Well it's another month another webinar, Oct 15th @ 10:30 to 11:30 am PDT. This month was to be on Support, customer portal. However the customer which my CSM booked apologized but is unable to come.  However Chris Duke, a fellow member, is willing to step up and share what he's done with their customer portals. (yes portals they have 3 different ones for a different set of verticals).

Also we have Kim Wallins from Hire-On-Demand to share what they found to be the most used free apps on AppExchange.

RSVP here

Remember the upcoming meetings:

• Oct 15th Webinar - 10:30 am - Support, customer portal. (now un-conference)
  
• Nov ( Dreamforce User Conference 18th-20th)
• Dec  17th - Webinar - Post Dreamforce briefing. Share what you learned or missed.
  

Past meetings:

• Sept 17th Webinar - 10:30 am -  ERP integration AND Quoting
  
• Aug 20th Quarterly Meeting - 10:30 am Noon . Mini-mini-mini Dreamforce. One topic for each business unit: Sales, Marketing, and Adv. Admin/baby Dev. (Link to Micaiah's slide deck)
• July 16th Webinar - 10:30 am - Opportunity Management (Forecasting)
• 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

"I found the session very informative. We’re currently using an add-on product from Apttus to do Sales Proposals for 2 different sales teams. While the Salesforce Quoting product was impressive, it looks like we’ll be keeping Apttus around for a little while. "

Greg M

"Overall, I think the presentation went well.  I did not experience any technical issues.  I was pleased to learn of the new quote functionality.  Thank you Tyler.  I hope that I can utilize the new features, although my first impression is that I’ll be waiting for the entire three part quote functionality to be in place before my company will utilize the option."

Here is the write up from the last weeks meeting.  It appears I have my second strike ;). Below is the write up from from the long time member, Harry. For the webinars I'll be scaling them back just to a single topic and phone bridge.  Thanks for hanging in there but I do want to announce something important.

Come the new year I will no longer be able to run the local meetings for I'm moving out to the Sacramento area.  However the webinars can continue but the local meetings will be a bit hard.  My employer has agreed to let me telecommute and come into the office twice a month. Therefore I'm going to need someone to help out run the local meetings.

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Last week's one-hour SVUG webinar organized and hosted by Pete Fife,  had two separate but simultaneous presentations: one by Steel Brick on quoting and one by Pete on ERP. The presentation platform was ILinc. In order to facilitate the two separate sessions, participants were asked to use headsets or use the chat text feature for comments/questions.  The first 10minutes was spent dividing up the attendees into the two separate groups, then squelching all the noise background from the individual microphones and putting everyone on mute.  I  attended the quoting session. Max Rudman was the presenter from SteelBrick. We spent more time in the housekeeping mode asking him to bring his volume level up sufficiently for us to hear. Once that was fixed, Max gave an overview of  "Quote Quickly" which directly integrates with Salesforce. The product appears to have some nice features to simplify the process of everyday quoting with professional pdf style quote pages. Steel Brick will customize a quote form with a company's branding  for $300-500,  and the monthly user fee for Quote Quickly is $29.00. Additionally, users will need to use the Salesforce "Products Module" and that will add another $10/$20 per user per month - FYI... Lastly, I strongly recommend that Pete scale back his ambitious plans for multiple presentations to keep these webinars running efficiently and effectively as he has so well done in past webinar sessions....

  What others have said:

The meeting was informative, but I think the technical issues overshadowed a lot of it. ... Plus there were a number of people who didn’t get the “Mute you Mic” message and so there was a fair amount of background noise during some parts. The guy from Salesforce not being there was also a bummer, but I’m glad that he’s rescheduled.
 
It was good to see a quoting tool that’s not horrendously expensive.

Lori

My only feedback (which I am sure that you already have ) is the volume was really low so it was very difficult to hear the discussion and a get a good feel for the product.

 
Pat

Two topics going on at the same time, yes you heard me correctly.  The catch is we'll be utilizing VoIP, voice over IP. Meaning you must have a working headset for your computer to hear and talk with each other.  This will be something new for me. We'll be utilizing the Classroom feature of iLinc, they donated their very cool technology to allow us user groups to hold these remote meetings. To RSVP please use this form, click here.

A Boomi customer will talk about their tool for doing integrations with Salesforce. In the other session we'll have Max from Steelbrick consulting show his quoting tool. There should be plenty of time to ask questions and share with each other some of the things you do.

Agenda

• Class room 1 - Topic: Integration
• Class room 2 - Topic: Quoting

• Sept 17th Webinar - 10:30 am -  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.
  

• Aug 20th Quarterly Meeting - 10:30 am Noon . Mini-mini-mini Dreamforce. One topic for each business unit: Sales, Marketing, and Adv. Admin/baby Dev. (Link to Micaiah's slide deck)
• July 16th Webinar - 10:30 am - Opportunity Management (Forecasting)
• 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

• Unique dialing technology
• First and only multi-line dialing system
• No dead air or, stated differently, no delay
• One individual - equivalent to a 40-person call center with Refractive Dialer 
• pulls records from Salesforce and creates record back into Salesforce
• Compatible with VOIP, Skype,  POTS (plain old telephone service), and company switching networks
• You choose how to dial out
• Drop-in feature, allows you to leave a message if connected to a recording system at the contact end, and allows you to move on for the next call
• Extensive metrics to measure effectivenss and accountability
• Cost is $8.00/ hour - billable time only

 What others said

"I found the guest presentations and topics very informative and applicable for my specific clients. The networking was also extremely helpful as well."

Brian H.

"The event itself was nice in terms of location, time, venue. The subject matter was lacking a bit. ... Basically it felt like we were pitched 2 for 2 hours from 2 companies. I was hoping to pickup things for sales and marketing related sfdc stuff."   

Ryan V

"The mini dreamforce meeting was great even though a lot of time was spent on the eclipse installation in the ADV Admin/Dev session. .... The speaker provided some valuable information which will help us to explore more about Force.com IDE, especially the ways how to get codes from code.google.com. I really enjoyed this mini dreamforce meeting, will definitely sign up for the next one."

Paul

"I have to say that the Refractive Dialer session was one of the most naked (and ugly) sales pitches I've ever heard at a user group meeting. The second session on Pipeline Manager was also a canned sales pitch.  Smoother, but no less inappropriate in my view. ... I  think we need to have a standard in presentations that vendors aren't allowed to talk about their products (or at most give a 1-2 slide overview of their company)."

David T

"The event was worthwhile because of the networking.  I wish there was less vendor talk and more best practices or lessons learned.  More networking time would be nice"   

    Anonymous

"Perfect timing, and interesting topics. My favorite session was the the introduction of Refractive Dialer -- an interesting alternative to predictive dialing. As always, you attract great people, making your events to perfect networking opportunities!"

Ulrich

This webinar was by far my biggest every by a factor of 3. This was a West Coast User group meeting for we had a couple people from the northern, Portland and Seattle user groups along with San Diego. The below write comes from long time user group member Harry Christie who was gracious enough to do this write up.  Some brief stats about the webinar:

• 72 confirmation, 65 attendees
• Avg time attendees stayed: 58 min
• 20 attendees stayed on for 25 mins after to review Mirapoint's Renewal process and how they track Customer Base.

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."