Time Zones for Leads & Contacts

If you call on clients nationally, you may have figured out that it often makes sense to make your sales calls starting in the Eastern time zones and working towards the West. For example, if you live in the Central time zone and start your business day at 8am CT, you may not want to call on clients in the Pacific time zone first thing in the morning (6am). Furthermore, you may want to start your calling on the Eastern time zone because they will be at lunch before you know it. Consequently, it is very helpful to be able to sort your Leads or Contact calls by time zone. There are a number of ways of achieving this, including some plug-ins for the Firefox browser, but I prefer a solution native to salesforce.com that doesn't require me to be on a specific computer and using a specific browser. Consequently, I created this Time Zone custom formula field to identify time zones.

Outlook Integration with Salesforce.com

As a salesforce partner, one of the most common pieces of functionality we get asked to deploy or assist with is integration between Microsoft Outlook® and salesforce.com. This can take a variety of forms. This article discusses the considerations and steps in configuring your Outlook application to work with Salesforce CRM. Most people think of "email" when talk out Outlook, but the Connect for Microsoft Outlook desktop application provided free to all Salesforce CRM customers using a PC can also synchronize calendar appointments ("events" in salesforce speak) and To-Do items ("tasks" in salesforce speak). Similar functionality is provided for LotusNotes users with a separate tool provided by Salesforce and to Apple Mac users running Mac Mail or Microsoft Entourage, through the free Maildrop and SF3 applications from PocketSoap. The considerations in this article are relevant to both PC and Apple Mac users, but the configuration discussion focuses on Connect for Microsoft Outlook.

Social Media for Business Success

What Are You Thinking?

You would not be alone if you or your colleagues are asking questions like:

• Isn't social media for personal, non-business conversations?
• Our company already has a LinkedIn or FanPage, aren't we already covered?
• What does it cost to manage a social media strategy?
• Can you explain the Chatter and Salesforce for Twitter applications?
• We are B2B, isn't social media for B2C?
• How do Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, YouTube and others apply to business?
• What do I need to know that I don't already know?

Harvest2Salesforce Connector

Intended for companies and professional services organizations that track time entry related data for internal or clients projects, the Harvest2Salesforce Connector from akaCRM effortlessly integrates time entry data from the Harvest time and expense tracking web-based application with salesforce.com.