Salesforce.com was recently honored for their role in shaping the Internet.

To mark the 25th anniversary of the registration of the .com domain, VeriSign and the 25 Years of .com Honorees Committee has nominated 25 online companies which have helped shape the internet as we know it today and Salesforce.com has been nominated in a category that includes industry giants such as Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook.

Salesforce.com was also recently named one of web’s most innovative companies by Fast Company for its enterprise cloud computing and overall Software As A Service innovation.

Salesforce CRM > AppExchange > SF Mobile > Force.com/Sites > Chatter…the innovation continues.

Scheduled Data Export is a rarely talked about feature that may make you a data savior one day.

Data Export lets you prepare a copy of all your Salesforce data. You can generate backup files manually once every six days or schedule them to generate automatically at weekly or monthly intervals. When an export is ready for download you will receive an email containing a link that allows you to download the file(s).

Below are the directions to schedule a backup.

1) Click Setup | Data Management | Data Export and Export Now or Schedule Export. The Export Now option prepares your files for export immediately. This option is only available if a week has passed since your last export. The Schedule Export option allows you to schedule the export process for weekly or monthly intervals.

2) Select the desired encoding for your export file.

3) Select Include attachments… if you want your export data to include attachments.

4) Select Replace carriage returns with spaces if you want your export files to have spaces instead of carriage returns or line breaks. This may be useful if you plan to use your export files for importing or other integrations.

5) If you are scheduling your export, select the frequency, start and end dates, and time of day for your scheduled export.

6) Select the types of data to include in your export. If desired, you can include all data in your export file. We recommend that you include all data if you are not familiar with the terminology used for some of the types of data.

I’ve personally seen this feature save many companies time, money and embarrassment, so setup this free feature today.

Increasingly, customers prefer to receive service through the internet. According to Gartner, by 2012, 65% of all support conversations will happen over the internet. How is your company adapting?

Here at Myriad Minds, this trend has created strong demand for Salesforce Customer Portal and it’s helping our clients deliver faster, anytime service while lowering customer service costs. In fact, Gartner studies have shown the average cost of a customer interactive via phone is $7.50, while the same interaction via a self-service portal is only 50 cents. The value of customer portal is even greater now that Salesforce Content is free.

Using customer portal, your company can deliver a tailored web experience by selectively exposing internal processes to your customers. Because customer portal is built on the Force.com platform, custom portals can be rolled out in weeks, not months. A basic portal can be setup in a few days.

Some of the more common uses of customer portal include:

• Knowledge Base/Service/Cases: Provide easy self-service, 24×7
• Help & Training: Deliver rich content in an engaging experience
• Ideas: Let customers post ideas or questions, vote on the answers of their peers, and add their own comments
• Reporting: Allow customers to create reports and track their service

If you want to learn more, below is a recorded webinar that provides a comprehensive overview.

I find myself discussing user adoption with clients, prospects and the CRM user community more and more often. The standard advice on this topic is often centred on broad concepts such as ensuring management buy-in, engaging users and implementing change management. These are worthy (if slightly bland) recommendations, but how about some more specific suggestions?

Here are 4 tangible tips that are certain to drive CRM user adoption in your business. (With thanks to Ingrid Elgar of Articulate for her recent contribution on this topic at the Sydney Salesforce User Group):

1. Get your KPI metrics out of Excel and into your CRM: The message from your management team must be that staff performance will be measured on metrics that are in the CRM, not hidden away in a management-eyes-only spreadsheet. If the sales team has a target of 50 deals for the month, then show that number in a big, colourful dashboard component as soon as a sales user logs in. If marketing must hit a 25% lead conversion rate this quarter, then let’s see a funnel graph displaying that number front and centre in the CRM.
2. Close the visibility gap between sales targets and actuals: I see this time and time again. Sales guys can view their deal targets, but the actuals to measure against them are held somewhere else. Too often the opportunity pipeline is in the CRM, but the financials on won deals are in the billing system, and the sales team can’t compare the two until the end of the month. There is no greater motivator for a salesperson than to be able to look at their 6-month pipeline and know that it’s worth $173,465.89; or to see clearly that they’ve achieved $35,650 of their $50,000 sales target for the month. Better still, with a little effort you can calculate sales commissions in your CRM in real time, such that a salesperson knows that closing that killer deal before Christmas is worth $1,275 to their pay packet in January. This may take a little development or integration to pull off, but the impact is massive.
3. Run your team through a performance dashboard: This one’s easy, but too often its value is undermined by indecisiveness and management tinkering. Keep it very simple and just do this:
   • Agree a performance dashboard that contains your key metrics.
   • Announce it at your 10am Tuesday morning sales/marketing/customer service team meeting (I hate Monday mornings, so Tuesday morning it is).
   • Have a scheduled process that emails the dashboard to everyone for 9am every Tuesday morning, for discussion at the meeting.
   • Don’t change the dashboard. For a while, at least. No-one will trust the score if the goalposts keep moving. When the dashboard does need refinement, don’t just tinker with it. Follow the first three steps again methodically.
4. Streamline the user experience: In most offices, management look to ensure each staff member is comfortable. An ergonomic chair, an eye-height low-glare monitor, plenty of natural light … we look to create a pleasant work environment. But then we provide a CRM (where users spend hours each day) where creating a sales opportunity for a new prospect is an 11 step process involving 7 screens, 43 clicks and the customer’s name typed 3 times. It’s an incongruous situation. Instead, take the budget allocated for the new eggplant & cerise paint scheme and spend it on customising the day-to-day user experience of your CRM. Consider three key improvements:
   • Reduce clicks: create shortcuts and rationalise screen layouts. For example, allow a salesperson to create an account, contact, opportunity and task record all on one screen, with one Save at the end.
   • Automate repetitive tasks: if it’s repetitive and manual, then you can be sure it’s annoying and error-prone. Automating repetitive tasks shows that you value your staff to do the work that machines can’t. Email confirmations, status updates and data exports are prime candidates for automation.
   • Make it fun: For the social networking generation, leading-edge technology is actually fun to use. Steal design tips from the web and from devices like the iPhone, that is, the technology people use by choice every day. If you can make your CRM approach a Facebook level of interactivity, your staff will actually want to use it. Be creative.

