You can use Salesforce Fomulas to link to other databases and websites, to bring in images from the likes of Yahoo Finance and Google Charts, or even to help you auto-fill objects by adding / overriding a New Object button.

The slide deck below references a tremendous wealth of further reading, videos, and documentation, including a Dreamforce video on using Google Charts with Salesforce Formulas. And, the last two pages of the slide deck contain formulas you can plug into your Salesforce org without creating any additional fields (other than, of course, the formula field).

Enjoy!

Salesforce.com Formulas – Tips and Tricks

I’m a bit of a coffee nut. I weigh my beans, grind them in a burr grinder, and make my coffee using either a double walled french press or a manual espresso pump – my dependable Presso. I’ve blind-tested Lavazza against Illi, and firmly rejected Lavazza. I then moved on to local coffee roasters, settling for a while on Square Mile Coffee Roasters but in the last few weeks I’ve changed allegiances to Monmouth Coffee.

You might think my interest is over the top, or OCD, or simply going to far, but anyone who has started a business knows the never-ending effort involved. Often a labor of love, sometimes a thankless toil, but it is not an occupation for the weak of spirit or part timers. On top of the regular challenges, I added one more challenge when I launched myself off a hundred foot cliff while skiing in France just as business was taking off, leaving me first in the hospital (where I hired my first employee) and then in a wheelchair for three months. Regardless, it demands everything of you, and if you are going to make it through, you will find it a lot easier with a Cup of Joe in your hand.

Which brings me to one of my pet peeves – the myriad of fluff-filled, yawn-worthy awards given in the social enterprise space. I don’t mean to denigrate the applicants or winners – god knows they deserve every ounce of help they can get. It’s just that the assistance given by these awards is so often nothing more than a mastabatory marketing effort by the organisation giving it

For example, one of these awards lists among its benefits “Access to networking and training opportunities throughout the year provided by [organisation] and our partners” which sounds like marketing speak for “We will put you on our email newsletter and invite you to things you could have gone to anyway.”

When I have the cash to give away, I’m going to start an award called the “Survive the First Year” award (or something similar). I’m still debating with myself exactly what it’s going to recognize, but I know what the award is going to include:

• A year’s supply of high quality coffee, along with a Presso espresso machine (or a year’s worth of tea, depending on your caffeine delivery method of choice)
• A graphic designer to design (or re-design) your logo and business cards, and letterhead
• 200 of Moo’s beautiful Luxe business card
• Your website redesigned (if you think you need it) onto a beautiful WordPress theme, or FourSquare site
• Assistance setting up a Google Apps account for company email if you don’t have an email system you already like
• Assistance with your LinkedIn profile, as well as Facebook and/or Twitter, depending on your needs
• A year’s worth of accountancy services
• A year’s worth of service from Best Reception
• 4 Hours of legal advice, for you to use when you need it

I’d recommend to the person additional things that I think can be found elsewhere better than I could hope to provide. For instance,

• A mentor through Business in the Community. The guy they hooked me up with has helped me to no end, saving me days, if not weeks of time, and accelerating my business months ahead of where it would be if I didn’t have a mentor. BITC gets 10 out of 10 for how they’ve helped me.

We’re one of three organisations picked as UK partners – and quite frankly, we’re the coolest of the three.

Best of all, Common Ground will help us defeat Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge. What? Blackbaud buying Convio? Errr…long live our new Database Overlords.

If you’d like to learn more about Convio’s Common Ground, please join us for one of the following events:

Introduction to Common Ground: an online product tour
Take a free hour long guided tour through Convio Common Ground, the revolutionary cloud-based CRM system built on Salesforce without leaving the office. This platform lets you and your colleagues manage all your relationships in one place with social media built right in – sign up to see it in action!
Dates: Tuesday, 20 March, 12:00-13:00 and Monday, 30 April, 12:00-13:00
www.convio.co.uk/take-tour-common-ground

Live Common Ground demo
Because an hour is not long enough to show all the Common Ground has to offer, Convio would like to host you at our funky east London workshop space for a free extended in-person demo of the revolutionary cloud-based CRM system built on Salesforce. This platform lets you and your colleagues manage all your relationships in one place with social media built right in – so sign up to join us for some tea/coffee and snacks, an informal chat and insider look at Common Ground in action! Space is limited so sign up soon.
Date: Wednesday, 18 April, 9:30am – 12:30 pm
www.convio.co.uk/liveCGdemo

This means it’s also time to go back to Inkscape and add my certifications to my business card! We designed our business cards so people could stack up their certifications under their name. The funny thing is that last week I met, for the very first time ever, someone who actually asked me about my level of certification. I think it’s one of those things that consultants know about but the average small client doesn’t.

Anyway, for those looking for a few tips on passing the test, read on. I’ll discuss both of these together, as there was a bit of overlap, and because I can’t quite remember which question came from which test.

