CRM FYI

Some things get better with age. Some great examples of this are wine, cheese, and a well made violin. Other things don’t age so gracefully, like a salmon sitting on your kitchen counter…for a month. Over time, without proper maintenance, your Accounts and Contacts within Salesforce are going to stink, much like that fish.

People move from one company to another constantly. Their title may be Director of IT today and tomorrow it’s VP of IT. These changes are challenging to keep up with. Who do you go to for this information? Many of the lists you purchase for prospecting are already getting stale but to even find out how good the data is, you have to do all the work.

What if Account and Contact updates were fed to you? What if a simple dot of red or green next to each Account and Contact told you how up to date your data is? What if changes to YOUR Accounts and Contacts were proactively pushed into your Chatter feed?  That’s what you get with the new Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM.

You may know Jigsaw as the website where you can go to get the contact information of 22 million people at more than 4 million companies. Now you can get everything in Jigsaw natively within Salesforce.

Every time you look at an Account; every time you look at a Contact, you know if the data you’re looking at is current. Red tells you there’s an update available. Green tells you you’re in sync with Jigsaw.

Now updates to your Accounts and Contacts just roll into Chatter in realtime. You know when updated data is available. You can quickly click right on in, compare what’s in Salesforce and what’s in Jigsaw, accept any changes and save the record.

How clean is your data today? I’m not talking just the rudimentary, “Does it have a phone number or does it have an email address?” kind of questions. Is your data current? Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM comes with built-in analytics to evaluate what you have today and recommend changes. On top of that, could you possibly see a shorter sales cycle and a higher win rate if you had current data? Jigsaw helps you evaluate that with analytics.

Good data in Salesforce means each phone call or email happens right away because your sales team doesn’t have to go out and research such basic information. And how much more effective will they be when they proactively approach their prospect and ask them about that recent promotion? That personal touch  makes them look “in the know” about who they work with.

Pricing for Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM starts at $29 per month per user and is available today. Check out the images below. You can learn more at http://enterprise.jigsaw.com and be sure to follow @Jigsaw on Twitter.

Excitement builds around three times a year about what goodies Salesforce will deliver to their users via a painless application upgrade.  A few months before a release, you get some glimpses from the Idea Exchange of what’s coming, but then about a month before the release goes out the door, you get the final Release Notes that detail all the stuff they’ve been working on.  Summer 09 is coming this June and has a good dose of enhancements and new features.  Let’s take a look at a few highlights.

Case Sharing with Salesforce to Salesforce

A few years ago, I worked with some companies who were forming something they affectionately called coopetition.  They were some technology companies like HP and Storagetek who knew that when their joint customers had issues, it was not always so cut and dry whose problem it was.  These vendors used a technology platform to share telemetry about their joint customers and keep from finger-pointing between the vendors.  Case Sharing in Salesforce to Salesforce is similar to that.  Two companies who both use Salesforce can work together to immediately share selected case information that can ultimately help the end user get resolution faster, and with more accuracy.

Workflow Visualization

Sometimes a picture explains something much better than words can.  With Summer 09, you can now see your Salesforce workflow processes graphically and explain your workflows better visually, from start to finish. 

I had a chance to see this feature and try it out during the Usability Testing phase of development and I have to say it’s going to be a real help in documentation of more complex processes.  Besides, there’s always someone in the crowd that wants to see your diagram, and now you can get the exact, up-to-the-minute one, right inside Salesforce

Chart Analytics 2.0

Two of the long-missing chart types in Salesforce have been the Donut and the Funnel.  Now they’re both available to you and much rejoicing can be heard at the Idea Exchange from the many people who voted them up.  Other significant additions to Reports and Dashboards in this release are values displayed on charts, new colors in charts, available color-blind-safe colors, and a slightly different look to the Dashboard panels.  Let’s call it some very useful additions, but nothing particularly mind-blowing.

Misc.

Lots of other features can be found throughout the Release Notes, but here is a summary of some you may want to look into.

• Significant changes to both iPhone and BlackBerry app (including the availability of Salesforce Mobile Lite for free, if you didn’t know about that already)
• Automated multi-wave Campaigns
• Generic from-email address support
• Sharing setup UI enhancements
• Enhanced declarative logic for picklists
• Sites usage reporting
• Search result ordering
• SAML 2.0 support
• UI option to help load detail pages more quickly
• Auto complete of User fields with Users in your Recent Items list
• Mexican Spanish and Romanian language support

Randall Isaac, CEO of Bluetide Management is my guest blogger today.  I’ve known Randall for a year and a half and his company specializes in unearthing data hidden in CRM that affects decision making and bottom lines.

