Thursday, June 12, 2014

Receiving a SalesForce Certification

SalesForce.com offers a fairly comprehensive certification program.  This program helps administrators, developers and architects of SalesForce systems become recognized for their skills.  These certifications are very beneficial, especially when you are thinking of changing jobs or starting your own "SalesForce Consulting Firm".  That is because they are consistent and recognized world-wide.

I personally have done four of the seven certifications available.  I have done the Administrator, Advanced Administrator, Developer and Service Cloud Architect certifications.  There is still the Advanced Developer, Sales Cloud Architect, and Technical Architect certifications.  

With any of these certifications, I found I learned a tremendous amount about SalesForce by achieving each certification.  This is because as you are studying for the certification you learn about other features/tools available in SalesForce that your organization may not be using.  

Once you get one of these certifications, with each release, you will have to do a "maintenance exam" with every SalesForce release.   There is basically one maintenance exam for Administrators (and its related certifications including Advanced Administrator and Service Cloud Architect) and one for Developers.  They take about 20 minutes per release to do.

For those of you thinking about doing a certification, I recommend visiting the following sites:

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Visit to Heron Tower

I just had the opportunity to visit the SalesForce.com offices in London at Heron Tower (scheduled to be renamed to SalesForce Tower in the future). I have to admin I was impressed by their offices. I have been to the offices in Vancouver, Canada but they were nothing compared to these offices in London. They have an amazing view of the city of London. 


I was there to learn more about the Summer '14 release that I will post about soon. 

If you ever get an opportunity to visit a SalesForce.com office you should!

Monday, June 2, 2014

Tracking Customer Satisfaction

Tracking your customers and their satisfaction is important, especially if you want to upsell customers and retain them for years to come.  With SalesForce you have a tool to help you do this.  

SalesForce gives you a powerful system to manage survey responses and thus, customer satisfaction.  Since SalesForce is a database system fundamentally, you could make a custom object to track customer satisfaction questions.  These could be questions like:

  1. On a scale of 1 to 10 how satisfied are you with our services?
  2. Would you recommend us to a friend/co-worker?
From there, you would then have reporting tools (since SalesForce lets you report on custom objects) so all you need is a way to get the data into SalesForce.  This could be done any number of ways including:



  • Having your reps/customer success teams manually entering the data into SalesForce after a call, etc.
  • Having a tool, like Clicktools (www.clicktools.com) plugged into SalesForce so that you could email them a survey and have their responses go into SalesForce
  • Having a website where customers could give their feedback and have it imported
So there is no reason why you shouldn't be tracking your customers satisfaction scores so that you have a quantitative way of knowing what your customers are thinking. I can help you build any of these if you need!