Halak Consulting, LLC

How did I prepare for Salesforce.com Certification exams

2012-01-23T12:08:00.000-08:00

Salesforce.com certification exams are designed to test the knowledge and experience of people who are administrators and developers. These certifications also give credibility to present themselves to customers and partners. The tiered certification approach is designed to mature consultants as they grow with their practices. The passing rate for these exams is not high as people who take the exams assume that they know everything. Salesforce wants to ensure quality of people providing Salesforce.com services. With that comes anxiety on how to study for the exams and how to pass them. I am sharing my experience on how I studied to get my certifications. My consulting experience for over eight years has helped me along the way as well.

How to Study

I will highly recommend taking the Salesforce.com certification classes. A lot of the questions on the exams are based on the material that is covered in the classes. I paid for the class room training for ADM 201 certification. The benefit I got was to interact with an experienced instructor and have the ability to ask questions and get answers. I would have been lost without that as I knew 60% of what was covered in class. I know everyone can teach themselves through books and online help. What is covered in the course does not compare to online help. I had the study book to refer to as I started studying for the exam. This helped me tremendously as not only did I need to know how to set things up, but I had to know the limitations for all functionality. This is very well defined in their training material. I reserved two to three days studying for the ADM 201 certification exam.

As a Salesforce Consulting Partner, I had access to online training. I reserved about two to three days going through the online training for the Sales Cloud Consultant certification in September 2011. I came back to this training before I took my exam again in January 2012 and reserved just as much time refreshing myself on the material.

Practice what you learn

I spent some time setting up some of the things I learned in class. With class room training, you get to continue to work with your training ORG that is provided to you during class. I exploited the training ORG to the max going over everything I learned. This was a good reinforcement practice. I also took screen shots of things that I thought were important and created a word document so I could go back and refer to that again. I will recommend everyone to get a free developer account to practice everything you learn.

For Sales Cloud Consultant Certification in October 2011, I took a business scenario and set up a demo ORG with all the functionality a business would need. I got a developer ORG and set it up for a business that sells education classes and hires people to provide the training. I named the business Halak Education. I set up all custom objects for classes, resources, assignments, skills, time cards. I also setup opportunities, opportunity products, quotes, reports and dashboards, campaigns, web to lead, self-service portal, customer portal, Salesforce for Social Media. This gave me the confidence to not only quote a prospect how long it would take to setup a system like this, but also helped me understand what kind of discovery questions I need to ask before I start a project. Above all, it gave me the experience I needed to fully understand Salesforce.com. I also now have a very robust demo system that I can use to educate prospects and customers on Salesforce.com functionality.

ADM201 topics to study – Some of the topics that will be covered

Setting up User Interface – All User Interface options including chatter setup
Organization Administration – Company Profile, Fiscal year, Currency management
Security and Access – Everything on Profiles, Roles, Role hierarchy, Role access, Sharing rules, Organization Wide Defaults, Login hours, IP Restrictions
Customization – Objects, Fields, Page Layouts, Record Types, Field level security, Related lists, Data validation rules
Workflow Rules
Workflow Approvals
Marketing – Campaigns, Lead queues, Assignment Rules, Web-to-lead, Auto response rules, Lead conversion
Reports and Dashboards – All reports & dashboard features and attributes
Service and Support – Cases, Solutions, Web-to-case, Case Escalation Rules
Import Utilities – Data Loader and Salesforce Import
Exceptions for every feature – look at the limits and edition document in the help file

Sales Cloud Consultant topics to study – Some of the topics that will be covered

Solution discovery – Questions to ask a customer for their needs
Building a strong pipeline – Lead Generation and management
Funnel Management – Opportunity Management and Forecasting
Improve Sales Rep Productivity - 360º view of the customer
Drive More Business – Marketing Campaign Management
Sales and Marketing Alignment – Lead hand off process
Reporting and Analysis – Reports and Dashboards
Products, Price Books and Assets
Territory Management
Partner Portal
Salesforce to Salesforce
Service and Support
Ideas in Salesforce

I hope this will give perspective certification candidates an idea of what they need to work on and know in order to pass the exams.

