The low down on the new FbD Michigan branch office

Wow! December was an amazing month for us here at Force by Design. We publicly announced our intention of starting a new branch of our practice in East Lansing Michigan. We simply could not be more excited about the opportunity to bring the wonders of salesforce.com and cloud computing to the mid-coast!

In mid-December the Force by Design team secured support from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC), the City of East Lansing and LEAP, FbD will soon establish a new office in East Lansing, Michigan. We look forward to welcoming motivated, Salesforce-savvy rockstars to the FBD Team to help our Michigan based clients take cloud-computing to the next level. Over the next five years, FBD aims to create 50 jobs, with a planned investment of $430,000. The hiring process is already off to an exciting start, with the recent hire of Nick Fusi, to whom we would like to extend a warm welcome. In addition to creating new job opportunities, FBD is excited to help boost the local economy and enhance East Lansing’s economic activity. We have tremendous confidence in the Michigan work ethic, and believe East Lansing is an ideal place for us to take the future of the company. What a great way to start the new year!

We would like to invite you to review the following media sources for additional coverage of the move to Michigan:

Please let us know what you think about our latest foray into the mid-west, by posting a comment below.

DreamForce ’10

It’s that time of year again! DreamForce ’10. A little later than usual, in years past the event was held in Oct or Nov, DreamForce is now in early December (12/6-  12/9). Ahhh, a salesforce.com holiday in San Francisco! Interesting timing but not altogether a bad thing. The year is winding down, companies are looking to put budgets into place for next year, and hey, San Francisco is a great place to shop!

The buzz will be Chatter going into General Availability. Chatter was last year’s big announcement that fell a bit flat only because Marc Benioff’s build-up of it was so big, so slow, and the description made everyone ask “huh?”. Now that Chatter is out in all its glory, I’m happy to say that I love it and it’s changed the way I use the application and communicate with everyone here at Force by Design. Push everyone towards Chatter instead of email by responding with a Chatter link. Set an initial goal of reducing your email by 25%. Trust me. It *can* be done. Not only will you have to fend off less email, your visibility into leads, deals, projects, etc., will be better than ever.

© Kenneth Yeung – www.thelettertwo.com

As far as participants go, this will be the biggest DreamForce. Salesforce.com has even extended its Early Bird discount through Friday, October 8th in hopes of packing the Moscone Center.

As we saw last year, I think many, if not all, of the break out sessions will be standing room only.  The food will be ok, the lines will be long, and tote bags will be omni-present. All that aside, the secret to DreamForce is this: Know the difference between Moscone North and Moscone South and now, Moscone West!  The official floor plan is not yet available, but to help you find your way, poke around the Moscone’s interactive map.  I’m not kidding. I’ve seen more backpack-wearing attendees running from one end of the tunnel to the other wondering how they fell down the rabbit hole. Remember: One side badges, the other side everything else. That’s it. If you understand this, your DreamForce ’10 experience will be sure to be a rip-roaring success.

Have fun folks! With Stevie Wonder as the keynote and Bill Clinton as the sax-playing musical headliner, it’s certain to be a DreamForce for the ages!

We hope to see you there!

- Bryan

Bryan Coddington co-founded Force by Design in 2008 and also serves as a principle consultant. Bryan specializes in salesforce.com process design, development, and project management.

Cloudforce 2 Tour: San Jose

Join the Force By Design team at this event on Tuesday, June 22nd at the San Jose Convention Center. The agenda includes a Keynote speech delivered by Marc Benioff, followed by 18 breakout sessions for sales, customer service, developers, IT executives, ISVs, and entrepreneurs. Lunch is included. It’s a great place for networking with peers, cloud computing experts, salesforce.com customers, and partners.

Please stop by and chat with our Force By Design Founding Partners: Micaiah Filkins and Bryan Coddington. Feel free to reply to this blog or email experts@forcebydesign.com if you’d like to setup an appointment with them.

See you there!

Register Now for this free event, space is limited.

San Jose Convention Center
150 West San Carlos St.
San Jose, CA 95113
(408) 277-3900

Vote for our Dreamforce Presentation

Our client Spencer Bolles and one of our founders, Micaiah Filkins, are trying to get on stage at Dreamforce! Would you help us?

It’s that time again: Dreamforce ’10

Mark your calendars! It’s the event that all of us Cloud fanatics look forward to every year! Be a part of the experience: hear the latest in Salesforce.com news, interactive sessions, guest speakers, a great place for networking!

