Author Archives: lkao

User Interaction Design Basics

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.

Posted in AppExchange, Product Management, Salesforce.com - General | Comments Off on User Interaction Design Basics

Salesforce.com for Nonprofits: Recommended Administrator Training

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) *
Posted in Non-Profit / Foundation | Comments Off on Salesforce.com for Nonprofits: Recommended Administrator Training

Salesforce.com Knowledge Base – Using Solutions

An administrator for a non-profit posed a question recently about implementing Salesforce Service & Support’s Knowledge Base feature. This is a critical part of the CRM lifecycle, and some upfront investment in thinking about what solutions to create can dramatically reduce repetitive support inquiries later on.  I figured I’d give you some process tips if you’re considering using this.

Salesforce.com Solution

First, some vocabulary. A Knowledge base in Salesforce is comprised of a set of Solutions, so certain designated customers (or the general public) can search through it to find answers to common issues. Considering that phone-based, live customer support is one of the most expensive customer support channels, businesses of any size should consider offloading some of the more basic questions to an area that people can search themselves.

Posted in Service and Support | Comments Off on Salesforce.com Knowledge Base – Using Solutions

What’s a Sales Forecast For?

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.

Posted in SFA | Comments Off on What’s a Sales Forecast For?