Salesforce.com Secrets of Success: Best Practices for Growth and Profitability (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Praise for Salesforce.com^® Secrets of Success

 

“Salesforce.com is usually thought of as an SFA system, but it really needs to be thought of as a full-fledged CRM. For more than five years, I’ve headed up marketing teams trying to expand the power of SFDC for highly automated Internet customer interaction systems. Salesforce.com^® Secrets of Success is required reading for the modern marketer, sales exec, or customer support professional.”

–Mark de Visser, CEO of Sonatype

 

“Salesforce.com^® Secrets of Success is terrific because it gives guidance to every major executive, as well as tactical recommendations to the implementation team. Using this book’s methods ensures the high user adoption rate we achieved at Syneron. It also provides hundreds of tips that save time and money in the real world.”

–Doron Gerstel, CEO of Syneron Medical

 

“Salesforce.com^® Secrets of Success helps the busy executive figure out what to do–and not to do–when a Salesforce system is being built or extended. I appreciate the balance it provides, giving strategic guidance to the executive team and tactical tips to the implementers.”

–Dave Kellogg, CEO of Mark Logic

 

“Salesforce.com^® Secrets of Success focuses on the business processes that surround SFDC–the things that people do to leverage the system and become more effective. Any organization going through internal change in sales, marketing, or other customer-facing teams needs to see and work on the big picture. This book helps them do just that.”

–Jon Lambert, CFO of Wombat Trading Systems division, New York Stock Exchange

 

“Mr. Taber takes a hard look at reality and CRM systems and finds the way to bridge the gap between the two using Salesforce.com. You are sure to succeed with your Salesforce.com initiative by reading this excellent book. This is the Salesforce.com ‘manual’ we were all looking for.”

–Joshua Meiri, Salesforce.com User Group Leader

 

“Salesforce.com^® Secrets of Success combines Agile with Salesforce.com, the most widely used, hosted SFA system. Taber takes it one step further by telling product marketers and product managers how to use SFDC and the latest Agile tools to do their jobs better. A must-read.”

–Rich Mironov, CMO of Enthiosys

 

“Salesforce.com^® Secrets of Success is the distillation of lessons learned at dozens of SFDC customers, and every lesson has been put in terms that people at every level of the organization can understand. I only wish this book had been out when we were building out our system–we could have saved endless meetings by simply following its best practices.”

–Daniel Moskowitz, CFO of Zend Technologies

 

“Salesforce.com^® Secrets of Success is an invaluable guide for the executive wanting to get the most leverage from Salesforce.com. The book tells the executive what to ask for–and what not to ask for–to get the best revenue visibility and results from the team. We’ve been steadily expanding our SFDC system to make it into a full-fledged CRM, using the techniques from this book. This book is highly recommended for companies that want to grow their size and sales performance.”

–Dave Robbins, CEO of BigFix

 

“Salesforce.com^® Secrets of Success is the first book to apply Agile methods to SFA/CRM systems development, and it breaks new ground for both the technologist and executive. At ThoughtWorks, we’ve been using Agile for years, and Taber’s Salesforce approaches really pay off.”

–Roy Singham, CEO of ThoughtWorks

 

“I have been waiting years for this book and never knew it! David Taber has written an excellent guide to the benefits and pitfalls of implementing SFDC and, in the process, provides insight and valuable information on successfully navigating through user groups, management, sales, marketing, and IT departments to get the best results.”

–Dan Weiss, Manager of Sales and Marketing Applications, Bell Microproducts

Drive Better Productivity and Increase Saleswith Salesforce.com–Starting Now

 

Discover Real-World Best Practices–Without Paying Expensive Consultants

 

You’re investing in Salesforce.com for one reason: to drive major performance improvements across your entire organization. Salesforce.com^® Secrets of Success will help you do just that. Drawing on his experience with dozens of deployments, author David Taber offers expert guidance on every aspect of Salesforce.com deployment, with results-focused best practices for every area of the organization touched by Salesforce.com, including sales, marketing, customer service, finance, legal, and IT. This is information you’d otherwise have to pay a consultant $300/hour to get...information you won’t find in any other book!

