CRM FYI

This week I had a chance to write a guest blog post for the Salesforce AppExchange. I chose to write about utilizing networks to become a hero to your Salesforce users.

It’s not hard, it really doesn’t take that much time, and in the beginning, you can even start out by just listening in. No matter your experience level with Salesforce, you’ll gain a lot, just by listening on on some of the channels I mention.

Have a look and I welcome your feedback either here or on the AppExchange blog.

With a network, you don’t need to have all the answers to be a hero to your users.

Amid all the hoopla around Google Buzz, Salesforce is making some buzz themselves in the Enterprise space with the announcement of a Chatter private beta to 100 customers today.

When Salesforce began looking for customers to start kicking the tires on Chatter, the response was overwhelming. More than 2,500 companies enthusiastically volunteered for the beta. From that, 100 were chosen across many industries including financial services, manufacturing, high tech, and professional services.

So what really is Chatter? Well, if you’re one of the 400 million people who have joined Facebook already, you already have a little familiarity with what it’s about. Chatter is streams of information, files, comments, photos, snippets, videos, data, and intelligence, fed to you directly in context of where you already work. Chatter takes the work out of finding this information and instead puts it in front of you, knowing what you need to know about and letting you customize and filter your feeds to be most relevant.

Chatter is the culmination of numerous business functions that we can all benefit from. It’s part content management system, part team report card, part data field history viewer, part chat client, part message board, part workflow notifier, and part get-to-know-the-people-you-work-with social network. It makes data come alive, whether that’s letting you know an important deal just closed, a new product catalog was published, a competitor just had a bad earnings call, your co-worker needs help with their presentation, or one of your customers is late in paying an invoice to you. Chatter brings all that together in one place so you can make better decisions, help others on your team, and easily publish news with just a few clicks

Much of the information you’ll get in Chatter is timely and important, so Salesforce needed to find a way to provide you that information even when you don’t have your browser open with Salesforce. That’s why along with Chatter, they’re introducing a new Chatter client for the desktop that is built on Adobe Air. Much the same way TweetDeck provides you background popups with relevant tweets you decide you want to know about, Chatter will provide you that immediate feedback on your computer, regardless of what application you’re running and what’s in the foreground. Since this Chatter client runs on Adobe Air, it works on both Mac and PC using the same code.

When you’re away from the desktop, you don’t have to miss out on Chatter there either. Chatter will include dedicated iPhone and BlackBerry apps right out of the chute. No more hauling out the laptop to see what your team has been doing to move deals forward. Information is served to you in real time. No waiting for an email that a deal closed, just follow it on Chatter and you’ll know.

Among the biggest benefits of Chatter is the fact that it’s built on a solid, secure infrastructure that you don’t need to worry about. Just know it’s there, it’s secure, it’s scalable, and it’s out of sight. You won’t pay for a server upgrade, you won’t patch a database, you won’t buy a firewall, you won’t add a hard drive, you won’t have to do load balancing, you won’t have to tweak a kernel, you just go about your work and leave the rest to Salesforce. And because Chatter is just an extension of the applications you’ve already setup, all the data security that’s already in place just works, out of the box for Chatter.

It’s almost like Chatter is putting a human side on CRM. Today, we converse in the halls, in meetings, on the phone, and through email, but we don’t exchange more than limited amounts of data about ourselves, the projects we’re working on, the deals we’re closing, or the scoop we learned. We occasionally share information using Salesforce itself, but we rarely see the data come to life. Chatter brings the insights to you. Even the fact that all users of Salesforce will have a profile page which can contain a photo, bio, stream of what they’re doing, the groups they are members of, the documents they update, and the people who they follow tells immensely more than just passing in the hall or during a meeting.

As Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce pointed out back in November, with Facebook, I can know what movie my friends have been gone to, but I don’t have just as easy access to what deals that same person is moving forward in my pipeline. It doesn’t have to be that way. Chatter will offer prescribed and subscribed content to keep you in-the-know about anything in Salesforce.

I can see it now. Chatter streams will eventually become the topic of conversation throughout the halls of companies around the globe. Have you noticed how often Facebook and Twitter are mentioned in the news, television shows, and even in the lunch room? When people begin seeing the value of sharing, collaborating, informing, assisting, building, and  broadcasting, in context, it will change the way we work.

