Silicon Valley

Aug 20th User Group Meeting

Our August user group meeting is coming up. This meeting will have a combination of 3 key topics: Marketing, Sales, and Adv Admin/Baby Dev. 

The Marketing track, Knowing when to pull the trigger, will focus around lead generation and qualification.  We have Joshua Tillman from Refractive dialer bring in a customer to present how they utilize the tool to bring in more leads and their qualification process.

The Sales will be on how to defog that crystal ball, pipeline/forecast management.  Michael Bonner from Pipeline Manager will be brining a customer to explain how they utilize their tool to help gain insight and manage the pipeline.

The Adv Admin/Baby Dev will focus on getting started with Eclipse and how set up your first site.  Micaiah Filkins from Force by Design will be showing us the basics of Eclipse and how to start publishing some of your data in Salesforce to the outside world.

To view the agenda and register for the event see the Registration Page

Posted by Fifedog on July 29, 2009 Posted at 03:52 PM | | Comments (0) | Bookmark

July 16th 2009 Forecasting post wrap up

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.
In my last slide I mentioned about an idea which allows the roll-up summary fields to utilize formulas as criteria. Click here to vote for it

Silicon Valley Users Group - July 16th, 2009, Webinar Post Follow up
Written by Harry Christie
 
Topics: Forecasting webinar with Angela Pellegrino of LinkedIn and Report Customization example by Pete Fife with
Mirapoint.Well folks,
 
Pete has kept right on target with his SVUG roadmap for 2009 with today's Webinar. As per his previous
SVUG Webinars, iLinc was the presentation platform used and showed great flexibility for both the presenters, and the
attendees. We really put the chat and feedback features to the test during the one-hour conference.  Pete even began the webinar session with a video cam of himself at the controls - whoa fifedog!
 
Angela gave a an excellent presentation showing how she has created custom objects, custom fields, custom formulas, and validation rules within Salesforce to provide her management the forecasting visibility needed based on the company's defined weighted probabilities for three categories: commit, outlook, and upside. Lots of questions were raised and Angela responded to each and every one. There was also some discussion regarding the company's implementation of on-line contracts using products like docusign, e-signature, and echosign. Conga merged was mentioned as a leader in producing output letters from Salesforce.
 
 Pete then gave us some insight into  his method of solving a forecasting report request that he was tasked with at Mirapoint. This discussion touched on the relational objects aspect of Salesforce.com.  Pete gave us three possible approaches for solving this reporting problem and provided some excellent insights into the overall process. 
 
Hard to believe that this much information was presented in a one-hour session. As usual, Pete did a fine job of emceeing the Webinar. As much as I enjoy the SVUG face-to-face gatherings, this webinar is hard to beat; its well-focused, very efficient time-wise, and offers great flexibility for presenters and user group members to participate; and, of course we have Pete running it to boot!
 

Harry Christie

Vice-President - Sales

Gigatest Labs


==============Below are some quotes from other attendees===================

"Today was the first event of the Silicon Valley User Group that I have been able to attend and I must say, I was impressed!  .... excellent questions and some decent best practice sharing.  Hope to be part of more of these sessions in the future!"

Franco - Big Machins

"I heard the presenter say they had a required field for why an Opportunity was Closed-Won.  ....  I loved that they were putting the focus on the successes as much as the losses. "

Kim - American Medical Systems

"It was a valuable session but would be good to have more dialogue between the speakers and attendees."

Christine - InfoBlock

 
"I learned that a lot of people decide to build their own objects instead of using what Salesforce provides for forecasting but what they can't easily re-create is the management over-ride portion.  That was very useful for me to hear in the context of my own implementation."
Rhonda - Audatex

Posted by Fifedog on July 17, 2009 Posted at 01:41 PM | | Comments (2) | Bookmark

Opportunity Management, Forecasting only with Salesforce.com

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

Posted by Fifedog on July 8, 2009 Posted at 10:02 PM | | Comments (1) | Bookmark