It’s Alive!

Posted by Peter Mitton on 16 Nov 2006 | Tagged as: Uncategorized

Hello everyone! Sorry for the long delay between posts, but computer problems over the last month have prevented access. But no more, problems solved, and we will be able to continue our work. Watch for a new post in our Task Management series. Happy Salesforcing!

Dreamforce Videos - See what happened!

Posted by Peter Mitton on 20 Oct 2006 | Tagged as: Uncategorized

Jamie, over at http://blogs.salesforce.com has posted a series of videos from Dreamforce.

If you are like me, you wanted to be there, but couldn’t. So these videos are an excellent resource to explore and learn about what happened at Dreamforce this year. It makes me want to go to next years event.

Check it out!

Task Management Tools Lesson 2: Creating Custom Fields

Posted by Peter Mitton on 20 Oct 2006 | Tagged as: Sales Process, User, Administrators, Tips and Tricks

In Part 2 of our series, we discussed how we create tasks for ourselves and other team members and where to find those tasks again later. In part 3, we continue the process of organizing and presenting that information in a concise and easy to follow manner.

So, in this lesson, we continue to examine the creation and use of reports to help manage our tasks. If you recall from our earlier discussion, we generally want to know the following things about individual tasks…

  1. What is the Task.
  2. Who is the Task assigned to.
  3. When was it assigned.
  4. When is it due (if has a due date).
  5. Is it on time, or is it late

More below the fold!

Continue Reading »

Whoops…. I am behind schedule.

Posted by Peter Mitton on 18 Oct 2006 | Tagged as: Uncategorized

Those of you waiting for the continuation of yesterdays article will need to wait a little longer. I should have the video fixed later tonight and be able to post later this evening or first thing tomorrow AM. Thanks for your patience!

Task Management Tools Lesson 1: Creating and Finding Tasks

Posted by Peter Mitton on 17 Oct 2006 | Tagged as: General, User

In Part 1 of our series, we discussed, in broad and conceptual terms, how we might utilize Salesforce as a tool for internal communication. We also discussed some of the theoretical tools that might be required to properly track and report on those communications. In part 2, we will begin the process of organizing and presenting that information in a concise and easy to follow manner.

Lets review, for a moment, some of the questions we should be asking ourselves, and then begin to put together a way of answering those questions using Salesforce.

Question 1: What tasks are assigned to me?

This is a pretty basic question, and probably one of the most important. Thankfully, it has already been answered for us. On our home tab is a quick list of all of our current tasks. If we examine the list, you should notice that there is a drop down selector in the upper right corner that allows us to filter the list of tasks. It should be noted that when we exceed a certain number of tasks, the display on the front page stops, and we are presented instead with a “view more” option. This takes us the second screen which shows us all of our tasks as well as calendar events.

You can see this demonstrated in the attached Lesson Video #1: Creating and Finding Tasks (11m26s, 3.48mb).

In our next lesson, we discuss how to create a report which will show us all of the tasks that are assigned to us.

Vacation Time!

Posted by Peter Mitton on 10 Oct 2006 | Tagged as: Uncategorized

Just a quick notice, I will be on vacation from Wed 10/11/2006 to 10/16/2006. I am not sure if I will have internet access where I am going, so I will post the articles this week if I can, or when I get back. Articles to look for…

  • Continuing the series on task management.
  • Discussion of new Saleforce programming language.
  • Discussion of data securtiy and privacy.
  • And so much more!

See you all when I get back.

From the “Things that should be in Salesforce but aren’t - file!” - Task Management Tools

Posted by Peter Mitton on 10 Oct 2006 | Tagged as: Sales Process, User, Managers, Administrators, Tips and Tricks

When we work in Salesforce, we have the advantage of being able to communicate across the enterprise using the activities tools. Now, we have already covered the process of creating activities, but as we can see from our example, we don’t have a lot of visibility.

But you might be saying to yourself right now “But I saw all my tasks and events, thats pretty visible, isn’t it?”.

You would be right about that, it is pretty visible to you, but what about this scenario. Lets say we have used the activity creation tools to create a task for another one of our team members. How do we know its complete? Heck, how do we even remember that we created the task in the first place. Well, this series of articles is going to cover this in some detail. Get your propeller hats out, because we are going to dive in to some advanced tips and tricks below the fold!

Continue Reading »

Response to Kingsley on the Successforce blog

Posted by Peter Mitton on 06 Oct 2006 | Tagged as: General

I am always surfing around, trying to find interesting bits of Salesforce knowledge. Normally, I kept that information to myself or shared it with my team. But with the start of this blog, I feel a need to share that information when I find it. As a new blogger, questions like this are important to me. In his post, Kingsley at Successforce writes…

After Scoble and Charlie Wood blogged about how well SAP treated bloggers at their conference, I’ve been wondering - how can we treat our bloggers better?

And for those of you who wonder why we would want to engage bloggers, it’s because they write about us, and often in a way that appeals to the greatest PR machine on earth: Google. We would love for more of you to write about us (good or bad), and I’d welcome any ideas on how we can help you along.

Well, here are my thoughts, below the fold.

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Arrowpointe Products releases Info Center Beta

Posted by Peter Mitton on 05 Oct 2006 | Tagged as: General, Administrators

Scott over at Arrowpoint Products and Perspectives on Salesforce.com has relased a new AppExchange application. Looking it over, I would think of it as a bit of a mix between a FAQ and a Wiki. In Scott’s words.

The Info Center was developed to fill a common need. During a rollout, users typically go through well constructed training sessions and will usually walk away with training materials, quick reference guides, etc. However, once the system has been in production for a while, people rarely ever reference that material again. When people have questions, the answers can be hard to find in the training materials. Training materials are typically not organized to answer specific questions that arise.

This is a problem we would frequently run into, and I have often thought that the Salesforce document solution wasn’t very strong in its basic implimentation. This is something I am going to have to play with. You can read more here and here.

The First Cup of the Day: Starting My Salesforce Day - Part 2 Activities

Posted by Peter Mitton on 05 Oct 2006 | Tagged as: General, Sales Process, User

In part 1 of this series, we outlined the concept that the start of our sales day as an “Outside Salesperson” starts on the Home Tab of Salesforce . As you could see in that article, the Home Tab was looking pretty sparse. In fact, it is down right empty!

Thats no good! Our managers are looking at their sales metrics and saying “What the heck is Peter doing?” and “Why isn’t Peter scheduled to make calls?” and most importantly, “Why do I keep this guy around as a Salesperson?”. These are questions we don’t want our bosses to ask us. As Salespeople, the only time we want to hear from our boss is when he or she is telling us how great we are and how they are planning on increasing our comission rate. Verbal reports are for “Old Style” sales organizations. This is the age of the computer! This is the age of “pulling data” rather than “pushing data”. In a word, we need to do some CALL PLANNING.

Continue Reading »

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