create the Label for the new link. (Call it LinkedIn to make things easy.)

Here is the string to put into the large text box at the bottom. Make sure you save the custom link! Click OK at the pop up box.

COPY LINK

**Make sure that the format for the name is {!Contact.FirstName}+{!Contact.LastName}. There has been some issues with the link in some browsers.

This is searching LinkedIn for contacts that match the first name and last name of the Salesforce

record you are currently viewing.

6. Next click on Page Layout and click edit.

You will find your new custom link in the ‘Account custom link’ view on the right side.

7. Drag the LinkedIn custom tab and drop it into the ‘Useful Links’ section. Save everything.

8. Now go into a contact record and see the new LinkedIn link. Go ahead, give it a try!

If you are feeling adventurous, you can follow the same steps in the “Accounts Setup” but use the string below to search for any record in LinkedIn that works for the target company.

COPY LINK

• Turn Challenging Questions into Sales
• How to keep people from putting the seat back on airplanes.
• Avoid Getting Your E-mails Deleted
• Warming up to cold calls
• Crafting an Opening Sales Statement
• The Right Voice-Mail Message Will Get You Through
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Sales Processes
• Eight Basic Selling Steps
• How to Make Winning Software Sales Calls
• How to Make Price a Non-Issue

Go to your Setup and edit your personal information in the “My Personal information” section. Make sure you have your name, address and phone number in correct.

Now go to the “Email” section and make sure you have the right email address (This should be done already) and create an email signature.

Something like:

Regards,
{!User.FirstName} {!User.LastName}
{!User.Phone}
{!User.Email}

[and you can add a logo or picture by using the html code for example]
img src=”http://www.yourpicture.jpg

Obviously you can add a lot to your signature, this is just an example.

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• Turn Challenging Questions into Sales
• How to keep people from putting the seat back on airplanes.
• Avoid Getting Your E-mails Deleted
• Warming up to cold calls
• Crafting an Opening Sales Statement
• The Right Voice-Mail Message Will Get You Through
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Sales Processes
• Eight Basic Selling Steps
• How to Make Winning Software Sales Calls
• How to Make Price a Non-Issue

The most well known outage was in 2005 and it has had periodic issues since with the most recent being March 9th 2007 when the connections with the highly touted AppExchange platform seemed non existant. One of the salesforce.com partners said that the outage took 2 days to correct.

With problems like this how can they continue to grow when their are much better solutions like NetSuite available? The answer is in a large budget set aside for marketing.

Now it seems that instead of fixing the problem they have added a partner on deck that will put the data on other availible server in case such an incident were to happen again.

Having a partner to do this service seems like a good idea, but one would think that the SFDC camp would almost be cringing while signing the contract.

It’s such a shame that companies pay a premium service for a SaaS model and it comes to having to pay more just to have access to your data.

This is why executives and sales leaders need to ask their CRM vendor if they can provide a guaranteed uptime.

• No Related Post

• Turn Challenging Questions into Sales
• How to keep people from putting the seat back on airplanes.
• Avoid Getting Your E-mails Deleted
• Warming up to cold calls
• Crafting an Opening Sales Statement
• The Right Voice-Mail Message Will Get You Through
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Sales Processes
• Eight Basic Selling Steps
• How to Make Winning Software Sales Calls
• How to Make Price a Non-Issue