How Dreamforce Demonstrates Salesforce’s Success

The first Dreamforce, the Salesforce user conference occurred in 2003, showcasing 50 exhibitors and drew 1,130 attendees. My first thought in seeing that was…really? Dreamforce has only been around for 8 years? It feels like much longer...in a good way.

This year, Dreamforce will have 270+ exhibitors and I'm guessing will exceed last year's 23,000 attendees. I did the math for you. Last year's attendees exceeded the first year's by 19x. And what’s important about that is it reflects how much bigger Salesforce has grown over the same period.

In 2003, Salesforce had 6,400 customers. Today, the company has almost 98,000 or about 14x more than in 2003.

Eloqua and Jess3 teamed together to create a nifty infographic about the rise of Dreamforce.

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Shaping Customer Service in the Social Era

I love talking about collaboration almost as much as I like doing it.  When people come together, one idea spawns others and before you know it, greatness erupts into the world.

The reason social media is transforming business today (and in years to come) is because it allows us to team together in ways we could never achieve in our traditional, proximity-based societies or companies.  And that includes collaborating to meet customer needs.

Your customers know as much or more about the “real world” use of your products than your service reps or even product engineers might know. 

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Automate & collaborate a la Intellicore Design Consulting

In response to queries about the solution sets offered by Intellicore Design Consulting, I prepared a video to give folks and up close and personal look.  Our solutions focus on on-demand business automation, collaboration, and eCommerce.

The slide below is taken out of the presentation and gives you the quick answer.  The presentation gives you more information, hosted by moi.

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Should you fire clients? – Salesforce insights

Jeremiah Owyang wrote a recent article about the strategic value of firing problematic clients during a recession.

In particular, the best candidates for termination are those who lead to some sort of net negative that lowers profitability.

Makes sense to me – although I’d look at the situation in any economic environment.  The question then is how you determine who those net-neg clients are.  The answer is to balance anecdotal information with hard analytics.

Let me show you how you can use your Salesforce solution to determine a thumbs up or down on a client.

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Twitter API extends value of Salesforce’s Service Cloud

This week, Salesforce.com announced the marriage of Twitter with Salesforce.  A Twitter API to Service Cloud, Salesforce’s customer service product, will allow companies capture Twitter conversations, import them into Salesforce, and take action on the micro-conversations.

Some hailed Salesforce’s announcements with big woo hoos while others poked at the news. I saw at least one blogger lament the coming of advertising intrusions into the Twitterverse.

We at Intellicore Design Consulting think this is good news. Let’s dish about what it means to customer service a la Salesforce.

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Leadership tips to foster successful Salesforce implementations

One of the most popular articles to date in my blog is 7 Tips to stimulate Salesforce.com user adoption.  Taking that as a cue that successful Salesforce implementations ranked high on the corporate list of Important Initiatives, I thought I’d explore some of the elements of successful implementations, starting with leadership.

I created an in-depth webinar on the topic so this will be more of a review.

Just as a side note, while I’m specifically referring to Salesforce through this article, in truth the same tips can be applied to any major initiative.

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Integrating Salesforce + GroupSwim + web design for complete customer lifecycle experience

Last week I visited with a potential sales partner about Intellicore Design solutions.  Among the topics, I discussed how we saw our business automation, collaboration, and web design solutions integrating together.  Said another way, Salesforce, GroupSwim and web design/eCommerce.

Knowing that a picture is worth a thousand words, I drew a diagram for our prospective sales partner.  Then this weekend, I listened to a fabulous video presentation by David Armano, VP of experience design with Critical Mass, on Thinking Visually, The Movie and it spurred my thinking to post a copy of the sketch in Big Cat Chronicles.

This is just a sketch, and not a fancy graphic, but it gets the job done.  So here it is, the our world view of our solutions.

Click to enlarge

Customer outreach via Salesforce and GroupSwim

If you have a customer-centric business, then you already know that you need to outreach to your customers. The question then becomes how?  We like integrating Salesforce and GroupSwim to accomplish the goal, giving each solution different aspects of the heavy lifting.

Yes, the two solutions have some redundancies like both having knowledge bases.  In most of these cases, though, one solution outperforms the other so it makes sense to use a combined best of breed solution to get the give the most to your customer interactions.

Here’s how we envision things – and this is the sort of thing we’re in process of developing.  This springboards on a discussion that I touched on in my article Integrate community and CRM solutions & alleviate sales challenges.

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