Add LinkedIn integration to Salesforce.com

As a sales person, I live in my CRM. It's the primary tool for my profession second only to my phone. Another sales tool I use is a social networking site called LinkedIn. Here is how they discribe themselves "LinkedIn is an online network of more than 10 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries". I call it the MySpace for professionals. I have put together a way to bring the two tools together and make my Salesforce CRM work for me in new ways.

When prospecting or in the course of general due diligence, the more you know about your lead the better. LinkedIn has over 10 million registered users. Chance are if you are dealing with a company executive, they have a LinkedIn account. Searching LinkedIn can give you some interesting facts as well as give you better insight to 'who they really are."

I used to pull my lead in the CRM that was either uploaded from a trade show or a person asking for more information and cut&paste the name into another tab that had LinkedIn up already. (Yes, tabbed browsing is much better!) This worked fine. I didn't know any better so I adjusted and made it work. Now LinkedIn is looking for specific information right out of the contact record and all I have to do is click the link. Here's how.

1. Go to your setup screen. The link is located in the upper right corner of your screen. When you get to the page it should look a little like this.

2. On the left section there is a link for App Setup. Click that.

3. Find the Customize your Contacts tab

4. Now go to Create a new custom link

5. Click on 'New' and create the Label for the new link. (Call it LinkedIn to make things easy.)

Here is the string to put into the large text box at the bottom. Make sure you save the custom link! Click OK at the pop up box.

COPY LINK

**Make sure that the format for the name is {!Contact.FirstName}+{!Contact.LastName}. There has been some issues with the link in some browsers.

This is searching LinkedIn for contacts that match the first name and last name of the Salesforce

record you are currently viewing.

6. Next click on Page Layout and click edit.

You will find your new custom link in the 'Account custom link' view on the right side.

7. Drag the LinkedIn custom tab and drop it into the 'Useful Links' section. Save everything.

8. Now go into a contact record and see the new LinkedIn link. Go ahead, give it a try!

If you are feeling adventurous, you can follow the same steps in the "Accounts Setup" but use the string below to search for any record in LinkedIn that works for the target company.

COPY LINK

SOCOMFORCE Coming Soon

This domain will be use for the development of tweaks and modifications to Salesforce.com that a company can use to customize the Salesforce CRM to help drive sales. These posts will be grow over time and will be primarily focused on the sales person and how to use your CRM to gather better information on your accounts, contacts and leads. Since a CRM is supposed to empower the sales person let's make a few adjustments in your Salesforce CRM that will drive better decisions and make your daily sales grind a bit easier the SOCOM way.

Many companies use Salesforce, they are the leader in the CRM market. The most obvious appeal for companies to use a hosted CRM as a sales tool is mainly the on demand nature of the system and the ability to give executives a view into the company with special reports and dashboards.

But what about the account manager on inside sales person? Besides having a basic listing of leads, contacts and opportunities, what can they do with such a great tool? How many dashboards are available out of the box for them? How customized are the fields in their records? Chances are like most companies you have a few special fields created and mostly the defaults for everything else. Then you wrap your sales process around that and figure it out as you go along.

I'm going to show you that salesforce.com with a few SOCOM Sales input can turn your CRM into a well oiled revenue generating machine. That's the plan anyway. :)

You say you don't use or need a salesforce.com account for work? Thats fine. Get a personal account. These are great for socialites, freelancers and contractors. Pretty much anyone that wants to use a better system than Outlook.

Download SalesForce for free here.

Here are a few posts that are coming soon.

1. Use the power of Google inside your CRM for more information on accounts.
2. Get LinkedIn integration with your contacts.
3. Add the links that matter most.

LinkedIn and the Art of Avoiding an Asshole Boss

Mean-spirited morons are still running much of the workplace, and it’s time to take a stand. Most nastiness is directed by superiors to subordinates; so before taking a job, do your homework and screen them out in advance. (After all, avoidance is the easier than curing.)

To do this, I propose that you check your prospective boss’s references just like she’s checking out yours. I’m not suggesting that you ask your prospective boss for a list of references (you can try, but it may mean you don’t get the job).

