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By Pete Barlas, Investor’s Business Daily
The cloud computing trend shows no sign of slowing, which is good news for cloud software vendors Salesforce.com and NetSuite. NetSuite (N)shares are up about 65% since May, while Salesforce.com (CRM) is up about 40% since August. Both companies are expected to post Q4 revenue growth of about 30% vs. Q4 2011, says Richard Baldry, an analyst for Wunderlich Securities. Salesforce.com and NetSuite are two of the cloud trend pioneers. AP View Enlarged Image Click here to travel to the training page.
To start building your Salesforce and Force.com skills, take advantage of these short online tutorials. These are samples from our full Premier online training catalog, which contains more than 100 titles and is updated monthly. When you’re ready for more, contact your account executive about Premier Success Plans. An article on Computerworld discusses the main focus of SalesForce.com Spring 2013 release. Below is a small excerpt, but you can read the full article here to see the rest of the new features and updates in the release.
“Salesforce.com’s next product update will feature scores of new capabilities for its core CRM (customer relationship management) application as well as the Chatter messaging and collaboration service. A sandbox preview for the Spring ’13 update is scheduled for Jan. 11, according to a set of release notes posted on Salesforce.com website. The update will feature a large number of enhancements to Chatter, Salesforce.com’s social collaboration and messaging service, covering areas such as search, content previewing and general usability.” Salesforce.com Announces Fiscal 2013 Third Quarter Results
• Quarterly Revenue of $788 Million, up 35% Year-Over-Year • Deferred Revenue of $1.29 Billion, up 41% Year-Over-Year • Unbilled Deferred Revenue Increases to Approximately $3 Billion • Raises FY13 Revenue Guidance to $3.041 – $3.046 Billion • Initiates FY14 Revenue Guidance of $3.80 – $3.85 Billion “Business is Social: Connecting with Customers in Entirely New Ways
A worldwide social revolution is taking place today. There are more than 4.5 billion social users around the world and they are having more than 150 million conversations everyday on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more.” This article gives some insight into how SalesForce.com is positioned to be a leader in the emerging social CRM business strategy. Read the article here. Most VPs of Sales and VPs of Marketing love Salesforce.com! It immediately places their teams in a best practices sales and marketing environment. The Salesforce reporting engine enables company-wide visibility into your marketing campaigns, leads, opportunities, support cases and much more customer information. Additionally, with the relatively high rate of turnover in sales, most new hire candidates have used Salesforce in previous gigs, which theoretically reduces their ramp up time. Finally, Salesforce is just “cool”! Great company. Great software. But is your company maximizing the benefits of Salesforce?
Way too many companies buy Salesforce but never properly implement and maintain it. Few companies really maximize the Salesforce ROI. The companies that get the most value out of Salesforce champion its implementation and usage. Management inspires their teams to use it as a productivity and management tool. Management uses it to make informed marketing and sales operations decisions. The better the data, the better the decisions. Salesforce shines when used as a productivity tool. Here are some sales management suggestions: • Reinforce the idea that as a sales rep or sales manager, there is no better place to manage your leads, accounts and opportunities. It is a best practice environment. • Let them know that management relies on Salesforce to make decisions. • Track leads by status by sales rep. Make sure your reps are getting through all of their New leads (preferably daily). • Set pipeline creation targets (preferably weekly) then share their results. This can be a good indicator of hustle and promotes competitiveness. • Make sure your sales reps are assigning meaningful tasks to every opportunity. What does it take to move the opp forward? • Challenge your reps to keep Opportunity Stages, Close Dates accurate. • Hold formal sales forecasts meetings (preferably weekly). Use Salesforce for the data, not Excel. • Make sure your sales reps have quotes tied to the higher probability opportunities. Your customers can’t buy without a quote. • Look at Last Modified Date and Stage Duration for each Opp. Identify stagnant opps and coach them on how to move them forward. • Communicate that “if it didn’t happen in Salesforce, it didn’t happen”. • Reward your reps for good usage behavior. Ironically, using Salesforce the right way results in better sales and higher commissions. Promote the ease of use and benefits and hold people accountable. Once your team is using Salesforce productively, run reports regularly. Examples include: • Marketing Campaign Effectiveness • Leads by Rep by Status • Pipeline Creation by Rep by Week • Pipeline by Rep by Stage. Weekly, monthly and quarterly. • Opportunities without Tasks • Opportunities without Quotes • Opportunities with Expired Quotes Configuring Salesforce to serve as a productivity will help your sales reps do their jobs better. Over time this will have huge benefits on management’s ability to focus on the right marketing campaigns. It will help management quickly evaluate the sales reps. It will give management better deal management and better forecasting. I love Salesforce because I have seen it enable all of the things discussed above. Cloudingo discovers and eliminates duplicate data in your Salesforce instance – cleaning up your Leads, Contacts and Accounts records. Please read these complementary AppExchange reviews highlighting Cloudingo’s power, ease of use and customer service
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