Eons ago (mid-April), the same team that brought you Salesforce for Google AdWords launched Salesforce integration with other business apps in the Google Apps suite: GMail, Google Documents, Google Talk, and Google Calendar.
The good folks at ZDNet published the launch and demo, in case you couldn’t make it.
I’ll be going into more detail later about how to set up each aspect of these apps.
The folks at the consulting firm, MK Partners, created a quick and easy connector between Jott.com and Salesforce.
Jott.com is a free service that allows users to call a phone number, leave a voice message for someone (including yourself), and then converts the message from speech-to-text, and either emails or text messages it to the recipient.
The MK Partners code allows you to leave a message for yourself, which then generates a task in Salesforce for you to complete. Pretty nifty. (And, if you’re somehow using Jott and Salesforce and David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach to organizing things, I’m sure this will come in handy, too.)
Some of you with older orgs may not know about this popular tip. One quick and easy time-saver that you can use in Salesforce is its use of hovers, or “hover-overs.” With this feature turned on, you can get a quick snapshot of a record from two places: 1) Your sidebar’s Most Recent Items list, and 2) from the Lookup link from within any record.
To activate this, go to Setup > App Setup > Customize > User Interface.
Check the Enable Hover Details and the Enable Related List Hover Details checkboxes.
Don’t forget to hit Save!
I came across an article on BNet that discussed why “Scientific Forecasting” flops. All the examples they gave were based on organizational challenges, and I wholeheartedly agree.
Salesforce.com does a good job of providing a Forecasts tab for companies that really enforce this process, but IMHO this is more suited for companies selling specific products (usually with SKUs) that need to tie this information into their back-end systems. Is this the majority of users? I’ll boldly say that I don’t think so.
Even users that have the above situation may also not use forecasting in the system, simply because of the organizational challenges that seem to rear up when it comes time to forecast.
