Salesforce CRM Functions – Salesforce CRM - The Definitive Admin Handbook Third Edition (2015)

Salesforce CRM – The Definitive Admin Handbook Third Edition (2015)

Chapter 7. Salesforce CRM Functions

This chapter gives you an overview of the functional areas within Salesforce CRM, where we will look at the process from the campaign to the customer and beyond. Within the functional areas, there are various touch points where the business teams concerned with marketing, sales, and customer service have to agree on roles and responsibilities for aspects of the business processes. We will now look at each of the following core Salesforce CRM functions:

· Marketing administration

· Sales automation

· Customer service and support automation

· Enterprise social networking and collaboration with Salesforce Chatter

A functional overview of Salesforce CRM

The Salesforce CRM functions are related to each other and, as mentioned previously, have crossover areas that can be represented as shown in the following diagram:

A functional overview of Salesforce CRM

Marketing administration

Marketing administration is available in Salesforce CRM under the application suite known as the Marketing Cloud.

The core functionality enables organizations to manage marketing campaigns from initiation to lead development in conjunction with the sales team. The features in the marketing suite can help measure the effectiveness of each campaign by analyzing the leads and opportunities generated as a result of specific marketing activities.

Salesforce automation

Salesforce automation is the core feature set within Salesforce CRM and is used to manage the sales process and activities. It enables salespeople to automate manual and repetitive tasks and provides them with information related to existing and prospective customers. In Salesforce CRM, Salesforce automation is known as the Sales Cloud and helps salespeople manage sales activities, leads and contact records, opportunities, quotes, and forecasts.

Customer service and support automation

Customer service and support automation within Salesforce CRM is known as the Service Cloud and allows support teams to automate and manage requests for service and support by existing customers. Using the Service Cloud features, organizations can handle customer requests such as the return of faulty goods or repairs, complaints, or provide advice about products and services.

Associated with the functional areas, described previously, are features and mechanisms that help users and customers collaborate and share information, this is known as enterprise social networking.

Enterprise social networking with Salesforce Chatter

Enterprise social network capabilities within Salesforce CRM enable organizations to connect with people and securely share business information in real time. Social networking within an enterprise serves to connect both employees and customers and enables business collaboration. In Salesforce CRM, the enterprise social network suite is known as Salesforce Chatter.

The Salesforce CRM record life cycle

The capabilities of Salesforce CRM provide for the processing of campaigns through to customer acquisition and beyond, as shown in the following diagram:

The Salesforce CRM record life cycle

At the start of the process, it is the responsibility of the marketing team to develop suitable campaigns in order to generate leads. Campaign management is carried out using the Marketing Administration tools and has links to the lead and also any opportunities that have been influenced by the campaign.

When validated, leads are converted to accounts, contacts, and opportunities. This can be the responsibility of either the marketing or sales teams and requires that a suitable sales process to have been agreed upon. In Salesforce CRM, an account is the company or organization and a contact is an individual associated with an account.

Opportunities can either be generated from lead conversion or can be entered directly by the sales team. As described earlier in this book, the structure of Salesforce requires account ownership should be established; this looks at inherited ownership of the opportunity. Account ownership is usually the responsibility of the sales team.

Opportunities in a CRM system are usually processed using an agreed sales process with predefined sales stages. Sales stages typically advance to a final stage of either closed/lost or closed/won, where a closed/won opportunity represents a successful sale. Successful sales opportunity information should then be logged in the organization's financial system.

Upon acceptance of the deal by the finance team (and perhaps the delivery of the goods or service), the post-customer acquisition process is then enabled where the account and contact can be recognized as a customer. Here, the customer relationships concerning incidents and requests are managed by escalating cases within the customer services and support automation suite.

Marketing administration

Marketing administration in Salesforce CRM provides closed-loop marketing automation from within the marketing app that can be accessed from App Menu in the top-right corner of the Salesforce CRM screen.

Marketing administration enables integrated marketing functions such as campaign management, lead management, reporting and analysis, response tracking, and campaign effectiveness, and it allows users from various departments to centrally access marketing activity.

By default, the marketing administration features provide some level of read-only access to all users. However, to create, edit, and delete campaigns and carry out advanced campaign and lead management functions, users must have the Marketing User license set on their user record, as shown next:

Marketing administration

Note

The Marketing User license is available as the standard for organizations with the Enterprise or Unlimited editions and can be applied to any active user.

The following key features are available within Salesforce CRM marketing administration:

· Campaign management

· Lead management

Campaign management

With targeted marketing campaigns, companies can build market awareness, generate leads, and learn from their campaign results to fine-tune offers to various customer segments.

The campaign management feature in Salesforce CRM allows your users to manage and track outbound marketing activities. These can be direct mail, road shows, online or print advertising, e-mail, or other types of marketing initiatives.

Some CRM systems have sales and marketing features separated, requiring marketing and sales users to log on to two separate modules; however, with Salesforce CRM, a dedicated Campaign tab is provided to enable marketing and sales users to work together within a single system.

Within the Campaign tab, the marketing team can access sales information for their campaigns and the sales team can have visibility into the marketing activities that affect their accounts, contacts, and leads. Campaigns can also be organized into hierarchies for flexible analysis of related marketing initiatives.

By integrating the marketing and sales effort for campaign and lead management activities, far greater collaboration can be achieved.

Essential success criteria for campaigns can be captured and used to further develop the definition of marketing targets. This enables marketing departments to become more accountable and better demonstrate their marketing Return On Investment (ROI).

The steps to consider when managing and working with campaigns in Salesforce CRM are as follows:

· Campaign planning

· Campaign setup

· Campaign creation

· Campaign execution

· Campaign responses

· Campaign effectiveness

Campaign planning

Before starting to build and run campaigns, it is useful to have an overall plan of the goals and objectives of the campaign, such as the core processes and the type of campaign—mass marketing e-mails, hosting a conference, sending direct mail, and so on.

The targets for the campaign need to be identified as well as whether they should be existing customers, existing leads, or new leads. With existing leads, you can use lead scoring and lead status to facilitate customer segmentation. For example, a series of archived status definitions could be used, such as No Interest, Future Interest, Nurture, and so on.

