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

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

by David Taber
Released November 2013
Publisher(s): Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN: 9780133511116

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Book description

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.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. About This eBook
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright Page
  5. Praise for Salesforce.com® Secrets of Success
  6. Dedication Page
  7. Contents
  8. Acknowledgments
  9. About the Author
  10. Introduction
    1. Paying Off on the Promise of CRM
    2. Achieving the Promise of SFDC
    3. Do You Need an SFA System or a CRM System?
    4. When Salesforce.com Is the Best Choice—and When It Isn’t
    5. How to Use This Book
  11. Executive Summary
    1. What Every CxO Needs to Know about Salesforce.com
    2. Why Are You Looking at an SFA or a CRM System?
    3. Keeping the Big Picture in Focus
    4. Your Role in Driving Project Approval
    5. Your Role Once the Project Is Under Way
    6. Your Role in the Adoption Cycle
    7. Your Role after Deployment: Using SFDC to Help Drive the Ship
    8. Essential Tools for the Executive
  12. Part I: Planning and Implementation
    1. Chapter 1. Planning Ahead
      1. Developing a Model of Your Customer Relationship
      2. Setting Goals at the Business Level
      3. Setting CRM Requirements: Who, Where, What, and Why
      4. Organizing and Publishing Project Documents
      5. Prioritizing Requirements
      6. When Requirements Should Bend
      7. Knowing Your Boundaries
      8. Making the Business Case
      9. Agile Project Metrics
      10. Avoiding the Big Bang Project
      11. Outsourcing
      12. Setting Executive Expectations
      13. Getting the Right Resources Committed
    2. Chapter 2. Reports and Data
      1. The Executive View
      2. New Things You Need to Measure
      3. Scoping the System via Report Mock-Ups
      4. The Crux: Semantics
      5. Reports—Inside versus Outside
      6. Scoping the System via User Screen Design
      7. A Guided Tour of the SFDC Object Model
      8. What’s in a Namespace?
      9. SFDC’s Data Requirements
      10. Historical External Data
      11. The Days of Future Passed
    3. Chapter 3. Preparing Your Data
      1. Getting the Lay of the Land
      2. Migrating Data from an Existing SFA or CRM System
      3. Migrating Data from Other Systems
      4. Your Big Weekend: Doing the Import
      5. There’s Got to Be a Morning After: Deduping Records
      6. The Morning After the Morning After: Enriching Data
      7. The Ultimate Job Security
      8. Creating a Cost Model for Clean Data
    4. Chapter 4. Implementation Strategy
      1. Big Bangs and Waterfalls
      2. The Agile Manifesto
      3. You Really Have to Plan: Agile Development Is Not Enough
      4. Wave Deployment
      5. What’s in a Wave?
      6. Planning the Sequence of Waves: WaveMaps
      7. Collecting Resources for a Wave
      8. Starting the Wave
      9. As a Wave Takes Shape
      10. Dirty Little Secret: The Data Are Everything
      11. During the Wave: Real-Time Scheduling
      12. Kicked Out of a Wave
      13. Wave Endgame
      14. Deployment
      15. Getting Ready for the Next Wave
      16. Postimplementation Implementation
  13. Part II: People, Politics, Products, and Process
    1. Chapter 5. People and Organizational Readiness
      1. Using the SFA Maturity Model
      2. Part I: What Does Management Want to Achieve, and How Hard Will It Be?
      3. Part II: Is Your Organization Ready for Its Target Level?
      4. Part III: How Big Is the Gap?
      5. Understanding the Next Wave of Users
      6. User Training
      7. What User Readiness Means for Deployment
      8. Postdeployment User Frustration
      9. How Many Administrators Does It Take to Screw In a Light Bulb?
    2. Chapter 6. Working the Politics
      1. It’s Not Just Big Organizations
      2. Who’s the Champion?
      3. Who Pays for the System Implementation?
      4. Who Will Own the System?
      5. Who Owns the Data Now?
      6. Dealing with Review Committees
      7. Identifying and Dealing with Opposition to the Project
      8. The Politics of System Adoption
      9. Identifying and Dealing with Adoption Problems
      10. Indoctrination
      11. The Politics of Restriction
    3. Chapter 7. Products You Will Need
      1. Don’t Overdo It
      2. First, Seek to Understand
      3. Next, Weigh Your Options
      4. Essential Toys: Featurettes
      5. Essential System Administrator Tools
      6. Essential Add-Ons for the Marketer
      7. Essential Features for Sales Management
      8. Essential Tools for Support
      9. Essential Extensions for Finance
      10. Essential Features for the Executive
    4. Chapter 8. Optimizing Business Processes
      1. What Is a Business Process?
      2. How Do Business Processes Fit Together?
      3. Which Business Processes Do You Need to Think About?
      4. Analyzing Business Processes
      5. Example Business Process Analysis
      6. How Much Should Be Changed?
      7. Best Practices with Business Process Redesign
      8. Making the Changes
      9. After the Changes Are Made
  14. Part III: Best Practices
    1. Chapter 9. Best Practices for Sales
      1. Universal Best Practices
      2. People Buy from People
      3. Job One: Define and Document the Sales Model
      4. Sales Development Reps (SDRs)
      5. Inside Sales Reps
      6. Outside Sales Representatives
      7. Field Sales Engineers or Product Specialists
      8. Sales Management
    2. Chapter 10. Best Practices in Marketing
      1. Marketing Organizations
      2. Lead Generation and Collection
      3. Campaign Management
      4. Lead Handling
      5. Lead Cultivation and Nurturing
      6. Lead Qualification and Conversion
      7. Partner Marketing
      8. Customer References
      9. Advertising and Messaging
      10. Public Relations
      11. Product Management/Product Marketing
      12. Marketing System Administrator
      13. Marketing Executives
    3. Chapter 11. Best Practices in Customer Support
      1. Support Organizations and SFDC
      2. Universal Support Best Practices
      3. The Customer Order Support Center
      4. Order Expediting, Distribution, and Shipping
      5. Customer Help Desk
      6. Technical and Warranty Support
      7. Professional Services
      8. Service and Support Executives
    4. Chapter 12. Best Practices in Finance and Legal
      1. Driving the Investment Decision
      2. Keeping Expectations Reasonable
      3. The Path to Project Success
      4. Accounting and Ongoing Operations
      5. Mergers, Integrations, and Divestitures
      6. Fundraising
      7. Legal
      8. Human Resources
    5. Chapter 13. Best Practices in IT
      1. Level of IT Engagement
      2. Skills IT Will Need
      3. Planning for the Implementation
      4. Implementation
      5. Ongoing Usage
  15. Index

Product information

  • Title: Salesforce.com Secrets of Success: Best Practices for Growth and Profitability
  • Author(s): David Taber
  • Release date: November 2013
  • Publisher(s): Addison-Wesley Professional
  • ISBN: 9780133511116