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Entrepreneurs with Denis Oakley

I HELP BOLD LEADERS TRANSFORM THEIR BUSINESSES AND THE INDUSTRIES THEY COMPETE IN

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Salesforce Premier Admin
How to use Salesforce Premier Admin Effectively

Salesforce offers a premier admin service to go with all licences. The cost is usually 15 – 25% of the total licence cost each year added onto the monthly bill. The lower rates enable you to receive premier support – you get better and faster support on cases. The premier admin service gives you access to a team of salesforce admins who will undertake a variety of everyday tasks for you. This article is about how to use Salesforce Premier Admin effectively.

You can check out the details on the Salesforce site here and a full set of features here

Full disclosure: I’m a Salesforce customer and I am the Salesforce Malaysia User Group Manager but I receive no compensation from Salesforce.

Salesforce Premier Admin is Cost Effective

For small businesses with less than 50 seats I think that the premier Admin service is a no brainer. The fewer the seats you have the more cost effective it is. Here’s why:

In the US the average salary of a Salesforce Admin is $65,000. On a freelance site such as Elance you can find reasonable quality Indian Salesforce Admins and developers for $20/hour. If you are on a 5 person force.com licence you get unlimited premier admin support for $20/month. If you have a five person enterprise licence that becomes around $100 per month.

There’s an immediate cost advantage for you over hiring on an ad hoc basis or having an in house admin. Salesforce’s support model is predicated on the fact that most of the time most people will not be giving their admins a heavy work load.

The other advantage is that by using a dedicated outsourced resource you get more knowledge. In one company that I worked with ($100 million annual sales) the IT manager looked after the SAP implementation, Salesforce and all other systems with just one sysadmin to assist. So every time he needed to do something he headed off to the help pages to learn how to do the task – or refresh himself. Costly and expensive.

For larger instances it can work as well. A lot of the admin tasks in Salesforce can be repetitive or time consuming. Think of going through multiple layouts to add a new field or updating profiles after a process change. So it can be better to hire a developer/project manager and then have him offload much of the grunt work to Salesforce admins thus ensuring that you get maximum value for his time.

Downsides of Salesforce Premier Admin

Of course there are some things that you must appreciate when using outsourced Salesforce admins.

  • Based in India or Philippines
  • Don’t know your Salesforce instance
  • Don’t know your business model
  • Not working for you full time?
  • Sometimes poor English
  • Agents can be misallocated beyond their level of experience

How to Maximise your Return from Salesforce Premier Admin

I’ve used Salesforce premier admin now for 4 years and these are the ways that I get the most benefit from it

Do the project management yourself.

Split everything up into small tasks that can be completed in one or two hours at most. Then make each a separate case. This gives you a high chance of getting the golden outcome of submitting the case, getting the acknowledgement email and then getting the case closed email all in an hour or so.

One case where I didn’t do this was when I had set up a bunch of processes in the new process builder. They were fine when I tested sandbox but when they went live we got flooded with Apex errors. The reason was that process builder doesn’t do any bulkification and we were hitting SOQL limits. There was no work around and so every process had to be deactivated and redone as a workflow and also use a managed package to deal with cross object updating. The specification was very clear but the whole thing took weeks before I abandoned the case and started over. Then it got done in hours as 10 much smaller cases.

Spend more Time on the Case Description.

I can’t stress this enough. Explain the use case and why you are doing the project. Provide the context and then set out very clearly, just like you would to a new graduate exactly what you require. Take this all; the way down to what you want fields to be named as, what goes in the description box, where the validation messages are etc. Firstly it makes their life easier as they don’t have to worry about your intent and can just get on with the job. Secondly you have far fewer problems as you have spent more time getting exactly what you want clear in your mind.

Use Templates.

Depending on what you use the admins for it can often be worth developing templates for use when you submit a case. These can make it a lot faster to put a high quality case together and it makes sure that all the little things that you do yourself, or would do if you weren’t so lazy/stress (delete whichever doesn’t apply) are done. Generally I uses them for workflows and dashboards as these save the most time.

Respond Quickly.

If they email you reply back as quickly as possible as they will get back to work on the case straight away if you get back within an hour. If you leave it longer you’ve delayed it by 24 hours normally

Don’t use the Phone.

State explicitly that you don’t want to use the phone in your case. If you don’t you will get a call pretty soon after the case is allocated. The guys are nice but call quality and accent can subtract from value. More importantly I’ve rarely found the unsolicited calls to add much value. They just interrupt my workflow. Salesforce SOP is always to refer to the case by their reference number rather than your case description which is incredibly annoying.

Don’t have too many Cases at Once.

Case management ability in SF for an admin is poor and so you often end up managing via email which only works with a couple of cases. Far better is to maintain a list of prepared cases and flow them through the system as the previous ones complete

Don’t ask anything too technical.

