Why is it that some people can bring great ideas time and time again? I have no idea why some people can. I do know that Seth Godin is one of these rare people. Here is his last talk on Tribes from TED.
After watching, the question is how will you motivate / lead your tribe. You can see more of Seth ideas at his blog http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
I took a few pictures at today’s salesforce.com Twin Cities’ User Group meeting and Cloud Event. The Twin Cities’ User Group is one of the stronger salesforce.com groups in the country. My estimate was that we had well over 100 customers for today’s event.
Our typical agenda is a brief update on our community, followed by a few customer presentations and at least one salesforce.com partner presentation. I always find these meetings to be very helpful. If you haven’t been to a user group in your area please, PLEASE do yourself a favor and go. Click here to find a user group near you!
Today’s customer presentation was given by FICO (FairIssac) on Building Customer Communities — very insightful example of how a business leverages multiple communication tools to enhance its customer experience. FICO uses salesforce.com Ideas, TypePad, Lithium and Acresso. Each platform has a specific role to help enhance the customer experience. Salesforce.com helps manage and coordinate this very unique customer community.
The project was completed in roughly 8 weeks with the assistance of Reside. Reside is the same company that brought salesforce.com Ideas to Starbucks and to the Obama transition team. If your business is planning or interested in deploying a custom branded salesforce.com Ideas project, Reside is a great choice. All the people I’ve met from Reside are fantastic.
As an extra bonus, Salesforce brought in Marco Casalaina, Senior Product Manager. Marco and his team brought out some of the new toys coming Summer ‘09. They gave us a great look at how businesses will use Salesforce.com as a window and communication system to existing Social media communities. It was wonderful to see how companies use salesforce.com with Facebook and Twitter.
(sorry for the bad pic, I was using an iPhone)
Today Facebook has over 200 million users and Twitter is rocketing past 9 million users. The Twitter application, I think, will be one of the stronger service applications. Today Twitter is just catching on with a mass audience. In the next few months businesses will either grow or be damaged by how well they handle 140 characters pushed to the web. The salesforce Twitter application delivers metrics and corporate brand management in a simple to use application. This, by far, was the most amazing thing I saw all day.
Once the User Group session was complete everyone had time for lunch before the CloudForce tour got started.
The Cloudforce Tour was well attended with hundreds more people coming together. For this portion of the day you could select from one of four different sessions.
I chose the Service Cloud session. In these economic times one of the best methods of growing any business is to improve your current customer service experience. I was very happy with the presentation given by the team at salesforce.com. As always, we had some great customers stand up and deliver real world examples of how they use salesforce.com. Because the Twin Cities is home to great medical device companies, we heard real stories of how salesforce.com helps improve health care!
Once the sessions were complete it was time for something that salesforce.com has always done well, networking. The format is always great. They place laptops and large flat panels all over the place for demos and partner exhibitors. In between all this, everyone is served great hors d’oeuvres and drinks with very good company (speaking of good company, be sure to check out this new application from ModelMetrics ).
Networking Salesforce.com style.
Salesforce.com is letting the community decide who the “house” band will be for Dreamforce ‘09. Be sure to visit ideas and place your vote. Current choices:
I began setting up my own Alltop page a few weeks ago. For those of you that don’t know, Alltop is an online “magazine” rack filled with blog posts etc. The purpose of Alltop is to give users all of the top stories based on topics.
Alltop allows you to spend less time searching for information and more time reading or gaining new insights. I’ve been a fan of Alltop since its launch, (Who isn’t a fan of anything Guy Kawasaki does?). Yet it wasn’t until Alltop rolled out My Alltop that I started being an active everyday user. My Alltop lets you build your own Alltop page based on content you select.
Here is the link to my alltop, http://my.alltop.com/MCC . I can see information on Marketing, Sales, Human Resources and Start-ups all within one clean interface. When you hover your cursur on a post title Alltop provides a quick view of the opening paragrpah. This feature helps me to drill into posts I find most interesting. Everything about Alltop is designed to maximize your time spent gaining information. Standard Alltop pages (topic based) are great windows into new sources of information. When you find a publisher / blogger you like a simple click adds them to your My Alltop page.
Once your page is set up you can share it with anyone. The next great thing for My Alltop would be a section that highlights the posts I comment on. Kawasaki, are you listening?
If you haven’t been to Alltop.com do yourself a favor and get there! Or just save my Alltop to your favorites. http://my.alltop.com/MCC
Still confused about Alltop? Watch this video.
http://my.alltop.com/MCC
more about "Get on top of your world with Alltop!", posted with vodpod
I read a few salesforce.com blogs and one of the best is gokubi.com. The publisher is Steve Anderson of One/Northwest. His company is focused helping Non-profit organizations excel with salesforce.com. Today he touched on a key point with CRM. Everyone Needs Customization
No matter how good a system is out of the box, it must be customized so that your users can reach their full potential with the application. My experience is the same as Steve’s no matter how similar any two businesses are they each operate with their own unique culture and processes. These little differences drive the need for customization.
If you want your users to get the most out of the software/applications within your business you should add as much of your unique culture and process as possible. Customization will make the software become more intuitive and natural for users. These type of customizations make new software usable, when something becomes easy to use we all use it. The key to any successful CRM is 100% user adoption.
Here is the link to the post. Link
Salesforce.com posted this video on cloud computing. Its a nice quick look at the current state of business application development. The future is now and its running in the cloud!
more about "Computing in the cloud, broken down f…", posted with vodpod
So, you get a million dollar check. It’s only natural to want to remember it. Putting it in a frame seems like a great idea. Just remember to cash it first!
