Opportunity Forecasting Webinar - Click here to register

The third Thursday is upon us which means we get to meet for another webinar.  We have Angela Pellegrino, Salesforce Administrator, at LinkedIn to talk to us about how they've been doing forecasting all nativly within Salesforce. They don't use the Salesforce Forecast module and she'll walk you through what customizations she did to their opportunities to make it work for them: new picklists, formula fields and some validation rules.

Then I'll show you the "One" report our COO looks at to run his forecast.  Incidentally it stopped him from modify the entire renewal ordering process with one formula field and this report.  If we have time I'll show you how we automated our 'customer base'.  Can you say you know exactly how many new customers you added this quarter? How about Lost? What do you consider a customer, anyone that has purchased or one that is currently under support?

Below are the upcoming topics:

• July 16th Webinar - 10:30 am - Opportunity Management (Forecasting)
• Aug 20th Quarterly Meeting - 10:30 am Noon . Mini-mini-mini Dreamforce. One topic for each business unit: Sales, Marketing, Support, and Adv. Admin/baby Dev. (You've received one email already and you'll be getting more about the topics of discussion.)
• Sept 17th Webinar - 10:30 am -  ERP integration OR Quoting (let me know on the linkedIn group)
• Oct 15th Webinar - 10:30 am - Support, customer portal.
• Nov ( Dreamforce User Conference 18th-20th)
• Dec  17th - Webinar - Post Dreamforce briefing. Share what you learned or missed.

Past meetings:

• June 18th Webinar - 10:30 am - Lead nurturing, Lead tools (click here for the recording)
• May 21st Quarterly Meeting - 9 am. Carla Shih speaking on Social Marketing

Just a little update for there's been a change of topics for the August meeting.  To increase the breath of the audience I decided to change it from Sales Ops topics to more functional department topics. Below is the updated schedule.

Dates and topics are as follows:

• July 16th Webinar - 10:30 am - Opportunity Management
• Aug 20th Quarterly Meeting - 10:30 am Noon - Sales, Marketing, Support, Developers
• Sept 17th Webinar - 10:30 am - More about ERP integration.
• Oct 15th Webinar - 10:30 am - Support.
• Nov ( Dreamforce User Conference 18th-20th)
• Dec  17th - Webinar - Post Dreamforce briefing. Share what you learned or missed.

Past topics:

• May 21st Quarterly Meeting - 9 am. Carla Shih speaking on Social Marketing
• June 18th Webinar - 10:30 am - Lead nurturing, Lead tools

Would like to thank everyone who attended.  Below is the recording of the meeting if you missed it. Also here is the results of my post meeting survey.

• Recording of the meeting: click here
• Did you learn something new: yes - 92%
• Want to learn more about the topic: yes - 67%
• Feedback: "... like more in-depth implementation information... it [content] was a bit basic but the presenter was clear and concise."

As I promised in delivering monthly webinars, I've marked off on my calendar every third Thursday of each month. This is my our road map for the rest of the year. I'm going to try and follow the Sales Cycle for topics.  Since the next month is a Marketing topic I figure we'll start there.

Dates and topics are as follows:

• May 21st Quarterly Meeting - 9 am. Carla Shih speaking on Social Marketing
• June 18th Webinar - 10:30 am - Lead nurturing, Lead tools
• July 16th Webinar - 10:30 am - Marketing qualification - Opportunity Management
• Aug 20th Quarterly Meeting - 10:30 am Noon . Quote to Cash - Pipeline, Quoting, Order Processing (ERP integration)
• Sept 17th Webinar - 10:30 am - More about ERP integration, and Quoting.
• Oct 15th Webinar - 10:30 am - Support, customer portal.
• Nov ( Dreamforce User Conference 18th-20th)
• Dec  17th - Webinar - Post Dreamforce briefing. Share what you learned or missed.