Taber walks you through developing a comprehensive and effective implementation strategy, followed by tactics and specifics to overcome every challenge you face, including internal politics. Through this book and its companion Web site, www.SFDC-secrets.com, Taber provides questionnaires, step-by-step guides, and extensive resources–all part of the Revenue Overdrive™ system that gives your organization maximum results from Salesforce.com.

• Achieve higher end-customer satisfaction and dramatic sales productivity gains
• Use the SFA Maturity Model^™ to assess readiness, fill gaps, and gain early, deep user adoption
• Overcome “people, product, and process” pitfalls that can limit the value of Salesforce.com
• Learn which tools, add-ons, features, and extensions are right for your implementation

This book’s start-to-finish roadmap for success can be used by companies of all sizes in all industries–with specific chapters for executives, team leaders, implementation team members, developers, and users throughout the business.

About the Author

David Taber is an internationally recognized marketing and management consultant in the IT industry, with more than twenty-five years’ experience, including eight years at vice president or above. 

 

Taber’s company, SalesLogistix, is a certified implementer of Salesforce.com solutions, with clients in the United States, Canada, Israel, and India. SalesLogistix created two widely used applications in Salesforce’s App Exchange. He has personally worked on dozens of Salesforce.com implementations, from early stage start-ups to larger companies such as Sun Microsystems and Symantec. His experience as a marketing VP–working with the sales organization, engineering, customer, support, finance, and corporate management–gives him unique insight into the habits and needs of the executive suite. Additionally, his background in IT makes it easy for him to work at both business and technical levels.

 

As an accomplished writer and speaker, Taber has created and delivered presentations to audiences in many countries and coaches CEOs on venture capital pitches. He has been a guest lecturer in marketing at the University of California and Carnegie Mellon University, and he taught the product marketing class at the University of California Berkeley extension.

Product Details

• Paperback: 504 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR; 1 edition (May 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0137140762
• ISBN-13: 978-0137140763
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #31,380 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Definitely has helped our Salesforce.com Implementation, October 1, 2009

By	P. Key (Redwood City, CA USA) - See all my reviews

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I didn't know David Taber before buying his book, though we live in the same area. Our organization implemented Salesforce about six months ago and have had great success with it in the Professional Services Department, but things had stalled in getting other departments, such as Sales and Marketing, to use the system.

We actually hired David as a consultant largely based on the depth of knowledge he showed in the book. In particular he tackles the hurdles that Salesforce adoption has in organizations and gives astute advice on how to address them. We are a smaller company than the Salesforce tutorials address, and I found better takeaway help from David's book than I did from the online Salesforce materials or the phone help salesforce provided with our expensive enterprise edition installation.

It did take working with David (or you could use other consultants) to go from very skeptical about Salesforce's value to us to developing a focused plan, customization, and adoption by other departments. David practices what he writes about--it's not consultant vapor-advice.

I should add that I have done a lot of high-level editing in my career, and David writes well and has created a structure that you can dive into in any section.

I highly recommend the book for those who have stared at Salesforce screens and said "Why don't they let me do this simple thing" as well as organizations that need a comprehensive strategy to get value out of the Salesforce platform.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Must Read for anyone buying or implementing SalesForce, June 9, 2009

By	Accorto (Redwood City, CA) - See all my reviews

Great book written by a consultant with a deep understanding of SalesForce, SFA applications and Marketing in general. Lots of useful information (and humorous sidebars) including gotcha's and how to's that you can't get in typical documentation. Tips on how to get buy in, user adoption and ongoing success with SalesForce. A great reference for existing users when questions and issues arise.
Defintely worth the investment as it can prevent many costly upfront incorrect assumptions and expectations.

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book!, October 16, 2009

By	Scott J. Arfsten "Scott Arfsten" (Granite Bay, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

I did a few implementations of Salesforce and knew there were lessons learned in the process and David's book hit them right on target. I could not stop reading this book as each chapter related to something I ran into and wanted to know more about.

This will definately help in my next implementaton and I apreciate the way David wrote this book, easy to read and right to the point. He didn't waste my time with fluff.