Why Salesforce Is Good For Your Career!!!

Salesforce offers an amazing set of Sales, Marketing, Service, Collaboration, Security, and Analytics Capabilities, as well as the ability to create your own solutions on the Salesforce1 Platform. Salesforce is used by a wide range of companies from small start-ups to large enterprise companies in various industries.

But did you also know that it’s good for your career?

When I attended Dreamforce last October, it was exceptionally clear that having knowledge and experience about how to use Salesforce is a plus on your resume because of the abundance of job opportunities associated with Salesforce. 

Here are four specific examples I observed:

1. There are close to 200,000 customer companies that use the Salesforce1 Platform. 

Each of these companies leverage Salesforce for critical business functions. In many cases, these customers are expanding their use of Salesforce and need experts to help determine how best to leverage the myriad of capabilities.

2. There are numerous Salesforce system integrators that help companies think of innovative way to use the Salesforce1 Platform. 

As an example, most of the larger system integrators have a team of Salesforce experts who work with companies that are starting to use Salesforce or expanding their use of Salesforce. These system integrators are focused on helping companies innovate with Salesforce.

3. There are close to 2000 companies that are built on top of the Salesforce1 Platform.

These companies can be found on the AppExchange and often need Salesforce experts as they continue to build out their specific capabilities. Some of the AppExchange solutions are built 100 percent natively on the Salesforce1 Platform.

4. CIOs that leverage Salesforce are seen as more innovative, more cloud leading, and typically want to maximize their INVESTMENT in Salesforce. 

And they are hiring Salesforce Admins, developers, and architects to implement business solutions and drive innovation.

For these reasons, Salesforce experts are in high demand.

In a recent Business Insider article titled “The Best Skills to Have on a Tech Resume," the number one most valued skill was “Salesforce Architect." In addition, according to the article, Salesforce Architect has the highest average salary across the most valuable JOB SKILLS.

Source Link: https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2015/01/why-salesforce-is-good-for-your-career.html

Is Your Website Like an Empty Easter Egg? 3 Essentials to Consider

On Easter, children everywhere hunt for shiny and bright eggs of different sizes that promise delicious treats inside. 

The curious look of anticipation on their faces might not be all that different from that of your prospects when they first discover your website.

As a good family member, you make sure that the kids will not be disappointed upon breaking the colorful outer shell — and discovering the good stuff inside. 

                             

But as an online business, how do you guarantee that your users will be excited and delighted when they crack the beautiful shell of your homepage? How do you ensure that your website is not just one big, beautiful — but empty — Easter egg?

By following these three essentials, you’ll be much more likely to convert your prospects and keep your existing customers engaged.

1. Make your website usable

The true test of beautiful web design is whether it helps users get to the information they want quickly and directly, rather than getting distracted or confused. Designing with the user in mind will help you maintain the sensitive balance between innovative design, your brand, and usability.INVESTING in solid information architecture will keep your users happy and your site scalable. Know what your users react to, what they like and dislike. Constantly fine-tune your website based on data-driven insights and strategic user-testing.

2. Make your website accessible

Cutting-edge design and web technology will always wow you on your high-powered wide-screen desktop. But what does it look like on other, less powerful devices or browsers? Does it work on mobile? Web traffic is shifting away from desktop and laptop toward a wide and growing range of mostly mobile devices. And you want to allow your users the same great web experience, however they access your site. Make it responsive. Make it browser-optimized. Make it mobile.

3. Make your website you (message and brand)

Put an end to brochureware websites already! Content is the lifeblood of your website, and the essence of your business and brand in a nutshell. It needs to be precise and clear. It should inform, entertain at times, but always inspire and motivate to make the user act. Create a content strategy that ensures that your content stays readable and understandable, actionable and shareable.

This Easter season, take time to delight your prospects and customers. Help drive your online business to new heights by making your website more innovative and beautiful, useful and accessible. 

Referral: https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2015/04/is-your-website-like-empty-easter-egg-3-essentials-consider.html

5 Blueprints for Building Smarter Emails

Marketers have all the tools available to them to live up to these expectations. But taking an intellectually challenged email and transforming it into a genius message with heroic timing is a daunting task. The answer is to evolve your emails in several manageable steps rather than attempting to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

five different kinds of emails:

1. Welcome Emails
2. Promotional Emails
3. Event Registration Emails
4. Transactional Emails
5. Cart Abandonment Emails

Reference:

• 5 Blueprints for Building Smarter Emails

Salesforce for Apple Watch: Inspired by the Consumer, Built for Business

Wearable devices present a tremendous opportunity for businesses to connect with customers, partners, employees and even products in a whole new way. In fact, 68 percent of executives call wearables a “priority” for their companies, according to Forrester Research (1).

