We all know that in the era of the Social Enterprise, it's essential to engage with multiple customer contacts to progress and close deals in the Social Enterprise. Now, with the Summer ’12 release we make the entry and reporting of this activity much easier with our new Shared Tasks capability, available for all Sales Cloud customers.

With Shared Tasks, a user can assign multiple contacts who are then related to a single task. For example, let’s say that Scott Thompson, a sales representative, needs to progress a big sales opportunity in the current quarter. He owns the task – which we’ll call “Conduct follow-up calls with VIPs” – of following up with several key purchasing influencers after a recent meeting.

Previously, he could not have related multiple contacts to this task. This means he couldn’t track the overall activity plus the individual interactions with these key influencers. Or Scott could have cloned the same task for each of the contacts he needs to follow up with. But this creates a data entry burden for Scott and generates false reporting due to a duplication of the same activity multiple times. In other words, at the end of the day Scott has one activity he needs to conduct, which is to have follow-up conversations with several contacts.

You, our customers, found this to be less than optimal, and that's why adding Shared Tasks was the number one Sales Cloud feature requested on the IdeaExchange. Now, Scott can simply click to add each of his contacts to the same task. And he can then access a single, real-time reporting view which shows that single task and the number of customer interactions he has had. His assignment and his impact are accurately reflected to sales management.

Your Salesforce administrator needs to enable Shared Activities and should read the Summer ’12 Release Notes before implementing this new feature. 

Remember - we always keep a close eye on the IdeaExchange! Please stay tuned for more enhancements to this feature.

So, how will you use Shared Tasks at your company? We'd love to hear! And click here to learn more about Shared Activities and our other new Sales Cloud features in Summer ‘12.