Consider how you need to analyze and report on campaigns.


It is worth considering this at an early stage and look to create custom campaign fields. You can customize campaigns so that you can improve the targeting and customer segmentation and help to compare and analyze which types of campaigns are the most effective for your sales and marketing teams.

Your marketing team might also want to target new leads through the use of third-party lists. These third-party lists of suspects, prospects, or leads can be flagged in Salesforce with a specific indicator. By flagging with a different record type, or assigning to a different queue, these lead records can be kept apart from existing prospects so that any prequalification or de-duplicating can be done before they are available for use in campaigns.

Campaign setup

When setting up campaign management, you should identify who should have access to campaigns.

Note

To create, edit, and delete campaigns and configure advanced campaign setup, users must have the Marketing User license checked on their user record.

By default, all users have read-only access to campaigns but, to create, edit, or delete campaigns, users must have the Create permission on their profile, as shown:

Campaign setup

When starting new types of campaigns, your marketing and sales teams should collaborate to agree on the customer information that is to be captured. Here, you can use the standard fields for both the Campaign and Campaign Member objects or create new custom fields, as appropriate.

Standard campaign fields

The following key standard fields are available on the Campaign object:

Field

Type

Description

Campaign Name

Text

This is the name of the marketing campaign. A relevant name should be chosen that is useful for both the marketing and sales teams, for example, Webinar Widgets EMEA FY12Q1.

Type

Picklist

This field is used for the type of campaign. Salesforce provides this standard list: Conference, Webinar, Trade Show, Public Relations, Partners, Referral Program, Advertisement, Banner Ads, Direct Mail, E-mail,Telemarketing, and Other.

Status

Picklist

This field is used for the current status of a campaign. Salesforce provides this standard list: Planned, In Progress, Completed, and Aborted.

Start Date

Date

This field is used for the date on which a campaign starts.

End Date

Date

This field is used for the date on which a campaign ends.

Expected Revenue

Currency

This field is used to set the amount of revenue the campaign will generate.

Budgeted Cost

Currency

This field is used to set the amount of money that has been budgeted for the running of the campaign.

Actual Cost

Currency

This field is used to set the amount of money that the campaign actually costs to run. This field must be recorded to calculate ROI.

Note that the ROI is calculated as the net gain using this expression: ((Total Value Won Opportunities - Actual Cost) / Actual Cost) * 100.

Expected Response (%)

Percentage

This field is used to set the expected response rate for the campaign.

Num Sent

Number

This field is used to set the number of individuals targeted in the campaign. For example, if a webinar campaign involved sending out invites to 25,000 people, then 25000 would be entered as the number sent.

Active

Checkbox

This field is used to set the campaign to either active or not active.

Note that, if the campaign is not active, it will not appear in reports or campaign selection picklists (found on lead, contact, opportunity edit pages, and related lists).

Description

Text (long-text area)

This field allows up to 32,000 characters to be entered to add detailed information for the campaign.

Total Leads

Number

This field is the sum of all leads linked to this campaign.

Total Contacts

Number

This field is the sum of all contacts linked to this campaign.

Converted Leads

Number

This field is the sum of all leads linked to this campaign that have been converted.

Total Responses

Number

This field is the sum of all campaign members that are linked to this campaign and have their member status set to Responded.

Total Value Opportunities

Currency

This field is the total amount of all opportunities linked to this campaign.

Total Value Won Opportunities

Currency

This field is the total amount of all closed/won opportunities linked to this campaign

The complete set of fields is shown next, where the picklist values can be adapted to suit your organization. They are accessed by navigating to Setup | Customize | Campaigns | Fields.

Standard campaign fields

Standard campaign member fields

The following key standard fields are available on the Campaign Member object:

Field

Type

Description

Campaign

Lookup (Campaign)

This field is the campaign name. It is set using a link to the campaign record.

Contact

Lookup (Contact)

This field is the contact name. It is set using a link to the contact record.

Note that either Contact is set or Lead is set (not both).

Lead

Lookup (Lead)

This field is the lead name. It is set using a link to the lead record.

Note that either Contact is set or Lead is set (not both).

Status

Picklist

This is the status of the campaign member as part of the linked campaign. Salesforce provides these standard values: Planned, Sent, Received, and Responded.

Every campaign has a specific outcome that can be captured on the member status and response fields. With well-defined member status and response values, reporting can be carried out in a much easier manner.

The complete set of fields is shown next where the picklist values can be adapted to suit your organization. They are accessed by navigating to Setup | Customize | Campaigns | Campaign Members | Fields.

Standard campaign member fields

Both your marketing and sales teams should also help define and agree on any required custom fields or picklist values, for example, segmentation definitions, status, and responses.

Campaign creation

To create campaigns, users must have the Marketing User checkbox selected in their user record and have the Create permission on campaigns in their profile, as shown previously.

To create a campaign, follow these steps:

1. Click on the Campaigns tab to view the campaign's home page or select Campaign from the Create New drop-down list in the sidebar.

2. Enter values for the fields that apply to the campaign, as shown in the following screenshot:

Campaign creation

3. Now click on Save; or click on Save & New to save the campaign and then add another.

Member status values

New campaigns have two default member status values: Sent and Responded. These are populated from the Campaign Member Status picklist that we looked at earlier.

Nonsystem administrator users can, however, overwrite the status values (for the specific campaign record only) from within the campaign detail page by clicking on the Advanced Setup button, as shown in the following screenshot:

Member status values

Here, your users can edit or replace status values, or create new ones as required:

Member status values

Tip

Creating multiple responded values

You can have more than one Responded value. These are summed together to produce the Total Responses calculated field.

Target lists

Target lists is a marketing term used to describe the individuals or types of people that are to be included as part of the marketing campaign.

In some situations, such as with an online advertising campaign, people are not specifically set up as individual targets. Here, the campaign would usually be set up in Salesforce as one without members.

If your campaign is targeting individuals, it is important to create a target list that has been segmented according to criteria that will result in the highest quality returns.

