Salesforce offers many ways to follow up with prospects but there is no real opportunity to enforce best practices or data accuracy so that reps focus on selling rather than mundane, but necessary, data entry. Until now…
Today, Active Endpoints is pushing the boundary of just how effective sales reps can be by making available a free meeting follow-up wizard. Built in Cloud Extend for Salesforce, this wizard guides users, directly in the CRM, through the process of entering meeting notes, capturing new contacts, creating follow up tasks and creating new opportunities. Details are in the press release below.
We invite you to take a minute to read about how the wizard offers priceless meeting follow-up, making the lives of sales reps much easier. Directly from Eric Egertson, our VP, Business Development and Strategic Accounts, he describes the wizard’s benefits from his own viewpoint as a salesperson, and how it allows him to focus on selling, not admin.
We all like free stuff. Try something at no risk. The Apple Store culture, in particular, has taught us to like free software. Well, Active Endpoints is taking Apple’s lead and offering a free Meeting Follow-up wizard, built with Cloud Extend for Salesforce, the leading cloud based sales force automation (SFA) system, to make the lives of sales reps much easier. Documenting notes from a sales call, new contacts you met, new opportunities you identified, and follow-up tasks such as additional meetings are now automated through this free Meeting Follow-up Wizard. This is just one sample of the wizards that can be built in Cloud Extend.
Get the wizard now or watch a quick five minute video of it. Below the video, you’ll find a quick overview of how the wizard works.
Once the wizard is installed, you’ll find a “Guides” section in the Salesforce Contact screen. Expand the Guides section to run the Meeting Follow-up wizard, which prompts you to:
Enter general meeting notes as free-form text.
Enter new contacts, including first name, last name, email address, business phone and title.
Enter new opportunities, including opportunity name, booking amount, expected close date and stage. Close date and stage are entered via pop-up calendar and pick list, respectively.
Create follow-up tasks, including task due date (set via pop-up calendar) and the task itself (via free-form text). Follow-up tasks can also be created for and assigned to other users.
As you move through the wizard, each completed step is numbered and tracked in the “History” window that sits to right of the main wizard window. To go back to an earlier step and add another meeting note, for instance, or follow-up task, simply click on that earlier step in the History window. After completing the wizard, all the information entered displays in the corresponding fields of Salesforce Contact and/or Account screens.
Sure, you could memorize the four steps above and enter all of the information in the Salesforce UI directly. But you’d be jumping from field to field or screen to screen entering new information. Worse, an incoming call or some other distraction could interrupt your post-call routine, leaving a new contact or opportunity undocumented.
The wizard, on the other hand, prompts you for everything you may need to enter – in logical order, within a single screen. Step away from the wizard for a minute or a day or longer, and when you return, it picks up where you left off – with the History window confirming the completed steps.
By streamlining meeting follow-up, the wizard can improve customer relationship management, marketing programs and pipeline visibility. And now, you can streamline your follow-ups for free. Get the Meeting Follow-up wizard, and let us know what you think.
Big Data processing improvements over the last several years have been incredible. Between in-memory solutions and massively parallel high performance analytics, it is just mind-boggling the computations that can be completed almost instantaneously. With the near universal connectivity and information available from both Big Data and transactional data sources, it is now possible to get the answer to just about any question no matter if it is from transaction histories, social media interactions or machine to machine sensors. It all translates into faster problem resolution and greater insight into customer satisfaction, which in turn should help every business create higher value for their customers.
However, enterprise applications have not maintained pace. Not only are they poorly suited for mobile, a topic in one of my previous posts, but today’s enterprise applications are woefully inadequate at integrating all that data into business users’ everyday workflow so they can react ahead of time.
The solution is not more middleware or enterprise application integration, as some of the big stack vendors such as IBM, Oracle and SAP have suggested. Instead, the solution is to divide and conquer, so to speak.
