Just some facts to start with:
- I’ve implemented, customized and trained on four (4) different clients.
- As of writing this post, I am now the single administrator at my company managing 93 users, Enterprise edition, across six (6) different departments.
- As of writing this post, I am now the marketing administrator and webmaster. That means I have customized our website and marketing campaigns to submit leads to SFDC, implemented the online customer service portal and am using ‘Campaigns’ to report on marketing ROI.
- I’ve built some complicated lead routing rules; currently my active routing rule as 28 statements.
- In my production environment, for the six (6) departments mentioned above, I have over 300 custom reports and 30 dashboards.
- I use SFDC sandbox regularly
- I have integrated SFDC with our marketing automation provider – Vtrenz – so that marketing information and contact data flow bi-directionally.
- I’ve built a flex app that used the SFDC API to call and publish data to a website.
- As of writing this post, I have over two years experience as an administrator for both one (1) client, as well as, multiple clients at the same time.
SFDC, and CRM in general, are still battling the adoption war but SFDC has made great strides. I am a huge proponent of the application and I say that having learned the application through “hard knocks”. SFDC marketing is pretty slick and the event coordination is something short of spectacular. But I don’t know that side of SFDC that well; I just know the application. The application speaks for itself and it is really good, not perfect but really good.
Some interesting projects that I have worked on:
1. Implementing SFDC : Kicking off a SFDC project is pretty exciting. Most people want to create the logins and send them out to everyone. They want to rush into it WAY too early. Being able to get perspective on how SFDC is going to be used requires a lot of patience and the ability to ask a lot of probative questions. I became quite the flowchart designer after having talked to so many people about their day-to-day process and how we could use SFDC to augment. You have to start with a flowchart and get approval from the executives (read: flowchart the lead/marketing process, the opportunity/sales process, the data update process, the database integration process, the outlook integration process, the reporting/dashboard process, etc. There is a lot of upfront thinking you have to do before you let everyone run free in the application. If you do not, the SFDC adoption will fail.
2. The API : We needed to display some information from SFDC to a website. One of our analysts internally was using Excel and a had a pre-defined process of checking the accuracy of the data with the executives. So I connected his file to SFDC using the Excel connector, which updated the data in SFDC when he told it to. That data went into SFDC as an ‘Asset’ record. That data was then subsequently called to the website via the API.
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