Where has my IT gone?
Hands down, there is nothing better in life than being a parent. Our children can make us laugh, swell with pride, cry and scream all in the matter of 10 minutes! Children’s ability to bring out the best in adults is amazing. So, what can we learn about selling from our own childhood?
We’ve all experienced 1-3 in action. We can remember doing them ourselves or see them in action with our own children.
In sales, the IT factor is an internal DESIRE; it’s the driving force that elevates a mediocre sales person into a serious producer. As children, we all had the sales IT. At some point, we were told NO a hundred different ways. Yet, the obstacles placed in front of us never seemed to matter. As a child, you know what you want – it’s just that simple. Each NO meant we either tried a little harder or changed methods until we reached our goals.
It was on our childhood trips to the store or talking with our parents about school that we learned our sales skills. The store and kitchen were our classrooms to develop our selling style. A lifetime of NO’s makes most people fear even asking a question. Success breads success.
I have a poster on my wall from a Marathon I ran a long time ago. On it, there is a quote that defines what I am talking about:
“From where does it come, to see the race to its end? It comes from within.”
Committing to complete a marathon is probably the easiest means to discover your internal IT. A marathon is a long process of training, pain, suffering, doubt and when completed, joy. Along the way there are doubts about why you CHOSE to take on this challenge. Things like: “It’s too early/cold/hot to run. My leg hurts. The game I want to watch is on. I can run tomorrow.” Yet, to complete a marathon, you put all these things aside. Why? Because you made a choice, a commitment to yourself to complete a marathon. Your IT is speaking, telling you — ” if you stop now, you are quitting on yourself and that is the worst thing you can do.”
To complete a marathon, you must work at it each and every day. Your marathon IT will not allow you to stop working toward the goal. IT knows the reward for achievement is better than the alternative. Even a day of rest has a purpose: to heal your body to train again. Your diet changes and everything in your life alters by making the choice to complete a marathon. The choice begins to ignite your IT. It’s on miles 17,18, 19… of the marathon when you discover if your IT is truly in you. It’s late in the race when you are tested. When self doubt speaks louder, your IT will carry you to the finish.
In sales, the choice to grab onto your IT is all on you! A good sales manager can help get you through the painful days and see your dips before they become too severe. Your ultimate success depends on your ability to let your IT take control and guide you to buying customers. IT teaches the value of LISTENING to understand and speaking to be understood.
To turn on your sales IT, you must first define your race:
So if you feel you have lost your IT, don’t worry. Make a commitment and get yours back. Before you know it, your internal IT will have a life of its own and you will be a child in the candy store. Except this time, you have the means to buy everything you always wanted (let’s hope you also have full dental)!
It’s always been just a matter of time before Google Apps and Salesforce.com got serious about one another. It appears that time is now.
Last week, Google started their own version of “AppExchange” and this week we get to see the benefit to salesforce.com: Salesforce for Google Apps! This will go down as one of the great business advances of the year and will become a very big item on Microsoft’s radar.
What you can expect, maybe not today, but easily before the end of the year and probably before summer is Gdocs merging capacity replacing the current mail merge object in salesforce.com. As a user, one of the great features and biggest headaches is mail merge. It’s not a salesforce.com issue. It’s a Microsoft issue. Running the merge is a heavy process on most user machines and creates big time lags, application hanging, etc . . . resulting in many frustrated users. Gdocs merge will eliminate this, as the process will run on salesforce.com or Google’s big, fancy powerful servers. This isn’t here yet, but should be very soon. Today you can link docs between Gdoc and salesforce.com with a click and send it to contacts. Very nice. 
The incorporation of gmail adds one of the best email apps into the salesforce.com interface. Many people want more robust integration of email and now they have it. In the online demo, gmail runs as a separate app that you can send and auto link back to salesforce.com. Salesforce.com users can easily add Gmail via a web tab creating a fully embedded email app in salesforce. Outlook is a great application, but it takes up a lot of system resources. Gmail is web-based and simple to use. Add to it the best SPAM filter around and you’ve got a serious business app on your hands.
Additional enhancements include the ability to chat in salesforce.com using Gtalk and directly export salesforce.com reports to Gdocs. In this area, the Gdocs (spreedsheet) dashboard components are very nice and getting a recent upgrade. When you mix all of this together using iGoogle, it will be interesting to see who is the user interface of choice. Salesforce.com seems the natural choice. But with a few more tweaks, iGoogle may use salesforce.com as its back-end database, pulling all of its data from a salesforce.com org.
As you can see, I am very positive about this arrangement. In the current configuration, more businesses can start to drop Microsoft services and begin using Google. The complete integration is still a few steps away; but, with salesforce.com and Google, they do have the internal resources and vision to bring a tighter system to market in a very short period of time. As soon as mail merge can run with Gdocs, I’ll be recommending this application to everyone that will listen.
You can learn more over at salesforce.com. Here is the link:
http://blogs.salesforce.com/blogs/2008/04/announcing-sale.html
I watched this lecture last night. Randy Pausch is the father of three young children, a husband, a tenured professor at Carnegie Mellon University. When he was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer with only 3 – 6 months of good health remaining, he gave his last lecture.
His message is positive and not about cancer. He speaks about what he’s accomplished, how he did it and how we all can reach our potential. The lecture is about 1 hour and 15 minutes.
