Since many of the mods I will be mentioning all have this in common, I'll make it easy and explain this once and link to it as needed.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

I found this while looking for information on tweaks I can make to my salesforce.com account. I was looking for a way to add images into contact and account records and came across this. This simple mod not only allows you to add a contacts Yahoo IM name into a special field, it goes one step further to create an icon that will tell you if that contact is online or off. Now the search is on to find simular mods that can do the same for AIM, Google and MSN.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 ...

As a sales person, I live in my CRM. It's the primary tool for my profession second only to my phone. Another sales tool I use is a social networking site called LinkedIn. Here is how they discribe themselves "LinkedIn is an online network of more than 10 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries". I call it the MySpace for professionals. I have put together a way to bring the two tools together and make my Salesforce CRM work for me in new ways. 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 ...

You have your account. Either through work or the personal account you signed up for. Now make sure you have your information in correct.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.

This domain will be use for the development of tweaks and modifications to Salesforce.com that a company can use to customize the Salesforce CRM to help drive sales. These posts will be grow over time and will be primarily focused on the sales person and how to use your CRM to gather better information on your accounts, contacts and leads. Since a CRM is supposed to empower the sales person let's make a few adjustments in your Salesforce CRM that will drive better decisions and make your daily sales grind a bit easier the SOCOM way.Many companies use Salesforce, they are the leader in the CRM market. The most obvious appeal for companies to use a hosted CRM as a sales tool is mainly the on demand nature of the system and the ability to give executives a view into the company with special reports and dashboards.But what about the account manager on inside sales person? Besides having a basic listing of leads, contacts and opportunities, what can they do with such a great tool? How many dashboards are available out of the box for them? How customized are the fields in their records? Chances are like most companies you ...

5 tips for writing e-mail subject lines that'll get recipients to read on One of the most important elements of your e-mail communications is the subject line. Next to the "from" address--which should be a recognizable company name--the subject line will determine whether your e-mail gets opened.Writing a great subject line is no small challenge. You only have a few words to make it compelling, urgent and specific--without sounding too sales-like or misleading your readers. Here are some tips for writing subject lines that'll get great results.1. Keep it short and sweet. Do your best to keep your subject lines under 50 characters, including spaces, as most e-mail clients display 50 characters or less. A recent study done by e-mail monitoring company Return Path showed that subject lines with 49 or fewer characters had open rates 12.5 percent higher than those with 50 or more characters. The study also found that click-through rates for subject lines with 49 or fewer characters were 75 percent higher than for those with 50 or more characters. Want to increase your open and click-through rates? Keep your subject line short and sweet.2. Be specific. A ...

Salesforce.com (CRM) is by far the most well known CRM company in the industry but they are far from the most accessible. Huh? Salesforce.com has outages? Yes, it happens more often than anyone wants to admit, especially in the salesforce camp.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 ...

All sales reps want solid, qualified leads. Not surprisingly, the CRM upgrade that sales reps request most frequently is lead generation and management. Unfortunately, this type of software has a long way to go before it will be really useful. To understand why, let’s look at the early adopters – the high tech firms that always get the newest software technology before it becomes generally available.According to the analyst firm IDC Research, approximately half of marketing investment across the tech vendor community is allocated to demand generation. Furthermore, about one-third of that investment is earmarked to directly support the sales force. That’s a significant commitment, but new research from IDC shows that, for most high tech vendors, this complex and expensive intersection of marketing and sales remains very much a “work in process.” In other words, they don’t know how to make this stuff work yet.IDC undertook the study to find out which IT vendors have demonstrated best practices in lead management process development and execution. While IDC hoped to discover best practices, the study revealed that marketing's lead management process at a majority of tech vendors failed to provide even the most basic element: establishing ...

The battle drill is a tool that soldiers use to practice fundamental skills for their trade. The one that comes to mind immediately is Battle Drill #6 for the Military Police. I think of this one because I had to do this a hundred times (at least) in my military career.Battle drill 6 was the act of dismounting a MK 19 grenade launcher from a turret and placing it on a tripod away from the vehicle. Sounds easy enough but when the MK19 weighs in at 72 lbs, it can be a challenge after the 12th evolution and you are being timed to standard.But we did this drill time and time again for the shear fact that when on the battlefield you needed to know how to do this quickly, safely, and correct to complete your mission.Drills like these were rehearsed with most of our free time to keep us sharp and on top of our game. The same should be done in business.Sales leaders should develop their own drills that are specific to their industries. For example I work in a hosted application space for a company called NetSuite that competes with SalesForce.com (CRM) (Who I can say is ...

Strategic Software Sales (SSS) and Business Process Reenginering (BPR) often go hand in hand. While some types of software (like office automation) can be installed in virtually any corporate environment, truly strategic software, like CRM, ERP, or PLM always require significant organization change (i.e. BPR) before it can be truly effective. The reason is simple. Automating a clunky business process is pretty much like strapping a jet engine to a covered wagon.Unfortunately, whenever a software sale crutches on the requirement to do BPR, there’s a good chance that the customer won’t buy, because nobody likes BPR. In the classic Reengineering the Corporation, authors Hammer and Champy estimate that “as many as 50 to 70 percent of the organizations that undertake a reengineering effort do not achieve the dramatic results they intended.” That’s an abysmal track record and (since it comes from the guys who literally “wrote the book”) it’s probably overstating the number of actual successes. In the real world of corporate executives, it’s widely understood that BPR is likely to become a major corporate headache rather than a truly transformative experience.This presents the software sales rep with a challenge. On the one hand, you don’t want to scare your ...