Targeting existing leads or contacts

To target existing leads or contacts, you can use the following methods in Salesforce CRM:

Method

Description

Use the Campaign Detail page

Click on the Manage Members button to add multiple campaign members

Create Lead or Contact reports

Click on the Add to Campaign button to add multiple campaign members

Use Lead or Contact List views

Click on the Add to Campaign button to add multiple campaign members

Use the Lead or Contact Detail pages

Click on the Add to Campaign button to add a single campaign member

Using the campaign detail page

To add multiple campaign members from the Campaign Detail page, users should select the Manage Members button, as shown in the following screenshot:

Using the campaign detail page

You can add existing contacts or leads by selecting Add Members - Search from the Manage Members drop-down button on the Campaign Detail page.

Creating lead or contact reports

To add multiple campaign members from either lead or contact reports, perform the following steps:

1. Create a custom lead or contact report.

2. In the Select Criteria step, enter up to three criteria to segment the report data.

For example, to target all CFOs at Electronics or Energy companies with annual revenue greater than ten million, you would set the following:

· Title equals CFO

· Industry equals Technology, Telecommunications (using a comma to indicate an OR Boolean result)

· Annual Revenue greater than 10,000,000

Now, you can run the report and use the Add to Campaign button, as shown in the following screenshot:

Creating lead or contact reports

Using lead or contact list views

From within a lead or contact list view, you can click on the Add to Campaign button to add multiple campaign members, as shown in the following screenshot:

Using lead or contact list views

Using the lead or contact detail pages

You can use the Add to Campaign button within the Lead Detail and Contact Detail pages to add that record as an individual campaign member, as shown in the following screenshot:

Using the lead or contact detail pages

Targeting new leads or prospects

When using externally purchased lists of new prospects within Salesforce, it is advisable to flag the records with a specific third-party designation (say, by record type or custom picklist value). These records can then be prequalified before adding to any campaign or sales activity. Particularly important is the de-duplication of any new leads against existing records in your Salesforce database to determine which are existing customers or leads.

Salesforce does not recommend mass importing rented or purchased lists of prospects into Salesforce, as these lists are usually controlled by the list vendor and might have restriction or limited use policies. Here, you should simply make use of the list of names as your target list and only after the prospect has responded to your campaign should you import the lead record.

Campaign execution

Although campaign execution activities occur outside the Salesforce CRM application during the execution of either an offline or an online campaign, there are some features of the campaign activity that can be aided using the export facilities within Salesforce.

Users can use Salesforce to generate lists of accounts and individuals for mailing houses or e-mailing specialist partners to send out the mass marketing e-mails used in both online and offline events (such as trade shows, advertisements, direct mail, and so on).

There are various options available to integrate Salesforce with other solutions, including provisions for mass e-mailing. Integration solutions are covered later in this book where sources include the AppExchange directory (a Salesforce.com sponsored market place for accredited products and services).

Salesforce can be used to deliver some mass e-mails, but the application is not intended for large volume mass e-mail marketing, and there are limits to the quantity of e-mails that can be sent.

For each Salesforce application, a total of 1,000 e-mails can be sent per day to external e-mail addresses. Using the Enterprise Edition, the maximum number of external addresses (unique or nonunique) you can include in a mass e-mail is 500 and for the Unlimited and Performance Edition, the limit is 1,000.

Note

The mass e-mail limits do not take unique addresses into account. For example, if you have john.smith@widgetsXYZ.com in your mass e-mail 500 times, it counts as 500 against any limit.

You can build an integrated web form to automatically capture individuals as leads in Salesforce. This is detailed later in this chapter in the Lead management section under Marketing administration.

Campaign responses

After the campaign has been executed, your company will want to track the responses, which can include the following:

· Website response using a form on your website where you can set up a Web-to-Lead form to create a target page with a response form. All responses appear in Salesforce as leads but can be linked to the campaign. This is covered later in this chapter.

· Mass update or offline response using the campaign member import wizards to import a list of leads or contacts and their responses. Users need the Marketing User profile or the Import Leads permission to use these wizards.

· Manual response; for example, when prospects and customers respond by phone or e-mail, users can manually record these responses on the Campaign History related list on the lead or Contact Detail page.

Campaign responses

Campaign influence

To ensure existing opportunities are included in the results for the campaign, you can add the campaign to the Campaign Influence related list on the opportunity, as shown next.

Note

The Campaign Influence related list is not included in the set of related lists on the Opportunity page layout by default, so you might need to include it on your chosen Opportunity page layout.

By setting the Primary Campaign Source flag (a checkbox on the Campaign Influence record), the opportunity amount is included in the campaign statistics and reports.

Campaign influence

Campaign effectiveness

Campaign effectiveness can be analyzed using either the statistics on the campaign record or by running campaign reports.

Campaign statistics

The summary fields on the Campaign Detail page, as shown next, allow various statistics to be seen, such as the total number of responses, the amount of business generated from the campaign, and so on.

Campaign statistics

The campaign statistics are automatically recalculated every time a campaign is saved. When a lead gets converted to an opportunity, the campaign that was most recently associated to the lead will automatically pass over to the opportunity.

Campaign reports

Reports can be accessed from the Reports tab by selecting the Campaign Reports folder, as shown in the following screenshot:

Campaign reports

As an example, the Campaign ROI Analysis Report shows you performance metrics and gives you a figure for the return on investment for the campaign, as shown in the following screenshot:

Campaign reports

Tip

ROI calculation

The ROI percentage calculation taken from the Campaign ROI Analysis Report uses the following equation:

((Total Value of Won Opportunities - Actual Cost) / Actual Cost) * 100.

In the example shown, we have ((30,000 – 2500) / 2500) * 100 = 1100%.

Lead management

Managing prospective customers appropriately often raises issues within companies. The status and quality of prospect data can cause obstacles when trying to automate processing through the sales process. Prospect data often comes from various sources that, if not carefully controlled, can make them difficult to accurately process.

