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

Drive Better Productivity and Increase Saleswith Salesforce.com–Starting Now   Discover Real-World Best Practices—Without Paying Expensive Consultants   You’re investing in Salesforce.com for one reason: to drive major performance improvements across your entire organization. Salesforce.com® Secrets of Success will help you do just that. Drawing on his experience with dozens of deployments, author David Taber offers expert guidance on every aspect of Salesforce.com deployment, with results-focused best practices for every area of the organization touched by Salesforce.com, including sales, marketing, customer service, finance, legal, and IT. This is information you’d otherwise have to pay a consultant $300/hour to get...information you won’t find in any other book! Taber walks you through developing a comprehensive and effective implementation strategy, followed by tactics and specifics to overcome every challenge you face, including internal politics. Through this book and its companion Web site, www.SFDC-secrets.com, Taber provides questionnaires, step-by-step guides, and extensive resources–all part of the Revenue Overdrive™ system that gives your organization maximum results from Salesforce.com. Achieve higher end-customer satisfaction and dramatic sales productivity gains Use the SFA Maturity Model™ to assess readiness, fill gaps, and gain early, deep user adoption Overcome “people, product, and process” pitfalls that can limit the value of Salesforce.com Learn which tools, add-ons, features, and extensions are right for your implementation This book’s start-to-finish roadmap for success can be used by companies of all sizes in all industries–with specific chapters for executives, team leaders, implementation team members, developers, and users throughout the business.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments xix About the Author xxi   Introduction xxiii The Promise of CRM xxiii Achieving the Promise of CRM xxv Do You Need an SFA System or a CRM System? xxvii When Salesforce.com Is the Best Choice–and When It Isn’t xxix How to Use This Book xxx   Executive Summary  1 What Every CxO Needs to Know About Salesforce.com 1 Why Are You Looking at an SFA/CRM System? 3 Keeping the Big Picture in Focus 4 Driving Toward Project Approval 6 Once the Project Is Under Way 12 Deployments and the Adoption Cycle 17 After Deployment: Using SFDC to Help Drive the Ship 23 Essential Tools for the Executive 27   Chapter 1: Planning Ahead 29 Getting to Business Value 29 Developing a Model of Your Customer Relationship 30 Setting Business Goals 32 Setting Requirements: Who, Where, What, and Why 32 Organizing and Publishing Project Documents 36 Prioritizing Requirements 37 When Requirements Should Bend 41 Knowing Your Boundaries 41 Making the Business Case 44 Quantifying the Return 49 Developing a Straw-Man Schedule 52 Avoiding the Big Bang Project 58 Outsourcing 60 Setting Executive Expectations 62 Getting the Right Resources Committed 64   Chapter 2: Reports and Data 67 For Users, Seeing Is Believing 67 Start with What You Have 68 Scoping the System via Report Mock-Ups 71 The Crux: Semantics 73 Reports–Inside Versus Outside 74 Scoping the System via User Screen Design 76 A Guided Tour of the SFDC Object Model 78 What’s in a Namespace? 82 SFDC’s Data Requirements 84 Historical External Data 94   Chapter 3: Preparing Your Data 97 Data Pollution 97 Getting the Lay of the Land 98 Migrating Data from an Existing SFA/CRM System 98 Migrating Data from Other Systems 108 Your Big Weekend: Doing the Import 109 The Morning After: Deduping Records 110 The Morning After the Morning After: Enriching Data 114 The Ultimate Job Security 116 Creating a Cost Model for Clean Data 118   Chapter 4: Implementation Strategy 119 Before You Begin 119 Big Bangs and Waterfalls 120 The Agile Manifesto 121 You Really Have to Plan: Agile Development Is Not Enough 123 Wave Deployment 124 What’s in a Wave? 125 Planning the Sequence of Waves: WaveMaps 126 Collecting Resources for a Wave 133 Starting the Wave 136 As a Wave Takes Shape 140 Dirty Little Secret: The Data Are Everything 142 During the Wave: Real-Time Scheduling 143 Kicked Out of a Wave 146 Wave Endgame 147 Deployment 148 Getting Ready for the Next Wave 151 Post-Implementation Implementation 152   Chapter 5: People and Organizational Readiness 155 Adoption Is Everything 155 Using the SFA Maturity Model 156 Part I: What Is Management Trying to Achieve, and How Hard Will It Be? 157 Part II: Is Your Organization Ready for Its Target Level? 