Kao Consulting Inc.

Salesforce for Google AdWords is a popular and fairly new component for Salesforce’s marketing users. This feature now allows marketing folks to track their AdWords campaigns within Salesforce so people can tie leads to their sales. But what if you’re just starting to advertise online?

When dealing with smaller businesses, I find that while many are very savvy with Google Adwords and understand how important it is to have a search engine marketing (SEM) strategy, there are still many out there that are only beginning to grasp their need to play in this game. In this post, I want to tell those of you new to SEM where to go to get smarter on this.

For those of you that attended salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2007 conference, you heard of the release of Visualforce, which empowers developers to change the user interface of their applications to best meet the needs of their users. I think this is a powerful capability that can make anyone a web product specialist. That can also be a very dangerous thing since not everyone has “the eye” for navigation and design.

If you’re just getting started with implementing Salesforce for your non-profit, and you’re a first-time administrator to this product (or any database), it’s best that you orient yourself with some basic pre-recorded training.

I recommend watching 3…and a half (more on that later) training sessions.

1. Salesforce.com for Non-Profits (7 minutes)
2. Salesforce Fundamentals (13 minutes. This gives you an introduction to the product’s basic vocabulary. It’s not a 100% match to the Non-Profit Edition, but you should grasp the underlying principles and terminology behind Salesforce.com.)
3. Admin Fundamentals: Setup (20 minutes)
4. Admin Fundamentals: Customize (less than 1 hour) *