Dreamforce 2012 - The Big Picture and Takeaways

Another Dreamforce has come and gone.  As in the past, I came home and needed a day just to get my head back on straight and my feet back on the ground.  I'm going to do two things in this blog post.  First I'll talk about a few major themes that I picked up on in the messaging from Salesforce.  Second I have a few tips to share about coming back from Dreamforce and making the most of the experience.

Business is Social

Yes, it's a pretty buzzword laden term, but hear me out.  People working together is what gets things done, and now tools are being created AND USED to make this happen.  Chatter is one way to tie people together, but it also fits into a larger ecosystem of "socializing" your enterprise applications.  In the past, social components were always an addon that required users to learn additional systems and replicate data in more places.  With Chatter and other platform level social tools, this is no longer the case and it's all happening in one place.

Thinking out to the larger enterprise picture, more and more companies are investing in social infrastructure to both increase their employees effectiveness, and interact with customers.  Remember when people used to write a physical letter to a company?  And 10 years ago that became email?  Now those communications are coming in through Tweets and Facebook Messages.  Listening technology is finally catching up.

It's a Trust Revolution, Baby!

I've never heard the term Trust Revolution until Benioff's main keynote.  At first I thought "Great, more buzzwords", until he started painting a picture of what this means.  I picked up on two themes - First, a trust revolution is that providers of cloud technology have proven the technology.  Cloud tech is now trusted and reliable, and in many instances (Especially Salesforce), transparent.  Check out trust.salesforce.com to see how Salesforce outlines system status.  It's the best in the business.

The second theme with the Trust Revolution is that with many cloud applications, there has been a lack of interoperability between them since we are effectively using many vendor's infrastructures.  Initially, many vendors tried to be "everything to everyone", but the focus is shifting back to a "best of breed" approach.  With this new focus, there have been HUGE gains made in federated login and identity management.  Salesforce annouced that they will now be an identity provider and is actively working with many vendors to implement support for it.  Imagine, log into Salesforce and also login to all of your enterprise applications at the same time.  It's truly turning the browser into your operating system.  Exciting stuff, although potentially more forward looking than some of the other things at the conference.  If you're interested in this, talk to your account executive to get information on timing of releases.

Mobile - Still a Big Deal

Mobile is still HOT.  Salesforce gave touch.salesforce.com a lot of love during keynotes and product demonstrations.  Touch has been a bit quiet since last Dreamforce, it turns out they were digging in and really making the product more robust to "re-release" it at this year's conference as generally available.  

At Red Argyle, our mobile app developers are chomping at the bit to start implementing touch solutions so this is great news, as we now can start building native, touch enabled applications that will work on any modern browser, on any device.

Marketing - BOOM!

Salesforce unveiled a new cloud, called the "Marketing Cloud".  It combines a few key services that Salesforce has acquired over the past year.  Radian6, Site.com, and Buddy Media into a potent marketing engine to drive enterprise scale messaging.  And being Salesforce, this is all incorporated right into the core Salesforce platform, instantly combined with and adding to your data.

There's a big shift going on and Salesforce is leading the pack bringing this offering to the market. They believe that marketing budgets will exceed IT budgets within 5 years and they are making a play to get ahead of this. I can see the truth in this statement, as IT infrastructure diminishes and the need for social engagement increases, there could very well be a shift of spending into marketing activity.

OK So Now What?

Every year I get back from Dreamforce and feel like I have a Post-Dreamforce hangover.  The week was such an emotional high, so much fun, and so much magic, that coming back to the desk is like going from color back to black and white.  I'm here to tell you - It does not have to be that way.

In my experience, the only half of the value of a conference happens from attending, the other half comes from properly applying what you learned while there.  Whatever you're doing right now, stop and think hard about the feeling of total awesomeness you had last week and bottle it up.  Literally, remember hard what it felt like and hold on to it.  Now the challenge is strategically tapping into that feeling throughout the year to keep the energy high.  Of course there are some practical things to help with that.