If you want to present, sponsor anyone of these (well the quote to cash meeting), please contact me. Pete Fife (pfife at mirapoint.com)

First, Arnt Hearing led a great demonstration of how to create Validation Rules to keep your data clean. One example he presented was creating a rule that when an opportunity’s stage is “Closed Lost”, it cannot be saved without also choosing a “Lost Reason” field, such as “price too high”.

Along the way, Eric Kintzer reminded us that the Winter ’09 release includes new Logical Operators, such as && (AND) and || (OR). Very handy to use when creating those Validation Rules! Another tip Eric provided was Apex must be used to write validation rules against multi-select picklists (as of Spring ’09).

Second, Arnt and Pete presented how CRMfusion’s DemandTools product can be used to “MassChange” your data and find matching records and merge them. Utilizing DemandTools to look at any standard or customer object and based on pre-defined or custom criteria you can identify hundreds of records across thousands all in minutes. For the mass impact example they looked at finding all the Accounts with a NULL Territory and then updating the Territory to the Owner’s Territory. This example showed the usefulness of cross-object lookups.

We ran out of time to present Sharing Rules. A topic for another day!

The Web conference was enabled by a product from iLinc. This allowed for great interaction among the 16 or so attendees – multiple presenters, application sharing, chat, video, and surveys were all part of the webinar. You can contact Barry Duncan if you’re interested at bduncan @ iLinc.com or 602.718.1592.  He has a user community discount.

If you missed it, the entire webinar was recorded and is available here https://sfug.ilinc.com/join/xvtzvzh.

The next webinar is cancelled since we'll be having our meeting on the 21st of May. The next webinar will be on June 18th.

(blog authored by Bryan B. and Pete F.)

O.k. thank you all for taking the survey and I just wanted to update you on those results and on tomorrows Webinar.

It appears we have the right location, Sunnyvale. Now I need to put a list of those in the area to start hosting!  Looking at my results I think I needed a radio button and not multi-select. Anyway if you where to take the "Doesn't matter I'd go to both" answer and apply it to San Mateo AND Sunnyvale areas the result would be: Sunnyvale - 48 v.s San Mateo - 26. And that's with only 7 votes for San Mateo only. report summary

As far as the webinar, data management, we have 25 attendees signed up. I've figured out my issue with the recording so I'll be recording this and posting here and on our linked in group.

As my commitment to you here is the registration for the monthly webinar, https://sfug.ilinc.com/register/jhhhzhv. The topic will be determined by the linkedin group discussion.

The meetings will be Every Third Thursday at 10:30 to 11:30. 

Quick update. Save the date for May 21st at 9 am.  We're trying something different for this meeting.  The location is still tentative however I think I'm going to try and have it at my work, pending on the number of registrations I get.  We'll be having Clara Shih from Salesforce talk about Social Media Marketing with Twitter, Facebook and Blogs.

Clara Shih and Kingsley Joseph, two of the people at the forefront of Salesforce.com's social media marketing strategy, will share an introduction to social media marketing for business through channels like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs as well as share their insight on what works, what doesn't and what's next.

I'll be sending out an email with more details in the coming weeks.  Remember if you're a member to sign up on the linked in Group.

Having a 2 1/2 and 8 month old it just seems life just gets REALLY busy at times.  Well running this group seems to take the same form every now and then.  March is going to be a busy month for our user group.  We have three events, 2 webinars and one local user group meeting at Cloudforce in Santa Clara.

The first webinar by me, Pete Fife, is my first trial run utilizing iLinc, who has donated the use of their tool for all local user groups.  At this time, 11 PST on March 4th (Wed) I'll be covering the basics of Formulas and the use of the Excel Connector.  If you want to join registar here

The second event is another webinar on PRM at 11 PM PST on March 11th (Wed). This was going to be my trial run however it keep being pushed out, but heck why not!  Register Here

Lastly is the Salesforce Cloudforce Event March 18th. Here we'll be holding a face to face meeting at 10:00 am before the event offically starts.  We'll going to see about launching another 'sub-group' for those techies in the group around the force.com platform.