How to get better Lead Activity Metrics

Leads are the "rain" that help your business grow, so it's critical that your Leads are handled efficiently to ensure your pipeline stays full. Imagine the benefits of knowing exactly how long it's been since your open Leads have been contacted by your reps.

In this blog post we're going to show you how to set up a Surfwriter custom formula field that will help you ensure that your Leads are being handled by your team and either converted or disqualified in a timely fashion.

How it works:
The custom formula checks to see if a lead is open, not converted or disqualified and if so, calculates the number of days since the last activity date; if no activity date, then last activity is set to age of lead.

Directions (requires Admin Profile):

1. Log into your Salesforce Org and navigate to Setup->Customize->Leads->Fields.
2. Scroll down to Custom Fields and click "New".
3. Choose "Formula" as the data type for your new field and click "Next".
   
4. Enter "Last Activity Age" as the name of the new field, choose "Number" as the data type and under "Options" set "Decimal Places" to Zero.
5. Now paste the formula below into the formula editor and click "Save".
   

IF( AND(NOT(ISPICKVAL( Status, "Unqualified")),NOT(IsConverted = True), NOT(ISNULL(LastActivityDate))), (TODAY() - LastActivityDate), ROUND(NOW()-CreatedDate, 0))

Now you will have a convenient lead activity metric for use in reports and dashboards. We find it has been very useful to many of our customers to have a dashboard component which presents average Lead Activity Age by Sales Rep.

We help businesses gain real-time visibility and control over their processes every day.

Why not contact Surfwriter today to find out how we can help you?

Have fun,
Surfwriter, Inc.
Learn more: http://surfwriter.com
Labels: Force.com, Salesforce.com, Web to Lead

How to Add Required Fields to salesforce.com Web to Lead Forms

When you generate a Web to Lead Form in salesforce.com, there are no required fields included by Salesforce. This means that if you install the HTML Web to Lead form in your website, you'll get allot of incomplete or blank Leads in your Salesforce Org.

This is a common problem. If you already have a Salesforce Web to Lead form on your website and you haven't added your own field validation, then it's likely that you frequently receive Leads with essential fields such as name, email address or phone number omitted.

One simple solution to this problem is to validate the essential fields in your Salesforce Web to Lead form with a JavaScript field validation script.

INSTRUCTIONS

First add the following call to your new validation function when the form is submitted. You do this by adding a "onsubmit" attribute to your FORM tag, like the following (keep it on one line if possible):

<form action="your-sfdc-action" method="post" onsubmit="return checkform(this);">

Next, add the following validation function to the HEAD portion of your HTML document:
(note that this example code is configured to require first name, last name, email and phone)

<!--- Begin Surfwriter.com Web to Lead Validation Script--->
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
function checkform ( form )
{
if (form.first_name.value == "") {
alert( "Please enter your first name." );form.first_name.focus();
return false ;
}
if (form.last_name.value == "") {
alert( "Please enter your last name." );
form.last_name.focus();
return false ;
}
if (form.email.value == "") {
alert( "Please enter your email address." );
form.email.focus();
return false ;
}
if (form.phone.value == "") {
alert( "Please enter your phone number." );
form.phone.focus();
return false ;
}
return true ;
}
//-->
</script>
<!--- End Surfwriter.com Web to Lead Validation Script--->


Have fun,
Surfwriter, Inc.
Learn more: http://surfwriter.com

How to Receive Inbound Email in Salesforce.com

Inbound email services is an exciting new capability of Salesforce.com that allows Salesforce.com Orgs to receive and automatically parse the contents of inbound emails. This opens up a wealth of really exciting integration and automation possibilities.

Salesforce.com email services are automated processes that use Apex classes to process the contents, headers, and attachments of inbound email. For example, you can create an email service that automatically creates contact records based on contact information in messages.

You can associate each email service with one or more Salesforce-generated email addresses to which users can send messages for processing.

To allow multiple users to use a single email service, you can associate multiple Salesforce-generated email addresses with the email service, and allocate those addresses to users; or associate a single Salesforce-generated email address with the email service, and write an Apex class that executes according to the user accessing the email service. For example, you can write an Apex class that identifies the user based on the user's email address, and creates records on behalf of that user.

To begin using email services in Salesforce.com:

1. Click Setup | Develop | Email Services.
2. Click New Email Service to define a new email service.
3. Select an existing email service to view its configuration, activate or deactivate it, and view or specify addresses for that email service.
4. Click Edit to make changes to an existing email service.
5. Click Del to delete an email service.

Have fun,
Surfwriter, Inc.

How to Connect Microsoft Excel to Salesforce.com

Customers occasionally ask: "Can I connect my Excel Spreadsheet to Salesforce.com?" and "Is it true that there is a free Excel Connector for the Force.com platform?"

Yes, you can connect Microsoft Excel to the Force.com Platform with the free, Open Source Microsoft Excel Add-in written in VB by Ron Hess.

Here's how to get started:

Visit the Force.com Open Source Projects site

Read the Excel Connector Documentation

Download the Free Microsoft Excel Connector for Salesforce.com

Follow the Installation guide to install and configure the Excel Connector.

Once you've got the Add-In installed, the best way to begin is to launch Sforce Table Query Wizard. This wizard will guide you through the steps required to create a table within Microsoft Excel which represents a table in the sforce database. This wizard is the first menu item in the Sforce connector menu.

The Sforce Table Query Wizard contains three steps:

1. Select the location for the table.
2. Select the table name.
3. Select fields and operators to construct a simple query.

Once you have constructed a simple query and added it to the worksheet you may run this query using the button provided by the wizard, or using the connector menu item titled Query Table Data.

Have fun,
Surfwriter, Inc.