(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?

• how it works
• how to use it
• using it effectively

Marketing automation has been a hot topic for companies in all industries.  As more an more marketing efforts move online through your company’s website, natural search, paid search and social media, your prospects and customers are more knowledgeable about your products than ever.  As a result, most prospects interact with your company before actively “raising their hands” for information — without assistance of involvement from your sales and marketing teams.  You need to deliver timely content across multiple channels: online, in-person, at industry events and everywhere else.  Marketing automation steps in to help you to track the effectiveness of all of your interactions with your prospects and customers, online and off.

We’re hosting a 3-part webinar series with our partner, Eloqua, marketing automation pioneer, and Barbara Anguis Saxby, Founder and Managing Director at Accelent Consulting – a strategic marketing firm that has worked with companies like Peoplesoft and Salesforce.com.

This 3-part series covers the basics of marketing automation, practical applications for marketing automation and how marketing teams can measure success.

The first session answers the most critical question:

What is Marketing Automation?

We’ll talk about:

• Measuring results across the entire customer lifecycle
• Building a better marketing funnel
• Improving trust between sales and marketing

If you are interested in registering for the first session on May 18, register here.

• Webinar Session: What’s Marketing Automation
• Date: May 18, 2010
• Time: 10A PST

Are you interested in more content like this?  Join our marketing automation email list.

We’re looking forward to joining forces with hiSoft’s global team and we’re happy to note hiSoft’s clients are excited as we are.

“Over the past eight years of working together, hiSoft has become AIG Edison Life’s essential business partner in the areas of application system development and business process outsourcing.  We welcome hiSoft’s acquisition of Echo Lane, as we expect that it will bring great value and benefits to both hiSoft and AIG Edison Life.  The combined companies will contribute greatly to our strategic cloud computing initiatives.”

-  Tohru Futami
Managing Director and CIO
AIG Edison Life Insurance Company

As a part of hiSoft’s new Cloud Services group, we’re scaling up our capabilities and resources to better serve you. The entire Echo Lane team combines hiSoft’s existing consulting practice to form seasoned global team of CRM consulting professionals to focus solely on the Cloud.  Our new 100-strong team has 10+ years of CRM and Cloud solution expertise a larger pool of technical resources and a global reach.

• Read the full release on our blog, and on the wire
• Learn more about hiSoft’s services
• Update your email subscription to learn about our services: cloud consulting, marketing automation, complex quoting and configuration and more
• Learn more about hiSoft
• Apply: we’re looking for project managers, technical architects and salesforce.com experts

Acquired by hiSoft, China’s Leading IT Outsourcing Company

hiSoft leads China’s further expansion into global ITO services market; creates ‘best-of-all-worlds’ cloud services consulting practice through Echo Lane purchase

San Francisco, CA – April 15, 2010 — Echo Lane, one of the top U.S. solution providers for Salesforce.com and other cloud applications, announced it has been acquired by hiSoft, the leading global information technology outsourcing company headquartered in China. This is the most aggressive push yet into the U.S. cloud computing market for a major China-based IT Outsourcing company.

Under the terms of the agreement, Echo Lane will remain a wholly owned subsidiary of hiSoft, and the firms will join forces to expand their dominance in the cloud computing market, serving Global 2000 customers in the United States, Asia and Europe.

“Over the past eight years of working together, hiSoft has become AIG Edison Life’s essential business partner in the areas of application system development and business process outsourcing,” said Tohru Futami, Managing Director and CIO, AIG Edison Life Insurance Company.  “We welcome hiSoft’s acquisition of Echo Lane, as we expect that it will bring great value and benefits to both hiSoft and AIG Edison Life.  The combined companies will contribute greatly to our strategic cloud computing initiatives.”

Echo Lane was founded by Salesforce.com alumni in 2004 with an exclusive focus on cloud computing solutions.  The firm has since earned a solid reputation executing strategic cloud-based initiatives for customers in the manufacturing, high-tech and financial services industries.  In addition, Echo Lane provides a full set of business process and information technology consulting services around the software-as-a-service model.  Two deep specialties are: the migration of custom, legacy, and traditional on-premise applications to cloud computing solutions, and the implementation of fully integrated, end-to-end CRM solutions using leading cloud computing applications including Salesforce.com, BigMachines, and Eloqua.

“The acquisition of Echo Lane is an important step in hiSoft’s strategy to strengthen our global cloud service capabilities, as well as our CRM consulting practice,” said Tiak Koon Loh, CEO of hiSoft. “As one of Salesforce.com’s elite partners, with more than 1,000 completed projects in the past six years, Echo Lane brings an impressive portfolio of cloud computing knowledge and experience.  This, combined with hiSoft’s deep engineering expertise, extensive delivery capabilities in China, and broad CRM expertise within enterprise customers in the financial services, technology, and manufacturing sectors, we will allow us to provide our global customer base a whole new level of innovative and cost-effective cloud deployment services.”

With more than 4,500 employees across 16 global business offices and eight Asia delivery centers, hiSoft is a trusted outsourcing partner to its clients, leveraging a ‘flexshoring’ service delivery model via mostly China-based development centers. With an even mix of research and development services for those clients that build and sell technology products, and information technology services for those clients that leverage technology to run their companies, hiSoft is well known for both its engineering depth and industry breadth.  hiSoft is a private company backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, ePlanet Ventures, GE Capital, Granite Global Ventures, Intel Capital, Mitsubishi UFJ Securities (HK) Capital Limited and Sumitomo Corporation.

“We are very excited to join forces with hiSoft, because together, we now have the flexibility to offer clients an extensive array of end-to-end cloud and other technology solutions delivered by either onshore or offshore teams, depending on the client needs and requirements.” said Alana Kaselitz, Principal of Echo Lane.  “The power of our cultures working together will allow Echo Lane to leverage hiSoft’s reach, technology prowess and resources, and offer our hands-on-expertise to a wider global market.”

For more information, please visit Echo Lane at www.Echo-Lane.com and hiSoft at www.hisoft.com.

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.