Salesforce.com Secrets of Success (2^nd Ed.)
Best Practices for Growth and Profitability

New Tools and Best Practices for Driving More Sales and Profits with Salesforce.com

From Chatter to the Service Cloud, Salesforce.com now offers unprecedented opportunities to supercharge business performance. But most SFDC customers won't achieve that potential. Salesforce.com® Secrets of Success, Second Edition, is the one guide that will help you transform these opportunities into profit.

Drawing on his personal experience with more than a hundred deployments, David Taber guides you through every aspect of Salesforce.com planning, implementation, and management. Building on a first edition that earned rave reviews, Taber focuses on the most valuable innovations in Salesforce.com?s most recent releases.

Reflecting all that?s been learned about making Salesforce.com work, Taber offers results-focused best practices for sales, marketing, customer service, finance, legal, IT, and beyond. You?ll find indispensable new insights into accelerating user adoption, achieving stronger operational results, and overcoming today?s key obstacles to maximizing the value of Salesforce.com.

New coverage in this revised edition includes

• Using the Service Cloud to cut costs, accelerate time to revenue, improve agility, and maximize customer lifetime value
• Leveraging tablets and smartphones to build your CRM strategy
• Identifying prospects and delighting customers through Salesforce.com?s Social CRM capabilities
• Promoting more effective internal and external collaboration with Chatter
• Identifying best practices for going ?all Cloud??and managing the attendant risks
• Establishing realistic ?hard? and ?soft? metrics for everything from productivity and profitability to social CRM performance
• Discovering today?s most valuable third-party AppExchange products

Together with its companion website (SFDC-secrets.com), this new edition offers updated questionnaires, worksheets, templates, checklists, and other resources for every executive, team member, developer, and stakeholder.

Acknowledgments xxi
About the Author xxiii

Introduction xxv

Executive Summary 1
What Every CxO Needs to Know about Salesforce.com 1
Why Are You Looking at an SFA or a CRM System? 3
Keeping the Big Picture in Focus 6
Your Role in Driving Project Approval 10
Your Role Once the Project Is Under Way 16
Your Role in the Adoption Cycle 25
Your Role after Deployment: Using SFDC to Help Drive the Ship 30
Essential Tools for the Executive 34

Part I: Planning and Implementation 37

Chapter 1: Planning Ahead 39
Developing a Model of Your Customer Relationship 40
Setting Goals at the Business Level 42
Setting CRM Requirements: Who, Where, What, and Why 43
Organizing and Publishing Project Documents 47
Prioritizing Requirements 49
When Requirements Should Bend 53
Knowing Your Boundaries 54
Making the Business Case 58
Agile Project Metrics 75
Avoiding the Big Bang Project 76
Outsourcing 78
Setting Executive Expectations 81
Getting the Right Resources Committed 82

Chapter 2: Reports and Data 85
The Executive View 86
New Things You Need to Measure 89
Scoping the System via Report Mock-Ups 93
The Crux: Semantics 94
Reports-Inside versus Outside 96
Scoping the System via User Screen Design 99
A Guided Tour of the SFDC Object Model 102
What's in a Namespace? 108
SFDC's Data Requirements 110
Historical External Data 123
The Days of Future Passed 123

Chapter 3: Preparing Your Data 127
Getting the Lay of the Land 127
Migrating Data from an Existing SFA or CRM System 129
Migrating Data from Other Systems 140
Your Big Weekend: Doing the Import 140
There's Got to Be a Morning After: Deduping Records 142
The Morning After the Morning After: Enriching Data 147
The Ultimate Job Security 148
Creating a Cost Model for Clean Data 151

Chapter 4: Implementation Strategy 153
Big Bangs and Waterfalls 154
The Agile Manifesto 155
You Really Have to Plan: Agile Development Is Not Enough 157
Wave Deployment 158
What's in a Wave? 159
Planning the Sequence of Waves: WaveMaps 161
Collecting Resources for a Wave 168
Starting the Wave 173
As a Wave Takes Shape 176
Dirty Little Secret: The Data Are Everything 178
During the Wave: Real-Time Scheduling 179
Kicked Out of a Wave 183
Wave Endgame 183
Deployment 184
Getting Ready for the Next Wave 187
Postimplementation Implementation 188