Document and Report Generation Made Easy in Salesforce with Conga Composer

2011-10-11T13:56:00.000-07:00

Conga Composer makes it easy for Salesforce users to create sophisticated documents and reports using any data in Salesforce. I have custom designed a very simple billing and invoicing system. My challenge was to create an invoice record that showed all billings, advance payments and regular payments against an invoice. Data needed to be retrieved from five different records which included my project record, billing record, invoice record, advance payment record and regular payment record. These are all associated with the project.

This is very hard to do natively in Salesforce. So I turned to Conga Composer. With excellent support from their Business Analyst, I was able to create an invoice template in a few hours and I now have a one click button that generates the invoice for me.

We started with building the queries for all five records.

Query # 1 Select recent invoice on a project.

Query # 2 Select all fields from the billing record that are on the recent invoice and sort it by date in descending order.

Query # 3 Select all fields that are on an advance payment record where the invoice number matches the recent invoice on the project and list all advance payments by date in descending order.

Query # 4 Select all fields that are on a payment record where the invoice number matches the recent invoice on the project and list all payments by date in descending order.

Build a custom button on the Project record that invokes Conga Composer and compiles all the data together. Conga Composer users excel for holding the data while the document is generated in its native format or a PDF file. The next step was to setup the Word Template with all the relevant fields in tables, add currency and date formatting, including calculations for dollar values.

Here is the end result.

Conga Composer is used by small and large firms for their document generation and reporting needs. The great thing about this product is that you can setup templates for a whole package and create those documents in one run instead of one document at a time. For more information give us a call 415-233-4240 or visit AppExtremes.

Understanding Salesforce Terminology and Process Flow

2011-08-29T11:33:00.000-07:00

Salesforce is a fantastic CRM system. But, for those businesses which are new to Salesforce, how do you relate the Salesforce terminology with your sales process. I hope this will help you cross that bridge.

Let’s look at the definitions and then we will delve into process flow shown here.

Click on the image to see a larger view.

Campaigns

Campaigns are marketing efforts made by any business which includes mass mailing, email campaigns, trade shows, seminars, networking events, etc.

Leads

Every contact you get from these campaigns is added to the system as a lead. A lead is basically a business card with a name, address and phone number that could potentially be interested in your product. You either acquire this card in person, mail or lists. You have activities related to the lead development which will include calls, sending materials and possible meetings.

Account

An account is a place of business. It has a building, a door that you walk into, company name, address and a main phone number.

Contact

A contact is anyone that you are dealing with at that place of business. An account can have multiple contacts associated with it.

Opportunity

An opportunity is when there is potential for dollars from the account that you have developed. Opportunities have different stages through the sales life cycle. Based on your sales process, you will define the stages and probability of that opportunity closing. Here is an example of a few that are provided by Salesforce out of the box.

Stage	Opportunity Type	Probability	Forecast Category
Prospecting	Open	10%	Pipeline
Needs Analysis	Open	20%	Pipeline
Value Proposition	Open	50%	Pipeline
Proposal/Price Quote	Open	75%	Pipeline
Negotiation/Review	Open	90%	Pipeline
Closed Won	Closed/Won	100%	Closed
Closed Lost	Closed/Lost	0%	Omitted

Tasks

Tasks are your ToDo list. It needs to get done but is not date and time dependent. Consider task as a list that you put on your refrigerator that needs to get done and check things off as they are done. Tasks are an essential part of every step of the sales process starting from lead nurturing to post-sales support. In Salesforce, tasks follow with you every day until you mark them done.

Events

Events are things that dependent on a date and time. Events are your calendar book that you carry around. Once the date and time is gone, the event is done. Unlike in your calendar book you scratch out the event that is not happening and add a new one to the day when it is happening, in Salesforce all you have to do is reschedule the same event to another date and time so you have the history.

Actvities

In Salesforce, activities are a combination of tasks, events, call logs and emails. Very simple.

Most businesses run some sort of marketing campaign and leads are generated from those campaigns. Leads are nurtured by Sales reps with calls, following up with marketing materials and meetings to get the potential client interested.

A lead usually turns into a suspect before they become a prospect. A suspect is someone who is interested but not ready to spend dollars on your product or services. Salesforce does not have a specific process designed for a suspect. Ideally, when a lead reaches a suspect phase, the lead is converted to an account (suspect) and a contact. The system will prompt you to create an account, contact and optionally an opportunity. As the sales rep starts working with the suspect account, he/she can add related contacts at that business and associate them to the account. They can add all activities related to this account for each contact and that will be visible on the account.

