As many of you are now responsible for keeping work-from-home environments secure, here are some important steps you can take to protect yourself, your data, and your work.

Beware of COVID-19 phishing emails

Hackers are taking advantage of the heightened emotions during this time. Cybercriminals are targeting individuals and organizations throughout the globe. To help protect yourself, take time to review the details of your received emails, such as:

• Subject line: Is something off? For example, if you receive an email with a notice about a delivery you weren’t expecting, it could be a phishing attempt.

• Unrecognized email addresses: Do you know this person? Were you expecting anything from this person? If not, be wary.

• Attachments: Anything suspicious about the attachment? The name? The format? Do not click on these suspicious attachments.

• Credential requests: Is an email asking you to log in to something? Are they asking for your username, password, or other sensitive information? Do not give this information away unless you are sure the email is from a trusted sender.

• Content integrity: How does the message read? Is it poorly written? If so, it may be up to no good.

• Calls to action: Is the message requesting immediate, urgent attention? Are they asking for money? These types of emails are suspicious.

If you notice any of the above, do not reply or click the links within the email. Instead, forward the suspect email to your organization’s security team, mark it as suspicious through your email provider (if possible), and then delete it.

Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA)

You may be more familiar with the concept of two-factor authentication, or 2FA. MFA and 2FA both protect against unauthorized access by requiring a user to provide multiple authentication factors to prove their identity. This second layer of security may come in the form of a hardware security key or temporary tokens, Touch ID (which requires you to use your fingerprint to authenticate your identity), or authentication apps like Salesforce Authenticator. Always check the security settings of the programs you use and enable MFA when it’s available.

Use a strong password

A different password on all your apps and devices — work, social, and personal — is a simple measure you can take to protect your account,especially if MFA is not available. Ensure each password includes a mix of letters, numbers, special characters, and contains at least eight to ten characters. Do not share your password with anyone. Use a password manager, like LastPass, to securely store all your passwords and make it easier to create and use unique passwords across apps and services.

Ensure a secure connection

Devices that connect to the internet, such as computers and phones, have varying levels of security controls. If your organization provides a VPN (Virtual Private Network), use it consistently to make your internet connection more secure. You can also help keep foreign devices off your network by using the router’s administrator console to enable encryption (use WPA2 or WPA3) and updating your firmware when it’s necessary.

Secure your virtual meetings

The use of video conference platforms is at an all-time high. Take a moment to review your web conference platform’s security settings (Google Meet, Cisco WebEx) to help prevent gatecrashers from joining your meetings. Use the platform’s built-in security features, such as waiting rooms, screen sharing permissions, and participant notifications to manage activity to prevent unauthorized attendees. Be sure to create new meeting access codes and links for each meeting. Also, disable features on the platform that you don’t need — such as file transfer and recordings — to prevent unsolicited content and unauthorized sharing.

Secure your calls

Whether you are on the computer or on the phone, be aware of your surroundings and use headphones for work calls to minimize what others can hear. When using a landline, make sure others can not pick up the line on a different phone.

Secure your physical workspace

Prevent accidentally sending a sensitive email from your device by remembering to lock your screen when you walk away from your computer. If available, use a privacy screen for additional security.

Secure your data

Working from home can be a little chaotic at times, but especially in a pandemic. Be sure to store online work-related data like important files and emails in a secure location that is approved and accessible by your company. Also, be sure to back up your data in the cloud so you can alway retain it, even if your son spills his morning orange juice on your MacBook. If you have sensitive information in hard copy, keep it stored in a locked file. When you no longer need it, shred it immediately.

Keep devices patched

Your day-to-day schedule isn’t the only thing that needs a reboot — so do your devices. Reboot at least once a week and stay up-to-date with the latest versions of software and browsers. Through patching, aka version updates, your device automatically adds necessary new features, removes old ones, fixes performance issues, and removes bugs, all of which helps keep hackers out.

Check out some additional Salesforce security resources here:

• Updates on Salesforce Safety and Wellbeing Actions

• Measures in place in response to Coronavirus (COVID-19)

• Salesforce Security Best Practices

• Salesforce Help: Protect Your Salesforce Organization

To get more tips on navigating through COVID-19, check out our Leading Through Change series, where you’ll find thought leadership, tips, and resources to help business leaders manage through crisis.

• Here are five ways we’re helping our employees navigate work

• Ways to maintain customer relationships when you can’t meet in person

• You need to have a crisis communications plan in place

The post Is Your Remote Environment Secure? Here’s How to Keep It Safe appeared first on Salesforce.

Last month, due to the unprecedented situation with COVID-19, we spent 10 days pivoting Salesforce World Tour Sydney into a fully virtual event. This annual conference is Salesforce’s largest in the Asia Pacific region, attracting around 10,000 onsite attendees and taking more than six months to organize. Our reimagined event attracted almost 13,000 registered attendees and 80,000 Salesforce Live views.

As other companies face similar challenges, they too are pivoting flagship events to virtual spaces. This article is for those who are making the difficult decision to transform large-scale events from in-person to online. We share what we learned and how our experience can help you.

1. Know the facts and assemble your team

Despite the hurdles we faced on the path to this monumental shift, we realized there was an opportunity to do something special. Live streaming and conferencing tools are more available than ever before, and online events are far more affordable to produce. There’s also no indication online gatherings are a passing trend: Cisco predicts by 2022, 82% of all internet traffic will be video.