The standard advice aplies – know your stuff. The Salesforce-produced exam guides are the best place you can start, and the six prep questions are a great indication of what you’ll see.

You’ll find that you also have to know a bit of Apex stuff, which interestingly enough I wasn’t asked about on the Dev 401 exam. Clarity on where workflow functionality ends and where Apex triggers begin will be handy.

Salesforce also did something funny in their exam – they threw in features that you wish existed but were fairly sure didn’t. The question would go something like this:

The accounts object in your Salesforce org has too many blah blah blah. How do you fix it?
A) Clearly wrong answer
B) So-so answer, probably not the right choice
C) Clearly wrong answer
D) Mentions a checkbox in Customize > Accounts that would solve the issue, but you don’t ever remember seeing it.

And that was the problem – you’d stare at it, trying to decide if D) was just some made-up feature that they invented for the exam and you should chose B), or if you had a gap in your knowledge and D) did in fact exist and was the right answer.

I remember one question where I deliberated, and finally chose the B) option, confident in the fact that I couldn’t have lived and breathed Salesforce for two years and not heard about this feature. When I got home, I googled, and D) did in fact exist, but it was one of those things that you have to make a request with support to enable.

The point is, good test taking skills will help only so far. Particularly for the Americans raised on the fill-in-the-bubble SAT and Kaplan/Princeton Review, you will probably be able to intelligently cross off one or two choices. But there is no way you can get around the need to know the product and know it very well. Salesforce has written their exam in such a way that you can’t fake product knowledge.

But you can review it – one particularly useful place is ShellBlack. They have great walkthroughs of functionality that only take a minute to read, but give you enough knowledge that if you ever need to use that feature, you’ll be able to figure out your way through it.

Incidentally, I did the same thing other test takers suggested – I wrote down the numbers 1 through 60 and as I was going through the test, ranked my answer into one of three categories of how certain I was. In both I had about 30-32 answers I was certain about (or, rather, 98% certain). The rest were a mix of Maybe’s and WTF’s.

Best of luck to everyone about to take the test!

The last time a student asked me what the text and picklist on the bottom of a report meant, and I answered, “I have no idea!”

I now know both what it is and why I didn’t know before – it’s an undocumented feature that doesn’t appear in either Google or Salesforce Help search results.

If you look on the bottom of a report (Summary and Matrix, but not Tabular) you will see the text, “Check rows to filter, then drill down by:”

As far as I can tell, this replicates the “Summarize information by:” at the top of the report, only in completely different and obscure language. Basically, you can happily ignore it and stick to the functionality at the top of the report.

Enjoy!

[the first comment on this post expands the explanation even more]

The connector itself is free, and fairly straightforward. It can do one-way syncing from Eventbrite to Salesforce, so Salesforce will be able to grab all the info about your attendees, and report on it. The connector can even create a campaign and attach the imported contact/lead to the campaign, though you are better off creating the campaign first, so you can add member status like Attended and No-Show.

The import functionality is very intelligent. If a mixture of leads and contacts attended your event, as well as new records, the connector will update the existing contacts and leads, and import the new records as one of, Contacts, Leads, or Person Accounts. The connector matches the existing records based on email address, so while you might have some issues with people who have multiple email accounts, its otherwise pretty foolproof.

Also, while I usually import attendees just once, after the event, there is nothing stopping you from importing them several times before the event and then after, as additional people sign up. Neither duplicate contacts nor campaign member records will be created.

The connect can also bring in payment amount and discount code, which is wonderful, though cannot bring in any additional questions you might have asked. The payment is brought in at the Campaign Member record, so not perfect if you are trying to record all your income through Opportunities, but despite this mild issue I think their solution was the most elegant, rather than creating Opportunities.

And if a contact leaves the Company name blank, quite common for a B2C event, then the Contact record has a blank Account. You can always match them later, just put in Individual for the Account, or use something like Salesforce’s NfP Starter Pack.

The connector might need to go through a bit more revision – for instance, I had problems importing a single record due to (I’m guessing) the contact having an apostrophe in his email address: o’sullivan@… this led the whole import to fail, and I only figured it out by importing the contacts one by one until I had narrowed down the problematic record. Customer support is in a slightly obscure forum – if you are having problems with the connector the forum is here: http://getsatisfaction.com/efactory

All in all, five stars out of five for features, three stars for reliability and two stars for support. When it works, it’s great. When it doesn’t work, it’s up to you to find out why.

If you are new to Eventbrite, sign up for an account here: http://www.eventbrite.com/r/thirdsec.

And, we have another person on the team, Sisu Berhane, who I am so excited to be working with!

We also tried something new with the business cards, which was to emphasise both our consultants certifications and our partnership with Salesforce.com. So one side lists the certifications, etc, which are attained on the individual level, and the other side lists the company, and the partnerships attained on the organisation level.

