Archive for the ‘Salesforce’ Category

Presentation: Empower Mobile Salesforce.com Users to Close More Deals

Friday, July 9th, 2010 | located in Productivity, Salesforce | No Comments »

Yesterday we co-hosted a webinar with the folks from Echosign and the slides as well as the audio is now available in case you missed it live.

Use Ribbit to integrate communications into any web application

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 | located in Features, Salesforce | No Comments »

The DreamSimplicity team caught up with Greg Goldfarb, VP and GM of Enterprise Applications of Ribbit at the Sales 2.0 conference to discuss how businesses are using Ribbit for Salesforce to increase their sales team’s productivity.

One of the biggest hassles field sales teams have is the ‘red tape’ following their client visits. Many times they will spend hours in the office logging meeting notes and action items into Salesforce. Businesses who use Ribbit see instant time savings as the field teams call into Ribbit, record the notes from their meetings and Ribbit converts voice into text and places directly into your Salesforce account. Your client’s inbound message(s) convert to text as well, so it means more time spent on revenue generating items.

Greg Goldfarb of Ribbit with DreamSimplicity at Sales 2.0 SF from DreamSimplicity on Vimeo.

Marc Benioff says it is time for a change.

Thursday, March 4th, 2010 | located in SME Trends, Salesforce | 1 Comment »

salesforce.com CEO, Marc Benioff, shared a couple of thoughts via a guest video during the RSA conference keynote. Marc has spent the last 10 years pushing the edge of enterprise software by bringing productivity products into the cloud, and is encouraging companies to embrace change.

One of my favorite quotes from this short video is: ‘Lotus Notes was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg was. It is time for a change.” Amen brother.

I would not call myself a Benioff ‘fan girl’, but I do appreciate the vision he brings to the world of enterprise solutions - working to bring cloud + mobile computing + social elemsntelements and .

Making Use of SMS Reminders in Ribbit for Salesforce

Thursday, February 11th, 2010 | located in Features, Salesforce | No Comments »

Ever schedule a meeting and then spend the first five meetings of said meeting trying to locate everyone who was supposed to participate? Or hear the same “I forgot” excuse from the people who trickle in late? Sure, you probably sent out email reminders to everyone that morning but chances are those emails got quickly buried under 50 other emails. Or maybe it’s early in the day and not everyone has had a chance to read their email yet.

In my experience, sending an SMS text is much more reliable. The first thing people do these days when they hear that familiar ring tone letting them know they’ve received a text message is look at their phones. And now, thanks to cool new features in Ribbit for Salesforce, you can schedule SMS event and meeting reminders right from Salesforce.

The beauty of this feature is that you can schedule these reminders for groups of people in advance, so meeting participants will automatically receive an SMS with the meeting subject and time. And, the fact that you sent reminders for your event will be recorded automatically in Salesforce.

Now, with Ribbit for Saleforce’s SMS reminder feature, your sales team might not only remember to come to those important meetings, they might even come prepared.

Check out Ribbit for Salesforce’s New Release

Monday, February 8th, 2010 | located in Features, Productivity, Salesforce | No Comments »

In response to customer feedback, we’ve completely rebuilt our Ribbit for Salesforce productivity tool with advanced features for linking all your critical sales tools— voice communications, email, SMS, CRM, and voice-to-text transcription —so you can work less and sell more.  Upgrading is free—get all the new features for the same price!

Here are just some of the new features in Ribbit for Salesforce designed to make you even more responsive and productive:

• Schedule SMS reminders for tasks and events right from Salesforce
• Reply via SMS in Salesforce
• Answer incoming mobile calls on your home, office, or web phone using intelligent call routing
• Easily attach voice communications to customer records in Salesforce
• Talk to create new customer records or kick-off workflow in Salesforce
• Delete multiple messages, manage settings, and load pages faster with the new and improved user interface
• Use Ribbit with Salesforce Mobile on your iPhone or Blackberry

Sign-up for a FREE trial or test drive on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.

Starting April 30th we’ll be migrating our development efforts to the new version, so don’t wait to upgrade.

The ‘Cloud’ is no longer a dream.