Once there is an opportunity where the suspect is ready to start talking about purchasing your products or services, you can then create an opportunity and start tracking the opportunity dollars through its life cycle until that opportunity is closed. All activities related to this opportunity can be tracked in the opportunity and relate it with the particular contact that the rep is working with. Once again all these activities are visible on the account.

The pipeline report shows all open opportunities. Once the opportunity is closed/won or closed/lost, it falls off the pipe line report and then you can run reports to show how much business you have closed with different time frames.

This is a very basic overview of Salesforce CRM. Salesforce can be extended beyond the basics to fit your specific business needs.

What if you can change the dynamic between Sales Reps and their Manager? Now you can!

2011-08-22T11:00:00.000-07:00

When I looked at Foretuit, I was reminded what it was like to be a Sales Rep with big companies and have mangers breathing down my neck, pressuring me to tell them everything that was going on with my deals. There is an absolutely good reason for and I fully understand that as a business owner today. I truly believe that the intensity of push and pull has not changed at all even though CRM systems have evolved. Infect it has gotten worse. Most Sales Reps hate putting data into the CRM systems out of fear that their managers are going to nail them for things that are beyond their control.

I know I hated updating my pipeline since I could not really tell my manger what was causing the bottle neck for multiple reasons. One she did not want to believe me in the first place and, two there were factors at the prospect end that were beyond my control. Instead of taking a coaching approach to management, she embarrassed me on team sales calls. The comment that has stuck with me for all these years is this: “Do you know why it is important to update the pipeline? Because the Share Holders need to know exactly what is going on with the company” You have no idea how much I wanted to pull her eyes out of her eye socket.

Sadly, I hear these stories every day. Sales reps I talk with tell me they love Salesforce, but they hate putting data in the system as their managers would know what is going on. Well, I am on the other side now and I know it is very important for managers to know what is going on. I asked Michael Liebow, the co-founder of Foretuit, how he came up with the idea to develop the solution he has developed. And his answer was: “Out of pure frustration”.

What is Foretuit? It is a solution built as a complementary tool for Salesforce.com. Foretuit captures data of all communications from all areas of business. Data is gathered from email systems, internet and social media services, Salesforce activities and Chatter. Chatter facilitates all internal collaboration on a deal.

So let’s say John is working on WAP Mobile Research opportunity. There are seven people involved in the deal from Sales, Legal, Production, Fulfillment and Marketing. Chatter gives the team great power to collaborate and push this deal forward. And then there are five people involved from the prospect side. There are email communications and activities related to all involved. John has worked so hard and he truly believes the deal is going to close on time. He sees Foretuit alert on his deal and lets Mary know that the bottle neck is at the prospect end in their Legal department. What is Mary’s first reaction? Ya right!

What if Mary had the power to view at a glance what is going on with all deals and who is causing the bottle neck. The following screen shots will show you just that. Mary can have a dashboard that shows her at a glance what her pipeline looks like. The blue circles are opportunities that are on track. The red circles are opportunities that need attention.

Mary drills down into the WAP Mobile Research Opportunity and gets a detail of how the deal has progressed so far. She can see the 80 percentage probability that the Foretuit engine has predicted.

She can further drill down and look at the timeline of communications with all parties involved. Mary can see meetings setup in the future knowing that John looks forward to this deal closing but he was also right about the bottle neck. She can see that Novella Flanders in Legal at the prospect has made only one attempt and there has been no further communications from her since August 5th.

What this does is give Mary options on how to handle this situation. If this is something John can’t influence, then she has the power to call Novella herself.

Does this truly change the dynamic between Sales reps and their managers? Yes, it does. Mary has a lot more insight into her pipeline and knows that she can trust her reps and take their word for what they are telling her. This also builds a trusting relationship for the reps with their managers as they no longer fear their bosses.

Foretuit goes one step further and gives you a mind map of all the contacts Brent has for his enterprise level opportunities. What happens if Brent leaves and John takes over his account? How can John get a high level overview of who Brent dealt with? Here is what Foretuit does for John.