Sales process makes a dramatic improvement on revenue performance, yet the majority of sales managers don’t use it effectively.

I am an unabashed fan of CSO Insights’ annual poll of sales executives. As opposed to research from many top analyst firms that is so academic I wonder if any of them have ever carried a sales bag, the survey data from CSO makes want to scream ‘right on – finally real sales challenges are being talked about’! 

Here is some selected data from their latest survey of 1,800 senior sales managers; 

• 89% of sales managers feel sales process provides real positive impact to sales results 
• But 60% of sales managers don’t use sales process 
• Formally managing sales process makes a huge difference; managers who formally manage vs. those who ‘informally’ manage report 5% higher win rates. 
• CSO pegs the incremental revenue associated with this better win rate at an astonishing $2.25M per year, per 20 rep team. 
• Now the clunker: only 15% of sales managers say that their CRM provides impact to revenue results. 

I’d like to offer my opinion on how this data all ties together. 

What is Sales Process?

The Wikipedia definition of sales process 

“A sales process is a systematic approach for performing product or service sales. The reasons for having a sales process include seller and buyer risk management, standardized customer interaction in sales, and scalable revenue generation. 

Specific steps or stages in a sales process vary from company to company but generally include the following steps: 

1. Sales Universe 
2. Sales lead 
3. Qualified prospect 
4. Need identification 
5. Proposal 
6. Closing 
7. Deal Transaction 

From a seller’s point of view, a sales process mediates risk by stage-gating deals based on collection of information or execution of procedures that gate movement to the next step.” 

Why are so few managers formally using Sales Process? 

The last line of the definition is about information that sales reps collect at each sales stage and the procedures that they engage in to move opportunities forward is what sales people do every day. The Role of a manager is to bring that activity in line with sales process. CSO Insights found that there is a dramatic difference in sales performance based on how a manager achieves this; formally and regular reinforcement drives far better performance than simply informally talking about it. 

The naysayers will say “CRM captures sales activity in the form of Tasks and Events (for those not familiar, think MSFT Outlook’s Task and Calendar features for sales people), so what’s the problem?” 

Well, here’s where the whole system breaks down. The role of a sales manager is defined by huge pressure, lots of hours away from family travelling, and too much to do in too little time. They do not have time to click around the CRM to try to find their reps’ activity information. A fly on the wall of any sales forecast review meeting taking place right now anywhere in the world will very likely observe a sales manager inspecting and guiding sales activity with their sales reps verbally. In other words, CRM is not participating in the fundamental sales manager function of managing the team’s sales activity! Voila – millions of sales dollars are being dropped…because of too many clicks! 

The solution is for CRM to think like a manager 

The dilemma is that once a company has realized success and is going down a certain path, it’s really hard to change. Salesfore.com has gone through exponential growth and has a wide diversity of customers. Whenever they add a feature it’s really important to satisfy the widest possible audience. That must make it hard to bring it all down to solve a specific business problem for a specific user role. 

Sit in a forecast review meeting, watch and listen to the dialogue and things become very clear. CRM needs to support consolidation of information onto the user interface so that it flows with the meeting; 

1. The rep walks in the room; show that reps revenue forecast 
2. The manager and rep start drilling into opportunity status; show the high level details of the opportunity, revenue, company, contacts, products, stage, etc 
3. The manager wonders if the reps’ activity lines up with proper sales process: show the task activity associated with the opp. Ie., formally manage process 
4. The manager wants to guide the rep back in alignment with sales; enable on the spot task creation and editing so the manager doesn’t have to wonder if the rep has captured the guidance. 

The point is that these are all actions that CRM already supports, but doesn’t present. A little user interface design can save a ton of clicks..and turn them into millions of dollars! 

You can find out more about Bluetde Management at their website.  http://bluetidemanagement.com  Their flagship product, Sales Clarity gives you a whole new realtime view of the data buried in your CRM.

Talk seems to be forming around the “big announcements” coming next Monday from Salesforce.  TechCrunch says it has to do with more Google integration.  That’s cool….maybe it could have some of what I’ve beein hoping for.

If you look at the new ways you can integrate Google Gadgets into iGoogle with your Google Spreadsheets data, you’ll see some pretty good looking charts.  I’d like to see the ability to use Google Gadgets within a Salesforce Dashboard or Report. 

