Salesforce, Apex, and Lead Filtering oh my.

Well it’s been a while and we’ve all been really busy with customer implementations. It’s time to get back to blogging.

January 2008 saw Salesforce.com enable Apex code for free for it’s Enterprise and Unlimited Edition customers. What a huge step this made towards more enterprise automation and empowerment within the platform natively. Imagine taking the best of Java, adding to that native database support, driven by events (triggers) and you have Apex. Very cool stuff. We’ve been able to replace s-controls with Apex that allow for unattended operation of actions instead of a user having to press a button. The beauty of this is no more client-side processing. A lot more flexibility in where we can do things and when. And some cool application stuff we’ve been working on.

For example, tired of all the junk leads that come in from your website. How many times do the sales people have to deal with a lead from joe@biteme.com. Or mickey from disney. What if you could have the equivalent of a spam filter but for leads? Well .. it’s real .. and it’s here. A self-learning Lead “Spam” filter. We populate it with specific titles, company names, and email domains to ignore. You can add to it’s self-learning mode either thru adding your own filters or by individually blocking leads so that the next time they come in you don’t have to mess with it. We’ve got it up and running at a client now and it easily cleaned approx. 12% off their base of leads immediately and it’s managing to catch about 50% of their new leads every day that are not worth following up on. Now all we need is a cool name. Lead Squeegee? Lead Miner? Diamond Hunter? Feel free if you have suggestions to let us know.