Without a central system and agreed approach, there can be conflicts between the marketing team, who are often unable to trace what is happening to the prospects after distributing them to sales, and the sales team, who are unable to verify the quality of the data. Salesforce CRM helps bridge any gap between sales and marketing, and by using lead management mechanisms, it offers a way to improve the management and automation of the flow from potential customers to a closed sales deal.

Leads are prospects or potential opportunities and are accessed in Salesforce CRM from the Leads tab. They are sources of potential deals that usually need more qualification and can be visitors to your website who requested more information, respondents to marketing campaigns as described previously in managing campaigns, trade show visitors, and so on. Leads are stored and managed separately from account, contact, and opportunity records, which are covered later in this chapter.

Standard lead fields

The following key standard fields are available on the Lead object:

Field

Type

Description

Lead Owner

Lookup (to lead or queue)

This field is the user or queue who owns the lead. A lead can be owned by a person or stored in a queue. Here, you can allow specified users to accept (and return) leads from a queue. This is covered in more detail later in this section.

Last Name

Text

This field is the last name and is a required field. The last name is copied over to the Last Name field on a contact record during the lead conversion process.

Company

Text

This field is the company name and is a required field. The company name is copied over to the company name on an account record during the lead conversion process.

Lead Status

Picklist

This field is the status and is a required field. Salesforce provides these standard values: Open – Not Contacted, Working – Contacted, Closed – Converted, and Closed – Not Converted.

Lead Status is an important field used in the lead process settings, as described later in this section.

Lead Source

Picklist

This field is used to set the source from which the lead appeared. Salesforce provides these standard values: Web, Phone Inquiry, Partner Referral, Purchased List, and Other.

The complete set of fields is shown next, where the picklist values can be adapted to suit your organization. They are accessed by navigating to Setup | Customize | Leads | Fields.

Standard lead fields

Lead business process

Creating a business process within the lead management function involves agreeing on and implementing the steps and field values that are to be recorded by the sales and marketing teams during the lead life cycle.

The lead processes are accessed by navigating to Setup | Customize | Leads | Lead Processes, where processes can be created or edited as shown in the following screenshot:

Lead business process

You can now assign the status values for the lead, as shown in the following screenshot:

Lead business process

Finally, associating the lead business process with one or more record types will make it available to your users (based on their profile).

Creating leads in Salesforce CRM

There are several ways to create lead records within the Salesforce CRM application. This includes the manual entry of single leads by your users, the manual entry of leads by the prospects themselves (using public facing web forms known as Web-to-Lead), or the manual importing of multiple leads within the application by you or your users.

Creating lead records within the application

Leads can be manually created from either the Leads tab by clicking on the New button, or from the Create New selection in the left-hand side bar, as shown in the following screenshot:

Creating lead records within the application

Manually creating leads with Web-to-Lead

With the Web-to-Lead functionality in Salesforce CRM, leads can be directly entered into your Salesforce application from a public-facing website. This means prospect information can be gathered directly from the individual. This feature is used to generateHyperText Markup Language (HTML) code that can then be incorporated into the required web page.

Lead settings

To enable the Web-to-Lead feature, you must first configure the appropriate lead settings by navigating to Setup | Customize | Leads | Settings. Now, click on the Edit button to display the page, as shown in the following screenshot:

Lead settings

Now, select Default Lead Owner and select the Notify Default Lead Owner checkbox to automatically notify the default lead owner whenever a lead is assigned to them.

Note

The default lead owner becomes the owner of any leads that are not autoassigned by lead assignment rules.

The Web-to-Lead settings

To enable the Web-to-Lead feature, you must first configure the Web-to-Lead settings by navigating to Setup | Customize | Leads | Web-To-Lead. Now, click on the Edit button to display the page, as shown in the following screenshot:

The Web-to-Lead settings

Now, select the Web-to-Lead Enabled checkbox, select the user who will be set as the creator whenever the lead is entered from an online web form, and finally, create Web-to-Lead e-mail auto-response rules to determine which e-mails are to be sent to prospects when they submit information online. Then, click on Save.

Generating the Web-to-Lead HTML code

To generate the Web-to-Lead HTML code, navigate to Setup | Customize | Leads | Web-To-Lead. Now, click on the Create Web-To-Lead Form button to display the page, as shown in the following screenshot:

Generating the Web-to-Lead HTML code

Now, select the fields to include in the form, and specify a URL that users will be taken to after submitting the form. Finally, click on the Generate button, and then copy the generated HTML code and send it to the team responsible for the website in your organization.

The page style can be customized for your website, but the core form elements that have been generated within the HTML code should not be changed.

With the Web-to-Lead feature, you can capture up to 500 leads per day.

Tip

To increase the limit of 500 leads per day

This feature can be increased by sending a request to Salesforce customer support, although there might be additional costs for this increase.

Web-to-Lead auto-response rules

Auto-response rules provide a method to customize any communication that is sent back to an individual after they have filled out a web lead form. These autoresponse rules can contain logic to determine which e-mail template and what content is to be sent to leads that have been generated using Web-to-Lead.

To enable auto-response rules, navigate to Setup | Leads | Auto-response Rules. Then, click on the New or Edit button, as shown in the following screenshot:

Web-to-Lead auto-response rules

Here, you first create the rule detail and name and activate the rule. Then, you add the rule entries that contain the logic and where multiple rule entries can be created. Rule entries require the following:

· An order of execution

· The criteria for when the rule is triggered

· A sent from e-mail address detail

· An e-mail template to be used to send to the respondent

Note

Any e-mails that are sent are included in the daily limit of 1,000 mass e-mails for an organization.

Manual importing of multiple leads

To import leads, navigate to Setup | Data Management | Import Leads. Now, follow the onscreen instructions to export your data from its current source and label each column in the file with the correct field name, as shown in the following screenshot:

Manual importing of multiple leads

Note

Only users with the Import Leads permission on their profile (in the general user permissions section) have access to the importing leads feature where files of up to 50,000 leads can be imported.

A lead assignment rule can automatically assign leads to users or queues based on values in lead fields. Alternatively, a Record Owner field in the import file can determine lead ownership for each imported lead.

Without a lead assignment rule or Record Owner field, imported leads are automatically assigned to the user who has carried out the import.