Appirio has done some cool stuff with Salesforce data secured in Google Gadgets on your iGoogle homepage.  Now I’d like to see the reverse and see some Google Chart Gadgets inside Salesforce. 

If you like the idea, please promote it here on the Idea Exchange.

Successforce is the mack daddy source for info you need as a Salesforce user, developer, administrator, executive, or competitor.  (OK, you need some other bloggers too)  Not a walled garden, they’ve made Successforce open to all who want to read and even contribute to the content therein.  But how does Salesforce make it easy to find what you need?

The answer lies in Google Custom Search Business Edition.  Ryan Pollock, a Product Marketing guy from Google wrote a blog post and did a short video interview about Custom Search with Salesforce VP of Developer Relations, Adam Gross.  Adam talks about how easy it was to integrate the Google Custom Search across all their pages and ensure we find what we need, regardless of what technology their assets lie on in the Salesforce back end.

Looking a little deeper into the pricing model, it wouldn’t be hard to see a quick ROI with an inexpensive service like Google Custom Search. 

Custom Search Business Edition is available in a number of plans:

• Search less than 5,000 web pages: $100 per year
• Search less than 50,000 web pages: $500 per year
• Search less than 100,000 web pages: $850 per year
• Search less than 300,000 web pages: $2250 per year

It’s good to know Salesforce sees it important to draw together all their resources for us, across so many sites.  Site searches are often neglected due to our experience of them providing us little or no value.  I wonder how many corporate websites could use a quick, inexpensive search makeover like this and see their customers find some real value from all the content they’ve spent millions producing.

Idea: Salesforce, you’ve got a “Who We’re Reading” section on Successforce pointing to many blogs, including my own.  How about adding our sites to your Google Custom Search Results?  There’s some good content out there people would get value in finding. Salesforce heard my request, and they’ve updated the custom search to include my blog and others; proof that they’re listening.  Thanks!

Technorati Tags: successforce, salesforce.com, crm, google custom search

See the sessions you missed at Dreamforce 07.  They’re starting to show up on Google Video.  About 50 of the breakout sessions are available already and more will be added soon. 

To see what’s available now, search Google Video for Dreamforce and sort the results by Date.  If you’d like to know when new videos are posted, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for new videos with the Dreamforce tag.

You’ll also find some user submitted videos of the excitement of Dreamforce as well as some footage from the volunteer project run by the Salesforce Foundation held Saturday, September 15. 

As the keynote sessions are added, I’ll be sure to let you know as they are worth a second watch.

Technorati Tags: dreamforce07, force.com, salesforce.com, crm

June 5 has come and gone.  The Google Salesforce alliance announcement that had been rumored and speculated about for weeks was made more clear.  In a nutshell, Google and Salesforce teamed up to revamp the widely popular Team Edition of Salesforce as Salesforce Group Edition.  What it means to the thousands of Team Edition customers is that they will now have an on-ramp to building their business through Google AdWords.

While much of the media is talking about that side of the June 5 Press Luncheon, I wanted to give you some highlights you may not have heard about.  Some are quite significant and deserve more time. 

Google.org was started with the same 1:1:1 model that the Salesforce Foundation began.  Both companies give 1% time, 1% equity, and 1% product.  Wise insight prior to either company going public made it possible to reserve hundreds of millions of dollars to be given away to organizations in need. 

There are three companies that Marc Benioff has particularly high esteem for; Apple, Google, and Adobe.  Apple has made elegence in design and utility.  Google shares the same technology model of multi-tennancy, the availability of web services to empower applications, and an ease of use that makes it stand out against the competition.  Adobe has long strived to make seamless interoperability between it’s sophisticated applicaitons and this is no better evident than in the new CS3 suite of graphic applications.  Marc also pointed to the speed with which Adobe pulled the Macromedia applications into its core applications upon that acquisition.  Adobe understands ingegration, workflow, and ease of use.

Google Gears will be the heart of Salesforce Offline in time.  Google Gears makes offline interaction with web applications possible.  This will make it possible for Salesforce to store data locally while offline, but sync effortlessly when connected, all with an enhanced user interface including AJAX.

Salesforce Group Edition was written as though Google and Salesforce were one.  The start of this effort was designing the product as though they were one company.  Taking the skill and expertise of both development teams, they made improvements that each would not have been able to make on their own.  This is a unique partnereship that neither has done before.

