The Dashboard App For Your Viewing Needs

Whether it is sales, marketing or service, for teams or managers, dashboards can provide you with much needed up-to-date information, to keep your business running as smoothly as possible. With Salesforce.com CRM Dashboards you will have the advantage of greater pipeline predictability as well as being able to view the performance of individuals and teams.

Being able to easily view the organization of your team, increases the effectiveness of your business as you can see the activity of both sales and service teams, such that you can adjust your business management accordingly. This entire package includes some highly useful dashboards including:

Sales & Marketing Dashboards
· Marketing Executive Dashboard
· Sales Executive Dashboard
· Sales Manager Dashboard
· Salesperson Dashboard

Customer Service Dashboards
· Agent Supervisor Overview Dashboard
· Service Executive Overview Dashboard
· Service KPIs Dashboard

Remedyforce – Help in the Cloud

When problems arise in the world of technology, solving them can often be a time consuming ordeal. To make life simpler, BMC and Salesforce.com have collaborated to produce Remedyforce and as it runs in the cloud, there is no need to buy servers, deal with complicated hardware and software or worry about maintenance.

Remedyforce provides a number of solutions including a self service portal, allowing employees to research and resolve their own issues, request help from IT, or initiate standard IT requests, all of which are available from your mobile device. To give you a visual indication of events, there is a Remedyforce dashboard, which shows your calender, such that you can track and manage incidents as well as see reports on performance.

Support staff can use chatter to communicate with each other within Remedyforce, which helps them respond quickly and improve productivity. With the Help Desk in the cloud there is 25% higher first call resolution, 20% lower mean time to resolution, 60% lower unplanned downtime and 50% call deflection, making Remedyforce the ultimate solution to your problems.

Filter the Facts for your Dashboard

Winter ’12 brings new advancements in dashboards and reports with the development of Dashboard filters, which make it easier for users to see the data they need. In terms of dashboards, there is now the option to choose which data to display, through options in a drop down list, with the option of specifying up to 10 values for users to choose from. This filter value option saves times, as previously it could only be achieved by creating several dashboards. With the filter option of ten values, there are several advantages:

• managers can easily filter to view data for different team members

• sales VP can flip between data for each region, without switching dashboards

• Product managers can share a single view of a dashboard and then switch to a view of just their own products

A further advantage is the Enhanced Reports Tab, which makes managing reports and dashboards a simple matter. The tab displays the most recently viewed dashboards and reports and from there it is possible to search for a specific dashboard or report. It is also possible to perform actions on an item from its menu button, as well as create new reports or dashboards directly from the Reports Tab rather than having to navigate to the dashboards list. Further advantages to report types are:

• administrators will be able to create custom report types where customers are the primary object

• using custom report types, support managers can build reports to show which agents are and aren’t closing cases, on the same report

• sales managers can build performance reports focusing on users with opportunities

Social Revolution – 7 Ways to Network

In this age of blogging, tweets, status alerts and facebook, there is an influx of information available in real time on social media sites, which both customers and sales reps can use to their advantage.

1. Get in the game – the first important step step is to find out exactly what your customers need before beginning your pitch. Where this used to be a tedious step, with social media it is simply a matter of logging into an internal collaboration tool in order to customize a proposal, tailored to the needs of the client.

2. Know your customer’s hangouts – with so many avenues of information available, it is important to figure out where customers and potential customers engage in the social web. Tuning into customers conversations will give you an insight into their needs and give you an advantage.

3. Make yourself “like”able – building a brand for yourself, is a combination of the traditional business world and the social media world of tweets, blogging, comments and status updates. Controlling your position in the world of social media, by polishing your profile and joining the relevant industry groups, will bring business to you, rather than having to go out and find the contacts.

4. First friends, then leads – as customers visit the various online forums, use the opportunity to give them as much information about your product as possible, rather than trying to make a hard sale. The customer is obviously searching for information, so try to give them the details they need, showcasing the great service you can provide.

5. Connect with social intelligence – knowing you to call and who to contact in a company, is a vital piece of information and with social networks being so advanced, it is now easier for a good salesman to to figure out who to approach in the sales process. It has been found that this social intelligence leads to to significantly higher success rates, making it worth while to search for the right contact.

6. Tweet up your pipeline – the key to using social networks is not just talking, but listening. Set time aside to tweet regularly about your company, however at the same time, give yourself an hour or so to listen to online conversations about customer issues, so that you can step in at the right moment to offer a solution to problems they have already identified.

7. Get together, sell smarter – the new sales tool is connectivity. With all relevant information being available by clicking the collaboration tab, it is no longer necessary to spend hours searching for specific details, up-to-date documents and expert advice. The employee social network provides the answers and connections needed to sell smarter.

Monitor Media with RADIAN 6

With over 150 million sources including facebook, twitter and blogs, there is a sea of information and conversations out there, regarding industry, brands and competitions. So the question is: how do you make sense of it all? Radian6 provides you with the answer, as it allows you to listen to the talk concerning your company, analyze conversations and then take part in real time.