Part II: People, Politics, Products, and Process 193

Chapter 5: People and Organizational Readiness 195
Using the SFA Maturity Model 196
Part I: What Does Management Want to Achieve, and How Hard Will It Be? 197
Part II: Is Your Organization Ready for Its Target Level? 205
Part III: How Big Is the Gap? 213
Understanding the Next Wave of Users 215
User Training 218
What User Readiness Means for Deployment 220
Postdeployment User Frustration 221
How Many Administrators Does It Take to Screw In a Light Bulb? 222

Chapter 6: Working the Politics 225
It's Not Just Big Organizations 225
Who's the Champion? 226
Who Pays for the System Implementation? 231
Who Will Own the System? 233
Who Owns the Data Now? 236
Dealing with Review Committees 242
Identifying and Dealing with Opposition to the Project 243
The Politics of System Adoption 244
Identifying and Dealing with Adoption Problems 249
Indoctrination 251
The Politics of Restriction 252

Chapter 7: Products You Will Need 255
Don't Overdo It 258
First, Seek to Understand 259
Next, Weigh Your Options 264
Essential Toys: Featurettes 270
Essential System Administrator Tools 272
Essential Add-Ons for the Marketer 276
Essential Features for Sales Management 278
Essential Tools for Support 284
Essential Extensions for Finance 287
Essential Features for the Executive 289

Chapter 8: Optimizing Business Processes 291
What Is a Business Process? 292
How Do Business Processes Fit Together? 293
Which Business Processes Do You Need to Think About? 296
Analyzing Business Processes 306
Example Business Process Analysis 311
How Much Should Be Changed? 316
Best Practices with Business Process Redesign 317
Making the Changes 321
After the Changes Are Made 322

Part III: Best Practices 325

Chapter 9: Best Practices for Sales 327
Universal Best Practices 327
People Buy from People 330
Job One: Define and Document the Sales Model 332
Sales Development Reps (SDRs) 335
Inside Sales Reps 350
Outside Sales Representatives 355
Field Sales Engineers or Product Specialists 368
Sales Management 369

Chapter 10: Best Practices in Marketing 397
Marketing Organizations 397
Lead Generation and Collection 401
Campaign Management 412
Lead Handling 418
Lead Cultivation and Nurturing 430
Lead Qualification and Conversion 431
Partner Marketing 434
Customer References 434
Advertising and Messaging 437
Public Relations 438
Product Management/Product Marketing 440
Marketing System Administrator 444
Marketing Executives 447

Chapter 11: Best Practices in Customer Support 457
Support Organizations and SFDC 457
Universal Support Best Practices 459
The Customer Order Support Center 471
Order Expediting, Distribution, and Shipping 474
Customer Help Desk 475
Technical and Warranty Support 476
Professional Services 482
Service and Support Executives 485

Chapter 12: Best Practices in Finance and Legal 489
Driving the Investment Decision 490
Keeping Expectations Reasonable 493
The Path to Project Success 494
Accounting and Ongoing Operations 495
Mergers, Integrations, and Divestitures 506
Fundraising 507
Legal 508
Human Resources 511

Chapter 13: Best Practices in IT 513
Level of IT Engagement 514
Skills IT Will Need 518
Planning for the Implementation 521
Implementation 531
Ongoing Usage 541

Index 557

David Taber is an internationally recognized IT marketing and management consultant with more than twenty-five years' experience, including twelve years at the VP level or above. His company, SalesLogistix, is a certified implementer of Salesforce.com solutions, with 100 clients in North America, Europe, and Asia. Taber also writes for CIO.com and has a library of more than one hundred fifty articles on Salesforce issues.

The #1 guide to succeeding with Salesforce.com: now updated with the latest best practices and knowledge for effective deployment

• Covers Salesforce.com’s newest releases and innovations, including Chatter and the Service Cloud, and the best new AppExchange third-party add-ons
• Based on real world experience from 100+ Salesforce.com implementations
• Includes powerful, proven techniques for accelerating user adoption and achieving stronger operational results
• Contains up-to-the-minute guidance on social and mobile CRM
• Packed with exclusive online supplements, templates, and checklists for more effective planning and implementation
• Builds on the First Edition that has earned online rave reviews