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.

1. Sales Cloud for Beginners
2. Sales Cloud for Customers
3. Your Cloud (Admin, Developers, IT)
4. Service Cloud for Customers

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:

• Foo Fighters
• Lenny Kravits
• Crosby, Stills and Nash
• Barenaked Ladies

Ford assembly line circa 1935.

I like to think selling is simple.  People choose to make things complicated. Usually the villain is the salesperson. Many times sales get stalled or fail to develop because of a disorganized selling process.

Implementing a CRM typically helps salespeople get organized. CRM ideally includes a simple to follow process  that GUIDES salespeople to make the right steps. Some companies spend a ton of money on high-end Sales Training/Methodologies. Salespeople become so overly trained they actually lose their ability to effectively sell.

It’s refreshing to see a post from Build a Sales Machine that lays out an extremely simple process for sales development. If you are looking for a way to help your team become more productive, do yourself a favor and read this post: Create Predictable Pipeline by Moving Prospects through an “Assembly Line.” The author, Aaron Ross, does an excellent job identifying a simple-to-use system that any company can implement.

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

A few days ago salesforce.com opened up their mobile platform to everyone at no charge. With the roll-out of Mobile Lite any salesforce.com user can access the application on the go. I can’t tell you how long I have waited for this access to be included with my standard licensing value.

To activate Mobile Lite  access the set-up section of salesforce.com and click one check box. It really is that simple. Here are some screen shots to help.

Once activated Blackberry users need to download the application to their phones with this link, http://mobile.salesforce.com/setup . iPhone users head on over to the app store and search  Salesforce Mobile.

I’m  an overly connected person and use a Blackberry Curve and an iPhone.  The Blackberry set-up takes a little bit longer than iPhone, I recommend Blackberry users install at the end of the day or at a time when they will not need access to their Blackberry for 10 – 30 minutes. iPhone users can access Mobile Lite within 30 seconds of downloading.

In comparing the two devices iPhone users get very easy to use navigation, large fonts and dashboards.  All of this  makes it extremely easy to view and access records. My Blackberry is a Curve so the screen is not nearly as large as the  iPhone. On the Blackberry you gain simple access to all salesforce data and  Dashboards.  Either platform will bring tremendous vision to all mobile users.  My sales teams are ecstatic about this new tool.

This is a fantastic effort to bring more mobile users into the cloud.  From an administrator standpoint, I can now pull direct real world user feedback on the effectiveness of mobile access.  Prior to mobile lite there was no way I could justify the additional expense of salesforce mobile. Now we can use field feedback to help us weigh the benefits of upgrading to the full mobile version.

Thank you,  Salesforce.com! You’ve made mobile access for the masses.  I’m interested to hear how others plan on using this new business tool?

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!

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!