Salesforce Canada

Social media is just one piece of the pie. If you don't measure your efforts, it's nearly impossible to learn and grow. Here are best practices to choose the best metrics and define ROI.

When the other side scores in a hockey game, the TV cameras quickly pan over to the home team coach’s face. And usually, apart from looking a little unhappy, that coach wears an expression that shows he or she is already thinking of how they can help turn things around.

While Thursday at Dreamforce officially marks the Women’s Leadership Summit, Tuesday kicked off with some powerful programming around women in technology. Though each of the speakers came from a different angle, the message of carving out your own path came through loud and clear. Here are five takeaways from these sessions.

The Canadian economy has been built on the backs of driven, savvy and determined entrepreneurs. Industry Canada indicates that small and medium-sized enterprises (fewer than 500 employees) make up 99 per cent of business in Canada and employ 64 per cent of workers in the private sector.

Over the next few days, 160,000 registered attendees and media from around the world will be learning about Salesforce’s customers, solutions and vision at Dreamforce. But for 70 international journalists, the event started a day early with an exclusive tour of some of San Francisco’s most innovative and revered companies.

Some people count the days to the start of hockey season. Others count down the shopping days before the holidays hit. But for the more than 150,000 people who make the trek to San Francisco from 78 countries around the world—and another 10 million who join via live streaming—the countdown is on for Salesforce’s Dreamforce, the largest software conference on Earth.

A few weeks ago, the Financial Post published a story that spoke directly to a potential threat facing many Canadian businesses. In “How to stay one step ahead of disruptors in the app economy,” the newspaper looked at how companies like Uber are competing with the taxi industry, and Airbnb is shaking up the hospitality sector. The Post suggested the stakes are high if Canadian firms don’t want to get left behind.

Amid the day-to-day challenges of running a company, like trying to grow sales and delivering customer service, it may be easy to forget how cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) can help contribute to key business outcomes. In that sense, there’s no time like now to look at what the business community has learned about CRM and cloud computing, and then apply it to your organization. Think of it as a grown up version of practicing your A, B, Cs.

The Internet is filled with advice on how to help parents and children adjust to the back-to-school transition. Some of these tips make just as much sense for those selling products and services as it does for those learning the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic.

Three years ago, the federal government published a report called “The State of Entrepreneurship in Canada,” and while it showed a surge of people launching small businesses at the time, it also indirectly helped explain why customer relationship management (CRM) has become such a vital contributor to their success and survival in 2015.