VerticalResponse for AppExchange Blog

Sneak Peek at Our New Features!

For those that missed out on Dreamforce, I wanted to briefly talk about some of the upgrades we're planning to release in the upcoming weeks.

To give you some background on our product development process, we log all incoming features requests that are sent into our Support and Sales channels.  We actually use salesforce.com to handle these requests and they are logged based on category and tracked based on popularity.   If you've submitted requests in the past - thanks and keep 'em coming!  If you've not yet done so, just remember we can't build it if we don't know it's important to you so let's hear your feedback.   

So in addition to the valuable data captured from the feature tracker, we also gave users the ability to rank proposed product enhancements through a survey we sent out a few months back. Based on feedback we received from the survey, we came up with the following product upgrades:

"Account" fields as filters when querying for Contacts - By far the most requested feature and as such we've put this on the top of our list. We'll support both standard and custom Account fields (in addition to the 3 that exists now) as query parameters for Contacts as well as providing more choices for query operators (i.e. does not contain, etc).

Why is this important? Now you can create targeted lists based on the attributes of the Accounts within your org. For example, "go big" and easily grab all the Contacts in one fell swoop based on the Account Rating. Or "go small" to target only the Contacts for Accounts in CA whose Industry is equal to Software/Hardware.

Saved query functionality - Many of you build your lists using the same (or similar) search parameters and the goal here is to offer a way for you to save your most frequently run queries for easy access. In just a few clicks you can create your new list without having to re-enter the parameters or map the fields from scratch.

User interface & workflow improvements - This is actually my favorite part of the upcoming release project. Our objective is to make our app more intuitive for Salesforce users and have it feel less foreign within your SF account. We’re adopting some of Salesforce’s style conventions to make the presentation and navigation much more current an simple to follow.

Here's a sneak peek of the new VR Email tab with the "Quickstart" area.  This new section is designed to give you easy access to the most commonly used features of our app: creating a new mailing list or creating a new email. 

In addition, you'll also see a snapshot of your most recently sent emails and have the option to update stats back into your salesforce account, for multiple campaigns, all at the same time (a huge time-saver!)

Tell me what you think and if you have any suggestions, please send it over my way!

Dreamforce 07 Highlights

Talk about a busy week! I had a great time at Dreamforce but I must say, I had enough of Moscone for a while.

Janine has been blogging about the show all week but I wanted to also give you my highlights.

Keynote by George Lucas - Everyone who was there for the notes can probably recall George's comments on how he has confidence that "bacteria will survive." He also made a great point about today's educational system and how it lacks cooperative and interactive learning. Edutopia's approach is to use curiosity as a learning tool. Instead of telling kids to learn Math, tell them to build an airplane. From there, they'll learn why they need to learn Math. Kudos to George Lucas on his foundation's great work.

Panel Discussion on Corporate Responsibility - Our CEO, Janine was a member of this panel. I agree with Janine when she talks about the impact helping others has with a company's morale. As an employee of VR, it feels good knowing our organization is involved with helping others. We're not out to save the world but it felt rewarding helping families within our community (St. Joseph's is located 10 blocks away from VR). Besides, good deeds are contagious. Just image if other companies adopts a similar program to give back to their communities like the Salesforce Foundation.

It's true that VR holds non-profits in a special light. They're out there doing good things and we love to help them be more successful at it. VR offers a 15% discount for non-profits and watch out for an even better deal in the near future.

Josh's Presentation on List Building - I talked to Josh a day before his presentation and I can feel how nervous he was as anyone would be who'll be speaking in front of a group of 200. But man, once he was up on stage, he made a superb presentation. He talked about the right way to build and grow a mailing list. How building a good list takes time. Shortcuts such as purchasing a list can do some lasting damage to your corporate branding and it more than likely will label your company as a spammer. So, if you ever come across a disc with 9M emails for $19.99, run towards the other direction as fast as you can (I stole that last line from Josh's presentation).

The presentation was so great, watch out for a future webinar on this subject.

VR Wins Best in Show!! -  After all the suspense, VR was awarded Best In Show! Working mainly on the AppExchange version of our app, this was one of the proudest moments in my VR career. Congrats to the entire team and great work!

Meeting Our Clients - In my opinion, this is the best part of the show. I've talked to many of our clients on the phone. Nothing beats a good handshake and putting a face to the voice. Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth to say hi and give some real solid feedback. Your opinions and feedback are very valuable when it comes to developing our app. It may sound a bit cliche but the more successful you are with using our product, the better we become.

I think that's it for now. Post your comments. :)

--Chris

Tuesday Evening - The Appy Awards! Best in Show Goes to....