The advantages of Radian6 are threefold:

Mold marketing according to media – With your finger on the pulse of the public, it is easier to read trends, understand key demographics and adjust your business accordingly. Once you understand how people view your brand, the trends in the market and demographics, you are better equipped to market your product, analyze your campaigns, suit your content and make business decisions.

Pace your pipeline – When people in the online community raise certain issues, or bring to light specific requirements, you can answer that call, improving your customer relationship. Being aware of what is being said about specific prospects and competitors, gives you the opportunity to build on those weaknesses and use them to your advantage.

Superior service – The trick is to spot the troubles before they become serious issues and to make sure the appropriate personnel are alerted to the situation as soon as possible. With the ability to monitor conversations, tweets and posts, you can prioritize, create customer service cases, respond to the problem, all while maintaining a record of the interaction.

Radian 6 gives you all the tools you need to listen to your customers, analyze the issue and respond in real time, giving your business all the advantages it needs.

Management with the Milestone PM App

When it comes to the daily grind of business, management is key to maintaining organization in your daily tasks. With all the projects that can be going on simultaneously, you don’t need any added stress – and this is where the Milestone PM Project and Management app comes in.

A Force.com app, it is the solution to your management issues as it is designed to keep track of time and budgets as well as report the status of various tasks. To simplify matters, Milestone PM provides a number tools, including the ability to create templates as well as import and export them to suit yourself. There is also email integration, reports, dashboards and project summary screen, so that data is always updated and easy to view.

With this kind of information and management at your fingertips, there is no reason to ever be overwhelmed by the number of tasks in your business. Free yourself up to concentrate on the tasks at hand and let Milestone PM keep track of everything else.

Get To Know the Social Enterprise

The world of technology is all about the next big development and Blat-Lapidot and Salesforce are excited to invite you to an event to introduce your business to the latest advantageous technological tools. Taking place on November 23^rd at the Dan Accadia Hotel in Hertzliya, you will discover the benefits of the Social Enterprise.

Appearing at this will be senior, international Salesforce executives and experts from Blat-Lapidot who will draw from their extensive experience, to explain the advantages of the social network. Various aspects of the social enterprise will be expanded upon, including certain case studies. Added to the discussion of the social enterprise, will be talks regarding the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud in connection with managing sales organizations and customer service.

This event is intended for CEO’s, CIO’s, Vice Presidents and Sales, Service and Marketing Managers, so pleased register in advance to enjoy the wealth of information that will doubtless benefit your business. 

The Age of Social Enterprise

We live in a world that is rapidly becoming smaller as communication methods advance technologically. This automatically impacts the business arena just as much as personal lives, as networks such as Facebook transform the manner in which customers and employees communicate. It is the age of social enterprise, where the power of platforms lies in their adaptability.

To evolve with the times, it is vital that the platforms we use give developers the freedom they need to create new applications, thereby ensuring the success of the platform. Moving forward, Salesforce brings you the next generation platforms which are open, social and mobile, including profiles, files and feeds all of which are updated in real time. Having these apps built on open standards allows an extra element of freedom which adds to the value of the platform.

To give businesses what they need, Salesforce present three different platforms:

• Force.com: to create your own employee social network

• Database.com: to create your customer social profile

• Heroku: to create your customer social network

With the world of communication being ever expansive, Salesforce brings you the tools to stay on top of your game, improving your business relations with these platforms.

Heroku – For Your Customer Social Network

There several good reasons for developers to love Heroku, not the least of which is that it is the only multi-language cloud application platform, supporting multiple frameworks, databases and languages including Java and Ruby. This amazing technology gives developers the freedom to forget their servers and focus instead on the applications.

Heroku is completely open so it is able to run on other platforms and be easily integrated, therefore allowing developers can use the frameworks that they are most familiar with. With this openness, developers have portability to run their applications not just on Heroku, but on other platforms. Integration is also simpler within other systems, such as back office systems and other cloud services.

The focus of Heroku is connecting with developers and giving them a way to instantly deploy their apps, meaning that it goes directly from desktop to the cloud, available to millions, in just a few seconds with a simple command. With all this flexibility, it is no wonder that over 170,000 customer applications have been built on Heroku. 

Database.com – For Your Customer Social Profile

With the business world becoming ever more social and mobile, it is vital to move with the times and this is where Database.com comes in. Salesforce has taken the multitenant cloud database and rebuilt it to be the world’s first social, mobile and open database, in order to capture the social customer profile.

Database.com can run on any platform and allows you to choose how you store your data. If you have sensitive customer information that must remain in a specific location or region, Salesforce provides for this contingency. They have created the database.com data residency option, to provide the choice, freedom and flexibility that is so often necessary.

The best feature of database.com is that it integrates all of your applications including force.com apps, heroku apps or the apps from the Salesforce appexchange. All the information fro these apps is integrates in database.com, which allows you to easily run analytics and share data, as it is all in the one place.

Most important of all is the security and reliability of database.com. It is the self same database that has been powering Salesforce apps since 1998 and with over 100,000 organizations relying on it, database.com has a reputation of trustworthiness that is beyond doubt.