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 | located in Events, Salesforce | 1 Comment »

It was great to be on the floor of the Dreamforce 09 conference last week with the Ribbit team as we demoed the new release of Ribbit for Salesforce and our integration into LiveOps and their “Future of Customer Service” demo.

We had over 300 people stop by the Ribbit booth for a demo, and I was elated to see their overwhemingly positive response to the new features (SMS functionality, new UI, independent flash phone, etc.), which are all now available in the appexchange listing. <go download it now!>

Then there were the frogs. Surprised to see how many folks loved these little green squeeker toys, so we decided to play a little ‘frog spotting game’ with them. As we walked around the expo hall, we handed out some cool hard cash to those folks wearing them proudly. Get a fun toy AND win some cash. Not a bad little deal there.

Loking forward to 2010 and hearing about more customers embracing the cloud and seeing how Ribbit for Salesforce can increase the productivity of teams around the world.

Ribbit brings unified communications to sales professionals on the salesforce.com appexchange

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 | located in Salesforce | No Comments »

New SMS messaging and voice-based record creation features in Ribbit for Salesforce CRM help accelerate CRM information and sales productivity.

This morning, Ribbit announced the latest version of its award-winning Ribbit for Salesforce CRM. It will be demoed at the Ribbit booth (#317) at Dreamforce ‘09, salesforce.com’s user and developer conference taking place this week in San Francisco. Built using the Force.com platform, the new version of Ribbit for Salesforce CRM will be available for a free test drive and deployment following the Dreamforce launch on the AppExchange.

Using the same cloud computing principles as salesforce.com, Ribbit is providing the first service that enables mobile professionals to unify the communication and CRM tools they are already using, and dramatically improve productivity.  Ribbit allows users to keep the same phone number, CRM system and email account, and now offers new SMS functionality, stronger voice-to-text features, deep integration for mobile access to salesforce.com, “find me, follow me” technology and an upgraded user and administrative interface.

Ribbit is the first service that enables CRM customers to easily program how voice and SMS interact with their Salesforce CRM workflow.

Analyst firms report that wide adoption of unified communication in the enterprise has been traditionally hampered by the need for forklift hardware and software upgrades and the fact that management of messaging and telephony typically lie in different groups.  In addition, companies with people in the field often report difficulty in driving CRM adoption and capturing full ROI. Ribbit has eliminated those roadblocks, bringing unified mobile communications — that can be integrated into Salesforce CRM— to sales and other customer facing departments.

Through Ribbit’s SMS integration, users can now send personal or automated text messages from Salesforce CRM, respond to voicemails with SMS messages or create SMS reminders for events and tasks in Salesforce CRM. Ribbit also sends users SMS notifications for new voice messages, including the voice-to-text conversion.

Ribbit is taking the next step in voice-enabling data entry into salesforce.com. Users can now talk to create new custom records or cases and kick-off workflow. Users can also record email drafts and meeting notes via their mobile phone.  When an incoming call can’t be answered, voice-to-text transcription allows Ribbit users to receive, respond to and forward voice messages — without ever dialing in to listen.  Messages are automatically mapped to leads, contacts and in-progress deals in salesforce.com, and because it is transcribed to text, voice-based records act like data objects that are both searchable and shareable.

Ribbit for Salesforce CRM is available in the US and the UK. Ribbit offers free enterprise pilots and pricing starts at $15 per user per month, with no additional set-up fees.

QUOTES:

• Kendall Collins, chief marketing officer, salesforce.com: “Salesforce.com customers actively look for opportunities to broaden the tools they provide to salespeople to improve collaboration between the field and the office to win more business. With salesforce.com and partners like Ribbit on the AppExchange, companies have enterprise-ready options for empowering the field sales team. The proliferation of mobile devices as a sales tool is an example of how cloud computing enables companies to adapt communication models to maximize sales efficiency.”
• Greg Goldfarb, vice president and general manager of enterprise applications at Ribbit: “Customers have been asking us how to take the next step in tying mobile communications to Salesforce CRM, especially around SMS and dictating information into CRM.  Ribbit’s extensible platform has enabled us to quickly integrate new capabilities that are instantly accessible without any new software or hardware.  We’ve gone a significant step further in blending mobility and CRM and as a result, salespeople are now able to spend less time on tedious tasks, and sell more.”

