My SalesForce Experience

In my previous post I wrote about the customization efforts of integrating our different marketing and sales tools. In this post I’ll detail some of the customization I’ve implemented in SalesForce.

Sales Dashboard

I don’t like the default opportunity report view of SalesForce. It requires too many clicks to enter into and doesn’t support in place editing.

So, I’ve developed a sales dashboard that makes viewing our most important opportunities a snap – and can be found at the home page of our sales guys. In the process I’ve added about 20 custom fields to each opportunity, trying to cover the following topics:

1.       Dates of all steps in our sales process – like POC date, closing date, production date, etc.

2.       Feature management – which missing features the customer needs (if any). In the future I plan to connect this to our feature management tools.

3.       Fields for all relevant opportunity data (for us – number of databases, type of database, etc)

4.       Pricing. Although SalesForce has a product feature, which allows mapping products from the product map to opportunities, it just requires too many steps to implement. Instead we just made sure the product list associated with the opportunity is empty so the amount field can be updated.

This dashboard is used by our Sales Reps to view their opportunities, and is sorted according to the stage of the opportunity in the process.

Auto Conversion

When visitors register at our site LoopFuse automatically creates a lead in SalesForce. This is not enough in our scenario. Why? Because those who register need to gain access to our support portal, and SalesForce only enables Self Service Support for Contacts, not Leads.

Now, LoopFuse allows for creating Contacts in SalesForce instead of leads, but no opportunity is created.

So we have created a trigger that is activated whenever a lead is created. Not wanting to convert all leads, we use the campaign field to mark which leads come from LoopFuse – and which are generated manually.

We have made some other tweaks to SalesForce, but those were the major ones. I guess we’ll have more soon – I’ll update new developments on this blog.