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Salesforce.com Secrets of Success: Best Practices for Growth and Profitability

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Salesforce.com Secrets of Success: Best Practices for Growth and Profitability

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Description

  • Copyright 2009
  • Edition: 1st
  • eBook (Watermarked)
  • ISBN-10: 0-13-265104-1
  • ISBN-13: 978-0-13-265104-2

Drive Better Productivity and Increase Saleswith Salesforce.com–Starting Now

Discover Real-World Best PracticesWithout Paying Expensive Consultants

You’re investing in Salesforce.com for one reason: to drive major performance improvements across your entire organization. Salesforce.com® Secrets of Success will help you do just that. Drawing on his experience with dozens of deployments, author David Taber offers expert guidance on every aspect of Salesforce.com deployment, with results-focused best practices for every area of the organization touched by Salesforce.com, including sales, marketing, customer service, finance, legal, and IT. This is information you’d otherwise have to pay a consultant $300/hour to get...information you won’t find in any other book!

Taber walks you through developing a comprehensive and effective implementation strategy, followed by tactics and specifics to overcome every challenge you face, including internal politics. Through this book and its companion Web site, www.SFDC-secrets.com, Taber provides questionnaires, step-by-step guides, and extensive resources–all part of the Revenue Overdrive™ system that gives your organization maximum results from Salesforce.com.

  • Achieve higher end-customer satisfaction and dramatic sales productivity gains
  • Use the SFA Maturity Model to assess readiness, fill gaps, and gain early, deep user adoption
  • Overcome “people, product, and process” pitfalls that can limit the value of Salesforce.com
  • Learn which tools, add-ons, features, and extensions are right for your implementation

This book’s start-to-finish roadmap for success can be used by companies of all sizes in all industries–with specific chapters for executives, team leaders, implementation team members, developers, and users throughout the business.

