A few weeks ago I read a post by Steve Gillmor from Salesforce.com about The Office of the Future which pointed out how high tech (iPad, iPhone, GoToMeeting, Skype) and “low rent” (McDonalds parking lot) the office of the future is for some already.

Last night, I was getting ready to go out for the night to do a video shoot and some post-production work when I stopped to think, “Should I bring my laptop with me?” Only a couple of thoughts later in my mind, I concluded that my office is not just an anywhere office, it’s really at the same time a nowhere office. I headed out the door with only a iPhone in hand, yet I knew that I wouldn’t lose productivity that night on account of the lack of technology I was carrying.

In video post-production, you spend a lot of time designing the look and feel you need for a project, then when it comes to output, you can spend hours waiting for your work to be rendered, encoded and finally published to whatever medium you choose. What can you do while you’re waiting? The answer is be productive on a computer that’s anyone’s.

A majority of the business tools I use every day don’t live on a hard drive. They’re in the cloud so Im not locked to a physical office location, nor even to a specific piece of hardware like a laptop or a network to be productive.

What could I do from the edit bay while my projects were rendering and encoding?

I could into Salesforce.com, send some custom email templates to prospective customers and update opportunities I am working on. I could add publishing and video view analytics from The Salesforce Channel to the custom objects in Salesforce and update my channel performance dashboard.

I could search for, organize, filter, and publish videos for The Salesforce Channel all from a standard web browser. Even all my tag groupings are stored in Google Docs so I wasn’t more than a login away from all that.

I could use HootSuite to look at all my favorite Twitter groups and send updates off to my Facebook profile and Pages as well as LinkedIn and obviously Twitter. Through the browser, HootSuite give me a consistent user interface with the same productivity and immediate connectivity to all my networks. All configurations are stored in the cloud and look the same, no matter where I log in.

I could look for new blog posts and status updates on the most important companies and people I talk to each week using Gist. I don’t need to install any app; I go to the Gist website and all my interactions, whether email, calendar, Facebook or Twitter are stack-ranked by importance on my Gist dashboard.

I could work on a collaborative planning spreadsheet, document, or wiki page using Google Docs and Sites instead of tossing files on flash drives and never-ending email threads with constant revisions.

Truthfully, I was able to do all the above work securely, in the cloud, with need for nothing more than the browser on the Mac Pro I happened to be using while encoding the video. I didn’t need processor power; it happened in the cloud. I didn’t need a flash drive because my files and data were all in the cloud. I didn’t need to install applications or plugins or even use a certain browser. My work just gets done wherever I am. And if I’m in the edit bay or on a friend’s laptop or even at my mom’s house, I can be just as productive because my anywhere nowhere office is all I need.

Can you think of a significant day in the history of software? I’m looking for a day that a single company changed the way millions of people do business and made them more productive. I’m guessing there have been a few; but honestly none of them quickly come to mind. From this point forward though, June 22, 2010 ought to stick in your mind as “The Day the Earth was Chatterized. ”

Salesforce Chatter is a collaboration platform for business that’s as intuitive to use as Facebook, more contextual than email, more alive than SharePoint, and runs on a secure, private, and trusted infrastructure already delivering billions of transactions each week.

From the first public mention of the word “Chatter” by Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, to the day it went live for 77,300+ customers, only 216 days passed. And in just 125 days, the Chatter private beta went from 100 to more than 5,000 customers. During the beta, more than 100,000 people used Chatter, and polled recently, 90% of them would recommend Chatter to others. Words like “amazing”, “crazy cool”, “fantastic”, and “monstrous win” are how users describe the Chatter experience. That’s impressive for a feature that can be enabled and deployed in under one minute, with just five clicks of the mouse, with nothing to install; no hardware, no software.