165 Part III: How Big Is the Gap? 173 Understanding the Next Wave of Users 174 User Training 177 What User Readiness Means for Deployment 179 Post-Deployment User Frustration 179 How Many Administrators Does It Take to Screw in a Light Bulb? 181   Chapter 6: Working the Politics 183 Technology Is Not the Problem 183 It’s Not Just Big Organizations 183 Who’s the Champion? 184 Who Pays for the System? 188 Who Will Own the System? 190 Who Owns the Data Now? 192 Dealing with Review Committees 197 Identifying and Dealing with Opposition to the Project 198 The Politics of System Adoption 200 Identifying and Dealing with Adoption Problems 204 Indoctrination 206 The Politics of Restriction 206   Chapter 7: Products You Will Need 209 SFDC Is a Platform, Not Just a Product 209 Don’t Overdo It 211 First, Seek to Understand 212 Next, Weigh Your Options 217 Essential Toys: Featurettes 221 Essential System Administrator Tools 223 Essential Add-Ons for the Marketer 226 Essential Features for Sales Management 229 Essential Tools for Support 234 Essential Extensions for Finance 236 Essential Features for the Executive 238   Chapter 8: Optimizing Business Processes 239 The Top-Down Perspective 239 What Is a Business Process? 240 How Do Business Processes Fit Together? 241 Identifying Which Business Processes You Need to Think About 242 Analyzing Business Processes 252 Example Business Process Analysis 256 How Much Should Be Changed? 261 Best Practices with Business Process Redesign 261 Making the Changes 265 After the Changes Are Made 266   Chapter 9: Best Practices for Sales 267 “Universal” Best Practices 267 Define and Document the Sales Model 270 Inside Sales 273 Sales Representatives 289 Field Sales Engineers or Product Specialists 301 Sales Management 302   Chapter 10: Best Practices in Marketing 325 Marketing Organizations 325 Lead Generation and Collection 326 Lead Generation Campaigns 334 Lead Handling 339 Lead Cultivation and Nurturing 351 Lead Qualification and Conversion 352 Partners 353 Customer References 353 Public Relations 356 Product Management/Product Marketing 357 Marketing System Administrator 360 Marketing Executives 362   Chapter 11: Best Practices in Customer Support 369 Support Organizations and SFDC 369 Universal Support Best Practices 371 The Customer Order Support Center 374 Order Expediting, Distribution, and Shipping 376 Technical and Warranty Support 377 The Customer Help Desk 381 Professional Services 382   Chapter 12: Best Practices in Finance and Legal 385 Driving the Investment Decision 385 Keeping Expectations Reasonable 388 The Path to Project Success 389 Accounting and Ongoing Operations 390 Mergers, Integrations, and Divestitures 399 Fundraising 400 Legal 401 Human Resources 402   Chapter 13: Best Practices in IT 405 Level of IT Engagement 405 Skills IT Will Need 408 Planning for the Implementation 409 Implementation 416 Ongoing Usage 421   Appendix A: Tools to Prioritize Requirements 431 Prioritizing Project Requirements 431 The Delphi Method 432 Prioritize via Investment 433 Weakest/Strongest Elimination 434 Popular Votes 437   Appendix B: Example Requirements Statements 439 Example Project Requirements: Smaller Company 439 Example Project Requirements: Larger Company 441   Index 447

About the Author :
David Taber is an internationally recognized marketing and management consultant in the IT industry, with more than twenty-five years’ experience, including eight years at vice president or above.    Taber’s company, SalesLogistix, is a certified implementer of Salesforce.com solutions, with clients in the United States, Canada, Israel, and India. SalesLogistix created two widely used applications in Salesforce’s App Exchange. He has personally worked on dozens of Salesforce.com implementations, from early stage start-ups to larger companies such as Sun Microsystems and Symantec. His experience as a marketing VP–working with the sales organization, engineering, customer, support, finance, and corporate management–gives him unique insight into the habits and needs of the executive suite. Additionally, his background in IT makes it easy for him to work at both business and technical levels.   As an accomplished writer and speaker, Taber has created and delivered presentations to audiences in many countries and coaches CEOs on venture capital pitches. He has been a guest lecturer in marketing at the University of California and Carnegie Mellon University, and he taught the product marketing class at the University of California Berkeley extension.

