So, now what?

Now that Salesforce is here, now what?

Well, my first priority is to get the Project object set up and sending itself down to Dexter so we can keep from having to duplicate data entry.

Beyond that, though, what do we want to accomplish with Salesforce? I've started reading a book called Salesforce.com: Secrets of Success by David Taber. Yes, believe it or not, there are nerdy people who go to that geeky area of the bookstore and not only buy but actually read those incredibly boring looking computer books! :) In one section, the author lists mandates for Salesforce.com (SFDC). Here are some of them:

• To be the only source of information about customer relationships. If other systems contain customer data, they need to be integrated with Salesforce.com over time so that the company achieves a 360 degree view of the customer.
• Not to be used as a spying machine or a micromanagement tool.
• To be used as the command center or virtual war room for winning accounts and keeping customers happy. The data entered into the system needs to be good enough to drive real decisions and allocate resources.
• To eliminate excessive emails, data reentry, and forgotten action items.
• To use Salesforce.com data for management meetings, as the system-of-record data.
• To enable the company to move toward an MBE -- Manage By Exception -- policy, meaning routine decisions should be handled "in process." SFDC's alerts, thresholds, workflows and reports should be used to handle normal situations and to automatically flag or escalate the unusual cases.

Sounds good, doesn't it? We've got some work ahead of us!!

Wanna chat? In Salesforce!

Today I went to a meeting of the Silicon Valley Salesforce.com user's group. The topic of the day was "Chatter," a new feature in Salesforce. It's still in beta but we can start using it any time we're ready.

Chatter gives us the ability to do a sort of combination Facebook/Instant Messaging within Salesforce. At first thought, it's hard to imagine what the benefit would be of that kind of capability. In fact, several of the speakers at the meeting today confessed they were skeptics but now they were all touting the benefits.

As with Facebook, you can post a status - something saying what you're doing - and those who are following you will see that status. But, even more interestingly, you can follow objects within Salesforce and have live discussions about those.

For example, you could go to an Opportunity and post a question about that opportunity - maybe "I'm with the customer and they're asking if we could show them an example of xxxx type of furniture." Everyone following either the person asking or that opportunity would see that question in a chat window, and could immediately chime in with suggestions or answers.

Soon we'll be doing projects in Salesforce. Think of the possibilities there. What if the leads for each project were able to instantly post updates on how the project was going? OK, they'd need a internet-connected device for doing that, but still, wouldn't it be cool?

You can post links and files and discuss those. We can also bring in feeds from external sources. For example, we have a Pivot Facebook page, we could bring in the updates from there. We could bring the updates from Herman Miller's page and other of our vendors.

Chatter in Salesforce is an exciting development! It'll be fun to explore it.