Read the entire post here.

LinkedIn as a resume?

Maybe I'm behind the times, but I just found a real cool feature of LinkedIn that allows members to create a resume like PDF of their profile. Sure the PDF is about 6 pages long, but it contains everything down to your personal recommendations. The only trick is you must have a LinkedIn account to see the link. ;) But it can be saved and sent out.


Here is what mine looks like.

Turning Sales Into Science

A friend passed this article along to me knowing that I stay on top of these types of stories. Little did I know that they mentioned NetSuite as a pioneer of the Sales 2.0 era. Thanks Jake!

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It's a question almost as old as commerce itself: Is selling an art or a science? For years, technology companies have been trying to transform the former into the latter. And for years, the results have largely been disappointing.

Think of those days as Sales 1.0. We're now in the era of Sales 2.0. Your bottom line may never be the same.

Remember the bad old days of sales-oriented technology? Customer relationship management systems that cost a fortune to install and crashed easily. Downloadable lists of sales leads filled with old or bogus data. E-mail marketing tools that targeted the wrong consumers. And on and on.

Fortunately, software firms that target small companies with sales tools have been getting smarter and smarter. Following pioneers such as Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) and NetSuite, a new generation of companies is offering easy-to-use, cheap (indeed, often free) technology that can supercharge the performance of your sales force--with minimal training and virtually none of the heavy-duty installation associated with the CRM systems of the past. With lead-generation and networking services, e-mail marketing products, relationship managing tools, and other bells and whistles, it's now possible to turn a sales operation into a gleaming high-tech machine. Here's a quick tutorial on some of the new tools and a nine-step guide to launching your sales force into the future.

1. Build a bigger Rolodex

The Products
Jigsaw, Ziggs, ZoomInfo, Spoke

How They Work
It's said that a salesperson is only as good as his or her Rolodex. Fortunately, it's now easy to have a much, much bigger Rolodex. There are a number of websites that invite businesspeople to upload and share their contacts with one another. The most popular is probably Jigsaw, which boasts 4.3 million contacts from professionals in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Subscribers can pay $25 per month to download 25 new contacts; you also can upload contacts from your own Rolodex in exchange for Jigsaw points, which can be accumulated and used for more downloads. Once you're signed up, most contacts come with direct phone lines and e-mail addresses; if a contact turns out to have bad information, Jigsaw awards points to users who report the problem and docks the user who uploaded the info. Two other online services, Ziggs and ZoomInfo, allow users to pay to download contacts or add their own profile. ZoomInfo also provides sales data and listings of competitors within industries, a neat tool.

Other services are taking the kinds of lists traditionally offered by Hoover's and InfoUSA (NASDAQ:IUSA) and putting them on a dose of steroids. Spoke takes big lists from providers like InfoUSA, enhances them by combining these lists with Web search data and user-validated list data, and adds it all together to create better lists. Spoke also makes it easy to slice and dice them by industry, geography, company, or revenue level. Ziggs is free; ZoomInfo is free for basic service, but advanced searches can cost as much as $12,000 a year.

Case In Point
As the director of inside sales at Bay Area e-mail security provider PostX, John Fales has long used the Web to prospect sales leads. But using Google can be time-consuming and cumbersome. And the lists provided by major providers were often filled with incomplete or outdated information. Then Fales heard about Jigsaw. The service made it a cinch to find multiple decision makers inside large companies and organizations. Fales says use of Jigsaw has sliced more than 50 percent off the PostX sales cycle. "We've been able to get into accounts very quickly as well as find a variety of potential players in a position to buy the product through the service," he says. "It's been consistently helpful. It would be very difficult to go back to the old way."

2. Network more efficiently

The Products
LinkedIn, Ryze, BranchIt, CompanyClick

How They Work
The kids have MySpace and Facebook, and it's hard not to be envious. In a matter of hours online, they're building vast networks of connections--the kinds of networks that take businesspeople years of mixers and rubber-chicken dinners to create.

