CRM projects don’t succeed with the flip of a switch or wave of a magic wand. Indeed, for the first 15 years of CRM history, practitioners were worried about the prospect that such projects can fail, and rightly so. In 2009, for example, Forrester Research was reporting that 47% of all CRM projects failed. In recent [...]

Salesforce.com officially allows organizations to have “Team Selling” for a select few business processes, such as Account Teams, Opportunity Teams, and Case Teams. But have you ever wanted to create a Team concept for other objects throughout the system, such as allowing for Campaign Teams or Teams for some special custom object?  With a little [...]

PEER TO PEER CRM IMPROVEMENTS A few nights ago in New York City, Cloud Sherpas and Informatica Cloud hosted a dinner for some of our favorite customers along with a handful of prospects. This wasn’t a sales pitch – what we hear over and over from our customers is that they are looking for opportunities [...]

In the next couple of days, four thousand IT professionals will head to Las Vegas for ServiceNow’s Knowledge13 conference for education, training and networking. The attendance is expected to be double that of Knowledge12, which is incredible. It goes to show the growth of the ServiceNow solution in the market as well as the absolute value the [...]

After spending a significant amount of money on a new sales force automation (SFA) system, you’d think that a large manufacturing company would review all leads, pipelines and forecasts from within the SFA software, right? But every week, sales managers at all levels walked print-outs and Excel documents into conference rooms to discuss sales activities. No wonder, [...]

For most organizations, there will be a discrepancy between the amount of your actual Salesforce.com users and the rest of the employees in your organization.  For example, you might represent a large manufacturing organization with 50,000 employees ranging from interns to Sales/Marketing to Field Service to executive management.  You might decide to only provide Sales [...]

Validation rules are great for maintaining data quality within a Salesforce system, and workflow rules and triggers provide automation to keep other fields or records updated in the system. There are scenarios, however when you may wish to switch these off for a particular user or group while leaving other users unaffected. For example, a [...]

What’s the best way to put mobile CRM tools in the hands of your salespeople or field service teams? Finding the best answer for your business starts with this question: What are you trying to achieve from your mobile CRM project? Answering that will help you identify the business goals that your project should support. Only [...]

The Manifesto for PRM Success How does treating your channel partners like customers manifest? It starts by remembering to always answer this question: “What’s in it for my partners?” That’s important as many companies today are trying to share more of the risks, as well as the potential for rewards, by transferring more marketing and sales responsibilities [...]

Salesforce.com announced last week (May 2, 2013) plans for a European data centre to be located in the English town of Slough. The data centre is scheduled for completion in 2014, and will be Salesforce.com’s sixth data centre. The decision to implement a new data centre is motivated partly by growth in EU business over [...]

How should organizations that rely on manual sales processes manage the transition to using CRM and sales force automation (SFA)? At medical device manufacturer Integra LifeSciences, an Cloud Sherpas client, for example, the sales team formerly relied on paper records and spreadsheets for tracking details. But whenever salespeople left the company, crucial information departed with them, [...]

Google recently released Maps Engine Lite, the replacement for their previous offering named My Maps. If you head to “My Maps” now, you will probably see something like this:   In Google’s own words: “We’re excited to launch Google Maps Engine Lite (Beta): http://mapsengine.google.com/map. Maps Engine Lite is a simple, powerful tool for mapping enthusiasts to create [...]