Sample Content

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xix

About the Author xxi

Introduction xxiii

The Promise of CRM xxiii

Achieving the Promise of CRM xxv

Do You Need an SFA System or a CRM System? xxvii

When Salesforce.com Is the Best Choice–and When It Isn’t xxix

How to Use This Book xxx

Executive Summary  1

What Every CxO Needs to Know About Salesforce.com 1

Why Are You Looking at an SFA/CRM System? 3

Keeping the Big Picture in Focus 4

Driving Toward Project Approval 6

Once the Project Is Under Way 12

Deployments and the Adoption Cycle 17

After Deployment: Using SFDC to Help Drive the Ship 23

Essential Tools for the Executive 27

Chapter 1: Planning Ahead 29

Getting to Business Value 29

Developing a Model of Your Customer Relationship 30

Setting Business Goals 32

Setting Requirements: Who, Where, What, and Why 32

Organizing and Publishing Project Documents 36

Prioritizing Requirements 37

When Requirements Should Bend 41

Knowing Your Boundaries 41

Making the Business Case 44

Quantifying the Return 49

Developing a Straw-Man Schedule 52

Avoiding the Big Bang Project 58

Outsourcing 60

Setting Executive Expectations 62

Getting the Right Resources Committed 64

Chapter 2: Reports and Data 67

For Users, Seeing Is Believing 67

Start with What You Have 68

Scoping the System via Report Mock-Ups 71

The Crux: Semantics 73

Reports–Inside Versus Outside 74

Scoping the System via User Screen Design 76

A Guided Tour of the SFDC Object Model 78

What’s in a Namespace? 82

SFDC’s Data Requirements 84

Historical External Data 94

Chapter 3: Preparing Your Data 97

Data Pollution 97

Getting the Lay of the Land 98

Migrating Data from an Existing SFA/CRM System 98

Migrating Data from Other Systems 108

Your Big Weekend: Doing the Import 109

The Morning After: Deduping Records 110

The Morning After the Morning After: Enriching Data 114

The Ultimate Job Security 116

Creating a Cost Model for Clean Data 118

Chapter 4: Implementation Strategy 119

Before You Begin 119

Big Bangs and Waterfalls 120

The Agile Manifesto 121

You Really Have to Plan: Agile Development Is Not Enough 123

Wave Deployment 124

What’s in a Wave? 125

Planning the Sequence of Waves: WaveMaps 126

Collecting Resources for a Wave 133

Starting the Wave 136

As a Wave Takes Shape 140

Dirty Little Secret: The Data Are Everything 142

During the Wave: Real-Time Scheduling 143

Kicked Out of a Wave 146

Wave Endgame 147

Deployment 148

Getting Ready for the Next Wave 151

Post-Implementation Implementation 152

Chapter 5: People and Organizational Readiness 155

Adoption Is Everything 155

Using the SFA Maturity Model 156

Part I: What Is Management Trying to Achieve, and

How Hard Will It Be? 157

Part II: Is Your Organization Ready for Its Target Level? 165

Part III: How Big Is the Gap? 173

Understanding the Next Wave of Users 174

User Training 177

What User Readiness Means for Deployment 179

Post-Deployment User Frustration 179

How Many Administrators Does It Take to Screw in a Light Bulb? 181

Chapter 6: Working the Politics 183

Technology Is Not the Problem 183

It’s Not Just Big Organizations 183

Who’s the Champion? 184

Who Pays for the System? 188

Who Will Own the System? 190

Who Owns the Data Now? 192

Dealing with Review Committees 197

Identifying and Dealing with Opposition to the Project 198

The Politics of System Adoption 200

Identifying and Dealing with Adoption Problems 204

Indoctrination 206

The Politics of Restriction 206

Chapter 7: Products You Will Need 209

SFDC Is a Platform, Not Just a Product 209

Don’t Overdo It 211

First, Seek to Understand 212

Next, Weigh Your Options 217

Essential Toys: Featurettes 221

Essential System Administrator Tools 223

Essential Add-Ons for the Marketer 226

Essential Features for Sales Management 229

Essential Tools for Support 234

Essential Extensions for Finance 236

Essential Features for the Executive 238

Chapter 8: Optimizing Business Processes 239

The Top-Down Perspective 239

What Is a Business Process? 240

How Do Business Processes Fit Together? 241

Identifying Which Business Processes You Need to Think About 242

Analyzing Business Processes 252

Example Business Process Analysis 256

How Much Should Be Changed? 261

Best Practices with Business Process Redesign 261

Making the Changes 265

After the Changes Are Made 266

Chapter 9: Best Practices for Sales 267

“Universal” Best Practices 267

Define and Document the Sales Model 270

Inside Sales 273

Sales Representatives 289

Field Sales Engineers or Product Specialists 301

Sales Management 302

Chapter 10: Best Practices in Marketing 325

Marketing Organizations 325

Lead Generation and Collection 326

Lead Generation Campaigns 334

Lead Handling 339

Lead Cultivation and Nurturing 351

Lead Qualification and Conversion 352

Partners 353

Customer References 353

Public Relations 356

Product Management/Product Marketing 357

Marketing System Administrator 360

Marketing Executives 362

Chapter 11: Best Practices in Customer Support 369

Support Organizations and SFDC 369

Universal Support Best Practices 371

The Customer Order Support Center 374

Order Expediting, Distribution, and Shipping 376

Technical and Warranty Support 377

The Customer Help Desk 381

Professional Services 382

Chapter 12: Best Practices in Finance and Legal 385

Driving the Investment Decision 385

Keeping Expectations Reasonable 388

The Path to Project Success 389

Accounting and Ongoing Operations 390

Mergers, Integrations, and Divestitures 399

Fundraising 400

Legal 401

Human Resources 402

Chapter 13: Best Practices in IT 405

Level of IT Engagement 405

Skills IT Will Need 408

Planning for the Implementation 409

Implementation 416

Ongoing Usage 421

Appendix A: Tools to Prioritize Requirements 431

Prioritizing Project Requirements 431

The Delphi Method 432

Prioritize via Investment 433

Weakest/Strongest Elimination 434

Popular Votes 437

Appendix B: Example Requirements Statements 439

Example Project Requirements: Smaller Company 439

Example Project Requirements: Larger Company 441

Index 447

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