5 tricks to accelerate business with emailed reports using Report Sender

image: /uploads/image: /uploads/image: /uploads/You need it for agreements, reminders, sending files, meeting with colleagues, and so much more.  Email.

Even though more people than ever have some form of access to your salesforce database through platform licenses, communities, etc, people still depend on emailing data for a surprising number of processes/workflows. Unfortunately, you are usually stuck with creating an email forward rule. And still don't get the data in the format you need (attached as a file).

Click here to learn more about the CloudAnswers Report Sender

It can be a challenge to keep processes working with outside partners or internal employees that don't work daily in salesforce.  Also, making them login to salesforce isn't always an option. To help make your admin life easier, we put together a new app that automatically emails your reports. On a schedule you decide, to any email address, not just those people with salesforce accounts (yes, inside and outside your company).

Here are our top 5 recipes to accelerate business processes using CloudAnswers Report Sender:

#1 Disseminate Product Updates to Partners

Partner selling is a reality of today's hyper-connected business world but most companies don't have the time and budget to build real integrations to synchronize their product catalogs.  A survey of our largest customers found that over 90% are distributing product catalogs using emailed spreadsheets that they must extract manually and send personally. That's a huge time commitment when you scale to large numbers of partners.

Here's how to solve this problem for free: 1. Create a report for products that are public to partners (this might require creating a custom field like "Partner Visible") 2. Create a report filtered to those products 3. Schedule the report using Report Sender (free app)

As an added bonus, your partner might be able to automatically load your spreadsheet into their system, making the process totally automatic for everyone involved!  Just make sure to include your product code and/or salesforce id (case-safe id) of the product so they can detect updates reliably.

#2 Connect Teams Without Salesforce Access

Here are some common scenarios where teams might not have full access to Salesforce but can benefit immensely from being pushed selective information. Implementation teams need to know about customer service issues for their projects, but they might be working in an ERP tool.  One customer service team might be using Jira self-hosted and can't easily integrate tickets. Finance teams might want to knows what upcoming deals are likely to close this quarter so they can prepare documentation folders for complex sales.

Currently, you might have one shared read-only account everyone uses to get information, but it still requires them to log in and get information on a pull-basis that requires your business users to login, remember where to go, and hopefully find the right information.

#3 Get rid of those users that only log in once every 3 months

Give them a daily or weekly email subscription of the information that pertains to them.

Each scenario above can usually be solved by creating scheduled reports targeted to the right individuals or mailing lists. Schedule a report of cases for a project manager's client or related product tag for a support team using an outside customer support tool.  Schedule reports of upcoming deals (current CQ or next 90 days) with relevant fields included.

#4 Provide Lead Lists to Lead Sales Partners

A popular trend over the last 5 years has been to outsource the BDR or cold calling roles.  Companies create 1 user account under a false name, assign all the leads they want to be called, and then let them rip.  It sounds great in practice, but it's sometimes hard to tell what kind of progress is being made over time since not everyone is familiar with how to build the reports, how to evaluate reports like "leads with converted lead information". Sometimes merging duplicates can really change statistics.

Solution:  Create a scheduled report to the partner and yourself that includes their assigned leads. This attached file will get sent every weekday or every week and will act as a poor man's snapshot that you can always refer back to.

However, some lower-cost cold-calling partners will want to call down a spreadsheet and won't log in to your CRM (or maybe it's just too time-consuming on your side to set that up).  It's up to you to give them that spreadsheet on a regular basis - which can be fully automated by using CloudAnswers Report Sender (free app).  Your flow then becomes: 1.  The partner gets an emailed report of all their open leads 2.  They call down the list, update the spreadsheet, and email it back to you

Now your whole process is automatic from your side and you don't waste time emailing reports anymore.

#5 Poor-man's EDI (integration)

The largest companies will negotiate API based connections, so each company's system will communicate in real-time with each other.  Companies on Salesforce have an average user count of only 25, so the chances are that you aren't having your IT department program integrations with partners at the moment!

Here's a way some of our middle size customers have actually integrated with partners with minimal IT involvement and without having to open firewall rules, involve security people, etc: a.  Identify the data you want to send to your partner using a report with filters b.  Schedule your report using CloudAnswers Report Sender (free app) to your partner's email address c.  If your partner is using salesforce, they can paste in code freely found online here, here, or here. Or if they use another system, they can often write a script to process the file from an inbox automatically. (we also do consulting so let us know if you need help)image: /uploads/image: /uploads/