Salesforce.com Secrets of Success: Best Practices for Growth and Profitability, 2009

CHAPTER 8Optimizing Business Processes

If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you are doing.

—W. Edwards Deming

THIS IS THE SINGLE most important chapter in the book—what really sets it apart—but it’s likely to be a little abstract. Because most business users rarely think in terms of business processes, this chapter is full of concrete examples explaining how to see the big picture and optimize the way different departments work together via SFDC.

The Top-Down Perspective

An SFA system could be thought of as a glorified contact manager—but if that’s the way you think about the system, you’d be missing nearly all the value it can bring as a management tool. The whole point of an SFA system is its ability ...