Having worked so hard for 5 years at the Salesforce relationship, having put so much effort into our product and integration, having a cube at the Salesforce Incubator, putting SO much effort into our music videos, being numero uno on the AppExchange forever...well, it all paid off last night when VR won...

        BEST IN SHOW!!!!

But hang on to your hats, cuz they also played our video ON THE BIG SCREEN!! You couldn't have had a happier crew than the VR crew last night.

Marc, did you have to mess with us and start with this line?

"And the winner is...all the way from Minneapolis Minnesota..." Nine deflated VR heads hung low like "Robbed...AGAIN!" But the VR logo popped on the screen and we heard the big guy say "VERTICALRESPONSE!!!". Thanks for the roller coaster MB.

Shoutouts go out to all of our customers, partners and employees that voted and all of the employees that work hard to develop, support, market and sell our product.

WOOHOO!! For more pix go here!

Tuesday Morning - Dreamforce

The Lucas Notes

Well the morning started off with George Lucas being interviewed by Famous adviser to Salesforce Robert Thurman. This guy has written tons of books on Buddhism, very close to the Dalai Lama, and Marc takes it down to: "Mostly famous for his daughter, Uma." Good one. George dressed up for the occasion, he wore a jacket with his jeans and flannel, and being a huge fan of the denim, my booth-uniform was tired.

George talked about his own philanthropic effort Edutopia. Great concept. Instead of a teacher barking and yammering at you all day, make it more of a collaborative effort. Collaboration you say? It's the name of the game at this year's Dreamforce. So kids should do more of a group learning environment (especially to learn to work with people they "hate" as GL put it). "If they taught that in school we wouldn't be in Iraq right now" (Applause).  This gets them ready for their potential future work life when they have to work with people they hate.

Kids today need to be challenged to think about things instead of a one way communications from the teacher, and it's up to the schools and the teachers to embrace it.

Weird? When he did say that the world will never be destroyed, and that it's not about saving the planet it's about saving ourselves. Wonder what Al G. thinks about that one?

He did however say he has faith in bacteria to survive. Ok.  Positive note? We as a race have come really far in just 50 years and that we're starting to pay attention.

I did like to hear him talk about collaboration as it related to him helping other Directors and other Directors helping him, which creates a better "playing field" if you will, for everyone. He applauds when any summer movie blockbuster comes out because it gets people going to the movies more. We see this ALL the time with our winery clients. They work collaboratively to try to get more people in general to buy wine and travel to the wineries themselves. Great point George.

2nd Life

What was cool? I stuck around for the next panel and being a fan of anything Social Networking, Philip Rosedale of 2nd Life (who is a FANTASTIC customer of VR BTW) was up  next. I took 3 "wows" away from this one:

• There are about 1000 people who make more than $1000/month selling goods that don't exist. Fascinating. 
• In keeping with that magic Dreamforce word "collaboration", he showed an "avatar" shopping for a non existent phone, with another random avatar approaching to give advice about the product.
• The 3rd wow? Four people in a real company coming together in a "room" to have a meeting with audio. The kicker? You can be whatever you want, even a horse.

Other Notes

Pot shots and Microsoft - In George Hu's keynote demo the fake company was a software company in Seattle called "Dinosoft". In today's fantastic mini-movie the demo had a dropdown called "Scared of the Big Players" and one of the choices was MSFT. Nicely done.

I had a panel on Corporate Social Responsibility and what we do at VR here to help our community. I think it went well especially on the heels of the keynote as well as our participation with the Salesforce Foundation. Thanks to all who attended.

Monday Afternoon - Dreamforce

It got crazy over lunch today. No less than 8 people at our booth at any given time. Mob scene. And Furious Alf himself was able to shuffle a big flat screen TV in to play our videos over and over. Tomorrow we should be downright sick of them.

For those of you who want to join us at our Dreamforce happy hour at Roe tomorrow night, make sure you're on the list.

Please vote for an Appy Award, Best in Show! Log into the Idea Exchange to do it.

Michael Sippey from TypePad is here and speaking tomorrow. We love our TypePad. We also bumped into Chris Baggott, who founded Exact Target, his new gig is Compendium Software for Corporate Bloggers.

We also ran into Kirk Crenshaw from RevCatalyst and Jason Stewart and Chris Golec from Demandbase. We just did a press release with each of them, check them out here and here. These guys do a killer job on filling the lead pipeline so that when the leads become contact a user can use VerticalResponse as the communications tool.

Rob Lamb from Clickability stopped by. He used to work at Salesforce now he's flogging content management and website analytics all in one. A very cool package for tons of salesforce users.

Cast Iron systems is here in "force" (argh, argh). They have a cool hardware solution enabling you to connect up data from one source to another, without having to be a rocket scientist. However, they actually have their booth set up as a disco ballroom, and they have their sales team in John Travolta-like white leisure suits. Wow. Love the Cast Iron and love Disco but...huh? I told my staff I would never make them dress up in disco suits or onesees. Nuf said.

Our uniform of choice? Taking from the ever popular Furious Alf "Get it Now" bling, we have T's made up and a few of them are actually be-dazzled. Yes we bought a Bedazzler.

I'll be back shortly after trolling the show floor some more.

Monday Morning Dreamforce - Live from the Show Floor!

So here we are at Dreamforce and it's a ZOO. More attendees and Partners than ever before. I think they said around 7000. And boy to we know, we have the longest running partnership that Salesforce has to date. 2002! That year it was in a tiny room at the Salesforce offices at Landmark with 6 other partners. Boy have things changed.

I'll blog about the show floor since I won't have too much time to attend the sessions. If one of us does, you'll hear about it.

The keynote this morning was great. The Marc and Parker show. Seriously the new stuff is very cool, Force.com. Good on ya Salesforce for coining yet another acronym, PaaS, Platform as a Service. Truly design your salesforce not only to fit your business needs but now you can use it on any device be it laptop, tabket, kiosk, handheld, you name it. I thought that was pretty cool. I'm excited to use it for our own business needs since so many of us have those nifty iPhones. Contacts and Accounts together on one screen? Shut up!

Also, George Hu talked about the new winter 08 version addresses some nice issues that the customers have. Salesforce is the only company I know that can get huge applause for bux fixes. (Oops was that outloud?) One nifty feature is editing a field directly on the screen you're on, without having to click through to do it. Nice especially if you're on a slow connection...much like I'm on now. (Dreamforce wifi a teensy bit slow, the pw is 800nosoftware by the way.) Another few? Hover help, nice again for the slow connection, and more campaign reports which us marketers cannot live without.

• Highlight: I met Mark Mangano last night from Salesforcewatch.com. Love your site Mark.
• Highlight: The "Baron of Beef" last night on the spit was Fred Flinstone like. Wow.
• Highlight: The VR booth is slammed but stop by anyway!

Got to get back to the show, I'll blog more in a bit.

Salesforce Foundation Event - We Made It

What a day Saturday was. There were about 16 of us that went to St. Joseph's Community Center on 10th and Howard here in San Francisco. Check out the pix!

Half of us were assigned to painting and half of us were assigned to moving dirt from one area to another (seriously).

There was a great lunch, there were really great people, even basketball VR on VR ensued.

Here's a video Ciaran from the UK Sailing Academy, a very cool non profit in the UK took of JP, and here's a video of the overall program.

Thanks to the Salesforce Foundation for letting us participate as a sponsor for the 2nd year in a row and thank to the VR employees, we did a great thing and had a great time.

Introducing The AppCrawl at Dreamforce 07!

We're gearing up for another amazing Dreamforce show this year, complete with product enhancements, special appearances by Furious ALF of course, and something I'm really excited about the -- The AppCrawl!

The AppCrawl is a grass-roots effort that was spawned out of a group of Salesforce Incubator Partners.  The Incubator Program allows SFDC partners to access SFDC resources within their own building.  If you're local, you may be familiar with the building, it's at the juncture of 101 and 92 in San Mateo.  VerticalResponse has used this space as a way to get closer to SFDC team members to strengthen our relationship.  We have also been fortunate enough to strengthen our relationship with some of the partners -- enough so that we've banded together to form "The AppCrawl".

The AppCrawl will be conducted at Dreamforce and allow SFDC prospects and customers to learn more about a select few incubator partners and how they can enhance their core SFDC application.  We'll be passing out "bingo" style cards on the tradeshow floor. We'd like you to stop by each of the booths of the participating partners.  Once you made the visit and learned about the offering, you'll get a stamp.  Getting all of the partner's stamps (i.e. completing the AppCrawl), gets you entered to win one of many prizes that we have.  Be sure to stop by one of our booths to learn more and start your AppCrawl!

Below is the list of participating partners:

VerticalResponse
Dreamfactory
Centive
Open Air
Clicktools
Convenos
InsideView
Ribbit

We're looking forward to meeting all of you at the show.  Start off with VerticalResponse, Booth #129!

- Alex

We're Speaking At Dreamforce, Check It Out

VerticalResponse is speaking at two sessions during Dreamforce. Check them out!