Unless you're selling something like video games or skateboarding gear, you're probably not going to have much luck marketing on MySpace. Fortunately, a number of social networking services geared toward small business have emerged. They promise to change the way we network forever. Palo Alto, California-based LinkedIn, for example, is often described as MySpace for businesspeople. You won't find videos, MP3s, or other flashy media on the site's bare-bones profile pages. What you will find are resumés, people's professional affiliations, special interests--and lots of them. LinkedIn has nearly eight million registered users from more than 100 countries spanning 130 separate industries, including thousands of top executives.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20061201/sales-into-science_pagen_2.html

Ten ways to use LinkedIn

I am a huge fan of LinkedIn as many of my colleagues can tell you. I found this post from another blogger that explains why LinkedIn is such a great tool. I have listed the top 5 reasons. Go to his blog to read the others. The original poster has the largest LinkedIn network known of.

• The average number of LinkedIn connections for people who work at Google is forty-seven.

• The average number for Harvard Business School grads is fifty-eight, so you could skip the MBA, work at Google, and probably get most of the connections you need. Later, you can hire Harvard MBAs to prepare your income taxes.

• People with more than twenty connections are thirty-four times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than five.

• All 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented in LinkedIn. In fact, 499 of them are represented by director-level and above employees.

• According to my inside sources, the person with the most pending LinkedIn invitations is...Guy Kawasaki. (Though I’m not sure if I should be proud or ashamed of this factoid.)

  Most people use LinkedIn to “get to someone” in order to make a sale, form a partnership, or get a job. It works well for this because it is an online network of more than 8.5 million experienced professionals from around the world representing 130 industries. However, it is a tool that is under-utilized, so I’ve compiled a top-ten list of ways to increase the value of LinkedIn.
  
  
  Increase your visibility.

• By adding connections, you increase the likelihood that people will see your profile first when they’re searching for someone to hire or do business with. In addition to appearing at the top of search results (which is a major plus if you’re one of the 52,000 product managers on LinkedIn), people would much rather work with people who their friends know and trust.
  
  Improve your connectability.

• Most new users put only their current company in their profile. By doing so, they severely limit their ability to connect with people. You should fill out your profile like it’s an executive bio, so include past companies, education, affiliations, and activities.

  You can also include a link to your profile as part of an email signature. The added benefit is that the link enables people to see all your credentials, which would be awkward if not downright strange, as an attachment.
  
  Improve your Google PageRank.

• LinkedIn allows you to make your profile information available for search engines to index. Since LinkedIn profiles receive a fairly high PageRank in Google, this is a good way to influence what people see when they search for you.

  To do this, create a public profile and select “Full View.” Also, instead of using the default URL, customize your public profile’s URL to be your actual name. To strengthen the visibility of this page in search engines, use this link in various places on the web> For example, when you comment in a blog, include a link to your profile in your signature
  
  Enhance your search engine results.

• In addition to your name, you can also promote your blog or website to search engines like Google and Yahoo! Your LinkedIn profile allows you to publicize websites. There are a few pre-selected categories like “My Website,” “My Company,” etc.

  If you select “Other” you can modify the name of the link. If you’re linking to your personal blog, include your name or descriptive terms in the link, and voila! instant search-engine optimization for your site. To make this work, be sure your public profile setting is set to “Full View.”
  
  Perform blind, “reverse,” and company reference checks.

• LinkedIn’s reference check tool to input a company name and the years the person worked at the company to search for references. Your search will find the people who worked at the company during the same time period. Since references provided by a candidate will generally be glowing, this is a good way to get more balanced data.

  Companies will typically check your references before hiring you, but have you ever thought of checking your prospective manager’s references? Most interviewees don’t have the audacity to ask a potential boss for references, but with LinkedIn you have a way to scope her out.

  You can also check up on the company itself by finding the person who used to have the job that you’re interviewing for. Do this by searching for job title and company, but be sure to uncheck “Current titles only.” By contacting people who used to hold the position, you can get the inside scoop on the job, manager and growth potential.

  By the way, if using LinkedIn in these ways becomes a common practice, we’re apt to see more truthful resumes. There’s nothing more amusing than to find out that the candidate who claims to have caused some huge success was a total bozo who was just along for the ride.

• Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn