Perspectives on Salesforce.com

The Salesforce for Google Apps functionality is live now! To get started, go to Setup and find the Google Apps Settings menu.

Step 1 is to identify your domain. Your company must have an existing Google Apps business account to do this.

Step 2 is to enable the features you want. This will be your main control panel for managing these settings.

Some observations:

• The Add Google Docs to Salesforce feature is very cool and will be very useful! It adds onto the existing Notes & Attachments related list and lets you create/associate a new Doc, Spreadsheet or Presentation to a record. You can also look for an existing document you have and associate that. I am not sure how it handles access to the document by others. You might have to specifically collaborate with people.

  

  I did not see any Mail Merge capabilities with this feature.

• When you enable the Google Docs tab, it adds the tab onto every application you have rather than asking you. You have to edit each application to remove it. This feature is nothing too special. Just a tab to Google Docs. I don’t see any special development Google did on their end to refer to Salesforce in their UI.
• Enabling Email to Salesforce gives each user a new Email Settings screen where they can edit their personal settings. The idea here is that you BCC a special email address and Apex code will process it and associate the email to your Lead/Contact. I tested it and attachments do not get saved.

  

  Email to Salesforce is not limited to Google Apps. The image Salesforce has includes gMail, Outlook and Yahoo! Mail.

  

• Enabling gMail Buttons & Links adds a gMail link to every email address field. When you click it, a gMail window opens to compose a new email. A special Salesforce email address is BCCed on the message so that it will be processed right into Salesforce for you and associated with the record.

  

  

• Enabling the Google Talk Sidebar Component puts the same Google Talk widget you see in gMail on the Salesforce sidebar. I opted to keep this turned off as I’ll keep using my Trillian client. This feature is not pulling Contact names into gTalk. It’s simply putting your current gTalk contact list on the sidebar. You’d add people the same way as if this integration never existed.
• I didn’t try any of the 3rd party apps. At first glance the Calendar Sync and Report Collaboration sound the most interesting.

What do you think about the new functionality?

The Salesforce / Google Apps integration news is coming out now. You can cut to the chase by watching the Salesforce Video on YouTube (embedded below), which explains how it works.

Salesforce’s main announcement page is http://www.salesforce.com/googleapps.

The permanent Salesforce product page is http://www.salesforce.com/products/google/apps.

Some of the notable sites are tracking it too. I am sure there will be lots more by morning.:

• Techmeme Discussion
• Techcrunch
• Mashable
• C|Net
• Associated Press

Some highlights:

• I believe this is offered free to all Salesforce users
• Save email right to Salesforce like you can do with the Outlook Connector already. Not sure if it has 100% of this functionality such as Attachment saves.
• Generate Google Docs, Spreadsheets and Presentations right from Salesforce and have them linked to your records. The Google Docs side will allow for strong collaboration and the linkage to Salesforce will ensure that everyone is working off the right document. I was unable to tell via the video if you can do Mail Merge to Google Docs like you can with MS Word.
• Google Chat is embedded in the Salesforce sidebar allowing you to chat with people right from within Salesforce
• Sync your Salesforce & Google Calendar via a 3rd party app
• Export your Reports to Google Spreadsheets with a 3rd party app

Check out the new Google Apps category on AppExchange to see all the 3rd party apps.

Keep an eye on the Paul Greenberg’s blog. A while back he issued a challenge to Salesforce and Microsoft to configure the application in an effort to compare the configuration capabilities of the 2 systems. Both have agreed to it. Should be interesting.

On a recent project, I was helping my client prioritize their lead data. They were having trouble with the default Rating field in Salesforce because 1) it required a user to populate the record and 2) the rating should change with the passing of time.

I came up with a formula that takes the Lead Status and Expected Close Date (a custom field) into account in order to derive a Rating value on a Lead. This client happens to use Leads for their entire sales cycle and converts Leads once they are sold, but this concept would apply to equally to Opportunities as well.