Derek Laney, Salesforce’s Head of Solutions and Product Marketing, Asia Pacific, says his team has been talking about doing online events for years. He was excited to replan the conference, despite the challenge ahead.

“There was no precedent to what we were doing,” he says. “So there was no reason for us not to try something new.”

Let’s start with four things to keep in mind as you strategize:

• Get leadership buy-in with visuals

• Develop new teams as needed

• Scrum often

• Ruthlessly prioritize and reprioritize every day

The Asia Pacific (APAC) Marketing Team oversaw the creation of a series of work streams for World Tour Sydney. Each one focused on a different aspect of the event: content, engagement, and communications. Other subgroups covered online streaming, live demos, customer management, and more.

Regular scrums ensured everyone knew what deliverables were most pressing. There were meetings with headquarters in the U.S. every morning and with the local APAC team in the afternoon. “With the time difference, we had people working almost round the clock,” says Renata Bertram, Vice President, Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) Marketing.

Bertam adds getting buy-in from the very top right from the start was an important part of their success. “We learned early on the importance of creating visuals to help people understand what the event was going to look like and what our production values would be,” she says. “For example, we built slides that replicated looking at a presentation through a screen.”

Ruthless prioritization was key. “I stopped answering everyone’s questions so we could focus on prioritization,” recounts Laney. “We didn’t want to be overwhelmed with the amount of challenges that we had to solve.”

2. Create a shortlist for session content

Our World Tour Sydney team procured a broadcast location and then set to work on content programming. A war-room team was assigned within the first few hours.

On day one, we determined which of the event’s 150 sessions would translate best to a virtual format. We came up with a plan for the top 30 sessions and all the people needed to deliver them. Laney recommends working with the wider team on a need-to-know basis to stay on target and move fast.

“It’s okay if there’s ambiguity around what the process is,” he says. “Not to say that we kept anything confidential, but we needed to focus. Opening up ideas to a larger group can create distraction.”

To avoid clashing interests, event leaders should determine the right time for open collaboration and the right time to be directive.

3. Figure out how to keep your online audience engaged

Next, we unwrapped all the elements that were in place for the physical event. Piece by piece, we determined how to change direction with the resources on hand. A key part of this was outsourcing. Many of our suppliers were able to pivot to create an engaging online experience. Our audio visual production partner, for example, had extensive television experience. That meant it could quickly create a compelling multichannel digital experience.

We also considered what we could repurpose. Digital content developed to project onto the back wall of an exhibition hall was used as engaging backdrops for online sessions. The builders for the exhibition stands shifted their work to constructing studios where the content team could film sessions.

Bertram says there should be an engagement experience work group focused on keeping the interest of people who were going to spend a day attending sessions and meeting people at a physical event.

“Streaming content is relatively easy, but how do you build in two-way interaction?” says Stuart Frank, Director of Strategic Events Asia Pacific.

The initial live event was meant to include an expo hall, so our team built a digital experience inspired by the act of browsing booths. Attendees from around the world could explore 18 virtual rooms based on Salesforce Customer 360. A company expert hosted each room, sharing demos with visitors and answering questions in real time. As this video shows, the experience let visitors engage with content in a way that was more active than watching a video and less formal than a scheduled meeting.

Alena Fereday, a Community Cloud solution engineer with Salesforce who helped create the digital experience provides this tip: “For people wanting to try something similar, we suggest building a working experience quickly so you have time to refine it. It made all the difference.”

Social media can also share highlights and preserve an element of two-way, live interaction. Although we didn’t get to it for the Sydney event, our social team is working to add interactive activities such as contests, Q&As, polls, and other fun moments into the mix.

4. Prep the team for Live AV

Being on camera on a set is very different from being in front of a live audience. Speakers used to a live environment are now in a feedback vacuum, so they must project confidence to engage the audience. Show speakers what the set and overall experience will look like for viewers.

Encourage presenters to rehearse in front of a camera as early as possible. Then give them the opportunity to see what they look like while presenting. They can empathize with the viewer’s experience and change their delivery.

A few other things we learned:

• Shorten the duration of sessions, because attention spans are shorter online.

• Try a conversational format with multiple people talking to each other. A variety of speakers makes for more engaging discussion.

• The camera only sees a one-by-one meter square, so the detail of what’s in that area is really important. Think about what’s going to make it into that space and how it will appear to viewers.

• Ensure that content is accessible for the visually challenged and hearing impaired. If you plan for a global audience, consider translation services for captioning.

5. Keep internal and external stakeholders briefed

We decided to communicate directly with sponsors, partners, and customers about our pivot. “There’s nothing worse than hearing secondhand news that will materially impact your business,” Frank says.

For the most part, many stakeholders are in the same situation and will understand your decision. Since they have a stake in your event’s success, collaborate with them on shifting content programming if needed.

Finally, when you are pivoting events, remember to consider your sales team. The in-person event was a significant opportunity for them to gain new leads, connect with existing accounts, and win new deals. But now what? It’s important to keep them in the loop so they can plan accordingly.