That’s why we are so excited to announce Salesforce for Apple Watch, designed to bring the personal technology of wearables to you, the business user.

Salesforce Analytics Cloud for Apple Watch

Salesforce Analytics for Apple Watch is a personal way for you to explore data, uncover new insights and take action with dashboards and lenses. You will also be able to swipe to get a quick glance of your most recently viewed dashboard, or use Handoff to transition between an Apple Watch and an iPhone seamlessly.

                                                        

 In addition, you will be able to query via Voice Search to surface a report, view a dashboard or find other information. The app is free with a paid license of Analytics Cloud and is expected to be generally available in April 2015.

Salesforce1 for Apple Watch

The Salesforce1 Mobile App has already enabled all kinds of people to run their businesses from their phones. And Salesforce1 for Apple Watch represents the next step in our evolution to a truly mobile workforce.

                                                     

 Salesforce1 for Apple Watch delivers instant, personal notifications to salespeople, service agents, marketers and more, keeping them connected to the business priorities that matter most.

Salesforce Wear Developer Pack for Apple Watch

Salesforce Wear Developer Pack for Apple Watch, more than two million Salesforce1 developers can build enterprise apps for Apple Watch that connect directly to the Salesforce1 Platform. 

                                                      

With Wear for Apple Watch, developers can immediately focus on the most important element of building an app for a wearable—the user experience—and have the identity, security and other shared services of the Salesforce1 Platform from the first line of code..

Reference:

• Introducing Salesforce for Apple Watch: Inspired by the Consumer, Built for Business

                                                        By Applogic IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd

Jon Sigler: Why the Salesforce1 Platform Is a Leader In Rapid App Dev

The Salesforce1 Platform is the world’s #1 enterprise cloud platform. With Force.com for building employee applications, and Heroku for creating amazing customer apps, the technology empowers developers to deliver solutions faster than ever before.

Jon Sigler is an expert in declarative development for all environments. After 13 years at Microsoft, and another eight years at Apple, he now runs visual design tools atSalesforce as SVP of Platform Product Management. Sigler sat down with us to give his take on what differentiates the Salesforce1 Platform and where the technology is headed.

Tell us about the new Salesforce1 Platform features.

In addition to recently redefining our visual tools -- Lightning Process Builder, Schema Builder, and App Builder -- we are entering the component model world. After all, component frameworks are the future of app development. This sustainable and efficient method is being used across the industry, with Salesforce the only company offering it in a scalable and secure fashion for the enterprise. Using our new Lightning App Builder, anyone can create pages with Lightning Components, which are built both by Salesforce and are open for custom development.

We also just launched a new Component Exchange, so third parties can create and deploy components to customers. The really great thing about the components themselves is that once they exist, we provide tools that let all users drag and drop them on a page, wherever they’d like. The model is out of the box and will work for any form factor.

What makes the Platform the undisputed leader in the cloud platform space?

In all of my years working with the enterprise, one of the things that people just despise is rolling out new software, because of upgrades and compatibility. So you roll out Access or Office or any new application, and every customer has to come back and see if everything still works. There’s just a ton of issues. People hate it and they don’t want to do it. The main thing the Platform brings to the enterprise is never having to worry about that. Salesforce runs a single code base so every customer is on the same version at the same time. And there are no concerns about compatibility or things breaking.

How does "cloud first" play into this?

Having the multitenancy, scalability, and security already existing, and not having to build tools for that, is awesome. Nobody else has done that and it will take anybody else a long time to build that. When you look at other desktop software companies, it’s hard for them to compete because their software was never engineered as a service. Salesforce is the exact opposite. It was always engineered to run as a cloud service that could be evolved into a platform other things could be built on. Today, not years in the future, we have a platform that’s not just for our apps, it’s for our apps that can be customized by anyone, as well as building completely customized apps.

Why is productivity so significant for enterprise developers?

There’s just too few developers to create the software solutions corporations worldwide now need. Too often someone in the enterprise wants a custom report, or page, or UI, and they call down to IT, and wait. They might wait a week, a month, six months, or be told “no.” Enabling developers to be more productive means they can build more solutions faster. And not only that, if you give developers a way to create functionality that can also be used by non-developers, it takes a lot of the work out of the hands of the developer.