The private beta is a great sign of progress and getting Chatter ready for prime-time. Remember, Salesforce unveiled the concept of Chatter only three months ago at Dreamforce 09. It’s anticipated that Chatter will be available for all Salesforce customers during 2010. While it’s an aggressive timeline to go from 100 customers on Chatter to nearly 70,000 by the end of 2010, that go-live will be a pivotal moment in enterprise computing. It will set the standard by which other collaboration tools will be judged. And while it will be a new concept for it’s users, it’s also going to feel like something they already know. There won’t have to be a day-long class to teach users how to use Chatter. It will come quite naturally, and when it does, watch what will happen in companies; as their data comes alive, reps are enabled, managers are informed, and the company hub becomes Salesforce and Chatter.

To learn more about Chatter, attend the live Chatter event today (February 17) at 12 PM PST.

Staples may have the corner on that “Easy button” thing, but Salesforce now has an “Easy box.” It’s called Setup Enhancer for Salesforce and it’s about to make navigating the Setup tree a whole lot easier.

Setup Enhancer for Salesforce is a Greasemonkey script that helps you find just what you’re looking for in Setup with a minimal number of keystrokes. Looking for Account Validation Rules? Don’t hit all those plus signs out there and scroll down endlessly. Type “val” and you’ll have one list of just validation rules. To learn more, check out the video.

All you need to run Setup Enhancer for Salesforce is

• Firefox 3.5 or greater
• Greasemonkey
• Setup Enhancer for Salesforce

This is the Salesforce administrator’s new best friend. If you try it and like it, please leave a five-star review of it at UserScripts and leave some feedback.

It’s kind of scary, but I think he really did. I was just drafting an email to my favorite User Experience team at Salesforce. I wanted  to discuss any future ideas they had on revamping the interface to allow “gradual data entry” and not just overwhelm people with a huge page layout with temporally superfluous fields on it.

When I heard that Salesforce had released a new feature set called Visual Process Manager (VPM), I first thought it was a rehash of the previously released visual approval process designer. While a good product, it wasn’t the most exciting thing around. (No offense to those who wrote it. Showing the process visually is WAAAY better than just looking at a series of steps.)

As it turns out though, Visual Process Manager was actually the first step in Salesforce breaking open the piggy bank to acquire some new companies to compliment their current functionality and expand way beyond what many of us are even dreaming about.

Salesforce acquired Informavores, a six year old company in the UK who specializes in simplifying process management. Co-founded by Steve Wood and Robert Suttie, they’ve been AppExchange partners with Salesforce since 2009.

The core of VPM is (the formerly known product) Firefly; a sophisticated yet simple to use, drag and drop interface that you can design process flows in minutes, not days. Test them out, on the fly. Then after they’ve been in place for awhile, measure which paths are taken most often; which ones are never used at all. Learn how you can tweak the process to make it smoother for everyone.

Fortunately, some of Informavore’s customers like British Telecom (BT) are already on Salesforce.com for CRM. While Firefly was originally designed to work with nearly any CRM solution, I’m willing to bet in the very near future, they’re moving to just one; Salesforce.

What gets me most excited about VPM is the idea that some data is gathered in sequence and the user doesn’t need to see 80 fields on a page, just to fill out the 20 which turn out to be relevant to their particular issue or inquiry. That’s where VPM’s call scripting comes in.

Using VPM to design a call script allows you to gather relevant data when you need it and help guide sales and support people down the right avenue to not only ensure better data quality, but gather the right data every time and ensure that mandatory paths were taken and so on.

I’ve already got in mind a project that I want to start building on VPM tomorrow. I have a team of sales people who sell Medicare insurance to the public. There are strict regulations around the exact scripts which much be read to members when they’re enrolling in Medicare. VPM will allow me to design all those paths (98 pages on paper) and ensure we not only gather exactly the data necessary to enroll those members, but will ensure that we read them each part of that script and record their response to the whole enrollment process. in “the old” Salesforce, I couldn’t do anything that complex without a customized solution like using Flex Builder for Force.com. Now rather than needing developers, business users can design and deploy complex business processes on their own and adjust as quickly as their business changes.

Do you have business processes which require this kind of scripting? Maybe it isn’t 98 pages like my Medicare model above, but maybe you need to gather relevant data step by step and the “old way” in Salesforce just hasn’t given you the results you need from a data quality or employee guidance standpoint. You should check out VPM.

I’m sure we’ll see a lot more about this in the coming months, but for now, Marc read my mind and has spent his first however many millions of dollars from the piggy bank wisely on acquiring Informavores.  This is a great step forward and I’ll let you know how it goes building my first scripts.

See an overview of Visual Process Manager

salesforce.com: Visual Process Manager Demo

Posted to The Salesforce Channel by CRMFYI on February 02, 2010

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See what Firefly for Salesforce can do (Informavores demo)

See an overview of Firefly for Salesforce and Force.com (Informavores demo)