You can hold briefings and post updates on internal channels. Build slides and renderings that replicate what you’d see on screen so the sales team knows what the event will look like. Record a quick one-minute explainer video to give employees a chance to sample the experience. And demonstrate the production quality so sales can relay progress to their clients.

Executing a strong game plan can allow you to shift your in-person event strategy to a virtual one. And think of it this way: you’ve now rewritten your company’s event playbook and replaced it with a modern, forward-looking one your customers can adapt to. “What we did was born out of necessity, but what has come out has the potential to change the game in what we do,” says Betram. “There is an appetite out there to engage this way.”

Our Leading Through Change series provides thought leadership, tips, and resources to help business leaders manage through crisis. Check out some of our most recent articles:

• Here are five ways we’re helping our employees navigate work now

• Ways to maintain customer relationships when you can’t meet in person

• You need to have a crisis comms plan in place

The post How to Turn an In-Person Event Into a Compelling Virtual Experience appeared first on Salesforce.

While we often can’t control the societal crisis at hand, we can control our response to it.

Here are five tips to help you formulate a plan that communicates the impact of a situation and next-steps to your customers.

1. Show that you care. People seek connection during times of uncertainty. Companies in our communities play a role in this. Consider a message to customers to show you’re aware of the issue and offer helpful resources. Social media, email, or your online community are particularly accessible mediums for a brief and immediate message.

2. Be proactive in your communications. Your customers count on you even more than usual during a crisis. Proactively announce changes or impacts to your business. Do not make customers hunt for the information they need – instead, bring it to them. Proactive communication will free up staff to focus on tasks other than answering the same customer questions over and over again.

   Create communication that is appropriate within a variety of channels, including email, SMS, push notifications, social, IVR systems, chatbot introductions, homepage modals, and headers, and dedicated web landing pages. Establish a parallel approach designed to inform customers and employees in equal measure as appropriate.

3. Offer a shoulder to lean on. Show your humanity with an authentic, sensitive response. For example, Walgreens and CVS are waiving prescription medicine delivery fees during the novel coronavirus pandemic. Small businesses are also stepping up. I received an email from my local deli offering free delivery for customers over the age of 70 within a five-mile radius of the business. Their message also directs recipients to share the email with “friends and family who may like having food delivered to avoid going out.”

4. Inspire your audience. In times of need, those who are not affected are often in a position to assist others. You can be a catalyst by allowing corporate citizenship to shine. Do all you can to help. Share a donor portal; communicate your philanthropic position; assist with collection coordination; donate products, services, money, or time; and communicate how your brand’s community can get involved.

5. Audit your content queue. Review your entire messaging stream, including social media, promotional and transactional emails, push notifications, and SMS, to identify communications that need to pause or shift as a result of the situation. Otherwise, there is a risk of damaging your brand if a message comes off as insensitive, incorrect, or seeking to capitalize on a tragedy.

These communications must be a company-wide effort. Develop a cross-functional “Go Team” with experts from public relations, social, email, mobile, website, design, data/IT, philanthropy, stores/field, logistics, supply chain, and customer service to coordinate teams and efforts.

Then, create a plan that documents responsibilities throughout the organization as they relate to customer-facing communications. Establish a crisis strategy and craft templates for communications. And if there’s time, do a practice run to make sure your plans and strategies are sound.

The US Department of Homeland Security shares key resources for preparedness, response, and recovery. Take these resources and extend them into your communications as well to your design. This will allow you to be agile while supporting your customers during a time of need.

Our Leading Through Change series provides thought leadership, tips, and resources to help business leaders manage through crisis. Check out some of our most recent articles:

• Here are five ways we’re helping our employees navigate work now

• We’re helping businesses manage through crisis

• See how we pivoted a live event into an online experience

The post How to Communicate With Customers During Times of Crisis appeared first on Salesforce.

1. to provide thought leadership, tips, and resources from Salesforce and our community of Trailblazers to help business leaders manage through crisis; and,
2. to provide a forum for community and conversation with peers.

In this series, we’ll share content that’s universally helpful regardless of your role in the organization, as well as guidance specific to CEOs, CMOs, CIOs, CROs, VPs of Commerce, service leaders, and for vertical industries. For example — we’ll share tips on employee communications, customer communications, solving for revenue challenges, and maintaining customer relationships in a work from home era.

For twenty-one years we’ve listened to customers share their greatest opportunities and toughest challenges. And with twenty-one years of insights from the Trailblazers among us — those business innovators who have experienced personal and professional transformation, we’ll draw from our experience, and these relationships, to share the best insights with all of you.

Now, I’d like to also hear from you. Please drop me a line (cmo@salesforce.com) to let me know what you’re grappling with, what questions you have and ideas for how we can share learnings from our customers to help inform your approach. Your input will directly affect our Leading for Change Series content, community, and conversation going forward.

While these are challenging times for all of us, I’m confident that, together, we’ll also see new opportunities to connect with our customers and new ways to do business. Please share this series with anyone in your professional circle who might benefit from the wisdom and perspective of peers.

Stephanie Buscemi

Chief Marketing Officer, Salesforce

The post Helping Business Manage Through Crisis appeared first on Salesforce.

In our professional lives, it’s “Can we meet?”