Where: Moscone Center, SF

When: December 6-9, 2010

Take advantage of Salesforce.com’s special early bird offer: $799 (usual price is $1199). Check out www.dreamforce.com for more details.

AppExchange gets an upgrade!

Salesforce.com introduces Aloha Apps!

Aloha Apps have special permissions that allow them to run without encountering Object and Tab limits among other advantages. We highly recommend searching through these apps and installing a few of them!

Some of our favorite Aloha Apps include:

• FinancialForce – An online accounting system built completely on Force.com platform. What makes it special is that the it can use data directly from client accounts and sales opportunities.
• DupeBlocker – A duplicate record prevention tool. Designed to recognize duplicated items within all fields, including custom fields.
• Salesforce for Google Adwords – Track the effectiveness of your Google Adwords. Connects directly to your Adwords account.

What is your favorite Aloha App? Let everyone know in the comments below.

Salesforce ServiceCloud 2

The announcement from salesforce.com this week regarding the new Service Cloud functionality is very exciting. We have been working with a number of clients that will benefit greatly from the new Salesforce Answers and Salesforce Knowledge offerings.

The big win with Salesforce Knowledge is dimensions. Specifically the ability to further refine the taxonomy of a given knowledge base entry. For instance with Salesforce Knowedge the system knows that a specific client has purchased a product, when that client searches for knowledge base articles the system knows to show them results for related to the product(s) the client has purchased. The Salesforce Solutions module, while powerful, lacked the ability to segment your KB articles to this level.

The Answers offering is also very powerful. We are huge propoents of crowd sourcing knowledge. Imagine, your community answering questions for each other and building your knowledge base for you, with your guidance of course. This type of functionality is hugely beneficial to smaller organiztions that cannot afford to employ full time knowledge management staff.

We could not be more excited about Salesforce for Twitter. Twitter has become the standard for micro-blogging and has capture the attention of millions of regular users. (Myself included! Follow me @micaiahf or us @forcebydesign) Forward thinking organizations have been supporting customers on Twitter for over 2 years. Now is the time for all ograniztions to get their Twitter strategy nailed down. If you need help with this, reach out to us, we can plan a strategy with you.

In short we are very excited about the progress with saleforce.com call center application set. All 3 of these features will benefit many of us. Check out more videos over on salesforce.com.

What do you think? Are these new features useful? Post a comment below.

Useful Salesforce.com Short Hand and Keyboard Shortcuts

Many of us spend our entire work day in Salesforce.com. Since we create and update so many records in a day, small time savers really add up over the course of a work day. These tips will help you save valuable time inside the system.

Phone Number Formatting Short Hand

Type any domestic US phone number in any of the common 10 digit phone number formats. e.g. 4155551212, 415.555.1212, (415)5551212,415-555-1212

When you move focus out of the field it will automatically reformat to (415) 555-1212

This short hand, works with all standard and custom Phone number fields.

Note: This feature only works in the UI, updating and inserting new records via the import wizard or the API will not get re-formatted.

Long Number Short Hand

In currency and number fields we can use short hand for thousands (k), millions (m) and billions (b).

Usage Example: When entering the company’s Annual Revenue into Accounts one could type 43b instead of 43,000,000,000. Then when Save is clicked the system changes the b to the correct number of trailing zeros.

Also works like this; Enter 1.2m then on save the system writes 1,200,000 into the field.

This short hand works with all standard and custom Number or Currency fields.

Salesforce.com Native Keyboard Shortcuts

Recent Items

Want to access one of your records in your Recent Items list?

In Internet Explorer one can Press ALT plus any number between 0 and 9 to highlight an item in the Recent Items list in the sidebar. Once the option is highlighted, simply hit the Enter key, you will be taken directly to the record. ALT-1 is the top record on the Recent Items and ALT-0 is the last record on the recent items.

As of the writing of this post, this feature does not work in Chrome or Firefox on the PC. (Please post a comment if you have tested successfully with any other browser.)

Hide/Un-Hide the Sidebar

If your organization has enabled the collapsible sidebar (which we highly recommend doing), press ALT+s to open or close the sidebar. Opening the sidebar using ALT+s automatically places your cursor in the Search box. This feature is extra useful as now you can perform a search without touching the mouse! ALT-s to show the sidebar | type your search phrase | Hit the Enter key | review your search results.

