May Meeting Recap

Want to thank every one for coming out yesterday. We had at least 50 people for the meeting. I know that some of you had to leave early and I completely understand. My only hope is that you walked away with some answers to your questions.

Salesforce 101 - This was our first attempt at an interview format to get good ideas from fellow members. If you found this helpful, please let me know so that I introduce this from time to time. 

Deep Dive - We walked through the 3 types of portals as well as setup the self-service portal and demo a "vanilla" customer portal.

Group Think - I demonstrated how to use a custom link and a special type of report to show lists of information about an account that is not available through related lists. In this case it was a list of sold products since they were not using Assets. We as a group were also stumped about how to get a list of accounts that have no contacts associated with it. If you can think of way to solve this - let me know so I can broadcast it out.

Thanks again to HarvestGold for the networking session. Those that stayed enjoyed the view and chance to talk.

Our next meeting will be in July. It will be an afternoon or morning at a location with free wi-fi and everyone's laptop open. We as a group will use it as a working session to address salesforce.com issues.

One last announcement - I will be hosting 2 new paid training classes in the near future. If you have an interest to be notified for dates for any of these let me know. The first will be a "Salesforce for Salesrep" user training. The second will be a redo of our "Admin 101" class that we did late last year. 

Thanks again for all that came out. If you have some comments about the session I want to hear them.

Our next meeting will be on May 7 at the Doubletree in downtown Pittsburgh starting at 2:30pm.

Our Agenda is once again split so that people of all types get fed

Salesforce 101 – Everything you should know but don’t. For this particular session a few of the admins/managers will come up for a few minutes and demonstrate a core function of their salesforce.com system that is particularly unique. This should give you some good ideas for your system.

Deep Dive – We explain a complicated topic. Salesforce.com has been pushing portals for some time now. I’m going to demystify what the portal features are and also give you a run down on the setup of the portals.

Group Think – Come and challenge the group with a question about salesforce.com. We have showed and learned some interesting ways to solve business issues through this session. It is my favorite since everyone has a different way of solving the same issue.

Finally HarvestGold is hosting a networking session in a room that supposed to be spectacular. And the hotel should offer some special rates for rooms if you deem that necessary.

If you are interested in coming – know that there is no cost to attend. Bring some business cards and maybe a few bucks for the networking session if we go longer then the bartender is contracted for.

I was pleased with the turnout. 30 people showed up and filled the room to capacity. A big thanks to Kathy Barton at Allied-Barton Security for allowing us access to the conference room. Everyone came away impressed with both the conference room and the facility in general.

For salesforce.com 101 - I spent some time showing how to track marketing campaigns for both Professional and Enterprise Edition customers. We used Report Types to help solve our questions.

 Diana Englemeyer from Exact Target took control for the Deep Dive and discussed email marketing techniques. I have inserted her slides into the deck. You will find them highly informative.

There will also be an annoucement soon of the Pittsburgh 3 day workshop for new salesforce.com admins. I'm looking to do this event in November.

As promised, I am announcing that our next meeting will be August 25th at a new and larger location. We will be meeting in the Cardello Building courtesy of Allied Barton.

This meeting should prove interesting for most as we will be focusing on Marketing through salesforce.com.

We will cover the following topics:

-Email marketing
-Event registration
-Marketing Campaign management

Even if you are a Professional Edition user, we will show some tips and tricks.

Please click here to register.

The Pittsburgh Technology Council is holding an annual social event where they invite all the groups they are associated with together for a night of networking and conversation. Who am I to deny us this opportunity for us to get together with the larger Pittsburgh community?

The event is called Summer Slam VII and last year's event brought a large and highly entertaining crowd and I would expect something of the same to this year's event.

I invite you to join us. I'll be there with a few prizes for the salesforce.com crowd.

Date: Thursday, July 17
Time: 5:00 - 8:00
Venue: Calico Jack’s – 353 North Shore Drive (Between PNC Park & Heinz Field)
Cost: Free
RSVP: Council events at 412.918.4229 or events@pghtech.org

I want to thank all that showed up for yesterday's user group meeting. I appreciate everyone braving the size of the room and making the best of the situation. It certainly appears that I will need to find a bigger room for future meetings. We definitely filled the room to capacity.

As a recap we covered the following yesterday:

Salesforce 101 - How to enhance the User Interface, using tags to make searches and organization more personalized, and Web to Lead to take interest from your website directly in to salesforce.com thereby saving a great amount of time. I was especially surprised about the highly postive feedback about tagging.

Deep Dive - How custom linking works and how to create your own. This is an often untouched feature of salesforce.com that can create huge improvements of your environment with relatively little effort.

Group Think - We helped a few new people with salesforce.com and how to properly implement as well as brainstorm how to show billable hours in salesforce.com.

The next meeting will be in the August time frame. Between now and then we are having a social gathering on July 17 with the Pittsburgh Tech Council.

Hello all,

Quite a few people from the group have been asking when the next meeting is. My apologies for not scheduling one sooner.

For our next meeting I thought an appropriate theme would be, "what can I do to make salesforce.com faster?" So the agenda for June's meeting is:

• Salesforce 101 - How to make salesforce.com bend to your will
• Deep Dive - Custom linking and the special sauce that makes these critical to your org
• Group Think - Your questions and concerns are always an important part of the meeting. We will once again open the floor to any of your questions.

Time and date for the meeting

Date:Tuesday June 3
Time: 9:00am - 11:00am
Location:
Panera Bread
7217 McKnight Road
Pittsburgh, PA 15237
(please note the NEW location)

If you are interested in attending, would you please contact me at bgross @ akustica dot com?

I want to thank those that showed up on a very snowy and miserable Pittsburgh evening for another adventure in the Pittsburgh User Group. Although those that showed on the web conference showed some dedication as we lost the connection a few times.

The lead conversion was interesting but what really got me going was CMU's presentation on their add-in for salesforce.com idea and CRMFusion's Tools. I greatly appreciate their time.

Also congrats to the individual who won the Garmin GPS.  It was a raffle for those attendees that showed up. Thanks again CRMFusion for the great gift.

The next meeting will be scheduled sometime in the April timeframe.

I have an interesting agenda for next week's salesforce.com user group meeting. As well as trying a different venue I am going to be quiet for a large portion of the meeting and let someone else talk.

First off - Carnegie Mellon University will be here to talk about a research project to improve the speed of accessing salesforce.com data.

In the salesforce 101 segment I'm going back to the absolute basics and discussing lead conversion. I'm going to answer the when, why, and how on converting leads as well as present a few theories that people use for this.

For the Deep Dive - we are going to have a guest from CRMFusion talk about data quality. For those new to salesforce.com or those with large amount of records this will be especially important to you.

As always we will open it up for General Q & A so that your questions get answered.

The meeting will be on Feb. 12 at 4:30 at Steelcoast Creative. Their address:

33 Terminal Way
Suite 419
Pittsburgh, PA 15219
412-431-4190

With the success of the last meeting in Cranberry, we are going for a return engagement there. I also wanted to have one more meeting for the year before the holidays.

Date: Dec. 19
When: 8-10am
Where: Panera Bread - Cranberry

What's on the agenda???

Salesforce 101 - I received a request to go over the Mapquest integration. While this is a bit much for 101, I'm going to give it a shot. If you have other requests I would like to hear it.

Deep Dive - There have been a boatload of changes recently with the latest releases. I'm going to cover some that I consider "high impact" to your org.

Your Questions - As always I will leave a portion of time open to your questions.

We will also have a special guest that I will announce in the email reminder. If you're not on the list - please let me know...

And just like last time - breakfast is part of the deal.

I look forward to seeing you there.