There are few of us with calendars with a lot of empty slots in them right now. Whether you work for a large enterprise or a small business, it’s hard to avoid a range of meetings that include:

• The status meeting — a regular touchpoint with a team, a department or even just a single employee and their manager to go over performance, obstacles and issues.
• The brainstorm meeting — an ad-hoc gathering to deal with a long-term problem or that’s part of an established process of developing a new product, service or strategy. This could also include meeting outside with a customer or prospect.
• The emergency meeting — usually called at the last minute based on a problem impacting operations, customers or both.

There are, of course, some other kinds of meetings that don’t easily fit into these categories. They are often brief, in the moment and are focused on figuring out a next step of some kind. Let’s call them “huddles.”

A sales team might need to huddle quickly with marketing and product folks to make the last configuration to something a customer has provisionally agreed to buy. Or some members of the service team need to briefly huddle with more senior leaders on making an adjustment to a return policy based on customer feedback.

Both formal meetings and huddles can often be augmented, or at least replaced, by technology that allows for digital collaboration and communication in easy, consistent ways. There are lots of applications to improve workflow today, particularly at a time when many of us are working with mobile devices. The tricky part is knowing when to weave them into the meeting process.

The following FAQ should serve as a guide whenever someone lobs a “Can we meet?” your way — or even when you’re asking the question yourself:

Who’s realistically going to show up?

There’s nothing worse than being the lonely individual sitting in a boardroom or breakout room, waiting and wondering.

It’s not that people skip meetings out of mere rudeness. Besides illness or other personal reasons for being absent, coworkers sometimes have to move a meeting because a customer is unhappy with their last purchase (or close to making a new purchase).

If a meeting has senior leaders of the company involved, the chances they’ll be unexpectedly pulled in a direction other than your meeting are even greater.

Finally, people are often late travelling back from meetings or events outside the office. All of this should be considered before the meeting invite is even sent.

Ask yourself: could collaboration or productivity tools achieve the same goal of gathering input or ideas? Could reviewing or approving something happen via a digital chat rather than in person? If that’s the case, you may be able to either avoid the meeting, or at least make sure those who missed it will be easily able to catch up and contribute after the fact.

What kind of content is involved?

There are probably some meetings that consist of nothing more than people talking, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to think of examples.

Most of the time, business professionals are meeting to talk about some kind of documents, whether it’s a spreadsheet associated with a budget, the creative that’s part of a new marketing campaign or a calendar of key events in customers’ lives that will form the basis of your sales strategy.

While gathering in person may be helpful to go over deep questions in some cases, there are a lot of projects where simply editing or adding to documents and files will help a team move forward on a project.

What you want is ease of access to the content, and version control to make sure everyone acts in concert.

Which actions is this meeting intended to drive?

As we suggested earlier, most meetings are called together for one of three reasons: to share information, solve a problem or make a decision. A few meetings may cover a mix of all three, but not often.

If you can share information that needs to be consumed by being read, for instance, using collaboration tools may be faster and easier than making someone show up at an appointed time and providing a verbal synopsis of what they’re about to see.

Similarly, if you can make a decision through a quick online chat, there are probably a few extra hours you can give people back in their day.

Solving problems may be a different story. Depending on the nature of the problem, team members might have to ask each other questions on the spot, or describe proposed ideas that would be easier to say out loud or sketch on a white board than by typing into an application.

Be mindful about the process you’ll be using to solve a problem as you make the call about asking for a face-to-face meeting.

Conclusion

The goal here is not to avoid meetings at all costs.

We can get some great energy by sitting down with our coworkers or even customers. A good meeting can improve morale or a customer’s impression of us.

In certain challenging situations — like putting an employee on a performance plan because they’re at risk or demotion or dismissal — you’ll want to be as personal and direct as possible.

Instead, your objective should be saving meetings for the occasions when they are most valuable, which is only possible using technology strategically.

That way, when you do call a meeting (or are invited to one), you and others will show up feeling a greater sense of purpose, and a willingness to use your collective time and energy as part of it.

The post The Right Business Tools Can Reduce Meetings: Here’s How appeared first on Salesforce.

1. LinkedIn’s Rapportive

Rapportive is a free Firefox or Chrome extension from LinkedIn that allows you to get an emailer’s LinkedIn and other social details in your Gmail inbox. That way you get to know a potential customer from their very first email.

Rapportive Gives You Data from Your Contact’s LinkedIn Profile in Your Inbox

This tool is primarily based on whether their email is linked to their LinkedIn profile. If it is, you will get their location, profile headline, current job title and company, profile links, and website links. This information gives you the chance to make a great first impression with your customer.

2. Yesware

Would you like to know if and when customers open your emails, what links they clicked, and whether they opened your attachment, as well as additional details about engagement? To take advantage of these features, consider Yesware.

Yesware Lets You Know How Recipients Interact with Your Message

Desktop alerts tell you when something important happens

This tool works with—and inside—Gmail and Outlook, connects with Salesforce, and has a ton of other features to help make your follow-up emails smarter and more effective. In addition to at-a-glance reporting, you also get desktop alerts when an email is engaged with, so you know right when it happens.

Imagine someone you talked to months ago just opened your email again and clicked on a link about your product or service. Now, months later, you can send them a follow-up email about that specific product or service at just the right moment. The results could be incredible! That’s where Yesware can be helpful and powerful, and lead to some extreme ROI.