Advances in the API are making a seamless developer experience.  Synergies between Google and Salesforce APIs are making it possible to deliver new usable applications in a fraction of the time it used to take.  Appirio is becoming the Salesforce “poster boys” for delivering applicaitons quickly.  Incubator residents, they’ve been highlighted by Marc Benioff at Software 2007, the May 21 Developer Day, and at the June 5 Press Luncheon.  Largely made up of software industry veterans, Appirio is driving enterprise adoption as an integration partner of Salesforce, and theiy’ve taken five products to market in record time, from ideas they heard about on the Idea Exchange.  Through advancements in their API and Apex, Salesforce is making it possible for entrepreneurs to build their business on the web, with complex functionality, in a less time than ever.

During Marc’s presentation, he might not have said “enterprise” once.  One analyst called Marc on this and it was interesting to see that the majority of the partnership is focused on small businesses, however, the more they learn from Google, it will surely trickle down into added functionality and usability on other editions than just Group.  June 5 was really about small businesses.

June 5 was a big day for Salesforce and Google.  It solidified that both companies are working together to make businesses wildly successful.  They each have some expertise that will be compliment joint development over the next months and years.  They also know they have a good thing going for them, working together.  I can only imagine what they’ll have in store to announce at Dreamforce 07. 

Technorati Tags: google, salesforce.com, adobe, apple, june 5, adwords, small business, group edition, google gears

John Ragsdale, of the Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA), writes about a new service called TruCast by Visible Technologies that brings visibility to what your customers or anyone is saying about your company across the Internet and blogosphere. What I find potentially even more interesting is that this tool not only identifies what is being said about your company, but it brings into view the overall sentiment of their posts and even maps out their sphere of influence across social networks.

TruCast enables you to

• Keep a pulse on what people are saying about your brand, products, or services.
• Respond to individual posts to address angry posters before they gain enough momentum to reach a large audience.
• Use information gleaned from consumers to improve your product, or create a new product to satisfy an unforeseen need in the marketplace.
• Stay ahead of emerging trends in the marketplace.
• Identify current and emerging influencers.
• Start buzz about a product, service, announcement, or initiative.
• Learn more about your most vocal critics and fans.
• Tailor your message with the help of data on opinion leaders.

When it comes to Marketing awareness and knowing what people are saying about your company, this seems like pretty valuable information. On top of that, what if you were tracking those who are big proponents of your company or brand and became aware of their sphere of influence across the Internet? 

Now, what if you tied TruCast to Salesforce and set that kind of sales intelligence before your account executives?  Use the positive proponents of your company to boost customer reference programs and find champions within each industry you serve.  Find out about discussions that are negative and do what you can to approach those issues. 

Bottom line, it does matter what people say about your company.  Now how are you going to find out what they’re saying?

You can read John’s thoughts on it here.

Technorati Tags: sspa, support, visible technologies, trucast, marketing, sales, bi, business intelligence, customer support, salesforce.com

Want to make a connection with someone at a prospect, but you don’t know who to go through?  It’s the age-old problem of making the connections you want through paths you don’t yet know.  How do you do it?  

Suppose I want to meet Dave Girouard, VP and General Manager of Google Enterprise.   What’s my best method of getting to him?

If I go in through LinkedIn, I see that I’m three degrees from him.  I can go through six of my connections to get to one of his connections to get to him.  Sounds good so far.  But who should I go through?  Who carries the most weight getting me in?  Did one of these people go to the University of Michigan with him?  Did someone work with him at Accenture?  It’s hard to tell.  I can’t draw any conclusions like that from what I have.

In comes Cogito, Inc., an on-demand relationship analytics company that can take hundreds of thousands of pieces of data about every person between me and Dave and assess the best path for me to follow.  It can take LinkedIn, Hoovers, Zoom Info, and hundreds more public sources and put them together for me graphically, without me hardly lifting a finger.  Cogito calls it Social Network Analytics.  “If somebody knows somebody else, however that might be, we can tell you how strong that relationship is, no matter how highly separated the relationship is,” says Coleman Barney, President and CEO of Cogito.

And if that wasn’t cool enough, imagine drawing those paths from you to your Contacts and Accounts in Salesforce.com.  Imagine seeing a thumbnail pathway from you to your prospects right there in Salesforce.  Find your best way to key influencers using the data you have, along with everything else that’s out there.  That’s relationship management to the next level and that’s powerful!  And for $10 a month, it sounds like instant ROI.

To find out more, check out Robert Scoble’s interview with Coleman Barney from Cogito.