Ten years later, I am finally getting the hang of Salesforce.com. Ironically, it was email integration between Salesforce and Outlook that forced me to really understand the system. Now I use Salesforce.com every single hour of every workday. I can’t imagine doing my work as a sales manager without it.

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Leads versus Contacts

To use Salesforce.com effectively, the sales team had to sit down and define how it was going to use its two primary ‘objects’: Leads and Contacts. Leads and Contacts don’t work together; they work sequentially. So the dividing line between a Lead and a Contact needs to be very carefully defined or chaos will ensue. Plus the sales team has to buy into the dividing line and define the Lead to Contact conversion rules.

Since implementing Salesforce.com, to our collective surprise, we have started using Leads more and more and Contacts less and less. We arrived at this outcome because we related Leads strictly to new deals, while Contacts were use to track existing customers and their renewals. It was easier to see what new deals were coming in using a custom Lead Summary View. By strictly excluding new deals from Contacts, we were able to clean up the Contact Summary so that it too was usable in a ‘blink’. In the beginning when we mixed new and existing customers in Contacts, the Opportunities Summary View got too complicated and unfocused and it was very hard to decipher.

Automatic Lead Creation Using Web Forms

Most of our deal flow comes from our web site or referral sites. We implemented Web Forms on our WordPress web site that automatically created Leads in Salesforce.com. We are able to tag the Web Forms from different pages and sources to see where they were coming from. This really helped marketing to track which landing pages were working and which were not. We can also see if a Lead was coming from Google Adwords or Facebook.

Descriptors

For every New Lead, we added descriptors in the Lead form: Product of Interest, Sales Status, Number of Seats, How Did You Hear About Us?, Salesforce Edition, IMAP Server and Trial Start Date.

On the Summary View, these descriptors let us see in a ‘blink’ what the Lead is about and its Status. We were able to create these descriptors ourselves after a training session with an outside consultant.

Lead Status

Knowing the Status of the Lead was very important to our Lead tracking process. We were able to use descriptors to track Lead status. The innovation was to put a number before the descriptor so the Leads could be grouped in order by their phase in the sales cycle: 1 Demo, 2 Setup; 3 Self Sign Up – Importing, 4 Self Signup – Not Importing; 5 Setup & Importing; 6 Setup & Not Importing and 7 Invoice. The remaining classifications are placeholders telling the sales rep to return to the Lead if a future state is achieved.

Email Messages

Our parent company, RAE Internet Inc., is the developer of Match My Email. We started developing Match My Email in 2010 because we were not happy with the SalesForce integration for Outlook and Gmail or the other vendors on the AppExchange like Cirrus Path, iHance, CureCRM, VCS Smart Email or Linkpoint 360. We even had a few sales reps using Thunderbird and GoDaddy. We wanted a fully automated tool that did all the work of syncing and logging emails to Salesforce.com, not a manual plug-in that required sales rep to take constant daily action.

By embedding a log of all emails to and from a prospect into the Lead page, we experienced a big improvement in productivity. Now the sales reps had all of their email communicates at their fingertips in Salesforce.com. They didn’t have to jump back and forth between Outlook and Salesforce.com to know what was going on with the customer in a ‘blink’. With the Email Messages log embedded in every page layout, sales reps adopted Salesforce.com faster and more thoroughly.

Email Activity Dashboard

As a sales manager, I liked the fact that I could track email activity by sales rep and see the direction of the email traffic — something that Outlook for Salesforce, Gmail for Salesforce, Cirrus Path nor the other tools on the market cannot do. By looking the ratio of sent emails to received emails, I can see how responsive a sales rep is to his or her customers.

Conversion to Contact & Account

After a Lead has become a paying customer, then we convert the Lead to a Contact with its associated Account. We do not create Opportunities at Lead conversion.

The advantage of Contacts for managing existing customers is that they rolls up into an Account and an Account can contain multiple contacts. Our experience is that after we get a new customer more people start to communicate with us about various issues: more seats, renewals, changed credit card numbers, changes in technical personnel, new Salesforce.com admins etc. The ability of an Account to roll up all the new faces at the customer into one record is useful. Combined with Match My Email, we also have the advantage that all the emails communications with all the Contacts related to an Account are shown in the Page Layout under Email Messages.

In a ‘blink’, we can see all the emails coming and going to all the counterparties at the customer and what is going with the Account.

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Aquaria KLCC

Located on the concourse level of the KL Convention Center, the 5000 square feet Aquaria KLCC is considered to be the largest aquarium on the planet. It is a home to more than 150 marine species and its major attractions include deadly sea-snakes, scary tiger sharks, blue ray fishes, beautiful coral fish, sea horses and much more.

Petronas Twin Towers

Petronas Towers is one of the tallest structures of the twentieth century and it is the symbol of the country’s modernism. This 88 floor building was planned by Cesar Pelli and his associates with both the towers joined at the 41st and 42nd floors by a 58 meter long Sky Bridge. The tower one is entirely occupied by the PETRONAS, a Malaysian State Oil Company and its associate firms. The tower two is taken up by many international companies like Barclay’s Capital, Bloomberg, Accenture, Boeing, Al-Jazeera, Microsoft, McKinsey & Co., IBM, Reuters and more.

Menara KL Tower

Menara KL Tower is definitely one of the Malaysia’s most familiar and favorite landmarks. Built in 1994, the tower stands at 421 meters and simply outdoes the Petronas Towers with its most magnificent and highest view of the Kuala Lumpur city. The tower’s spindle shaped apex can be seen from any place in Kuala Lumpur. The tower’s viewing deck is at 276 meters, at least 100 meters above the Petronas Towers Sky Bridge. The view is wonderful in the daytime and even better during the night when you can actually see the entire city in sparkling lights.

Theme Parks

The Klang Valley in KL features a number of interesting amusement parks that will ensure your kids love their stay in KL. The Sunway Lagoon Amusement park located in Petaling Jaya is the most well-known, with 3 distinct themes which include a water park, a Wild West-Park and a great African zone. Another famous theme park is the Wet World located in Shah Ala. The Mines Wonderland is one of the “must go” night amusement park near the Kuala Lumpur city. You can enjoy vintage car ride, train ride, musical fountain, tram ride and much more in this theme park. Outside KL, you’ll find the Genting Highlands Theme-Park to be a relaxing get away to the mountain tops. The park features all the regular trimmings of a kid’s play park with fast flowing rides and roller coasters.

Central Market

The Central Market building in KL was constructed in the year 1888 and started out as a wet market. It’s been remodeled and now is a famous heritage site and landmark in the middle of Kuala Lumpur. There are lots of stalls in the Central Market trading many types of artworks, handicrafts, shoes, clothing, Malaysian batiks, gifts and accessories.

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