3. Reply Now

Do you aim to answer your emails in a specific timeframe, or simply want to know if a message has been in your inbox a little too long? If so, the Reply Now extension, available on Chrome or Firefox, can help: It converts the standard Google inbox timestamp from a date or time to a timestamp that shows how long each email has been there.

This helps more critical emails, or those that you can archive, stand out.

4. Gmail’s Archive and Undo Settings

These aren’t additional tools, but two general Gmail settings that will make your life easier. The Send and Archive setting gives you two Send buttons: One lets you send an email reply and leave the original email in your inbox, the other lets you send an email reply and archive the original email. This saves you a step if you normally archive certain emails after you reply.

The Undo Send setting lets you cancel sending an email if you made a mistake. You can set the cancellation period for up to 30 seconds. After you send an email, you will see a message at the top of your screen that gives you the option to click a hyperlinked “Undo.”

Gmail’s Archive and Undo Settings Save Time and Headaches

If you click the Undo link, the email will not be sent. This can be a lifesaver, especially for critical sales emails! Another general setting you might be interested in is the desktop notifier. If you don’t want to open your inbox every hour, you can use this option to get a popup on your desktop each time you get a new email in your inbox. You won’t have to worry about whether or not you’ve received a new email while you are working in other applications. Do note that you need to turn these off when you go into presentation mode for a customer demo or sales meeting. 5. Boomerang Boomerang is a simple Gmail tool that allows you to archive emails, but schedule them to return to your inbox at a specified date and time. For those who use their inbox as a to-do list or want to be reminded of emails that don’t get a reply, this is the tool for you.

Boomerang Helps Your Organize Your Inbox and Your To-Do List

Effectively, it ensures you remember to do something at a specific time based on an email reminder, or that you follow up on something if no one gets back to you. Considering how important follow-ups are in sales, this makes Boomerang a highly effective tool. 6. Canned Responses If you find yourself writing the same email to multiple contacts, Canned Responses will help. This feature can be enabled in your Gmail Labs. Once enabled, you will see a dropdown at the bottom right of your Gmail email composer window. This is what allows you to save and access your canned responses—better known as email templates.

Canned Responses is an Easy Way to Create Email Templates in Gmail

When you find yourself writing an email that you use often, create a canned response by saving an email as you write it to someone. Then, the next time you need to write a similar (or the same) email, use your canned response.

Be sure to personalize every email. This is especially important if it’s a response to a sales inquiry. If you forget to personalize certain parts, bold them so you don’t forget the next time you send it. Or, remember that you have enabled your Undo setting and take advantage of it!

7. WiseStamp

If you want more than a basic, plain-text signature—something with more dynamic elements, like your company’s latest blog post or tweet—try WiseStamp. This tool works on all email platforms and allows you to create professional signatures that link out to your website, social profiles, and more. Best of all, they give you a variety of templates to choose from.

This allows you to create a professional email signature you can use for both work and personal emails. You never know when a personal correspondence could turn into a sale! Your personal connections may be impressed by your professional email signature, and that impression could turn into curiosity about your products or services.

WiseStamp Gives Your Email Signature a Much-Needed Facelift

8. Unroll.me

One of the biggest hassles with email is dealing with automated subscriptions. Whether you subscribed to a newsletter intentionally or unintentionally, or were subscribed to it without your permission, your inbox is probably swamped by emails that you may or may not be interested in reading.

The worst part? These emails could be inhibiting you from spotting the legitimate emails from your customers.

Fortunately, there’s a free service called Unroll.me that can help. Sign in with your email account (it works on most popular platforms) and it will identify all of the subscriptions that you belong to.

Unroll.me Helps You Manage Your Email Subscriptions

From here, you have a few options. You can choose to unsubscribe from the emails. You can choose to “roll up” the emails, meaning they will be added to one daily digest instead of hitting your inbox individually. Or you can leave them alone so that they continue to come to your inbox as usual.

Alternatively, if you use Gmail, you can use its built-in filtering feature to move automated emails from your inbox to specific labels, or simply have them bypass your inbox.

9. IFTTT & Zapier

These two services allow you to automate tasks between your email and hundreds of other applications. The difference is IFTTT is a free service more for personal use, and Zapier is premium service geared toward business use.

For Gmail users, you can visit the pages for both IFTTT and Zapier to learn how to create actions and triggers with Gmail and other apps, as well as see the automations others have created to make their lives easier.

While you’re there, check out the options you have for triggers and actions in Zapier with other applications and Salesforce. IFTTT also has a number of ways to connect Salesforce with your other platforms and tools.

Zapier Automates Important, but Time-Consuming Actions

• It has Gmail-specific automation
• It also has Zaps for Salesforce and other applications

Everyone in your company—sales, marketing, advertising, and others—should be able to find at least one automation tool that saves them a few minutes a day. These time savers could add up to hours, or even days, throughout the year.

Bonus: Salesforce and Outlook integration

Companies that use the Sales Cloud platform can sync their CRM data with their inbox. Keep track of interactions with customers and stay organized by having your Sales Cloud account and Outlook inbox connected.