Enhanced Page Layout Editor shortcuts

In order to see the Enhanced Page Layout Editor, one must first enable this in the User Interface settings section. Once enabled, simply navigate to any Page Layout then you can use the following keyboard shortcuts:

Undo = Ctrl+Z

Redo = Ctrl+Y

Quick Save = Ctrl+S

See how simple and familiar these are?

Sources

Salesforce.com Help and Training

Many years of salesforce.com data entry and consulting

Do you have other shortcuts or shorthand that I failed to mention? Add them to the comments below.

Note that you can now login with your Gmail, OpenID, AIM or Yahoo creditentials, thanks to RPX and their federated ID plugin!

Creating year-over-year-to-date Comparison Forumlas

Have you ever had a metric that you wanted to see on a graph showing where you are this year versus last year?

Business Case

Management has asked to see how the sales team is progressing compared to this same time last year, in a dashboard. They would like to see the number of deals closed this far into the last fiscal year, next to the number of deals closed this fiscal year.

Solution

Write a formula field that examines how far we are into the current fiscal year. Then look at the Close Date of each Opportunity to see how far into the year the deal closed. Finally we should only show the deals that were closed already at the same time in the relative fiscal year. Once the calculations are in place then create a report to show the metrics and finally place that chart on a dashboard for consumption.

Implementation

First off we need to get our formula setup, here is a template;

Example Formula

Field Label: # FY to Date


IF( (Today() - DATE(
IF(Today() < DATE( YEAR( TODAY() ) ,07,01),
YEAR( TODAY() ) -1,
YEAR( TODAY() )
),07,01)) >= (CloseDate - DATE( (IF( CloseDate < DATE( YEAR( CloseDate ) ,07,01),
YEAR( CloseDate ) -1,
YEAR( CloseDate ) )
),07,01)) ,
1,
0
)


Note: This formula assumes that the Fiscal Year begins on July 1 of each year.

Create this formula on the Opportunity object, call the field “# FY To Date“, you do not need to add it to the page layout.

As well if your fiscal year is not the calendar year, we will need to create a formula field that shows the dates in the correct sequence. This field will let us see the months in our fiscal year in the natural order on our chart.

Example Formula

Field Label: Close Date Reporting

CASE( MONTH ( CloseDate ) , 1, "FM07 - January", 2, "FM08 - February", 3, "FM09 - March", 4, "FM10 - April", 5, "FM11 - May", 6, "FM12 - June", 7, "FM01 - July", 8, "FM02 - August", 9, "FM03 - September", 10, "FM04 - October", 11, "FM05 - November", "FM06 - December")


Next create an Opportunity report and add a filter of “# FY To Date” = 1. Then create a chart with a Chart Type of “Line – Group Cumulative”, set the Y-Axis to SUM “# FY To Date” set the X-Axis to “Close Date Reporting” and set Groupings to Fiscal Year.

Now click Run Report and you should see a chart that looks like this.

Now just add that chart to your Sales VP’s favorite dashboard and sit back waiting for the thank you email to arrive in your inbox.

Want more tips like this? Then follow us on Twitter @forcebydesign and @micaiahf.

On-Demand CRM and Case Tracking for Law Firms: Maximize Client Acquisition and Retention

On-Demand Client Matter Tracking with Salesforce.com from Force by Design.

Traditionally, law firms have obtained the majority of their clients through personal connections and references. More progressive firms are taking advantage of new technology such as webinars, blogs, email blasts, and even YouTube to attract and maintain clients. How does your firm track all these sources to find out which ones work and which ones don’t? And once you make contact with a prospect, how can you coordinate efforts to convert them into billable clients?
Salesforce.com offers a cost-effective and easy-to-use solution that can substantially improve your client acquisition and retention success. Easily customized to fit the legal industry, Salesforce.com can be implemented quickly so most offices are up and running in a matter of weeks or even days. The Salesforce.com solution provides a secure, web-based collaborative environment for tracking marketing activities, prospects, clients, accounts, and cases.

How about giving your clients access to their case data online? With Salesforce.com Client Portal, your clients can view their case information, provide comments, and view or submit documents. Your clients would have 24×7 access to the information they need, greatly increasing client satisfaction and loyalty to your firm.

Watch this webinar to find out how one Bay Area law firm has changed their client acquisition and retention success by using Salesforce.com, and take a look at the system that has given them an industry advantage:

Benefits of the Salesforce.com solution

• Client acquisition and prospect database designed specifically for law firms
• Transitioning current client data and processes
• Integrating with Outlook
• Client Portal