All things Salesforce and getting caught up!

Sorry for the lack of postings lately, but things have been pretty hectic since Dreamforce for the Bluebird. Let's get you caught up...

I gave an interview with Marketo's VP of Marketing on the topic of lead management, a topic which I also spoke about at Dreamforce. You can view the presentation that I gave, along with Scott Keane from salesforce.com and Tony Siconolfi from MySpace.

Check out my Vertical Response "woman on the street" interview from Dreamforce below. If I look like I'm about to crack up, it's because there was a member of the hospitality crew staring at me from behind the cameraman and it was really unnerving! It also features local salesforce power users Jason Stewart of DemandBase and Kirk Crenshaw of RevCatalyst.



Last night I attended the SF Bay Area (North) Salesforce.com's User Group event. They gave an update on the Winter '08 Release which includes some killer features. For marketing, they're releasing the long awaited Campaign Hierarchies which enables you to create parent/child relationships for integrated campaigns rolling up campaign stats to the parent. Now most of you savvy power users had created custom fields or look-ups to manage this years ago, but still for newbies it's a great feature.

Next, they've built a sharing model for Marketing, so you can share access to Campaigns across groups. In the past, if your role was Marketing User, you could see everyone's campaigns. Now, you'll be able to make campaigns visible/invisible based on groups. I couldn't imagine why you wouldn't want everyone in your company to have access to your Campaigns pages, but I guess this was a deal breaker for some big Financial Services firms.

There are some other really cool features for sales and marketing alike, but I'll let you read the release guide to find out for yourself.

Kraig Swensrud, Senior Director of Marketing Products at salesforce, talked about Marketing in the Google era and the importance of your website as a lead generator and sales person for your company. A few interesting pointers and factoids about Google AdWords:

• Initial caps in URLs get higher click thru rates (e.g. SalesForceAutomation vs. salesforceautomation). Has to do with readability.


• Calls to action should be specific to what you want them to do - Learn more - Free Trial - Download a whitepaper, rather than simply 'Click here.'


• 4 out of 5 Salesforce for Google Adwords users are pointing their ads to their homepage! This is a major no-no people. Best practice is to send people to dedicated landing pages, which might not be visible on your external site (i.e. you can't navigate to them).

OK, that about does it for me, next up...Campaign reporting. Stay tuned!