CRM On Demand Learning Blog

I’ve been thinking a lot about the 2.0 technology trends, most particularly in the eLearning arena. But, a recent conversation with a networking-savvy friend of mine got me thinking about how social networking tools can contribute to my business success. How about you? Do you love what social networking brings to your business or hate it? Or somewhere in between – like…never thought about it? The increasing popularity among sales reps of using social networking sites to make connections with prospects or to accelerate sales deals makes me think that we should all be loving it, whether we know it or not. I ran across a very interesting (free) eBook called Can LinkedIn Increase Your Sales, by Jill Konrath, that gives some very specific applications of using that social networking site in a sales context.

This is actually leading somewhere CRM On Demand oriented – I remembered seeing some emails flying between some of our sales guys about embedding LinkedIn into contact and account records in CRM On Demand. So when you view a record, it passes the company or contact name into LinkedIn and shows the same contact relationships you would see by logging in and doing a search. It might come in handy, so I thought I’d share the info.

Note: You have to have application customization privileges in CRM On Demand to be able to do this.

For the Contact record

Create a Custom Web Applet for the Contact record:

• Navigate to Admin > Application Customization > Contact > Contact Web Applet
  
• Create a new Web Applet and configure it with this information
  
  • Location = Detail Page
    
  • Type = HTML
    
  • Web Applet HTML = <IFRAME frameborder="no" src=' http://www.linkedin.com/search?search=&sik=1208482857531&keywords=%%%First_Name%%%+%%%Last_Name%%%+%%%Primary_Account_Name%%%&sortCriteria=4' width="800" height="450"> No IFRAMES supported. </IFRAME>

• Navigate to a Contact Detail page.
  
• Click the Edit Layout link near the top right side of the page.
  
• Move the new Web Applet to the Displayed Related Information box.
  
• Click Save.

For the Account record

Create a Custom Web Applet for the Account record:

• Navigate to Admin > Application Customization > Account > Account Web Applet
  
• Create a new Web Applet and configure it with this information
  
  • Location = Detail Page
    
  • Type = HTML
    
  • Web Applet HTML = <IFRAME src="http://www.linkedin.com/search?search=&sik=1213996244420&company=%%%Name%%%¤tCompany=currentCompany&sortCriteria=4¤tTitle=currentTitle" width="800" height="450" marginheight=0 marginwidth=0 border=0 style="border:none;"> </IFRAME>

• Navigate to an Account Detail page.
  
• Click the Edit Layout link near the top right side of the page.
  
• Move the new Web Applet to the Displayed Related Information box.
  
• Click Save.

Caution: Consider performance

A word of caution when adding a Web Applet to a detail page – you should always consider the performance hit when adding anything to your page. Just test it after you add the new Web Applet, to see if the time it takes for the page to load is still acceptable. If it isn’t, you can instruct people to collapse that related information section – and only expand it when they want to view that content.

How would you like to add CRM On Demand content to your desktop, Google home page, or another application? Each one of our Widgets is a snippet of HTML code that you can use to view CRM On Demand data without signing into CRM On Demand itself. In other words, it's just a URL that gets you a small subset of the full application UI.

To get started, first make sure that you have the Embed CRM On Demand Widgets privilege. Click the My Setup global link at the top of any CRM On Demand page. If you see the Embed CRM On Demand Content link, you’re good to go! If not, ask your administrator to add that privilege to your role.

Second, check out the example shown in this MetaLink resource, which explains how to add the CRM On Demand Message Center to your Google.com home page:
Quick Guide: Embedding Content Using Widgets (Doc ID 565525.1)

Third, share with us your experiences with our Widgets. Let us know how you’re using them to stay on top of important CRM On Demand activities!