Import Queue shows you the status of the import. You will be notified by e-mail when your import is complete (this notification might take up to 24 hours).

Note

Marketing users with the Marketing User profile can also import new leads by selecting Add Members - Import File from the Manage Members drop-down button on the Campaign Detail page.

Lead queue

Queues can be thought of as a storage location to group leads together, usually by geographic region or business function. Leads remain in the queue until they are assigned or accepted by users. Users who have been included as part of the queue can access and accept the records by clicking on the Accept button, as shown in the following screenshot:

Lead queue

Note

Whenever you create a lead queue, Salesforce automatically generates a lead list view to enable users to access the records in the queue.

Creating and adding users to a lead queue

To create and provide users with access to a lead queue, navigate to Setup | Manage Users | Queues | New.

Here, you can carry out these operations: name the queue, select the supported object (either lead or case), and assign the queue member (either users, public groups, roles, or role and subordinates).

You can also set up the queue so that e-mails are sent to the queue members (using a default e-mail address for the queue) whenever a case is assigned to the queue.

Lead assignment rules

Lead assignment rules determine how leads are automatically assigned to users or a queue. They contain rule entries that are predefined business rules that determine the lead routing.

Lead assignment rules can be accessed by navigating to Setup | Customize | Leads | Assignment Rules.

Only one lead assignment rule can be active at any given time, but each rule can have multiple criteria, as shown here:

Lead assignment rules

Criteria are evaluated in the order in which they appear in the list. When there are multiple rules that could be applied, you can set the priority for the criteria by setting the most specific criteria at number 1 and then adding more criteria numbers that are more generic. The following screenshot shows you a simple example and the use of multiple criteria rules that are used to assign leads according to a geographic flag using the Country field:

Lead assignment rules

Lead conversion

Lead qualification depends on your business process and should have been developed in conjunction with both the marketing and sales teams.

As part of the lead conversion routine, certain key information contained on the lead record is mapped to the Salesforce CRM objects' account, contact, and optionally, the opportunity records. During lead conversion, new records are created for these objects where the account record name field will contain the Company Name field value from the lead, and the contact record name field will be populated from the Name field within the lead record.

Note

Any existing account or contact records are automatically checked before the lead conversion to avoid record duplication.

Opportunities that are created upon lead conversion contain default values for the required fields where Close Date defaults to the last day of the current quarter and Sales Stage is set to the first value in the Stage picklist.

Note

During the lead conversion, there is no opportunity amount value set on the resulting opportunity.

To convert a lead, select the lead that is to be converted either by clicking on the Lead tab and selecting from the list view or by searching and then clicking on Convert on the Lead Detail page, as shown in the following screenshot:

Lead conversion

The lead conversion screen will be displayed, where you can check the owner of the new records. Here, you can choose to send the record owner an automated notification e-mail. You can also set the status of the converted lead and specify that a new task is created for the record owner to act as a follow-up task, as shown in the following screenshot:

Lead conversion

Before creating any new account or contact records, the Salesforce CRM application attempts to match existing account and contact names and the name of the lead. When there is a match, you will have the option of selecting the existing records, as shown in the following screenshot:

Lead conversion

Clicking on the Convert button completes the lead conversion process and results in the following:

· The company name from the lead becomes the account name

· The lead name from the lead becomes the contact name

· The opportunity and contact are associated with the account

· Any campaigns related to the lead are associated with the opportunity

Note

Converted leads can no longer be viewed in the Leads tab and the only way to view the record is to create a lead report.

When customizing your report, enter a filter option of Converted equals True to view converted leads.

Lead conversion field mappings

There are standard field mappings between the lead and account, contact, and opportunity records that are provided by Salesforce for the lead conversion process; however, you can extend these. To extend the mappings, navigate to Setup | Customize | Leads |Fields. Now, go to the Lead Custom Fields & Relationships section at the bottom of the page, as shown in the following screenshot:

Lead conversion field mappings

Extending the field mappings might become necessary whenever you add required custom fields on either the account, contact, or opportunity records that are to be populated from the lead records. This is done as shown in the following screenshot:

Lead conversion field mappings

It is important to ensure the field mapping is in place whenever you have certain mandatory fields or rules for your account, contacts, or opportunities. This is because the validation logic for required custom fields and workflow or validation rules is enforced by the Salesforce application during the lead conversion process.

Salesforce automation

Salesforce automation allows the management and control of the phases required for the sales process within a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Enabling and automating these phases within CRM systems helps improve quality and also minimizes the time that sales representatives spend on each phase.

Salesforce automation in Salesforce.com is performed within the Sales App, which can be accessed from the App Menu in the top-right corner of the Salesforce CRM screen.

At the core of the Sales App in Salesforce CRM are the account, contact, and opportunity management functions that track and record each stage in the sales process for new and existing customers.

Accounts can be sorted by standard views or customized views, and users can add new accounts and edit existing accounts. Associated contacts and activities are also listed in the same page of the account where users can manipulate other operations, such as viewing, adding, and editing, as required. Account views can be filtered based on time variables, such as by viewing recently modified or created accounts, new accounts this week, and so on.

Account management

In Salesforce CRM, account management is carried out using the facilities found in the Accounts tab and is typically where customer information is located.

Account records are used to store the company information from converted leads and can also be used for the storage of company information for partners, suppliers, and even competitors.

Accounts might be considered "business accounts" from a business-to-business (B2B) perspective and are usually the company records stored within the application. However, Salesforce provides another variety of accounts called person account, which allows organizations with a business-to-consumer (B2C) business model to manage the relationships with individuals. The business account and person account records offer very similar features and fields; however, person accounts do not have certain fields or features such as a Reports To field, a Parent Account field, or the Account Hierarchy feature.

Note

Person accounts are not enabled in the Salesforce CRM application by default and are only available by sending a request to Salesforce customer support.

Business account information consists of company name, type, company website, industry, annual revenue, billing and shipping addresses, account record owner, date of creation and modification, and so on.