Review :
Praise for Salesforce.com® Secrets of Success   “Salesforce.com is usually thought of as an SFA system, but it really needs to be thought of as a full-fledged CRM. For more than five years, I’ve headed up marketing teams trying to expand the power of SFDC for highly automated Internet customer interaction systems. Salesforce.com® Secrets of Success is required reading for the modern marketer, sales exec, or customer support professional.” —Mark de Visser, CEO of Sonatype   “Salesforce.com® Secrets of Success is terrific because it gives guidance to every major executive, as well as tactical recommendations to the implementation team. Using this book’s methods ensures the high user adoption rate we achieved at Syneron. It also provides hundreds of tips that save time and money in the real world.” —Doron Gerstel, CEO of Syneron Medical   “Salesforce.com® Secrets of Success helps the busy executive figure out what to do—and not to do—when a Salesforce system is being built or extended. I appreciate the balance it provides, giving strategic guidance to the executive team and tactical tips to the implementers.” —Dave Kellogg, CEO of Mark Logic   “Salesforce.com® Secrets of Success focuses on the business processes that surround SFDC—the things that people do to leverage the system and become more effective. Any organization going through internal change in sales, marketing, or other customer-facing teams needs to see and work on the big picture. This book helps them do just that.” —Jon Lambert, CFO of Wombat Trading Systems division, New York Stock Exchange   “Mr. Taber takes a hard look at reality and CRM systems and finds the way to bridge the gap between the two using Salesforce.com. You are sure to succeed with your Salesforce.com initiative by reading this excellent book. This is the Salesforce.com `manual’ we were all looking for.” —Joshua Meiri, Salesforce.com User Group Leader   “Salesforce.com® Secrets of Success combines Agile with Salesforce.com, the most widely used, hosted SFA system. Taber takes it one step further by telling product marketers and product managers how to use SFDC and the latest Agile tools to do their jobs better. A must-read.” —Rich Mironov, CMO of Enthiosys   “Salesforce.com® Secrets of Success is the distillation of lessons learned at dozens of SFDC customers, and every lesson has been put in terms that people at every level of the organization can understand. I only wish this book had been out when we were building out our system—we could have saved endless meetings by simply following its best practices.” —Daniel Moskowitz, CFO of Zend Technologies   “Salesforce.com® Secrets of Success is an invaluable guide for the executive wanting to get the most leverage from Salesforce.com. The book tells the executive what to ask for—and what not to ask for—to get the best revenue visibility and results from the team. We’ve been steadily expanding our SFDC system to make it into a full-fledged CRM, using the techniques from this book. This book is highly recommended for companies that want to grow their size and sales performance.” —Dave Robbins, CEO of BigFix   “Salesforce.com® Secrets of Success is the first book to apply Agile methods to SFA/CRM systems development, and it breaks new ground for both the technologist and executive. At ThoughtWorks, we’ve been using Agile for years, and Taber’s Salesforce approaches really pay off.” —Roy Singham, CEO of ThoughtWorks   “I have been waiting years for this book and never knew it! David Taber has written an excellent guide to the benefits and pitfalls of implementing SFDC and, in the process, provides insight and valuable information on successfully navigating through user groups, management, sales, marketing, and IT departments to get the best results.” —Dan Weiss, Manager of Sales and Marketing Applications, Bell Microproducts