Integrate Sales Cloud with Outlook for a Streamlined Inbox

In Conclusion

There are a variety of tools that can help your sales team make better use of the time they spend in their email inbox.Some of the tools mentioned in this post have similar or crossover features: If you choose one, you may not need another. For example, Yesware has some of the same features as Boomerang and Canned Templates. As with every tool and platform you use in your business, check out your options first to learn what works best for you to be more effective, productive, and professional in your correspondence!

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In 1964, Charmin introduced a spokesman, Mr. Whipple, in its commercials. For 20 years the character was present in the toilet paper company’s advertising, along with the slogan, “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin!” In its heyday, both Mr. Whipple and his catchphrase were widely known and popular. Sullivan writes, “I’ll wager if Whipple were to air today, there would be a hundred different parodies on YouTube tomorrow.”

The first edition of Hey Whipple is approximately 20 years old, and it’s now in its fifth edition. Although it was originally written for traditional advertisers, this advertising tome is chock full of guidance for all marketers, and many of its lessons resonate with salespeople as well. In this article we’ll explore some of its classic guidance, much of which is echoed in popular blogs and articles online.

Some of the Lessons Marketers and Salespeople Can Learn from Hey Whipple, Squeeze This!

• Great ads are intelligent, clean, witty, beautiful, and human.
• Your brand should be an adjective.
• Your marketers and salespeople need to know your product inside out.

Great ads are intelligent, clean, witty, beautiful, and human.

Sullivan is talking about Volkswagen’s ads from the 1960s, but these adjectives should apply to your social media posts, paid ads, and email marketing too. And, just like the print ads written by the Mad Men of pre-internet advertising, memorable marketing that meet these same parameters takes time, effort, and strategy.

Intelligent

Intelligent online marketing, especially on social media, is well-planned and well-written. “The best social media campaigns start with a carefully developed plan,” Sonny Ganguly writes for Marketing Land. “The campaign should be a good continuation of your brand’s existing social voice and style.” Whether it’s a Facebook post about a new product, or an email campaign targeted toward leads on the cusp of converting, you must have a clear, defined strategy in place.

Clean

Do your landing pages have a clear call to action? When your visitors follow your instructions and land on your website, they need to know exactly what you want them to do. Every link, every button, every design element needs to be perfectly in place. As Megan Marrs writes in 17 Best Practices for Crazy-Effective Call-To-Action Buttons, your calls to action need to “appear in appropriate places that align with a user’s experience.”

Witty

Not every ad needs to be funny. But every piece of marketing material needs to be “clever in perception and expression” (especially when it comes from a salesperson). The function of the copy in anything you present to a lead or customer is to catch the reader’s attention. Demian Farnworth at Copyblogger says copywriting “requires creativity, a sense of beauty and style—a certain aptitude, mastery, and special knowledge.”

Beautiful

Amy Cowen explains this perfectly: She writes that content can be beautiful in different ways. “One example of ‘beautiful content’ is well-researched and organized content that has a structure and a flow. Another example is richly illustrated content that speaks to visual learners . . . A page of content completely devoid of grammatical and style errors is also beautiful,” Cowen says.

You’ve no doubt seen the statistics on the use of images in marketing and sales collateral. But not all visuals are created equally, and a healthy combination of a carefully selected images, graphic design elements, and proper formatting will set your materials apart. Your audience doesn’t want to be bored; serve them a visual treat.

Human

Social media has given companies an invaluable opportunity to have real, personal conversations with their customers. Marketing especially has shifted from a selfish, attention-grabbing endeavor to a more intimate relationship. Sure, commercials and print ads still exist to increase public awareness. But content marketing—through social media, email, websites, and other online marketing—demands companies be more human.

“It’s about creating camaraderie and accountability that inspires us to build better products and workplaces, to live more healthy and meaningful lives,” Ross Crooks says in his article for Forbes. Content creation has taken over the internet, but the most successful, like GoPro’s, is user-focused. Sullivan declares, “If content is king, conversation is queen.”

But how?

Creating anything worthy of all those adjectives is hard. That’s why Sullivan wrote Hey Whipple, an entire book about how to make a great ad. But you can start with these steps:

1. Have a strategy for every post and every email, every time you reach out as a marketer or salesperson.
2. Make sure your audience knows exactly what you want them to do, and can do it easily.
3. Catch people’s attention with your words—and choose those words wisely.
4. Create visually appealing content that draws your audience in.
5. Encourage a relationship between your reader and your company.

How to Create Effective Online Marketing

• Have a strategy for every interaction with your audience, every time you reach out as a marketer or salesperson.
• Ensure your audience knows what you want them to do, and can do it easily.
• Catch people’s attention with your words—and choose those words wisely.
• Create beautiful, appealing content that draws people in.
• Foster a relationship between your audience and your company.

Your brand should be an adjective.

As you create your relationship with leads and customers, you need to be in charge of your reputation. Your website, social media posts, emails, sales calls, in-person visits, and all your interactions with the public need to fit into the description you choose for yourself.

“It is up to you to make your brand stand for something,” Sullivan writes. Charmin, with its Mr. Whipple commercials, wanted to be known for having a soft product. Sullivan shares a few examples with cars:

• Jeeps are rugged.
• Porsches are fast.
• BMWs perform.
• Volvos are safe.