This mind map shows all the relationships between Brent and both internal and external parties. This shortens the transition from one Sales rep to another.

Foretuit is in beta and soon to be released. Why am I writing about this? One I believe in supporting small businesses and startups and two, this is a solution that I truly believe will change the love hate dynamic between sales reps and their managers. You can learn more about Foretuit and Test Drive Foretuit to see if for yourself.

Document Management in the Cloud

2011-08-15T17:16:00.000-07:00

Cloud Computing is the new way of managing day to day business processes for a lot of firms in varied industries. This revolution started many years ago and with a mature development platform like Salesforce.com it is very easy for application vendors to build native applications. Take a look at this three minute video on Document Generation and Document Management in Salesforce.com.

This document management system is built by AdvologixPM leveraging Libraries and Content. They are listed on the App Exchange. This highlights the flexibility and power of the platform. With over a 1000 application partners and new partners placing their applications on the App Exchange every day, Salesforce.com is clearly a market leader in the CRM arena.

Go Beyond Email for Client Collaboration

2011-08-15T17:15:00.000-07:00

Since the advent of email, our lives and the way we communicate with all our clients and business associates have changed. Our inboxes and PDAs, are bombarded with emails that sometimes get ignored simply because we don’t have time to shift through each and every one of them.

This impacts our ability to communicate with the client when we need to provide them with crucial information leading to client dissatisfaction. This is not just an issue with a client but also our peers and associates.

Big corporations embraced the concept of internal web portals or intranets to address effective collaboration with peers and associates. Then came client and partner portals to have just as efficient and effective collaboration with clients and outside personnel.

That same concept is now accessible to small businesses and lawyers through technologies like NetDocuments client portal, AdvologixPM customer portal and Google Apps where you have the power to share critical information and documents.

Imagine a scenario where you require a client to review a document that is emailed on Monday. The document needs to be filed with the court on Wednesday. Client sends the document back to you on Tuesday but you missed the email and it is sitting in your inbox. Wednesday deadline passes and on Friday, you discover you have completely missed the boat. Possibility of Sanctions?

Now imagine the scenario with a client portal. You place the document on the portal which notifies the client automatically that a document needs their attention. A task is added to your assistant’s calendar to follow up. The client reviews it and either approves it or suggests changes. After relevant exchange of instructions, the assistant has the approved document ready to be filed on Wednesday and you don’t have to carry that burden on your shoulders.

How incredibly valuable is that? You have a satisfied client who is going to brag about the efficiency and superior level of customer service your firm provided giving you the opportunity to bring in new business via word of mouth. Get the same level of satisfaction with your peers and outside counsel.

Differentiate yourself from the attorney next door with a new and innovative way of communicating with your clients. Go beyond email for client collaboration.

Phone2Lead for Salesforce - Maximizing Marketing ROI Automation

2011-08-15T16:17:00.000-07:00

A firm spends a lot of money and resources in marketing campaigns to both B2B and B2C. With native Salesforce.com functionality setting up multiple web sites and capture web to leads is simple and easy. What happens when someone calls in, instead of going to your web site and filling out the web form?

The sales representative adds a lead record, assign it to the campaign and then enter the phone call as an activity. Sales representatives hate this as it takes more time then they want to spend entering data in the system. This is a huge problem for management who is looking for Sales representative’s performance and effectiveness on selling.

Well, here comes Phone2Lead™ from Keystone CTI. Pete Fife (Fifedog) Founder and CEO of Keystone CTI has developed a solution that is a blessing for Marketing and Sales Managers including Sales Representatives.

Here how Phone2Lead™ works:

Purchase a unique phone number for each campaign which can be recycled for later campaigns.
When sending out campaigns (emails, direct mail, radio advertising, bill board or even TV advertisements) provide the specific phone number for the prospects to call in.
Control if prospects are prompted for a Keystone Code, sent with the outbound campaign. For new prospects via web forms, radio, TV, etc. you can setup the system for no prompt. When the sales representative answers the phone, the system identifies the campaign so they have an informed conversation with the prospect.
The system adds a new lead and an activity record for any caller who is not in the system. For an existing Lead or Contact, the system will add an activity record to tack the duration of the call with the corresponding campaign record.