Tip

Naming convention for accounts

Having consistent account names is essential to ensure clean and accurate account data. It can be useful to adopt an appropriate account naming policy to be used by all users in Salesforce. One way to achieve this is to ensure that accounts are named using their full legal name wherever possible.

As described earlier in this book, accounts are also the primary mechanism used in the organization of records.

They are used within the record sharing and ownership hierarchy and are the parent object for standard objects, such as contacts, opportunities, and so on. When changing the ownership of account records, you have the option to reassign these child records, as shown in the following screenshot:

Account management

Contact management

Contact management is performed using the facilities found in the Contacts tab. Contacts are the individuals that your users want to keep in touch with. For the sales team, this is likely to be people such as purchasers and key decision makers. For the marketing team, this might include the CEOs, CFOs, and other influencers. For support, the contacts could be any of the users of the product or service that your organization provides.

Salesforce CRM provides the facility for users to store, view, sort, filter, delete, edit, and find contact information that might or might not be associated with accounts. Each contact is recorded with details, such as title, contact details (address, cell phone, work phone, fax, and e-mail address), date of creation and modification, and contact record owner.

Activity management

Activities in Salesforce are made up of tasks and events. Unlike other areas of functionality, there is no access to Activities from the tab; instead, they are created and viewed from related lists on other types of records, such as account, contact, case, and so on. Users can view activities both in the context of a relevant item (such as where they relate to an account, for example) or as a standalone mechanism from their calendar and task lists from the Salesforce CRM home page.

The Activity History related list of a record shows all completed tasks, logged phone calls, expired events, such as meetings, outbound e-mails, and so on for the record and any linked records.

Cloud Scheduler

Creating and scheduling appointments with customers is a central activity of most customer-oriented businesses. Marketing, sales, and customer support teams spend time getting in touch with prospects and customers and use a variety of means to agree on a time and place to meet.

To improve this activity, Salesforce provides the Cloud Scheduler facility, an automated system that's used to manage the scheduling and presentation of suitable appointment times to individuals through a web interface.

Note

As part of the Cloud Scheduler feature, Salesforce creates a unique web page for the meeting that displays the proposed meeting times. When invitees visit the web page, they can select the times that are suitable for them and then send a response.

The Cloud Scheduler feature requires the new user interface theme to be enabled and is supported with one of these compatible browsers: Internet Explorer 7 or 8, Firefox 3.0 or higher, Safari 3.2 or higher, and Chrome 6.0 or higher

All the responses from invitees are then tracked by Salesforce and a date and time that fits everyone can then be selected and chosen as the confirmation for the meeting.

Cloud Scheduler setup

First of all, the settings for the Cloud Scheduler can be configured by navigating to Setup | Customize | Activities | Cloud Scheduler. The New Meeting Request button for the Cloud Scheduler can be added to page layouts with an Open Activities related list, such as contacts, leads, or person accounts (if enabled).

For users to request a meeting with a person account, you might also need to add the Email field to the page layout by navigating to Setup | Customize | Accounts | Person Accounts | Page Layouts.

You can also include the New Meeting Request button on the user's home page. This is displayed above the Scheduled Meetings and Requested Meetings tabs, as shown in the following screenshot:

Cloud Scheduler setup

If this section is not displayed on the home page, then Show Requested Meetings in the Calendar Section on the Home Tab needs to be selected by navigating to Setup | Customize | Activities | Activity Settings, as shown in the following screenshot:

Cloud Scheduler setup

Cloud Scheduler requesting a meeting

This section offers an overview of how users within your organization can request a meeting with coworkers and customers using Cloud Scheduler.

Requesting a meeting

Users can either navigate to the contact or the Lead Detail page of the individual they want to request a meeting with through the Open Activities related list, or they can navigate to the calendar section on their home page. They can then click on the New Meeting Request button to display the Meeting Request page. Here, users click to invite other Salesforce users, leads, contacts, or person accounts to the meeting and click in the calendar to propose up to five meeting times; or they can choose to let the Salesforce application automatically propose times, as shown in the following screenshot:

Requesting a meeting

Invitee responses

Salesforce e-mails a meeting request to the invitees so that they can pick the times they are available. Within the e-mail is a link that the invitees click on; it is called Respond to This Request and it opens the meeting's web page. Within the web page, invitees can pick the proposed times that are suitable for them, and then send a reply, as shown in the following screenshot:

Invitee responses

Confirming the meeting

Salesforce keeps track of all the responses so users can see when each invitee is available and can then select the best time to meet and confirm the meeting, as shown in the following screenshot:

Confirming the meeting

Opportunity management

Opportunity management is performed using the facilities found in the Opportunities tab.

Opportunities in Salesforce CRM are the sales deals that the sales team in your organization creates and updates. By adding new opportunities, the sales team is building the sales pipeline that will be used to produce figures for both individual sales forecasts as well as the wider company sales forecast.

Opportunity records are also important for other users in your organization to track, such as the marketing team that might want to monitor the effectiveness of marketing campaigns or the customer support team that might need to have an up-to-date view of customer spending when negotiating support contracts.

Service cloud

At the core of the service cloud in Salesforce CRM is the case management functionality that tracks and records activities dealing with customer, service, and support automation. Case records, in Salesforce, are associated with contacts and/or accounts.

A case is a detailed description of a customer's feedback, problem, or question. Your organization can use cases to track and solve your customers' issues. Cases can be manually entered from within the Cases tab by the support or sales team after, say, a phone call or e-mail to or from a customer. However, you can also set up more complex Web-to-Case and Email-to-Case to obtain customer responses from your company's website and customer e-mails.

Case management

There are number of ways case records, which might consist of recorded phone calls or e-mail communications, can be entered into the Salesforce CRM application. Case records can be entered manually by the users accessing the Case tab, but there are other methods available for you to consider, which include:

· Automatic creation from an e-mail using Mail-to-Case sent by a customer

· Automatic creation from a web form using Web-to-Case entered by a customer

The Email-to-Case feature

The Email-to-Case feature provides the facility for automatic case creation when an e-mail is sent to a preconfigured e-mail address.

The Web-to-Case feature

The Web-to-Case feature provides the facility where customers can submit support cases online.