These guys are admins not developers. There are further tiers of support behind them but if you need something technical doing its usually better to get a dev. This is especially true when you remember that the admins won’t touch triggers, apex or VF. They are best used to do the easy time consuming stuff and free up your time.

Be Polite and Treat them with Respect.

The guys and girls are great. They constrained with scripts and things that they have to do once you get past that they will really make a big effort to help you

I hope that these tips and tricks will help you get far more out of Salesforce Premier Admin and help you improve your business

Sorting tradeshow leads is time consuming and comes with an opportunity cost

In this article I’ll cover how to process trade show business cards in order to maximise trade show ROI

I spent most of last week talking to people at the oil and gas exhibition in Kuala Lumpur. Turnout was a little down compared to previous editions but I still ended up with four hundred business cards at the end of the show.

One of my favourites thoughts is the 1% rule. If you do everything 1% better you see dramatic changes in your business. It’s easy to go through business cards and make a quick judgement call on which will be valuable. It’s easy to throw lots away as they don’t fit some criteria.

Like anyone I’m fallible and I make mistakes – especially after standing up all day talking to customers. A far better way is to use behavioural filtering. You let customers, or potential customers, or even non-customers exclude themselves.

This isn’t the easy way though. It means that you have to get the business cards into the machine and then giving them stimuli to generate a response that allows you to score their behaviour.It doesn’t really matter what the machine is – salesforce, infusionsoft or your excel list of leads. They need to go in and be chewed over by your marketing processed and then like the sorting hat in Harry Potter be classified into Hot, Warm, Cold and No Value by their activity.

That part is all fairly straight forward with drip marketing campaigns and and measuring opens, clicks, views and dwell time. Whats not so easy is getting the business cards onboard.

Problems Processing Business Cards from Trade Shows

I’ve looked at a number of approaches over the years and these are the main issues that you face

  • Some are existing customers. Some are not. They need to be treated differently.
  • Some have specific actions that have to be undertaken as a result of the conversation at the booth.
  • Processing software is accurate up to a limit
  • Doing it yourself wastes lots of time and comes with a huge opportunity cost.
  • Outsourcing again requires checking
  • Business cards display the same information in so many ways that its very difficult to be efficient
  • Asian, or international, names and addresses can flummox many processors
  • Senior staff can gather lots of insight about business development opportunities from the cards.

With that in mind and with dozens of exhibitions under my belt this is an efficient way to get a fast timely and relevant response out to trade shows visitors

Split the pack to Maximise Trade Show ROI

All leads aren’t created equal and they don’t need to be treated equally.

First grab all the ones from your existing customers. If the contact exists already in Salesforce you can make your updates super quick.

If the Account exists but the contact doesn’t the fastest thing is usually to clone the contact. Then you make the amendments required.

These you do yourself. You can get a lot of value from this, and these are typically the cards that will have some action associated with them.

The next tranche are the likley prospects. Here it depends on numbers.  If you don’t have too many the fastest thing to do is to switch off validation rules and chuck them onto Salesforce with a simple account name, contact name and email address – and whatever field you use to trigger the exhibition drip marketing campaign.

Then use the Salesforce dataloader to export all these and hand that output over to your data processor to complete the fields and reupload. You’ve responded quickly, you’re engaging and yet you’ve spent as little of your precious time getting in touch – and they are in Salesforce. So they exist 🙂

The remaining two groups are the real trash and the marginals. Marginals get sent straight to the data processor and minimal data capture is undertaken. The ROI is small for each individual but in my experience as much as 50% of the ROI from the whole exhibition comes from these. It’s just too difficult to identify the gold from the dross at this stage. So you put it in cheaply and then as they show positive signs you reinforce success and upgrade their priority.

Data Processing of Business Cards

When I talk about a data processor I usually use an outsourcer. I find it’s best to maintain someone in the $3-5/hour range on Elance or Freelancer for this type of work. You need to give careful instructions and do some data quality management when you get it back – but it is the most efficient way of getting it done – and you can make sure that it complies with your validation rules before being uploaded. Automated systems normally take longer to do for the relatively small volumes that you get from trade shows. If you want to know more about doing this send me an email. This simple process helps to maximise trade show ROI by keeping costs and time low

This leaves the trash. Even here there can be gold. We capture first name and email and blast them with a simple question

“Do you you know anyone who buys our product and service? We’ll give you X if we make a sale”

Again you get a bit more gold and depending on the typical LTV of your customers this can be hugely successful

Summary

To make the most of attending an exhibition or tradeshow you need to reduce the cost of processing the business cards and maximise the chance of converting a lead.

Segmenting cards and processing them differently based on value and then responding to positive behavioural cues boosts your trade show ROI

 

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