List Building and Email Marketing

Don’t waste your marketing dollars -- or your credibility -- on email campaigns that don’t produce results. Our panel of email marketing experts shares the secrets of success and answers your questions on list building techniques and email marketing. Hear the latest trends, evolving opinions, and newest strategies, and take home tips for improving your email response rates.

When: 10:15 AM (PDT)  Wed, Sep 19, '07

Speakers: Josh Feinberg, VP Product Management, VerticalResponse
Scott Dorsey, President, ExactTarget, Inc.

The Power of Us: Share Your Strength

At the Salesforce.com Foundation, they believe in their programs and that real social change is very much within our reach. So do we at VerticalResponse. Join us to learn the benefits of implementing an integrated philanthropy model in your company, and take home tips and ideas to get started.

When: 11:15 AM (PDT) Tue, Sep 18, '07

Speakers: Diane Solinger, Executive Director, Entrepreneurs Foundation, Robert Wexler, Silk, Adler & Colvin, Suzanne DiBianca, Exec. Dir./Foundation, SALESFORCE.COM, Janine Popick, CEO, VerticalResponse, Milton Chen, Executive Director, The George Lucas Educational Foundation and Alana Karen, Policy Specialist Google Adwords, Google Inc.

Review - July 22 by NickSQ

If anyone here reads our AppExchange reviews, you'll notice tons of favorable reviews, however, as any heavily used software company knows, you can't please everyone.

I think the idea of being able to post a review is great as it promotes the community aspect of the AppEx marketplace, but not being able to respond to posts (and provide updated or correct information) is more than a little frustrating. 

We aren't looking to brush the negative reviews under the rug, quite the opposite actually.  We want to create an open and public dialogue where feedback can be provided, factual information shared and upcoming solutions announced.  So how do we do that...Take it to the Blog -- of course!

That's right, going forward we'll be addressing any negative reviews on our AppExchange listing here on the VR for AppEx blog.  We'll dissect each issue and provide the official VR stance so you get all the correct information.  We encourage you to comment, share your personal experiences and engage with other users so we can get the back-and-forth correspondence that is sorely lacking on the AppExchange review page.

So to get us rolling, I've picked the review below as a starting point.  Note: The text of these reviews are taken directly from the AppExchange review page (i.e. copy/paste) so all comments, as well as spelling/grammar, are the sole responsibility of the original poster.

Original Review:

"You Get What You Pay For...

Vertical response is great because it gets you around the 1000/day mass email limit imposed by salesforce but it has 1 major drawback that makes it unusable for us. It won't let you specify a from address. It sends out email on your behalf but the from email address is a very spammy looking address. This resulted in a 3000 email campaign only having a 30% open rate. It also doesn't appear to be a true salesforce app as it just reads for the VR website and 'inserts' this inside Salesforce. Not only is the VR site very slow, it doesn't integrate with other Salesforce stuff."

VR's Comments:

"It won't let you specify a from address."

Just to clarify, we allow users to choose a From Label (i.e. Acme, Inc or Joe Smith) and this information gets inserted to the left of the @ sign in the From Address.  We use a static sending domain (@mail.vresp.com) as this helps email delivery rates for a few specific reasons. 

1. First, having a From Address that differs from the actual sending domain can have a negative impact on delivery rates as this is often referred to as "spoofing."  This is a tactic used by spammers to hide their identity and masquerade as a legitimate source in hopes of bypassing spam filters. 
2. Second, the static domain allows us to handle all the email authentication protocols (SPF, SenderID, Domain Keys)on our client's behalf and requires no additional set up on their end. 
3. Third, VR has a proven record in the mass email space and we've developed a very strong reputation as a legitimate sender.  As a result, our sending domain (noted above) has credibility with both major ISPs and corporate domains so customers stand to benefit from these in-roads.

Horn tooting? You bet. ReturnPath estimates VerticalResponse's deliverability rate as being about 99% for users that use VerticalResponse for AppExchange. Besides, 30% is a pretty good open rate and above industry standard for opt-in marketing emails.

"It doesn't appear to be a true SF application."

Hmm, "true" is a little subjective because it can mean different things to different people but from a user interface perspective we understand that making our app look and feel more like the native salesforce.com application is very important to some users.

We're working on some UI and workflow changes that will address these concerns and will have them ready for launch within a few weeks after Dreamforce.  Speaking of that, come see us at our booth for a sneak peek as we'll be demoing the new wares.

Ok, hopefully some of this information has helped and we hope to get some feedback from the readers out there (good, bad, ugly).  Let's get this open forum rolling and feel free to challenge any of the comments noted above.

Lastly, if you got a product idea, send it over. I want to hear from you all so we can make this app better than ever.

-- Chris Carpio, Associate Product Manager