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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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I am a big fan of Gitomer.

One of his many sayings (and I do mean many) refers to the idea that if you are going to be great in Sales (with a capital “S”), then there are certain things you need to do in order to be successful. If I might quote:

“You can only earn a commision using a sales technique, but you can earn a fortune building friendships and relationships.” -Jeffery Gitomer, The Sales Bible: The Ultimate Sales Resource, Revised Edition

And really, when you get down to it, Salesforce is just a simple (and perhaps complicated at times) tool for helping you maintain and manage those important relationships. And if you dig even further, as salespeople, we deal with a LOT of different relationships. Keeping track of those relationships can be really hard. I know when I started, I juggled a lot of different pieces of paper, day planners, business cards, presentation materials, to do lists, etc., etc., etc.

Well, Salesforce can help us make this process easier, and smoother. With the help of this tool, we can manage one of the most valuable commodities we own as a sales team, INFORMATION, and use it to our advantage.

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Welcome to my new blog for the users of Salesforce. I have been using Salesforce for some time now. During my time using the Salesforce CRM, I have been a salesperson, salesmanager and site administrator. Because the cost of implemintation for my organization was so high, we did not have the opportunity to get training of any sort. Because of this, it fell upon me to learn the tools and pass that knowledge on to our inside and field sales personel.

In the course of learning Salesforce, I came to realize that something was missing out there. I thought that a resource was needed for everyday users to learn the ins and outs of Salesforce. I wanted easy to understand realworld examples that would help me improve my organizations best practices. This site is the result of that desire. In the future I expect to be posting my lessons, examples, thoughts and opinions on a variety of topics. I hope you will join me in learning together.

I welcome your comments and opinions, so lets get started!

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