If you don’t decide what your company stands for, or what its mission statement is, consumers will. And if your customers use different adjectives to describe your company than you prefer, you need to perform reputation management. Thanks to sites like Yelp and Google, people can share their opinions quickly and easily. Your goal is to have their opinions match your chosen description.

Kevin Lund and Eileen Sutton further delve into this topic in “Why Your Brand Should Speak Human,” an article they wrote for the Content Marketing Institute. “What impression do you make when a person first meets your brand through screens, a retail store, or a magazine? Like a face-to-face encounter, each of your channels is a potential handshake moment. Except you don’t have 30 seconds to make a first impression. You have maybe three seconds. How do you want to come across?”

What impression does your marketing make? What impression do your salespeople make? Make sure you don’t have an identity crisis: Ensure your interactions, collateral, and brand personality all match up with your chosen adjective.

Your marketers and salespeople need to know your product inside out.

In order to honestly reach leads and customers, your marketing and sales departments must understand your products and services. In fact, every member of each department should be able to use your products and services as your customers would. There’s no better way to run a business.

How to Get to Know Your Product or Service

Adapted from Luke Sullivan’s Process for Ad Brainstorming

• Question everything
  • Ask seemingly dumb questions
  • What would make you want to buy the product?
• Try your competitor’s product
• When you talk or write about your offerings:
  • Make the benefit relatable
  • Avoid style and focus on substance
  • Make your claims incontestable

Sullivan describes the process of ad ideation. Much of the process is just as pertinent to understanding what you’re selling.

• Try the competitor’s product.
• Don’t be afraid to ask dumb questions.
• Ask yourself what would make you want to buy the product.
• Dramatize the benefit.
• Avoid style and focus on substance.
• Make your claims incontestable.

Of course, you need to know your audience just as much as you know your company’s offerings. Successful marketers create personas and segment email lists to focus on a particular audience, but the same idea goes for salespeople, too. In the informative, long-form article “Your Product Demo Sucks Because It’s Focused on Your Product” on First Round Review, the author writes, “Good demos don’t have to be perfect for the product. They have to be perfect for the audience.”

Your audience is your top priority.

Sure, making the sale is important. Your metrics, ROI, sales figures, and financial statements are all key elements in determining your success. But your audience—leads, prospective customers, and customers—deserves your utmost respect and attention.

Communicating with your audience is the theme of Hey Whipple, Squeeze This!, and Luke Sullivan has important advice for aspiring and tenured copywriters and marketers. But much of his advice carries over to sales, too. No matter the size of your company or your budget, focus on how you communicate with your customers, who you are to them, and knowing your offerings and customers as well as you can. These priorities will help you succeed.

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Not only do salespeople need to learn how to use these apps, but they also have to figure out which apps are best for their needs, as well as which apps work well together. Fortunately, we did the work for you.

Top 10 Most Powerful Apps and Tech for Sales

To make sure you’re reaching your goals, consider the following apps and other technology you can use to make your job easier.

Square to Collect Payments

This technology allows you to accept payments on the go. It’s a small device that connects to your smartphone; your customers can swipe their credit cards for a flat rate of 2.7 per cent. The payment is processed instantly and you typically see the deposits in your account the next day.

The company sends companies the free card reader. Once a credit card is swiped, the mobile screen prompts the customer to leave a tip (or no tip) and then “sign” the screen. There is also an option to have a receipt emailed to the customer, which may be a great way to earn email addresses (just use them wisely).

Although this technology does require the salesperson and the customer to be face to face, it’s a great way to eliminate excessive invoicing, get paid quickly, and help salespeople who are at events or going door to door. And when clients come to the office for meetings, this technology gives you the power and convenience to process payments on the go.

CamCard to Bring Business Cards Online

As salespeople know, keeping track of your clients, networking, and making connections is an important part of the job. It can be exhausting, and most salespeople have a pile of business cards to keep track of, follow-up with, and essentially memorize (especially if you attend an event). CamCard helps you keep track of these cards and stay organized. This app makes it easy to convert business cards into contacts in your phone: Take a picture of the business card, and then upload the picture to the app.

Once you upload the photo, the contact will be listed in your phone; you’ll also have a CamCard library where you can see all of these contacts. The app gives you the option to connect with that contact on LinkedIn, which makes your “after event” duties much easier. The app costs $.99.

Another app called Scan Biz Cards offers the same features and is available for iPhone and Android. If you’re interested in this type of service, do your research to see which design is more to your liking.

Profit Story for More Confident Estimates

This is a great app you can download to help give you insight into how much the margin would be on a business idea. You can calculate sell price, cost price, gross profit margin, markup, and break-even analysis. For salespeople, this makes pricing products easier: If a potential customer wants to negotiate the sale, this type of calculator can help give you an idea of how much you can bend. The app costs $1.99.

Any.do for Organization

This app is great for organization and making sure you meet deadlines. It’s available for both iPhone and Android and it helps keep your to-do list in order. You can create different folders for tasks or for things you want to remember, and even collaborate with others by sharing folders through the app. When you complete a project, just swipe to cross it off, and then delete.

The app has helpful features such as voice transcription, which is great for salespeople who are always on the go. It can sync with a Chrome extension so that all of your to-do list items can be transferred to your Gmail account. It reminds you what you need to get done each day so you can make sure you stay on track. For busy salespeople, especially those who travel, Any.do will help you keep organized.

