One of the really cool new features that salesforce.com has made available with their Spring '08 release, is Salesforce Ideas. They launched salesforce ideas to their customers last year, and have been using it to drive development priorities ever since.
Now salesforce's customers can leverage that same functionality for their own employees, customers and partners. Post features or products that you're thinking about building and let the market dictate the prioirity level for each of them.
It's only available to Enterprise customers and above, since you'll need to enable the customer portal and/or partner portal to allow your constituents to log in and vote. But it's another great reason for Professional users to consider an upgrade.
I think the plan is to eventually allow non-customers and partners, i.e. the general public, to use it but I still think it's a cool feature.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Salesforce User Group Meeting - Bay Area
UPDATE - SLIDES POSTED - CLICK ON PRESENTATION HYPERLINK!
Today marked the first ever Salesforce.com Bay Area User Group meeting to take place in the morning, and it was a big success. Hosted by VerticalResponse, in their SF office, it drew a crowd of 40+ users from a broad range of industries (both commercial and non-profit) and edition users (group, professional, and enterprise).
Following an introduction by Jason Stewart, the Bay Area User Group leader, I kicked off the morning with a presentation on creating web-to-lead forms and auto-responder emails.
On behalf of our host, Alex Scalisi took the floor and touted the benefits of working with an email service provider like VerticalResponse to drive increased deliverability and ease of use. Jason was followed by Andrea Wildt, Sr. Product Mgr Salesforce Marketing, from salesforce.com, who demonstrated how to create advanced workflows for marketing. For instance, triggering an HTML email offering a total cost of ownership whitepaper one week after a lead is archived due to a lack of budget. Pretty powerful stuff.
There were lively debates over the virtues of HTML vs. plain text emails, with a focus on deliverability and trackability implications. The issue of designing emails for Blackberry users arose as well with the key takeaway being less image and text at the top of the email are key.
There was a lot of interaction and with only one sponsor presentation, it allowed for a lot more audience participation. Overall, it was a great event!
Today marked the first ever Salesforce.com Bay Area User Group meeting to take place in the morning, and it was a big success. Hosted by VerticalResponse, in their SF office, it drew a crowd of 40+ users from a broad range of industries (both commercial and non-profit) and edition users (group, professional, and enterprise).
Following an introduction by Jason Stewart, the Bay Area User Group leader, I kicked off the morning with a presentation on creating web-to-lead forms and auto-responder emails.
On behalf of our host, Alex Scalisi took the floor and touted the benefits of working with an email service provider like VerticalResponse to drive increased deliverability and ease of use. Jason was followed by Andrea Wildt, Sr. Product Mgr Salesforce Marketing, from salesforce.com, who demonstrated how to create advanced workflows for marketing. For instance, triggering an HTML email offering a total cost of ownership whitepaper one week after a lead is archived due to a lack of budget. Pretty powerful stuff.
There were lively debates over the virtues of HTML vs. plain text emails, with a focus on deliverability and trackability implications. The issue of designing emails for Blackberry users arose as well with the key takeaway being less image and text at the top of the email are key.
There was a lot of interaction and with only one sponsor presentation, it allowed for a lot more audience participation. Overall, it was a great event!
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
The Unsubscribe Mystery Resolved!
Have you ever had someone respond to an email marketing piece asking you to remove them from your list and complaining that they'd asked to opt-out numerous times, only to look them up in salesforce.com and find out that their opt-out box is ticked?
Well you're not alone. This was happening to me periodically with one of my clients and I couldn't figure it out. So of course the first thing I did was check my report criteria to see if opt-out was equal to false (which of course it was). Then after a lot of research, it finally hit me.
The person, who was a contact in salesforce, had been converted from a lead which meant that they were showing up on my lead report, and my contact report. Even though you can't get to or edit a converted lead, it still appears when you run a lead report! The lead hadn't been opted out, so the report was still picking them up. So if you're sending an email blast to a lead and a contact report, you could run into this issue.
The good news is that there is a super easy fix. Thanks to my buddy Jeremy over at VerticalResponse who pointed out that you can simply set your lead report criteria so that you're only getting unconverted leads. It's as simple as Converted is equal to False. Et voila!
Well you're not alone. This was happening to me periodically with one of my clients and I couldn't figure it out. So of course the first thing I did was check my report criteria to see if opt-out was equal to false (which of course it was). Then after a lot of research, it finally hit me.
The person, who was a contact in salesforce, had been converted from a lead which meant that they were showing up on my lead report, and my contact report. Even though you can't get to or edit a converted lead, it still appears when you run a lead report! The lead hadn't been opted out, so the report was still picking them up. So if you're sending an email blast to a lead and a contact report, you could run into this issue.
The good news is that there is a super easy fix. Thanks to my buddy Jeremy over at VerticalResponse who pointed out that you can simply set your lead report criteria so that you're only getting unconverted leads. It's as simple as Converted is equal to False. Et voila!
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