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Ribbit is one of a handful of selected mobile partners that are showcasing products in the Dreamforce Mobile Pavilion.
• Ribbit for Salesforce voted “Best Mobile App” in 2008 by salesforce.com customers
• Customer Testimonials
• Screenshots
• Demo Video

More information about Ribbit for Salesforce CRM can be found online.

Catch Ribbit at Dreamforce this week!

Monday, November 16th, 2009 | located in Events, Public Speaking, Salesforce | No Comments »

The Ribbit crew is heading to San Francisco this week for the salesforce.com Dreamforce event taking place November 17-20 at the Moscone North Convention Center. We have a few things up our sleeves, so make sure you stop by our booth (#317) on the show floor and ask the team to tell you everything they know. Think you will be happy you did.

You should also catch our very own Greg Goldfarb (vice president and general manager of enterprise applications) during his “Sales 2.0: Boosting Rep Productivity with the Best New Web Technologies” session on Friday (10:15 a.m. - 11:15 a.m) in Esplanade 300. And our good friend (and Ribbit for Salesforce loving client), Will Stacy, will be taking the stage during Dreamforce in the “Mobile Round Table: Success Stories from the Trenches” on Thursday (2:45 pm) in Room N125.

Looking forward to seeing you in San Francsico!

Broken Digits? Ribbit to the Rescue.

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 | located in Salesforce, mobility | No Comments »

I mentioned in an earlier blog post that I live a very active lifestyle—mountain biking, snowboarding, and soccer being some of my passions. Well, that lifestyle caught up with me recently in a form of a motorcycle crash.

Thankfully it wasn’t a serious crash, but I did break a few bones in my hands, which landing me in a pair of casts.

As you can imagine, this has made typing extremely difficult. But with Ribbit’s voice-to-text transcription feature, I was able to keep up with my electronic correspondence using my voice. I used Ribbit for Salesforce to dictate all of my emails (and even this blog post) by just by talking into my mobile phone. No need to use my hands at all—except for that one finger I used to press the buttons on my phone. But I supposed I could have used a toe if I’d really had to…

Salesforce Data Loader: Voicemail 
Archiving Made Easy

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 | located in Salesforce, Tips and Tricks | 1 Comment »

For reasons ranging from disaster recovery to regulatory compliance, everyone should regularly back up their data. A handful of companies are making a fortune selling subscription-based services to make it easy to backup our documents, email, even our music, right to the cloud. (I’m a big fan of Box.net and Google Docs, which is where most of my data currently lives). Why should backing up voice messages be any different?
Ribbit for Salesforce has given us a new way to generate voice-enabled content and save it as both text and MP3 files. Unlike voice messages that live within Verizon, AT&T, or Sprint, messages that get stored within Ribbit are yours to keep for as long as you want.

As a sales guy, I get a lot of voice messages that are account-related, and that are associated with leads, contacts, or opportunities. I realized I had hundreds of voice messages I wanted to remove from Ribbit without actually deleting them.

While I completely trust Ribbit to backups my voice messages, (which of course Ribbit does by hosting at OpSource), I wanted to keep soft copies of my voice messages myself.
 This is where the Salesforce Data Loader comes in.

If you aren’t familiar with it, the Salesforce Data Loader is a fantastic admin tool for exporting, inserting, and updating data within the Salesforce database. Since all my voice messages were converted into text and sent to Salesforce.com, I’m now able to extract and backup my voicemail. (Note: This is an administrator function only. Ask your Salesforce or Ribbit systems administrator to help you with your backup.)

Here’s how to perform the backup:

1. Find and copy your Salesforce User ID. To find your user ID, click on your name within the Salesforce user’s list. The ID is found in the URL as shown below:

2. Download, install, and launch the Data Loader. Click Export to export the voice messages to Excel.

3. Select Message (Ribbit1_Message_c) and then select an output location for your file:

4. Filter the Data Loader to remove only your voice messages. Select OwnerID from the Fields section to Equals as the Operation, and Value to your Salesforce User ID (from step 1). Then click Finish:

5. Confirm your intent to export this data by clicking Yes:

6. Your export is now complete. All voice messages have now been backed up to Excel.

Open your Excel file and back it up to an external drive, shared file server, or upload it to Google Docs for storage. Enjoy your new-found peace of mind!