Phone2Lead™ will allow you to truly monitor all the time that Sales representatives spend on working with leads giving measurable results. Not only can this solution be used for monitoring marketing activities, it can also be used to track partner referrals.

Monitor Your Marketing Efforts with Success

2011-08-15T16:12:00.000-07:00

As a business you put a lot of effort in marketing your products or services through multiple channels such as emails campaigns, direct mail, radio or TV advertisements, bill boards, etc. How do you really measure the success of your marketing campaigns? How do you know if your strategy is on target or it needs to be changed?

There are few basic steps that lead to successful marketing assessment. In order to determine if your campaign is successful, you need to track campaign activity, lead conversion rate and revenue generation from each campaign.

How do you monitor Campaign Activity?

Most firms will build Excel spreadsheets with the campaign information and add leads as they are received in response to the campaign. The amount of time spent tracking this information far exceeds the time and money spent on the campaign itself. It is also difficult to maintain an excel spreadsheet that is on one person’s computer vs. having a centralized monitoring system.
An alternative to an Excel spreadsheet is a system like Salesforce.com where you can setup Campaigns for each marketing activity and add both leads and contacts as campaign members. You can also setup campaign hierarchies. One example is a national organization that you work with for trade shows. Each trade show is a separate campaign with in the parent campaign. The campaign activity rolls up into the master campaign giving the firm visibility of the success at both the parent and child level.

How do you monitor Campaign Lead Conversion?

Once a prospect has made a decision to purchase your products or services, how do you tie that to your marketing campaign or see which campaign truly influenced the purchasing decision?
Most firms will create a separate Excel spread sheet for this function or use Outlook for client management. The issue here is two disparate systems that are not tied to each other to monitor true effectiveness of the marketing efforts made by a firm.

In Salesforce.com with campaign influence, you can see which campaign truly influenced the buyer in making their purchasing decision. Once a lead is converted, you can setup Opportunities which are tied to each campaign. This gives you the ability to view how many leads responded to your campaign, how many converted to a client and what were the revenue opportunities for each converted lead and how many were not interested in your product or services. This gives you a very clear picture of the effectiveness of your campaign both from a cost and revenue perspective.

How do you monitor Revenue Generation?

Most firms will create yet another Excel spreadsheet or use a billing program for monitoring revenue generation. Now you have a third system that is not centralized and data can’t be viewed for effectiveness.
In Salesforce.com Opportunities can be tied to Products that can be setup as a product list with price books. Each product or service purchased rolls up into each opportunity that is associated with each campaign.

One of the key components of measuring any success is analytics giving you the power to slice and dice your data. With Salesforce.com Dashboards and Reports, your firm will be able to not only monitor marketing activity at each individual level but also at the management level giving senior management insight into the effectiveness of the firm’s marketing efforts.

Salesforce.com As a Platform

2011-08-15T15:47:00.000-07:00

We all know that Salesforce.com is a cloud application, but what is Salesforce.com platform?

Let’s first look at what a platform actually is. The analogy that we can use is that a platform is a basis to build a structure on. For example, when you are building a house the foundation is a structure on which you can build different types of walls, doors, and roofs. All of these elements firmly rest on top the foundation that they were built on. Another way of looking at it is that a piece of land is a platform that allows you to build building structures on top of.

Salesforce.com has provided their underlying architecture as a platform with building blocks. The platform building blocks allow you to build different applications for different industries, while ensuring that there is conformity and standardization for every application being built. What companies like AdvologixPM do is use these building blocks to build an application that caters to their specific market. AdvologixPM has built an application that caters to the legal industry.

If we go back to building analogy, we can imagine a building owner putting together a tall tower that encompasses of square and rectangle blocks. A different building owner can build a structure that is built with round and oval building blocks. An application vendor can use the Salesforce.com platform to build applications for different industries conforming to different business practices. The platform also allows customization of the application for a specific business process need.

If a building owner wanted to add a round structure in the middle of their building, all they would have to do is talk to the owner who has built the round structure, take a piece of what they have done, and add it into their building. What this allows is the ability to inherit functionality from different applications and seamlessly integrate it with the current application without restructuring of any of the user interface.

As you can see different application vendors use different building blocks to build unique applications that are suited to their specific markets. These applications have conformity and stability due to the standards that have been established by the platform.