First, keep IT focused strictly on the data, keeping it clean, keeping it secure, making it available from every source (including Big Data sources), providing metadata views, etc. Second, permit business users to create their own processes by using their own wizards that leverage this newfound intelligence over the data.
In this new enterprise architecture, data services, created by IT, become the foundation for how we do our work at our desk or on the road. Each product group, geography and functional area would then create their own “customer centric” methods of interacting with the data and not be held hostage to antiquated applications that need to be rewritten or optimized.
Last week, salesforce.com’s Cloudforce Social Enterprise Tour hit Chicago and we were in town for the festivities. As a sponsor of the event, we were excited to bring Cloud Extend to the masses, doing live demos for attendees representing telecommunications, manufacturing, professional services, insurance and systems integrators. Doing hundreds of demos makes the day go by quickly and it’s hard to remember many of the comments. However, a few key ones stood out in my mind: “this is the coolest demo at the conference” and “your product made it worth my while to drive over four hours to this event.”
It wouldn’t be Cloudforce without a party so once the conference concluded, many attendees stopped by our happy hour next door at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place. It was a relaxing and fun way to recap the Cloudforce sessions, as well as meet many of the members of the regional Salesforce user groups. A big THANK YOU to the user group leaders for encouraging their members to join us. Feel free to contact them if you’re interested in joining:
Those of us on the front lines, especially the ones sitting in call centers around the world, know that virtually everything we do today is more complicated than it used to be. The competitive landscape is constantly shifting, new products and features are coming out faster than ever, and rules and policies seem to be in a perpetual state of flux. Closing our hottest prospects and supporting our most loyal customers become more complex with every passing day.
Today, it’s a given that no sales or support person can retain all that product, customer, competitor, market and other related information in his or her head. In response, marketing people, sales managers and domain experts of every sort try to help by providing vast amounts of information, building knowledge bases, and setting up social networks.
But more is not always better. All those well-intended efforts can overwhelm and confuse sales and support people where huge volumes of undifferentiated, and possibly conflicting information are readily available, especially on a social network,
Don’t get me wrong. Content, knowledge bases and social networks are extremely helpful. It’s really tough to sort through all that stuff when you’re on the phone with someone who’s expecting an answer NOW! On the front line, you don’t need more information. You need context aware automation that delivers the answers you need, when and where you need it. I don’t mind chatting with colleagues or putting a question out to the group, or searching a knowledge base. But to tell you the truth, it is a royal pain and keeps me on the phone too long. I prefer a business user-oriented, easy to use approach such as a wizard, developed by sales, marketing or support (and not IT consultants) that asks me a few questions. The wizard then gathers the information I need automatically behind the scenes, giving me the answer, or a suggestion of what to do next, in “real time.” I’m left to focus on what I do best – selling – rather than information hunting and gathering.
I’ve been a really happy Salesforce user since 2003. But it can be a little overwhelming for newer users, especially when they’re selling or servicing a lot of products. Thing is, like most cloud apps, Salesforce is very data-centric. It gives you lots of screens for entering data and tracking data. And Salesforce has excellent tools for reporting data.
What Salesforce doesn’t really focus on is process. It’s just not a process-oriented application. So it doesn’t walk users step-by-step through their workflows, guiding them through processes they need to perform in the course of their work. And that’s where Cloud Extend for Salesforce enters the picture: it lets business users create and add process wizards to the Salesforce UI, making it easier for novice and expert users alike to do their jobs.
Take a brand new lead screen in Salesforce. The lead status is open. There’s no lead source. There are no pending activities. There’s no activity history. You just started working on this lead, so you’ve clearly got a lot of data to collect, but no clearly defined process for collecting it. Cloud Extend for Salesforce adds that clarity, adding a sales guide section in the lead screen to give users a series of guides — or wizards — that walk them through capturing a given lead.