Note

The Web-To-Case feature can be used to generate up to 500 new cases a day.

When setting up Web-to-Case, autoresponse rules can be created that use e-mail templates to send an acknowledging e-mail to customers who have created cases using the web form.

Case queues

Queues can be thought of as a storage location to group cases together—usually by a geographic region or business function. Cases remain in the queue until they are assigned or accepted by users.

Whenever you create a case queue, Salesforce automatically generates a case list view to enable users to access the records in the queue.

Case records can be assigned to queues manually or automatically using assignment rules. Case queues and assignment rules are very similar to the queues and assignment rules available for leads.

Assignment rules

Only one case assignment rule can be active at any one time, and each rule can contain multiple criteria—up to a maximum of 25 criteria.

Escalation rules

Escalation rules are used to automatically escalate an unresolved case within a certain period of time. This escalation is triggered on the Age Over setting (when the Age field is overdue).

The modification of a field on a case is the only thing that stops the clock for escalation rules if the rule is set to "disable after first modified" or is based on the last modification time of the case.

Note

For each escalation rule, you can specify up to five actions to escalate the case over increasing periods of time.

The Age Over field specifies the number of hours after which a case should be escalated if it has not been closed.

This time is calculated from the date field set in the Specify how escalation times are set field.

No two escalation actions can have the same time period set.

Sending an e-mail to a customer from the case record does not reset the case escalation. Only when the record is changed, and not a related list, is the case escalation time reset.

Escalation rules use business hours to determine when to escalate a case. The case feature can include business hours in multiple time zones and can associate cases to various time zones.

Each escalation rule can have multiple criteria settings and up to five escalation actions per entry. An example of one such action is shown in the following screenshot:

Escalation rules

Early triggers

The early triggers mechanism enables case escalation to get expedited to the previous quarter hour slot. The setting is activated for the organization as a whole and is used to ensure that customer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are met.

The early triggers on the escalation box allow you to specify whether cases should escalate sooner than the Age Over time specified.

As an example, let's say that the escalation logic is currently running on the hour and the escalation triggers are fired every 15 minutes.

Now, say, a case is created at 16:16 and the Escalation Rule is set to trigger after one hour; the case will not be escalated until 17:30 because it missed the 17:15 escalation trigger by one minute. This can be an issue when precise escalation is required and hence, by enabling early triggers, this issue can be eliminated.

To enable the early triggers in the escalation box, navigate to Setup | Customize | Cases | Support Settings. Now, click on Edit and set the Early Triggers Enabled checkbox as shown next, and then click on the Save button.

Early triggers

Salesforce Chatter

Salesforce Chatter is an enterprise social networking application that helps users connect to people and share business information. It can be accessed from the App Menu in the top-right corner of the Salesforce CRM screen. Chatter feeds can also be accessed from within the Salesforce CRM record pages. All users with a Salesforce license have access to Chatter, plus you can create new users who do not have Salesforce licenses but wish to have access to Chatter. These user licenses can access Chatter people, profiles, groups, and files. However, they cannot access any Salesforce object data.

Chatter Only user licenses can be created for users within your company, which are known as Chatter Free, plus employees not in your organization such as customers, known as Chatter External. These are shown in the following screenshot:

Salesforce Chatter

Another Chatter license (not shown in the preceding User License selection) is the Chatter Only license. This license is also known as Chatter Plus and is for users who do not have Salesforce licenses but require access to some Salesforce objects in addition to Chatter. This provides access to Chatter people, profiles, groups, and files, plus the viewing of Salesforce accounts and contacts and the ability to modify up to 10 custom objects.

Note

You can upgrade a user's Chatter Free license to a standard Salesforce license whenever you wish; however, you cannot change a standard Salesforce license or Chatter Only license for a user to a Chatter Free license.

As mentioned previously, Salesforce Chatter can be accessed from the App Menu by selecting the Salesforce Chatter option within which these tabs are available: Chatter, Profile, People, Groups, and Files, as shown in the following screenshot:

Salesforce Chatter

These tabs are available in the Chatter app by default; however, you can also add these tabs to other apps if required.

Chatter primary features

The primary features discussed in this section exist in Salesforce Chatter.

Feed

A Chatter feed is a list of recent activities in Salesforce and are displayed on:

· The Chatter tab and Home tab. Here, users can see their posts, posts from people they follow, updates to records they follow, and posts to groups they are a member of.

· Profiles, where users can see posts made by the person whose profile they are viewing.

· Records, where users can see updates to the record they are viewing.

· Chatter groups, where users can see posts to the group they are viewing.

Post

A Chatter post is a top-level comment in a Chatter feed.

Invitations

As the name suggests, a Chatter invitation is the mechanism to send an invite by e-mail to coworkers (either with or without a Salesforce license) or people outside your company (such as customers).

Chatter settings

Chatter settings provide options for feeds, posts, and invitations. We will first look at the setting to enable Chatter, and then, in the following sections, we will look through the various settings that you can apply for Salesforce Chatter.

Enabling Chatter

Enabling Chatter also enables the new user interface theme, which updates the look and feel of Salesforce.

Note

Chatter is enabled by default for organizations created after June 22, 2010. For existing organizations, you must enable Chatter, as shown shortly.

When Chatter is enabled, the global search feature which allows searching across Salesforce, including Chatter feeds, files, groups, and people is activated.

Note

Where there are 15 or fewer users, all users automatically follow each other when Chatter is enabled.

The selection of the Salesforce Chatter options can be carried out by navigating to Setup | Customize | Chatter | Settings, as shown in the following screenshot:

Enabling Chatter

Let's look at each of the Salesforce Chatter setting options.

Chatter Settings – enabling Chatter

Select the Enable checkbox to turn on Chatter and the global search features.

The Groups option

The Group option allows you to modify Chatter group settings. By selecting Allow Group Archiving, you will allow automatic and manual archiving of groups.

Note

Groups can be activated even if this feature is not enabled.

The Rich Link Previews in Feed option

Select the Allow Rich Link Previews checkbox to display rich content in the Chatter feed. By enabling this option, links in posts are converted into embedded videos, images, and article previews.