Finally, I’d like to thank Lucy Savage-Mountain, who did a great job helping us translate our vision for our organisation into a logo that we were all really proud of. We came to her with a few examples and some ideas of how we wanted people to understand us and see us, and out of that came a series of images which culminated in our current logo.

Whether you will want to use one or the other depends almost exclusively on the cost of your event per person and the number of attendees per event, and to a lesser extent, the number of events per year. For high prices and high volumes, Acteva is affordable, and sometimes beats Eventbrite. For lower volumes typical with SME’s, Acteva’s price structure is prohibitive.

(While I live in the UK, Acteva charges in dollars, so to make the math easier, I’ve done everything in US Dollars)

I run fairly small events – training and workshops for people wanting to learn specific Salesforce skills, like Salesforce Reporting. The workshops have a dozen people each, with the price about $200 per attendee, but with half attending for no cost as they have an annual support contract with us. So, average $100 per person for 12 people.

I wanted to use Acteva as they had been specifically recommended by Salesforce, and have a high rating on the App Exchange, but running the numbers surprised me. Presuming 20 events a year, Acteva would cost 11.4% of gross revenue for the first year, during which time the Salesforce connector fees would be waived. Further years, with three admins (when I presume the fee waivers would cease), Acteva would charge an impressive 15.5%. Ouch. One sixth of my gross revenue from workshops lost.

Eventbrite lacks a few features compared to Acteva, but for the same setup, I’m looking at 6.1%. Perhaps Acteva is so amazing that I won’t mind the additional fees, but to get the percents mentioned I’d have to buy 20 events upfront – a $1300 commitment. Without any initial upfront cost, it’s a flat $100 per event, so 13.7% to Acteva the first year.

When would I use Acteva? If I was charging $3000, and not $100, per event. At that point, Acteva would be just under 4% for the first year, 4.1% for additional years, while Eventbrite now become the more expensive option, at 5.2%. Alternatively, if I had $100 tickets but 100 people came to each of my 20 events, the two providers would have cost parity, with Acteva at 7.4% and Eventbrite still 6.1%.

Perhaps Acteva is smart, not wasting their time on small fry like myself. But this is cloud computing – Salesforce and Google don’t shoot themselves in the foot with their pricing for small enterprises. I wonder why Acteva can’t cater to all customers as well.

All of the figures above include the default credit card charge from the companies. I’m too small to worry about that stuff, and am quite happy they handle it.

You are welcome to check my math – I’ve posted the spreadsheet below.

Unfortunately, they have made the same mistake that other companies do – claiming that moving contacts back and forth equals integration. Yes, with the connector you can move the names and addresses of people on campaigns into Mailchimp very easily. And you can move people who sign up through Mailchimp into Salesforce very easily. But this is not the level of integration that people demand.

Compare Mailchimp’s current offering to what Vertical Response does, and keep in mind that Vertical Response’s Salesforce App is from 2005.

This is in now way a recommendation for Vertical Response. The fact these features have been around since 2005 is impressive in that VR had more integration 6 years ago than Mailchimp has now, but is also damning of Vertical Response in that they haven’t innovated in this area for 6 years. This lack of innovation is most obvious when updating lists from within Salesforce – something MailChimp does get right.

When you send an email with Vertical Response, it asks you if you want to have the stats fed back to Salesforce:

What that means is when you look at a Contact or Lead in Salesforce, it has a related list with historical email information attached to the record:

This allows you to ask questions, and create reports, along the lines of:

• Who lives in a certain region and who opened the last email we sent?
• Who bought from us last year but hasn’t opened an email in the last six months?
• What are the phone numbers of everyone who clicked on the second link?

When your data is in different silos you have to go to two systems. Integration doesn’t just mean that aspects of your data move back and forth. It means that you can use the services of different providers from within your preferred system.

The only provider that does this really well is Exact Target. They have a couple glitches, and are also the most expensive, but hands-down offer the best integration.

Regular, for profit businesses can purchase different editions of Salesforce, each with their own features and pricing, ranging from a basic contact manager to the super-duper Unlimited edition. If a non-profit receives donated licenses from the Salesforce foundation, it receives 10 Enterprise licenses, completely free, in perpetuity. Additional licenses are discounted some 75-80%.

Aside from the pricing, there is no difference what-so-ever between between the features, support, etc. you get as a non-profit with donated licenses and a for-profit paying full price. Enterprise edition Salesforce is the same for everyone alike, charity or business.

A number of charities, and even some non-charities, take advantage of something called the NonProfit Starter Pack. This Starter Pack pre-configures Salesforce so it is more suitable for certain types of non-profit organisation. This pack can be included at the time you first receive your donated licenses, or added later, or removed later, or added piecemeal at any time. In some ways, it’s just one of the hundreds of free add-ons that can be found for Salesforce, though it is unique in that it is authored and maintained by the Salesforce Foundation, and specifically designed with non-profits’ business processes in mind.

Hopefully the table will clarify anything I left out in my explanation.