#1 - If you made friends, keep them!  Linkedin/Follow/Friend anyone that you had great conversations with.  Even reach out to them and have a chat.  Surrounding yourself with like-minded Dreamforcers will help you keep the energy high.  Another often overlooked thing is that session presenters are MUCH more available than you think and they present because they're passionate about the topic.  They'll be happy to talk to you if you have questions.

#2 - Go back through your agenda and organize your notes.  If you didn't take notes, make some right now.  Write down three takeaways from each session you wanted to attend and three action items that you can followup on.  Did you see a product at a session that looks interesting?  Schedule a demo, did you learn a great new formula?  Take a note of it and implement it.

#3 - The other sessions are coming.  Over the next few weeks, Dreamforce will begin releasing them to Youtube.  Recommend reviewing the session listing and picking out all the ones you wanted to attend but couldn't and make your own list that you can then sit back and review session content.

#4 - Schedule time to dream.  On your calendar, schedule an hour of Dreamforce followup/education per week for a year.  Make this your "special happy time" to do the above and keep making small progress every week.  I'm a big fan of "Getting Things Done" system and identifying a few actionable items per week will keep you moving forward.

Alright, I hope this was a helpful roundup and followups for you regarding Dreamforce.  I'd love if you had any other thematic observations from the conference to share or actionable followup items, leave a comment and don't be shy!

Garry

You Really Need to Know About List Views

Salesforce has lots of ways to get to your data, but one of my favorite is the venerable "List View".  I often see the usefulness of list views glossed over in trainings and implementations, but it's worth a few minutes to understand their full power.  First let's review the difference between a report and a list view.  

Reports rock when... 

• Need to display a lot of data from multiple objects
• Need to VIEW data
• Need to perform calculations on data
• Need charting/graphing capabilities
• Want to include in a dashboard
• Want to export to Excel or CSV

List Views rule when...

• Need to show data on one object
• Need to EDIT data
• Need to perform mass data or other operations to records
• You need to throw one together quick.  They are easy to build.

List View Super Basics

To open a list view, there is an innocuous little "Go" button on each tab to open the selected list view.  Salesforce does a pretty good job of making standard views available to get started with.  

When you've opened a list view, it may not look amazing, but there's a lot of power in this screen.  Here's a few nice features:

• Click a column header to sort on that column
• Click "Delete" to delete a record
• Cliclk "Edit" to edit a record
• Double click a field to change its value
• Check multiple records and then double click a field to modify multiple records at the same time

Using List Views Effectively

List views are a great tool, especially if you use them for the right stuff.  I think many job functions can be managed through a few simple list views.  Here's a few ideas to get you started:

• New Leads this week - tear through a list of leads and possibly qualify/disqualify by list view fields
• Opportunities whose close date is in the past - great for data integrity, creates happy sales managers and administrators
• Contacts with no activities in 90 days - who needs a good talking to?
• All My Open Leads - show all the leads you are currently working and quick access to work them!
• All My Opportunities - imagine updating your "Next Step" fields all from one place instead of banging through dozens of records one at a time

I would also advocate for creation of a daily/weekly list view lap checklist.  Keeping your list views in order means that your data is in order, and list views let you do it faster and more efficiently than any other Salesforce path.  I wrote a blog on checklists here, if you want some ideas for that.  If you want more technical information regarding creating, modifying, and using list views, it is available in your Salesforce help.

I'll leave with one final thought - If you end up with a few favorite list views, and have Chatter enabled, you can click the Chatter button from a list view and then "Favorite" that list view.  Then, all your daily "faves" show up in your Chatter favories, making it easy to run your daily list view lap.

I hope this is helpful, if you have any good ideas for useful list views, please leave a comment below.  If you cannot create list views but think they will help your daily work, contact your administrator and ask about them.  We're always happy to answer questions regarding this blog here as well.

Thanks for reading!

-Garry

Salesforce Cross Queries = Awesome

Today I was working with a Salesforce customer on the Nonprofit Starter Pack and a formerly impossible requirement came up.  It went like this:

Show me every household that has one member that has their constituency equal to "Parent" (For reference, the constituency field was a custom field on the Contact object)

Back in the "Olden Days", being, the days before Cross Queries were available to us, that would have have been quite difficult.  With the advent of Salesforce Analytics Edition however, that is now done quite simply.

Step 1 - pick a report type

In this case, I picked simply "Households" since I just wanted a household driven mail list.

Step 2 - Define criteria.

Here's the magic.  First, add a cross query.  Choose "Households With Household Members"

Next, add a filter, and choose "Constituency Equals Parent".

The logic for this is fairly basic, I want only households with Contacts in them and out of those Contacts, I only want ones that are parents.  These requirements could be changed to anything though.  Another example "Only show households that have kids with blue eyes".  It could be anything based on a contact field now.

Step 3 - Run the report and enjoy the results of your hard labor.

The resultset from the report now shows household data, and only households that have contacts who are parents in them.  It's a great way to report on a higher level object, and filter out lower level data that should not be included in your final result set.

Your executive director will probably give you a ticker tape parade, and hopefully even the rest of the day off.

Rock on.  -Garry

AppExchange All-Star!

At Cloudforce a few weeks back I was asked to participate on a panel which discussed our favorite AppExchange apps.  I commented that my favories were all from Force.com Labs, because they were open source, free, and an easy way for Red Argyle customers to try out some new things.

Upon my return, I was asked to write a blog about it, that would be posting to the AppExchange newsletter.  So, I just wanted to share a link to the finished product here:  http://blogs.salesforce.com/community/2012/03/appexchange-all-star-garry-polmateer-red-argyle.html

In the post, I outline my favorite applications with some links and screenshots so you can consider them for your Salesforce instance today!

Thanks!  -Garry

No Punch List!

I recently overheard a staff meeting with one of my customers.  They were talking about an exemplary employee who has a motto "No Punch List!".  Basically in their business they install furniture.  Very often, on a job, there is a missing piece, something needs to be modified, or a change otherwise made.  So, the installers create a "Punch List" of follow up action items.

During this meeting, the supervisor was talking about the one employee who lives by the credo "No Punch List".  This employee purchased their own tools and put together a well stocked repair kit.  This employee runs installations, and when things go awry, he was prepared to deal with the situation and fix problems right there, on the spot to get the job DONE.  Not just "mostly done", but "done done".

I thought this was a pretty neat story on a few levels.  

1) It has some elements of leadership.  This employee took it upon himself to outfit himself with a toolbelt.  This toolbelt allowed him to deal with situations much more capably and mitigate issues.  I sent the message "The buck stops here.  We're here to do a job, not shoulder work off to someone else or our future selves".

2) It's a great customer success story.  This employee had higher satisfaction ratings because his team got things done faster with less return trips and less errors.  Instead of installing something wrong, they would use their tools and fix it so it would be installed correctly.

3) From a PM perspective, it screams "Getting Things Done" and the Two Minute Rule.  If it can be fixed or done in two minutes or less, don't bother writing it down, just DO IT.

So how does this seguey to Cloud Computing?  Well, I think the three points are easily transferable.

1) With cloud computing, the "toolbelt" that you need is much, much smaller than traditional software.  The technology stack is abstracted and we only need to master a few elements to be able to deal with a large number of issues.  When we founded Red Argyle, we subscribed to a few cloud services and bought a few MacBooks.  That was the extent of the company infrastructure.  Our "toolbelt" was quick and easy to put together and we were ready to rock.

2) The cloud creates customer success.  Customers are not forced to dedicate resources to building infrastructure.  They can take an idea, and run with it.  The cloud brings ideas to life dramatically faster than traditional software.

3) Getting things done is the nature of cloud computing.  Many, Many more tasks can be done in two minutes or less.  This means more productivity and faster project turnaround.  Idea to Application happens in days not months or years.

With cloud computing, the punch list of mundane fixes is history.  With cloud computing, we don't need to put things off to the future to make it happen.  With a few minutes, and a web browser, problems can be solved.  It's a liberating feeling, and it's great to know that it's possible to do away with the Punch List with the cloud.

Do you have any thoughts on this?  What does your toolbelt consist of?