Requirements

The simplified requirements are to derive a Rating value as follows:

They plan to manage their pipeline closely using the derived Rating field. They want the Rating to get "better" as time passes, so that they can reinforce the use of the Expected Close Date field. For example, if there is a Lead in Presentation status and it gets forgotten by Sales, that lead’s rating will eventually get to "Hot" as the Expected Close Date approaches or is passed. Management will be asking about that Lead and it will either be accurate or the Expected Close Date will be updated to better reflect reality. Over time, they will really be able to trust the Expected Close Date field, which is a new field for them.

Solution

To accomplish this, I did the following:

1. Added a custom field on Leads called Expected Close Date. This would be filled out by the end-user and acts like the Close Date does on an Opportunity.
2. Added a custom formula field called Days to Close that calculates how many days away the Expected Close Date is. The formula is as follows:

   Expected_Close_Date__c – TODAY()

   This field was added to the Page Layout because it is pretty useful in and of itself. Also, the client is on Professional Edition, so we wanted this field available in reports and that’s how you make it visible.

3. Added a custom formula field called Rating (derived) that calculates a rating value using the requirements from the table above. I use this formula approach (using the CASE function) whenever I am doing some kind of matrixed formula result.
   CASE(1,

   IF(ISPICKVAL( Status ,"New"), 1, 0),"New",

   IF(AND(ISPICKVAL( Status ,"Contacted"), Days_to_Close__c <= 60), 1, 0),"Warm",
   IF(AND(ISPICKVAL( Status ,"Contacted"), Days_to_Close__c > 60), 1, 0),"Cold",

   IF(AND(ISPICKVAL( Status ,"Interested"), Days_to_Close__c <= 90), 1, 0),"Warm",
   IF(AND(ISPICKVAL( Status ,"Interested"), Days_to_Close__c > 90), 1, 0),"Cold",

   IF(AND(ISPICKVAL( Status ,"Presentation"), Days_to_Close__c <= 30), 1, 0),"Hot",
   IF(AND(ISPICKVAL( Status ,"Presentation"), Days_to_Close__c <= 90), 1, 0),"Warm",
   IF(AND(ISPICKVAL( Status ,"Presentation"), Days_to_Close__c > 90), 1, 0),"Cold",

   IF(AND(ISPICKVAL( Status ,"Sent I/O"), Days_to_Close__c <= 90), 1, 0),"Hot",
   IF(AND(ISPICKVAL( Status ,"Sent I/O"), Days_to_Close__c > 90), 1, 0),"Warm",

   IF(ISPICKVAL( Status ,"Sold"), 1, 0),"Won",

   IF(ISPICKVAL( Status ,"Lost – No Contact"), 1, 0),"Lost",
   IF(ISPICKVAL( Status ,"Lost – No Budget"), 1, 0),"Lost",
   IF(ISPICKVAL( Status ,"Lost – Not Interested"), 1, 0),"Lost",
   "")

4. The Lead Views and Reports we made for reps are driven by this derived field. By doing this, they have 1 simple value to prioritize on. Also, as new Lead Statuses emerge or if we re-define what "Hot" means, we only need to modify the formula. When we do, all the reports and views automatically pick it up since they are not hardcoding filters on the Lead Status of Expected Close Date fields.

Does anyone else use an approach like this? Any suggestions to make it better?

Depending upon complexity, it is possible to hit formula size limits. Especially considering the need to use the ISPICKVAL function for the Lead Status. Vote on this idea to fix the ISPICKVAL issue.

I have setup a knowledge base using my Salesforce org to contain solutions for Arrowpointe products. Going forward, this will be the official location for help documentation on all Arrowpointe products. It is currently well populated with information on Arrowpointe Maps and Info Center. I am in the process of populating it for Auto vCard, User Adoption Dashboard and the Akismet anti-spam solution.

The direct URL to the knowledge base is:

http://www.arrowpointe.com/support/kb/