The Veil on Salesforce Data Lifted
While Chatter and Salesforce CRM data are both available to everyone with a Salesforce license today, Salesforce revealed a new version of Chatter licensing which helps extend Chatter and even basic Salesforce data to all enterprise employees at a significantly reduced price. This Chatter-only license offers

• Profiles
• Status Updates
• Real Time Feeds
• Content and File Sharing
• Groups
• Ideas
• Read Only Access to Accounts and Contacts
• Limited Access to the Force.com Enterprise Cloud Computing Platform

Priced at $15 per user, per month, Chatter-only users will be able to utilize corporate data like Accounts and Contacts which have previously been completely off-limits without a full-Salesforce license. Additionally, each Chatter-only user is allocated up to 600 MB of storage space for Chatter content sharing while Enterprise and Unlimited Edition users get a storage bump from 500 MB per user to 1 GB. Professional Edition users get 600 MB of content storage.

Not that long ago, a single add-on license for Salesforce Content was $35 per user per month. Now all Salesforce users get Content included in their licensing and Chatter-only users get tremendously more than just Content was, and at less than half that original price.

While Chatter, file, and content collaboration is a great reason to get these new Chatter-only licenses, I can imagine a fair number of them will also be sold for the sheer fact that it allows read-only access to to Accounts and Contacts, some of the key data in any company.

Additionally, organizations will be able to share one custom application from the Force.com platform with their Chatter-only users.

As if adding Chatter to every Salesforce org wasn’t exciting enough, Salesforce also revealed that there are 30 new ChatterExchange apps available today to bring the Chatter add-on ecosystem to 60 apps. While every one of 160,000 customer designed apps are also Chatterized, these new ChatterExchange apps extend the usefulness of Chatter beyond what even Salesforce imagined. The thing I really like about the ChatterExchange is that this ecosystem is only beginning. Developer preview only began 99 days ago and already we see apps to Chatter when conference room lights are turned on, save and rate Chatter, auto-refresh group and individual status updates, bring in outside collaborators through Google Wave, map out where service reps are and reassign them on-the-fly, Chatter analytics and tons more. Considering Dreamforce 10 is still 23 weeks away, we’re going to see some fantastic new Chatter add-ons before the big show.

For information on getting started with Chatter, visit the new Getting Started page at Salesforce. There you’ll find easy to use resources like:

• Admin activation guide
• Sample email template for rolling out Chatter
• Interactive user training
• Use cases for Chatter
• Customer case studies
• FAQs
• Customer testimonials
• Customer survey results

Chatter customers really say it best.

Today I discovered a quick little tweak that can make your dashboards make more sense. It’s really simple, yet makes a big impact on reading the data.

When you see dashboard tables with “Record Count” on them, it’s not completely intuitive what kind of records you’re talking about. I found a simple way to relabel that dashboard component with the real label of what it is like Accounts, Contacts, Quotes Generated or whatever your data.

This simple tweak uses the Custom Summary Formulas available in the Report Builder tool to give you the same data as a Record Count would, but it’s with your label.

In the video, I show how you can relabel a dashboard table from Record Count to Contacts. This can be particularly useful when creating new tables with more than two columns and when you create Combination Charts with a line of other data. The Record Count label can be changed to be much more specific which makes your chart more readable.

Try it out and enjoy.

Momentum keeps growing in the Service and Support realm at Salesforce.com.  What started as humble beginnings back in 2005 as relatively simple case management is now expanding to be the most comprehensive Service and Support offering yet; the Salesforce Service Cloud 2.  With 8,000 companies already using the “current” Service Cloud platform, Salesforce has cemented their commitment to continued innovation, putting time, money, and developers behind building the best service offering available on any platform and for any business.

Service Cloud 2 consists of three parts, Knowledge, Answers, and Salesforce for Twitter

A core piece of the Service Cloud 2 is Salesforce Knowledge.  Just a year ago, Salesforce saw ahead of the curve and made a strategic acquisition of Instranet, a comprehensive knowledge management company that had some great technology, but still relied on single tenancy and complex software and hardware management.  Service Cloud 2 is the fully “in the cloud” version of that acquisition.  Re-tooling a technology and entirely integrating it to existing products usually takes years, but just one year later, Service Cloud 2 is able to fully utilize Visualforce, Apex code, and all the other benefit already available on the Force.com platform.  When asked if former Instranet customers were interested in switching over to the cloud, Alex Dayon, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Salesforce said, “They’ve been pushing us the hardest ”

Companies work hard to try and share knowledge across their organization and to their customers, but most of the technology to do so is complicated to design, deploy, and maintain.  Whether your business process is simple or deeply complex,  Salesforce Knowledge allows for rapid deployment, easy sharing of information to as few or as many people as you need, extremely simple customization, consistent innovation and upgrades, as well as being on a trusted, secure infrastructure that has been proven reliable.

Salesforce Knowledge is priced at $50 per user, per month and is slated for general availability in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010. (a few months away)

Salesforce Answers takes the knowledge of the masses and allows you to build on it and reuse it.  Most of us look to a search engine to solve a problem much sooner than pick up the phone.  The answers they find though might be dated and it’s often hard to know which answers are right.  Salesforce Answers helps you build knowledge through the people who talk about your products.  In turn, when your customers find the answer to their questions, they can be published to your knowledge base immediately and you gain millions of content writers.

One of the most interesting features of Salesforce Answers is it’s built-in integration to Facebook.  Now your company’s Facebook fan page can utilize Salesforce Answers right out of the box and millions of people have another way to join in the conversation and contribute.

Salesforce Answers is currently in pilot and should be generally available in the first half of fiscal year 2011.

The third piece of the new Service Cloud 2 is Salesforce for Twitter, a free integration between Salesforce and Twitter to monitor your brand, and join in the conversation that’s already happening.  Whether you realize it or not, people are probably talking about your products, your industry, and even your competitors.  How will you be prepared to respond to what’s being said?  Salesforce has a way.

Salesforce for Twitter features

• Search Twitter in real time – Don’t waste your time looking for service issues, let Salesforce find them for you.
• Monitor service issues on Twitter - Once you find something that needs attention, capture the conversation, see what others say, respond to it yourself, and join the conversation.
• Establish an Enterprise presence on Twitter – Show your interest in the people who are interested in you.  Resolve service issues before they escalate and engage your customers before your competitors do.
• Give your customers a direct channel to support through Twitter – Setup your own channel for customers to directly “Tweet to Case.”  Customer issues are immediately turned into cases to resolve and build a reputation of listening and response.
• Integrated push of “Tweets to Knowledge” – Don’t miss capturing a solution. Once resolved, publish the solution to Salesforce Knowledge.

Salesforce for Twitter Is available now from the Salesforce AppExchange.  If you’re interested in more information on Salesforce for Twitter or the Service Cloud 2, follow Salesforce on Twitter @salesforcenews.

Salesforce is proving that they “get” Service and Support.  With the Service Cloud 2, they are building an arsenal of tools to engage customers, track those relationships, resolve their issues, share information, increase brand loyalty, and improve customer satisfaction.

If you’re put back by the thought of how much it costs to use these tools, you probably ought to look at what the things you’re doing today are costing you in software licenses, hardware maintenance, unhappy customers, and frustrated employees.  I guarantee you thousands of companies are going to adopt this technology, pay the price, get the ROI, see repeat customers and grow their business.  Will it be you or your competitors?

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

How would you like to see the next generation of Salesforce user interface and influence the features that they work on for the future?  You can do that by participating in usability studies with Salesforce that are going on all the time.  Not only can you see all this, you’ll get compensated for the hour of your time that it takes to participate.  Depending on the testing, you can get a $50 or $100 Amazon gift card for just that hour of your time and ideas.

I’ve participated in this program for years and I’m impressed to see how the user experience team has grown and just how many people they hire, just to make sure that these apps look, feel, and act the way we need and expect them to.

Whether you can participate now, or sometime in the future, the person to contact is Miriam Melo. She’ll get you added to the list and as opportunities come up for testing, you’ll just get an email invitation.  Respond if you’re available and she’ll work on getting you in.  It’s that simple.  

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.

Salesforce has provided the Dreamforce 08 breakout sessions in record time this year.  Kudos to Erica Kuhl and her web services team at Salesforce tor getting them up so quickly.

Head on over to the Salesforce.com Community site and check out all the sessions you wanted to attend but couldn’t get to.  This year they have much better packaging of the content as the audio is synced to all the slides shown in the session.  Now you’ll see everything you would have gotten in the breakout (except for the speaker).

Didn’t attend Dreamforce 08?  No problem.  You don’t even have to log in to watch any of these great sessions.  Pick out your favorites and watch or even just listen while you’re doing your other work.  It’s a great way to get inspired and get more from Salesforce.

When you travel, why is it that in spite of the fact that you want your money back quickly, submitting your expense report is not the top activity on your mind? So far, for most of us, it’s because we’ve been stuck in a tedious processes of gathering receipts, taping them to paper, inputting data on either a spreadsheet or online app, then either dropping them in an envelope to Accounting. We put off submitting that expense report because it’s not fun and we have more valuable things to do with our time.  Model Metrics just changed the expense reporting game for us though. Weary travelers, get ready for the first and only expense report app you’ll likely ever enjoy. Get ready for Expense2GO.

Starting today in the Apple App Store on iTunes (v 7.7), you can download Expense2GO, the first native iPhone expense reporting app that lets you enter expenses on the go, online or offline and sync them securely to an expense management system in Salesforce.com with full workflow capabilities.

Model Metrics has built Expense2GO from the ground up on the iPhone platform.  They utilized the iPhone camera as a part of the app and integrated the whole process back to Salesforce.com and the workflow and approvals available from the Force.com platform.  From your iPhone, you can incur an expense and literally moments later, it could be approved by your boss and you’re on to more productive work.  At initial launch, the online interface for expenses will be a non-Visualforce application, but later this summer, the full Visualforce user interface will be released.

Part of the game-changing nature of Expense2GO is how you enter your expenses. As you get a receipt, take a quick picture of it with the built-in iPhone camera. Attach it to a visit or trip, put in a note or two and hit the sync button. It’s really that simple. But to say it’s that simple really doesn’t live up to the headline I gave it above, saying that expense reporting is sexy. To understand why I say that, you really have to see the video demo and the screenshots below.  It’s really quite elegant.

The benefits of Expense2GO seem huge.

• Instantly digitize receipts
• Online and offline data entry allows you to report an expense literally anywhere
• Interface utilizes iPhone multi-touch to make data entry extremely easy
• Security is built-in and enterprise class
• Workflow is built-in, customizable, and approvals can be done through the iPhone
• Integration through web services allows deep ties to be built to your back office
• Entering an expense report is fun for the first time

The cost of Expense2GO is $10 per month, per user, regardless of whether you use Salesforce.com already or not.  Salesforce.com CRM licensing is not required.

I heard someone once say that Apple makes the sexiest looking rectangles in the world and it’s true.  Apple makes some of the simplest, yet most elegant designs in their products.  The iPhone demonstrates that and now there’s a way to leverage that elegance in a business process that nobody liked, until now.  Model Metrics is pushing the envelope with the interfaces they’ve built to Salesforce.  Along with the iPhone 3G enhancements that are breaking down barriers to corporate acceptance of the iPhone, Model Metrics is showing us that the iPhone is not just a good looking device, it can really be leveraged to solve a big problem for travelers.

To download Expense2GO, you’ll need iTunes 7.7.  Then head to the iTunes Store and search Expense2GO.  While you can download the app today, you won’t be able to run it on the iPhone or iPod Touch until the iPhone 2.0 sofware update is released on July 11.

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!

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