Note

The rich content is provided by Embed.ly, which is a third-party web hosting service, and previews are only available for links to supported sites.

Salesforce does not share any private content with Embed.ly; it just shares the URL.

The Approval Posts option

Select the Allow Approvals checkbox to permit users to use Chatter posts within Salesforce Workflow approval processing. By enabling this option, users can approve any business process from within their Chatter feed.

The Coworker Invitations option

Select the Allow Coworker Invitations checkbox to enable everyone in your company to access Chatter. This allows all colleagues, even those who do not have Salesforce licenses, to collaborate using Salesforce Chatter.

Invited users can access Chatter people, profiles, groups, and files but cannot access Salesforce records unless they have a Salesforce license. To make Chatter available for company colleagues, you can either manually add Chatter users or use the Invitationsoption.

Starting in June 2011, invitations are automatically turned on for new organizations and the the Company Email Domains field is populated based on the first user's e-mail address.

Note

Salesforce recommends that you do not enter public e-mail domains such as hotmail.com or gmail.com. Anyone with an e-mail address in these domains can then join and access Chatter features and data within your organization.

You must provide at least one e-mail domain, and you can add a maximum of 200 domains. The domains that you enter should be those used in e-mail addresses within your company.

Note

As security, the Allow Coworker Invitations checkbox will not be activated if the domain is a free e-mail provider such as yahoo.com, gmail.com, and so on

The Customer Invitations option

Select the Allow Customer Invitations checkbox to permit users to invite people from outside your company network.

The File Sync option

The File Sync option allows users to access files saved in their Salesforce Files folder on their desktops from the Synced filter on the Files tab in Chatter and in Salesforce Mobile (covered in Chapter 10, Mobile Administration).

Your users need to install a desktop client called Salesforce Files. They can then securely store, sync, and share files between Chatter, their desktops, and mobile devices.

Note

Limits apply when using the Salesforce Files client: 10 GB is the maximum amount of data that individual users can sync in their Salesforce Files folder. Should the folder reaches this limit, new files will not sync until other files are deleted from the folder. 500 MB is the maximum size of file that can be uploaded using the Salesforce Files folder.

The Publisher Actions option

The Publisher Actions (or simply Actions) option lets you create actions and add them to the Chatter publisher on the home page, on the Chatter tab, in Chatter groups, and on record detail pages. Actions also appear in the action tray in Salesforce1.

Actions can be set up to provide your users with the option to create or update records and log calls directly in the Chatter feed or from users' mobile devices. Actions can be regular actions, such as create and update, or you can configure and develop custom Actions based on your company's needs.

The following lists the various types of actions:

· Standard actions: These are automatically included when Chatter is enabled, for example, Post, File, Link, and Poll. Here, you can customize the order in which these appear, but you can not edit their properties.

· Create actions: These allow users to create records. You can choose the fields used in Create actions and when the record is saved, or when any validation rule or mandatory field is fired.

· Log a call actions: These permit users to enter the details of phone calls where these call logs are saved as completed tasks.

· Send email actions (only available on Case records): These provide a Case Feed E-mail action on Salesforce1 Mobile (albeit at the time of writing this, it's a simplified version of the Case Feed E-mail function).

· Update actions: These let users amend a record from the feed associated with the record.

· Question actions: These let users ask and search for questions about the record.

· Custom actions: These are an extended functionality developed with Visualforce pages or canvas apps.

Feed tracking

When you enable feed tracking, users will see updates for the objects and records that they follow in their Chatter feed. Many objects and fields are tracked by default, but you can further customize feed tracking to include or exclude specific objects and fields.

You can set feed tracking for users, Chatter groups, and these standard objects: accounts, assets, campaigns, cases, contacts, contracts, dashboards, events, leads, opportunities, products, reports, solutions, and tasks. You can also configure feed tracking for custom objects.

The selection of the Salesforce Feed Tracking options can be carried out by navigating to Setup | Customize | Chatter | Feed Tracking (as shown in the following screenshot).

Feed tracking

Chat settings

The chat settings feature allows users to chat with people they follow in Chatter without having to use external chat clients.

The selection of the Salesforce Feed Tracking options can be carried out by navigating to Setup | Customize | Chatter | Chat Settings (as shown in the following screenshot).

Chat settings

In the Chat Settings section, select the Enable Chat checkbox to permit users to use the chat facility directly in Salesforce CRM.

In the Visualforce Settings section, select the Allow checkbox to permit developers and administrators to include the chat widget within custom Visualforce pages.

Influence

The Influence setting allows you to control how much activity users must have before they are included in influence-level calculations.

The selection of the Salesforce Feed Tracking options can be carried out by navigating to Setup | Customize | Chatter | Influence (as shown in the following screenshot).

Influence

Chatter e-mail settings

The Chatter e-mail setting allows you to apply custom e-mail branding for Chatter e-mails and control whether your users are able to receive e-mails and send posts using e-mail.

The options for the Chatter Email Settings can be set by navigating to Setup | Customize | Chatter | Email Settings, as shown in the following screenshot:

Chatter e-mail settings

E-mail notifications

The following are the steps to permit users to receive and reply to the e-mails:

· Select the Allow Emails checkbox to permit users to receive personal Chatter e-mail notifications

· Select the Allow Email Replies checkbox to permit users to reply to Chatter posts by e-mail

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at the functional areas within Salesforce CRM where we described the process from campaign to customer and beyond. We saw how leads in Salesforce CRM can be converted to generate the accounts, contacts, and opportunity records that will be processed through the sales cycle to form customer records; we also saw how these customers can be supported by the customer service and support teams using the case management features.

Within the functional areas, there are various touch points where the business teams concerned with marketing, sales, and customer service have to agree on roles and responsibilities for aspects of the business processes. Salesforce has developed Salesforce Chatter, which is a collaboration application that helps in this respect by connecting people and sharing business information.

In the next chapter, we will look at the ways in which the Salesforce CRM platform can be extended further through the use of customization technologies, such as Visualforce, where you can leverage further benefits for your organization and enhance the system without the need for expensive IT development resources.