Salesforce Group Edition, Giving it More Power

The majority of companies can benefit from the power of Salesforce Professional Edition and Salesforce Enterprise Edition. But some companies have a limited budget. For these businesses, Salesforce Group edition is a great solution.

The challenge is that Salesforce Group Edition has less features then Salesforce Professional Edition and Salesforce Enterprise Edition. The good news is that there are Salesforce best practices and workarounds that can be used to enchance Group Edition to give it more power.

Here are some examples of how StarrForce enhanced Salesforce Group Edition for a financial firm. Maybe these might inspire you to think of how you can enhance Salesforce Group edition too.

Limitation:

Salesforce Group Edition does not support campaign management.

Solution:

• StarrForce created a custom object called Campaigns/Events to hold main campaign data
  • The Campaign/Events object contains information such as:
    • Start date and end date
    • Event status (planning, accepting reservations, completed, etc.)
    • Expected Attendance (number field for planning) and Number of Attendees (formula field that counts the number of related attendees)
    • Venue information like city, state, phone, etc.
    • Budgeted and actual cost

• StarrForce created a custom object called Attendees to hold contact or lead information for each attendee to a campaign
  • The Attendee object contains information such as:
    • Attendee status (sent, responded, confirmed, not attending, etc.)
    • Lookup fields to contacts or leads with rules so that only one can be selected
      • The lookup fields link the contact or lead record to the event so that you can see the historical events attended from the contact or lead record
      • The lookup fields also allow the population of company, phone, and email information from the contact or lead record automatically to prevent duplicate data entry

Limitation:

Salesforce Group edition does not support mass emails

Solution:

• StarrForce created a custom report that lists all attendees (contacts and leads) and their associated email addresses.

• StarrForce created a custom link in Salesforce that takes the unique Campaign/Event ID and uses it as a filter in the above report.
  • This now makes the report dynamic so each Campaign/Event it is applied to will run a report of only the attendees associated to that Campaign/Event.
  • This report can now be exported as an Excel file (for an email list with Outlook) or as a CSV file (for import to Constant Contact or other mass email service of your choice).[button type=”success” size=”lg” link=”http://bit.ly/1jM4u4K”]For more Salesforce Tips and Tricks
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