(source: Office Clip Art)

We just posted a new free app on the Appexhcange to  attach your object to contacts, accounts and opportunities when your lead is converted.  Problem solved.   Customize the package to add the API name of your object, and you are good to go.  The best news, this app is free.  Enjoy!

Custom Object Lead Conversion

Need some ideas?

1.  Attach a “contract” to your lead to store terms and agreements for each opportunity

2.  Create an account management plan for leads and use it for a headstart to the final account plan

3.  Attach “competitors” to each lead, and move it your opportunity

4.  Link partners or resellers or consultants to each lead

Add your ideas to the comments.

Salesforce reports are great ways to review your data, and get a current snapshot on your business.  But for your users responsible for updating the info in the reports, it can be a bit of a pain.  You can either create a view with the same report criteria and audit it.  Or you can right-click, open a new window, edit….

Adding action buttons to your report can save your users a few clicks and time.

Actionable Reports

Create a formula field [formula (text)] with the following:

HYPERLINK("/" & {!Id} & "/e", "Edit") & " | " & HYPERLINK("/setup/own/deleteredirect.jsp?delID=" & {!Id}, "Del")

Update your reports with this link, and you are all set.  (No need to add this to your page layouts)

1. When you create an object, you’ll need to set the access permissions separately
2. Standard profiles will not have any access to custom objects created after Spring ’10’s launch
3. Existing objects will not be impacted

Here’s an excerpt from the notification:

What is the change?
In Spring ‘10, when you create a new custom object, the “Read,” “Create,” “Edit,” “Delete,” “View All,” and “Modify All” permissions for that object will be disabled by default. After the Spring ’10 release, you must specify which users should get access to custom objects.

Note: You can only change the object permissions for custom profiles, not standard profiles.  As a result, users with standard profiles (except System Administrator) will not be able to access custom objects created after the Spring ’10 release.

How will this change impact me?
If you have users assigned to standard profiles, clone these profiles and reassign your users to the newly created profiles. Then, when you create a new custom object, you will edit the user profiles to enable object permissions. Additionally, you can use enhanced profile management to edit multiple profiles at once.
Note: For custom objects created before the Spring ’10 release, access to these objects will not change.  Therefore, standard profiles will continue to have access to custom objects created prior to the Spring ’10 release.

Over the years Salesforce has made a few modifications customization options of system profiles.  As a best practice, we’d recommend creating custom profiles for all of your company’s roles, so you can control access however you choose.  These changes solidify this recommendations.  What’s your take on this change?

What are contact roles?

Contact roles allow users to tie people, and their roles in the process, to each opportunity.

Opportunity Contact Role Example

Using opportunity contact roles is the only way to pull in campaign information to help you understand which campaigns impacted each opportunity.  And of course it helps the sales team understand the people involved in every closed deal.

So if you need to prod your team into using the contact roles, download our free app on the Appexchange to require contact roles for opportunities, based on the opportunity stage. This app is customizable, and can match your own opportunity stages.

Find it here.

Minimize, or eliminate the time end-users need to customize it, and make it work the way they want.

This was one of our key goals as we launched Echo Lane — make it easier for organization to implement and use Salesforce.com (and other applications in the cloud).  Salesforce.com launched the AppExchange for Service Providers and an accompanying reseller program, recognizing just that:  sometimes customer success requires a bit of outside assistance.

Salesforce has a new white paper outlining how using the Appexchange can help organizations improve their success “in the cloud”  by using experienced partners to help fill in the gaps.  Now that the Appexchange has expanded to include partners, it is much easier to fill your shortlist with organizations that have the right experience to help you evolve your cloud computing and cloud application strategy.

Take a look at our white paper, “How to choose a consulting partner,” for a FAQs, preparation tips, and reference questions.

Related info:

• find Echo Lane on the Appexchange
• read our customer stories

In this issue we cover:  using Salesforce.com campaigns more effectively with campaign members, record types and custom member statuses.

Happy Holidays all!

Last week Eloqua announced a new social media toolkit and the SmartXchange community.

Here’s the scoop on these new marketing tools.

SmartXchange
This is the new best practices community from Eloqua (currently in beta).  It holds templates, and gives marketers a space to exchange ideas.  It is also a sneak peak of the new UI concepts.  SmartXchange preview:

Screenshot of the "Coverflow" in the SmartXchange

Social Media Toolkit
You can create “share this” style links in your Eloqua emails, giving your readers a shortcut way to share your content:

Social Sharing Screenshot

Social Media Reports
By building a Social Media campaign, it is much easier to attribute any traffic spikes, or new visitors to your social media outlets.  Here’s a sample:

Social Media Reporting

Learn more in the press release:

Eloqua Clears Path to Social Web

New Social Sharing and Reporting Tools Help Marketers Integrate Social Media into Marketing Mix

December 09, 2009
Vienna, VA, — Eloqua, the category-defining leader in marketing automation, today announced the worldwide availability of its new Social Sharing and Reporting toolset. The easy-to-use product allows marketers to harness the power of the social Web by pulling online conversations into their promotions, empowering fans to share marketing content with social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and track inbound traffic from blogs and social networks.

“We want to make social media marketing simple for our customers,” said Brian Kardon, CMO of Eloqua. “Our Social Sharing and Reporting tools are integrated into the same system marketers use every day, and they don’t require any special training. The social Web has become a huge influence on buying decisions. With just a few clicks, our marketing clients can trigger and leverage dialogues for their company, products and services.”

Eloqua’s Social Sharing and Reporting tools integrate with existing outbound marketing campaigns to enhance lead generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring and overall marketing effectiveness. Simply, the product allows marketers to go from zero to social in three steps:

Make campaigns shareable. Prospects can share marketing content and promotions with members of their social networks while marketers can embed third-party content, such as blog posts, directly into their email pushes and landing pages.

Track inbound traffic from social media sites/blogs. Capturing prospects’ relevant social media activities gives sales personnel immediate and unequaled insight into the interests and preferences of their potential customers.

Measure social media impact. Marketers can track which blogs and social networks are driving the most traffic to their Web site to better inform future media-buying decisions.

“Our new social media tools put our clients – the best marketers in the world – in the center of the conversation,” concluded Kardon.

If you missed the event, Salesforce has posted videos and slides from the sessions on the Dreamforce page.   For the video only, check here.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get to save any of our signature cocktail  “Fire in Cloud,” but we promise they’ll make an appearance at a future event!

Did you have a favorite session?  Comment below,  and tell us about your Dreamforce experience.

• Using Salesforce.com effectively
• Managing your customer lifecycle
• Q&A: sales cloud, service cloud and the custom cloud
• How to use marketing automation to measue ROI and increase your revenues
• Best practices
• News and events for Echo Lane

We’ll be updating this space about once per week, so stay tuned for more posts soon.

> Learn more about Echo Lane
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> Learn about our services offerings
> Read our customer stories
> Contact our team

Thank you for stopping by, we look forward to connecting with you!