Keynote for Presentations On the Go

Every good salesperson has a pitch ready to go at all times—it’s crucial to success. Keynote makes your presentation portable and can help make sure you stay on track if an opportunity arises and you weren’t necessarily prepared. This app from Apple allows you to not only bring presentations with you, but also gives you the option of creating interactive presentations on the go. You can view, edit, and share—all from the app.

This app is probably best used on a tablet, especially when you need to present information to a client or a small group of people. However, you do have the option of plugging your device into a projector. The app costs $9.99.

Fileboard to Narrow Down Your Leads

Fileboard helps salespeople qualify their prospects by calculating which contacts are ready to buy and who are just looking. It does this by showing you when your emails were opened, which slides of a presentation someone viewed, how much time they spent looking at a slide, and more.

Fileboard won the Salesforce Rising Star Award in 2014. It gives you more control and knowledge about your leads, and lets you know when you should pursue a sale and which leads are still at the top of the funnel. This app has a free 14-day trial, and users who sign up pay different rates depending on their business needs.

Doc Scan for Sending Multi-Page Documents

Salespeople often find themselves in a place with no scanner, yet they need to get information back to their desks quickly or to a coworker in a hurry. Whether it’s a large document, a business card, or a pamphlet someone gave you at an event, Doc Scan scans copies and then uploads them to Google Docs or Dropbox (two more apps you should consider downloading). The best part: It’s free.

FreeConferenceCall.com for Free Calling

This app offers unlimited conference calls (for nearly 100 people, if necessary), up to six hours each, for people in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and much of Europe. It’s a web-based interface, so you can use the app without paying for a dedicated service. You can also record calls, so you’re not missing out on any features by using this app. This is a great app for a sales team with a limited budget or one at a small- or medium-sized business. Because conference calls can be crucial, the FreeConferenceCall.com app can help ensure making conference calls is easy and professional.

Salesforce CRM app for Accessibility

Several experts consider Salesforce one of the top mobile customer relationship management (CRM) apps for salespeople. It allows you to run everything from one place. This includes dialing into meetings, checking your CRM records, logging calls, analyzing conversations, working with social media, and monitoring trends.

The Salesforce app is customizable, so you can have a unique experience and make sure you have everything you need. Many salespeople download this CRM app first, then decide which other apps will best suit their needs.

Don’t Forget the Basics

It’s worth mentioning that a salesperson should use some of the most basic apps, including email, Chrome, Google Docs, and social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. These apps are essential to success in sales, and although they may not make the list of the hippest or trendiest apps, they should already be in your app library.

The Takeaway

It’s important to find the right balance and get into a rhythm when it comes to using apps and technology. Start by creating a set of goals and challenges, and then add apps to your collection and your schedule. Chances are you’ll need to use more than one, but getting started with too many apps at once can be overwhelming. Start slowly, and eventually these technologies and apps will become a necessary part of your workflow.

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Produced by the same group behind Launch and Cascadia Summit which closed Vancouver Startup Week, the Traction conference brought together big names from a wide range of both established and emerging firms. We’ve rounded up some of the key insights from speakers and attendees:

Progress Starts With Being Honest About Your Struggles

One of the best tweets from Traction included a photo from a talk by Ben Yoskovitz, a seasoned entrepreneur who is also a partner with an accelerator program called YearOneLabs. His message: “Don’t lie to yourself about where you’re at, even if you’re not very far down (the road you want to go).” In other words, frameworks like Lean analytics break down the many stages of a startup’s life, from “empathy” (recognizing a poorly-met need to “stickiness” (creating a product that meets that need and which people actually use), and so on. Being clear about these milestones will help entrepreneurs focus their priorities accordingly.

When You’re Using Trial And Error, Spend Less Time on The Errors

Traction isn’t just the name of the conference but a book by Justin Mares, who was among the event’s keynote speakers. Several of Mares’ points were captured in social media. For one, startups should not just come up with innovative products and services but an innovative sales strategy: “If you can acquire customers in a way your competitors aren’t, that’s a huge competitive advantage,” he said, adding that while entrepreneurs will inevitably make mistakes, they should focus on the areas where they win. “Once you find something that works, double down on it. Keep doing it until it doesn’t work.”

Social Media Biz captured another important tip from Maron: that go-to-market strategies (or lack thereof) may explain why venture capitalists are reluctant to fund many startups. “The number one reason they pass on entrepreneurs they’d otherwise back is because the founders focus on product to the exclusion of everything else.”

Apply The Concept of ‘Traction’ To Success Metrics

The Vancouver Observer did a great job of interviewing not only organizers but many of the startups who sat in on Traction keynotes and sessions. They all had different ways of categorizing what “traction” meant to them in terms of evaluating their progress. This included:

• Number of new users (and level of activity, particularly ifit’s a startup t hat needs user-generated content)
• Increased revenue from each client, as well as how many clients you can retain
• Quality of reactions to onstage product demos and number of contacts made while attending a conference
• Quality of user interactions: It’s not just whether they’re using your product or service, but how happy they are or the value it provides them.

The main key takeaway from the conference was, however you define traction, one of the best ways to achieve it is to keep moving forward.

To learn more about how entrepreneurs can succeed, check out Salesforce for Startups or download our free eBook:

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