Everything mobile is HOT. Mobile advertising, mobile video and mobile CRM are just three mobile trends that will continue to flourish over the next several years.

As mobile adoption increases, mobile CRM will move from being seen as a competitive advantage to “the way we work”. It’s not a question whether should you go mobile, but when.

Companies who use Salesforce find the mobile app to be a great tool. Why? Well, it enables reps to stay connected even when they’re on the move. With instant access from a mobile device, reps can log calls, respond to leads, update opportunities, access key account information and view dashboards, whether they’re in a customer’s lobby or the back of a cab.

And yet, like any successful technology implementation, a well defined process and strategy will go a long way.

Bill Kalma of Model Metrics suggests asking 5 key questions before implementing SF mobile to help “separate fact from fiction and apply a mobile strategy that fits your organization and your users so you can realize success.”

What are they?

1.    Who are your users?
2.    How mature are your processes?
3.    What do users need to do to get their job done?
4.    What device suits your needs?
5.    How will security be maintained?

SF Mobile is available for Black Berry, iPhone and Windows Mobile device users. It’s free on Unlimited edition while Enterprise and Professional edition users can either pay extra for the full feature solution or use Mobile Lite, a free scaled down version.

Increase Salesforce adoption. Increase sales rep productivity. Go mobile today.

A recent article from ComputerWorld discusses 5 relevant business benefits of CRM. They are:

Business Payoff #1: Increased sales productivity, improved profitability. A properly implemented SaaS CRM system can mean measurable improvements in deal win rates, number of deals completed per sales rep, and higher average sale prices (ASPs).

Business Payoff #2: Better visibility and control.

Business Payoff #3: Less waste in marketing and sales. John Wannamaker’s famous quote, “only half my advertising works I just don’t know which half,” seems to apply to all marketing activities. But a well-configured CRM system can provide pretty solid measurement of marketing effectiveness, with ROI metrics down to the individual campaign level.

Business Payoff #4: Business agility, competitive responsiveness. The CRM system will provide you with the metrics and visibility to identify competitive problems and test solutions for best results. While this applies to any modern CRM system, there’s another level of agility that applies more to SaaS systems that support Agile methods in IT.

Business Payoff #5: Make your priciest business process more reliable. Typically, the highest paid people in the company will be in sales. Yet the company’s most unreliable business process is revenue generation.

The author notes, “Nothing comes for free – Salesforce.com, like any CRM system, is no “point and shoot” miracle. You need to do a lot of work in data cleanup, system integration, and process improvements to enable the business impacts described.”

Here at Myriad Minds, we find that to be 100% true. CRM is a methodology that has significant organisational implications. Managing the “soft” side of a CRM implementation is every bit as crucial as managing the system itself.

Everyone “gets” the concept of Salesforce as the killer CRM system in the cloud; Salesforce owns that space. But with a bit of creativity, you’ll see that the underlying Force.com platform is where the real power is, especially for extending CRM to your customers. The good news? Salesforce CRM is part of Force.com, so everything is seamless. The catch? There genuinely isn’t one, simply the need for a little upfront ingenuity.

Here’s a demo. We’ve used Force.com Sites and custom content management in Salesforce to create an interactive corporate website, entirely in the cloud. Everything you see here is pure Force.com, with no third party tools or extra licences required.

Are the days of big ERP systems finished? What role does cloud computing play in reshaping the software industry?

Those were just two of the questions our Managing Director, Glenn Elliott answered when he featured on The Scoop, a business and technology podcast commissioned by the Australian Financial Review. He was joined by Grahame Reynolds, chairperson of the SAP Australian User Group, and Steve Hodgkinson, research director at Ovum.

Click here to listen to the interview online, or here to download the 20 minute segment as an MP3.