Using the Force.com Excel Connector to add Campaign Members to a Salesforce.com campaign

I had a recent need to use salesforce.com to send out emails to 450 people. It's a hassle to associate those Leads as campaign members in SFDC using your browser, so I used the Force.com Excel Connector. What you want to do is simply take an xls with a column full of LeadIDs that you want to be on the campaign, have a column for CampaignID (that you want to associate these LeadIDs to), and then tell Force.com Excel Connector to Insert all these new rows as Campaign Members to that CampaignID.

1. Open the  Force.com Excel Connector and run a Lead query to export all of your Leads, or all of the ones that meet whatever criteria you are looking for.  Be sure to include LeadID as one of your fields.
2. Open a new window in Excel by clicking the New icon.
3. In a browser, go to salesforce and navigate to the campaign you'd like to use
4. In the browser, look at the URL.  This contains the CampaignID (screenshot 1)
5. Copy the CampaignID out of the URL
6. In Excel Connector, run a query to pull the Campaign MemberID, CampaignID, and LeadID (where your criteria are also met (screenshot 2). This should give you just the three columns above with no other data in the columns yet.
7. Paste in the CampaignID you copied earlier into the CampaignID column.
8. Then go back to your first xls file and copy the list of LeadIDs from there. Paste them into the LeadID column of your second xls.
9. After you've pasted in all the LeadIDs, you need to write the word "NEW" in each cell of the column for CampaignMemberID and paste that same CampaignID in the CampaignID column (screenshot 3 shows all of these pasted in)
10. Highlight all of the rows with your cursor.
11. On the Force.com connector toolbar, select "Insert".  This will insert all of the highlighted rows. 
12. You'll notice that it will replace the word "New" with a value for the new CampaignMemberID of each of the Leads.
13. Visit your Campaign in your browser and you'll notice that all of those Leads are now on the Campaign in the "Total Leads" field.

Screenshot 1:

Screenshot 2: 

Screenshot 3:

How to deactivate a salesforce user license

Sometimes this is as not as easy as it might sound. Just go to Setup>Manage Users>Users and then select their name right? All you have to do is uncheck the "Active" box right? Then you get hit with that error dialog telling you that you can't remove this user because they are in the default lead assignment rules. Or, if they are listed as the system default user who is to be assigned any unassigned leads that come in from a web-to-lead form.

Now Hiring- Salesforce.com admins

Are you a seasoned salesforce.com admin or developer? There's a new service called "Hire On-Demand" that specializes in hiring experienced people. It doesn't matter where you live, there may be a company seeking your skills. I found out about the service after being contacted through salesforce.com's Connect on Demand site. Apparently, the service was started by a former salesforce.com Account Exec who saw the need for his customers to find salesforce talent. And, if you are reading this blog, and you are not salesforce talent, then we probably have a problem on our hands. : )

Go to their site and submit your resume. You never know, you could land that next salesforce.com gig earning 7 figures (just like me). Well, it's 7 figures if you count the decimal places too......

Forensic tracking of your salesforce.com users

Ever had an employee go bad? Ever learned that an employee got fired on Friday, but no one told you to remove their salesforce access until Monday? I am always surprised when this happens, but, it does happen. Recently this scenario happened to me. Some genius decided to fire a senior executive, but not tell me about it for 2 days. That left me wondering if he had done anything in salesforce that he wasn't supposed to.

Outlook Edition Tip- When adding an email, notice what else you can do

If you use Outlook Edition to add emails to salesforce, then you should take notice of the other tabs that are available after you click the "Send and Add" button from within Outlook. Most of the time, people just click the "Send and Add" button, locate the contact in salesforce and submit. However, there are some other helpful tabs on that dialog box that you should check out. Note the "Related (What)" and "Message" tabs:

Reassign Leads using the Assignment Rules AFTER you've already uploaded them

Ever have a bunch of leads to import to salesforce, but you don't want your reps to get their grubby little paws on them yet? Maybe you have more information you want to be able to add to the leads before the reps get them, such as some notes you'd like to add so that all the information about the lead is complete. I commonly need to upload a list of tradeshow leads, but then I need to separately append Notes to the leads (Notes are a separate object and thus you can't import the Notes at the same time you import the leads). So, I need to upload my leads first, prevent my reps from seeing them, and then do some separate work on the leads. Once I'm ready, I want to re-assign the leads to the reps, but, since my assignment rules are complex, I want to leverage them instead of reassigning the leads through the reassignment tool, which is more manual.

Here's how you can upload your leads to a temporary owner, like a queue, and then, reassign the leads using your assignement rules. Note that we're not talking about reassigning salesforce leads using their reassignment tool, but instead, we are leveraging our already-built assignment rules to do it for us.

Hidden Tabs - Watch out, users can still see the data

If you want to restrict access to an entire tab in salesforce from some of your users, you might start by editing their Profile and setting their tab permission for that object to "Hidden".