Salesforce.com For Dummies

Rating:
Summary: You'd be a dummy not to buy this book!
Review: "Salesforce.com for Dummies" is, hands down, the best reference guide for salesforce.com users and administrators alike. Tom Wong has done an excellent job with this book. It is packed with useful tips that will help even the most experienced users and/or administrators get more from Salesforce.com. If you are ready to maximize your investment in Salesforce.com, pick up "Salesforce.com for Dummies." You'd be a dummy not to buy this book!



Rating:
Summary: Dumming it down for an admitted dummy
Review: As a new user to the CRM program, Salesforce.com, I was overwhelmed by the amount of information presented on the website. My first thought was, "I wish somebody would writed a "Dummy" book for the program. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it was being released and ordered my copy immediately. I received my copy shortly and began reading and applying the data presented in the book.

While I will continue to avail myself of the training presented on the Salesforce.com site, the presentation of the data in Salesforce.com for Dummies has given my use of the program a real kick-start.

The writer (Mr. Wong), has written this book for users of the program, not for computer programmers. The data is laid out in concise, easy-to-understand terms which even "sales-types" like myself can understand. Applying the suggestions in the chapter on customization has saved me hours of "hair-pulling" work.

I will continue to reference this book and will make it required reading for all those in my company using Salesforce.com. It makes a great CRM program even better, because we will now be able to use all of the features, rather than a few basic one.

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Summary: Drivers, Start Your Engines!!
Review: As a salesforce.com system adminstrator, I found this book to be invaluable. As intuitive as the system is, the topics covered are on point to the needs of users, managers and administrators alike. I found that tasks I learned to do in 15 minutes using the online help features included with the salesforce.com tool, can be done and learned in less than 2 minutes following the clear and concise instructions.

Throughout the book are examples of how customers use the tool as well as best practices and are a terrific addition to this handy guide.

With this book, I was not only ready to roll on with salesforce.com, but to accelerate quickly to leverage the tool to my sales team and across the enterprise.

Rating:
Summary: A Note from the Author
Review: Hi! I'm Tom Wong and the author of Salesforce.com For Dummies. I thought it might be helpful for some of you who might be considering purchasing this book to hear firsthand: why I wrote it, who it addresses, and what it is (as well as what it isn't). That may seem strange coming from an author, but for many readers not familiar with the Dummies series, they are often confused (and sometimes even disappointed) with Dummies books, and I'd rather try to be clear about expectations.

I wrote this book because as a salesforce.com user myself over the last 3 years, I've often wanted quick answers for ways to use the tool. Salesforce.com is easy to use and its online documentation is quite comprehensive, but the tool is so packed with functionality and the Help guide so detailed, that it sometimes took me time to determine the best way to do a common operation. I wanted to create a simple reference guide for business people who just want a quick answer to common needs. At the end of the day, most of us use sfdc because we want to understand our customers, be more productive and sell more (and not necessarily because we want to know all the intricacies of the application).

Which leads me to my second comment: who this book attempts to help. I wrote this book primarily for sales reps, sales managers, marketing teams, senior executives and beginning- to intermediate- level system administrators currently using (or looking to implement) salesforce.com. From a real-world perspective and as a sales and marketing professional myself, I've tried to design this book to give you quick answers based upon this concept of "what's in it for me". One of the biggest challenges in writing this guide is that there are so many types of customer-facing people using salesforce.com with unique business challenges, that it's virtually impossible to address them all in a 408-page book.

And that is my lead-in to my third comment: what this book is versus what it isn't. First, this guide aims itself squarely at sales and marketing productivity. I tried as hard as I could to include the third component of CRM, customer service, but I was given a limit of 390 pages and even that was stretched. So the chapters that would have addressed Supportforce.com are not included; that alone, could be a separate book. Second, this book may not be as useful to "power" system administrators so some of the highly valuable features related to things like custom objects and tabs were also left out as advanced concepts. And third, this is not a technical book for developers and other IT professionals, although you may find value in the business context in this book. For resources there, you may want to use Salesforce.com's developer site, www.sforce.com which is packed with both documentation and an active community of more technical users like you.

And finally, I would just like to say that I hope in some small way that this book is reflective of the great sales automation tool that I think Salesforce.com is. I think we all use technology to help us be more productive and effective in our daily lives, and I believe the people at Salesforce.com have built a great tool that helps companies overcome many of those technical hurdles that in the past may have limited us from serving our customers. If you have comments or improvements that you think I should make to the guide, I encourage you to send me an email at [e-mail] or post a note to my site, www.clientology.net. As you probably know, Salesforce.com releases major enhancements to their service three times a year, and hopefully in future versions of Salesforce.com for Dummies, we can incorporate both how-to's on those new features plus the valuable feedback you provide to me. I hope my comments help and that the book helps you be even more successful.

P.S. I would have omitted the star rating if I could, but I couldn't -- it's mandatory. (That said, I think I wrote a pretty good book (and you have to believe in yourself) so I gave it the maximum: 5 stars.)


Rating:
Summary: Best salesforce.com Reference Material Available!!!
Review: Tom Wong's book "Salesforce.com For Dummies" provides a fantastic overview of salesforce.com, whether you are an end user or a system administrator. The book clearly outlines the functionality of the product and it includes a great deal of information that will help users leverage the full power of salesforce.com. Salesforce.com users of all experience levels will find relevant information in this book. I have been using salesforce.com for more than three years, and I found several helpful tips that are going to allow me to use salesforce.com more productively in the future.

My company has been using salesforce.com since October 2001, and we use it throughout several functional areas of the company (e.g. Sales, Customer Service, Product Management, Project Management, Executive Management, etc..) I have requested that our Human Resources department make "Salesforce.com For Dummies" available to all current users as an ongoing reference material and to all future users as part of their orientation and training.

I would strongly recommend "Salesforce.com For Dummies" to anyone who uses salesforce.com on a regular basis. In my opinion, this is the best reference material available for salesforce.com.