We think it’s extremely important to make developers more productive with our toolset and component model, and while doing that, empower others -- knowledge workers, admins -- to create the solutions they want based off those components. That’s also the big advantage of Heroku. It frees developers from servers, scaling, and deployment, so they can focus entirely on writing codefor amazing consumer-facing apps.

What else makes the Salesforce1 Platform unique when it comes to rapid app dev?

A big thing is that the model inherently includes mobile. You can download the app, log into your org, and run your business. This new model is even more unique in that you don’t have to worry about managing pages and UIs for different devices, such as a tablet, a smartphone, or desktop computer, because you can simply create one page and it will display itself appropriately, on the appropriate device. The fact that this whole model is built-in is something that nobody else does.

Where is the Salesforce1 Platform headed?

We are expecting an explosion of custom applications. Say a company wants to build an internal meeting room registration system. Instead of peeling off and using another tool, they’ll say, “Oh, I’ve already got the Salesforce1 Platform, I can very easily set this up, create the components, drag and drop, and I’m done.” I think in five years we will see we’ve become much more of a Platform company, meaning that we will have a lot more custom apps built, by enterprises, by mid-markets, by customers in general. We have a huge head start in scalability and security in the cloud, and adding the Lightning Component Model and visual tools just means more and more people will be building custom apps.

Reference:

• Jon Sigler: Why the Salesforce1 Platform Is a Leader In Rapid App Dev

                                                        By Applogic IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd

Salesforce is a Facebook Marketing Partner

Salesforce has announced that we’ve joined Facebook’s® new Facebook Marketing Partner program.

The new program, launched today, replaces Facebook’s existing Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program. We welcome this evolution in the program and hope it brings better recognition to the partner ecosystem across geographies, industries and product offerings.

Salesforce is recognized as a Partner in these areas:

Specialties: Ad Technology, Audience Onboarding, Content Marketing, Community Management

Countries: United States, Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom

Industries: Automotive, Consumer Packaged Goods, eCommerce, Entertainment, Financial Services, Gaming, Organizations & Associations, Professional Services, Retail, Technology, Telecom

Salesforce has a long-standing relationship with Facebook. With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we have combined the pioneers and leaders of social marketing – Radian6 for social listening, Buddy Media for social publishing and Social.com for advertising – and have worked with Facebook to deliver amazing products and services for marketers. Some of our milestones include unveiling the next generation of Social Studio, which delivers unified social engagement for the Salesforce Customer Success Platform; launching an integration with Facebook Custom Audiences at Dreamforce; Winning the Facebook Innovation Award for our Active Audiences product; and Social.com expanding its partnership with the newly rebuilt Atlas.

For our customers, partners and potential customers, we want to let you know that nothing has changed. This is a partner program update from Facebook to add more clarity and make it easier for marketers to find partners based on their specific needs.

Reference:

• Just In: Salesforce is a Facebook Marketing Partner

                                                        By Applogic IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd

4 Ways Retail Can Reimagine Business: A New Salesforce E-Book

 This e-book, Engage With Today’s Customers: 4 Ways Retail Can Reimagine Business, takes a look at four of the big ways retail can alter the consumer shopping experience. Each chapter also features a major retailer that has reimagined its customer experience, plus actual examples on how this was accomplished.

The Structure of the E-Book

One chapter in this e-book is devoted to each of the following four topics: 

Digical

Mobile tools and social media are now a huge part of the shopping experience. All signals point to the buying process being about personalization and engagement. There is a blurring of lines between the digital and physical experience. Bain has dubbed this transformation “digical.”

In-Store Experiences

Another thing today’s retailers need to do to reimagine the customer experience is to make sales more personal and relevant. A great example is the country store that knew everything about its customers, including their recent purchases, their financial situation, and their kids’ birthdays.

Customer Engagement

Modern technology is ready and waiting for retailers that want to transform. Social tools allow brands to participate in the buying experience with customers. Mobile puts them where their clients are, while cloud gives companies the flexibility and speed to do both at the new pace the industry demands. 

Mobile Strategy

In recent years, we’ve seen more and more companies using mobile to disrupt traditional business models. Even with all of the innovation out there, it’s no secret that many retailers struggle with a mobile strategy. Retailers need to not only think outside the box, but also move fast enough to disrupt their industry.

Reference:

• 4 Ways Retail Can Reimagine Business: A New Salesforce E-Book

                                                        By Applogic IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd