Understanding Accounts and Contacts

Account: Account can be any organization that your company does business with. It can be your competitor,partner or customer. There can be a B2B or B2C accounts.By default, the accounts are configured for B2B  clients in Saleforce.Now if you have a client who is an individual, how do you configure your Salesforce for that.Salesforce can be tweaked to configure for individual clients and that is called as Person Accounts.Basically, you create an Account to hold all the information pertaining to that particular company or organization.For e.g You have Account  name, Account Number,Account Type(as in  Customer,Partner),Industry and other fields as per your business rules.
If Bank of America is one of your customer,you would create an account name as Bank of America.You can sort your customers by type so that you can have always separate customers from competitors.Basically, account is the centralized location for all your business related information.

Contacts: Contact is that person in your account with whom you would be dealing on all your business related meetings.Every Contact is associated with an Account name.You cannot have a contact without an Account name.Contact record in Salesforce stores all the information about that individual like First  name,last name,his mailing address. Some default reports that you can generate  based on contacts are Partner account contacts,Bounced contacts and contact history.

Understanding Leads

Since we are going to work on Salesforce, a CRM product, its very important to understand the keywords here like Leads, Account, Opportunity and Contact.We'll start our discussion with Leads.
To put it in plain vanilla sentence, lets put it like this. Leads are the bread and butter of your company.Lead can be any person who is interested in your product or services.He/She has some signs of a prospective buyer.Lead can come from any campaign, a seminar, roadshow or just while shopping around in the mall.
Now,lets focus on the following topics:

• How to qualify a lead: If you have been in your business for a long time, you would know whats your clientele like.That does not mean that you take the yellow pages and start dialing the numbers right away. You need to spend enough time and money and do your due diligence to actually understand the prospective client. Lets assume you are in software services business and you provide all kinds of software solutions including web designing, eCommerce,training and consulting. Now, to identify leads for your business,you need to build a strategy. Lets first decide that we are going to work only on projects which would fetch us revenue of $100,000 or more.For this criteria, we need to target only those companies whose annual revenue is at least 10 times more than that.Now that we know what companies we need to target, we need to start our actual work.Make a list of at least 20 such companies. Go on their websites. Study their core business.Try to identify the areas where your services could be of help to them which would ultimately result in their progression. For E.g If a company is in retail business but it does not have a strong online presence then you have a  good chance here to market yourself. Make a prototype of an eCommerce website, call up the company,setup an appointment with the right person asking them for their time so you could give them  a presentation of your services which would be relevant to their company.Similarly, do the same task for all the 20 prospective clients that you have chosen. If out of 20 clients, at least 2 came back with interest in your services, you are good. In the worst case, if nobody showed up, don't give up. It was a good learning experience and now you know what works and what doesn't.
• Once qualified, how do we manage that lead: Now that we have identified leads, lets see how well we manage that lead. Leads should be assigned to the right salesperson. There are various Lead assignment rules in Salesforce which we'll see later. Right now, lets understand the very concept of Lead Management. Leads can be managed based on various factors like territory based, business domain expertise or simple some in-house rules.Don't give EMEA leads to your salesperson in USA.It might not work unless and  until there are some other factors governing the lead assignment.  It would be a good idea to have a complete data available of all your Leads which includes emails,phone numbers, activity,documents easily available. Every fortnightly, run a report on this. It would give you a fair idea about your potential customer's behavior in terms of their seriousness towards doing a business with you. Segregate them in Hot,Warm or Cold. Focus on the Leads with 'HOT' behavior  and try to convert them into a  business opportunity. Warm and Cold leads are equally important, don't ignore them. Maybe its just a matter of time.Make sure you do regular follow-ups and the turn around time in answering any queries raised  by the Leads should be real fast. However, the trick here is not to be too pushy with your clients or else it might back fire.
• Finally,how to convert that lead into a Sales opportunity: Now that we have some serious potential buyers in our list,the challenge is now how to convert them to a Sales opportunity.Start engaging your client.Try to get as many inputs as you can from them.Once the lead gets that comfort level about your services and delivery, he'll formulate the requirements for you. Work on those requirements with him.This client would have a budget and timeline for the project that he is going to work on. Now you are almost there. Sign an agreement with your client and you have a new Sales opportunity ready to work on.

An overview of Cloud Computing and its Benefits and Flaws

Cloud computing is the buzz word these days. Almost every other company is trying to launch their IT process on the cloud. Let's first understand what  it really means and what are the advantages and disadvantages of putting everything in the cloud.To put it in simple words, anything that is virtual and is managed centrally is on cloud.

We all know what Amazon,ebay,yahoo,google,aol, does.While some of these companies might not be going as strong as the other but they are all part of cloud computing technology. Most of us would still remember when we made our first purchase on Amazon or made a first online search on Google/yahoo.All you had to do was to you enter your details and requirements and the information that you seek was given to you.For e.g if you want to buy a particular watch on amazon.com, you enter its brand name, category(men/woman)
and any other details that you might like and the product is displayed right in front of you.

Now that is  also on the cloud but the information that you get is what you desire. Lets name this as CLOUD A.

Ten years down the line, there has been a major paradigm shift. This decade has seen a spurt in the growth of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, You tube,Linkedin and likewise.

These networking sites keep us updated with what people in our network are doing. Now here, we are not asking for any information but the information is pushed to us . This is called CLOUD B.

Salesforce is based on a Cloud B model. Salesforce is basically divided into 2 segments. Sales cloud and Service cloud. Sales cloud takes care of all your Lead, Account , Contact and  Opportunity management related stuff while Service cloud talks about customer service which might include call center and self service.

Then Salesforce also has a Chatter application integrated to it. Chatter allows to keep yourself updated with any information that you might like to see within your company.Similiar to what we have in Facebook.

Some benefits:

• Multi Tenancy: Common infrastructure is being shared by lots of other companies too. You don't have to worry about maintaining the infrastructure resources, somebody else is doing that for you.
• You pay only for what you need: If there are only 5 users in your company who would be using Salesforce, your company needs to purchase only 5 user licence. No need to spend money buying user licence for the entire 500 employee company which definitely reduces the upfront cost.You can keep scaling up your user licences as and when you need.
• Automatic Upgrades:  This is a very important aspect of cloud computing. Here all the software upgrades are taken care by Salesforce itself. You might be holidaying somewhere and when you return to work , you find that your software has been upgraded without your interference.
• Data Access: You can have access to data at any point of time.

Some Flaws:

• Data is managed by some third party: You have less control over your data.
• You need to have a   long term relationship with the host provider for managing your data.

My very first blog on Salesforce. The aim of this blog is to share knowledge on Salesforce and help in preparing the interested  people for salesforce certifications.