For instance, we created a lead wizard for saleforce.com’s Cloudforce show in New York City last November. I was on the show floor with two other sales reps, armed with iPads and collecting information about prospects that stopped by the booth. We wanted to know 1) whether they were using Salesforce, 2) the size of the Salesforce installation, and 3) their biggest challenges.
Our goal was to qualify whether to pursue the lead. The challenge was to do it during that three- or four-minute conversation, while people were wandering around with drinks and hors d’œuvres and a recording of Mark Benioff’s keynote played repeatedly and loudly in the background. It was a hectic, confusing environment made more so by our sleep deprivation.
Now, I know Salesforce and Cloud Extend for Salesforce like the back of my hand, and I’ve been selling for quite awhile, but I used the wizard like everybody else. Why? Because it made my job easier. It ensured I remembered everything I was supposed to ask and discuss. And it streamlined data entry, automatically loading the gathered information into Salesforce.
Here, see a demo of the wizard we created, “Cloudforce New York City First Contact.” Below the video, I’ll just point out some of the highlights of using it during a typical encounter at the show.
First of all, the wizard asks for a last name and a company name, which are used to search LinkedIn and pull profile information into Salesforce. After I confirm that the LinkedIn profile retrieved by Cloud Extend for Salesforce is, in fact, the profile of the person I’m talking to, the wizard prompts me with each of the three questions I want to ask.
The third question — what’s your biggest Salesforce challenge? — is designed to trigger a high-value conversation, a brief but stimulating sales pitch. To that end, the wizard guides me to follow up that question with likely challenges: data consistency, driving user adoption and having people follow best practices.
Depending on the lead’s response, the wizard presents several discussion points that demonstrate how Cloud Extend for Salesforce overcomes that particular challenge. For instance, if user adoption is the issue, the wizard prompts me to note that user adoption increases when 1) mundane tasks are done automatically, 2) data is consistent, reliable and up to date, and 3) relevant information is easily and readily accessible.
After my pitch, the wizard guides me to schedule a follow-up meeting and demonstration. And if the person says “yes,” then I’ve qualified the lead — in about four minutes.
Now, the wizard is doing more than guiding my interaction. It’s also automating a number of steps I’d otherwise have to do by hand. First, I only enter the lead’s last name and company name, and the wizard automatically populates my lead screen with the first name, full company name and other company information found on LinkedIn, including the number of users in the company.
Second, the wizard automatically modifies the lead status, changing it from “open” to “qualified” based on the follow-up meeting I scheduled. The lead source is also automatically populated, in this case with “Cloudforce New York.”
Finally, the wizard creates a pending activity for a follow-up call in seven days, at 10am. And the activity history notes I met this prospect at Cloudforce and his biggest challenge is driving user adoption. I don’t have to type that note in. Trying to type anything on an iPad can be a pain, especially at a tradeshow. Instead, the wizard adds the note, based on my responses to its’ on-screen prompts while meeting with the prospect at the show.
While I’ve focused on leads, Cloud Extend for Salesforce wizards can be created for and run on any object in Salesforce, including accounts, opportunities, contacts, cases, even custom objects specific to your organization. And everything runs within the Salesforce UI, so users never have to leave Salesforce to do their work — something appreciated by first-time and long-time Salesforce users alike.
A guest post by Jonathan Adlerstein, CIO Plymouth Rock Energy
After a grueling selection process, months of careful planning and a waterfall implementation with a potpourri of vendors and professional salesforce.com implementation specialists, Active Endpoints made a huge splash in our new Force.com ERP implementation. How did this latecomer have such a dramatic impact on this strategic project?
First, some background. Founded in 1948, Plymouth Rock Energy delivered coal and heating oil to homes and businesses in New York City. Many years later, we continued to deliver heating oil but had also expanded into the deregulated energy market to serve natural gas and electricity to our customers. In the past few years, we’ve experienced explosive growth in these new product offerings and have since expanded across state lines to serve over 30,000 customers in the northeastern United States.
That’s all fine and good for the business, but it presented some pretty serious challenges to our technology team. In my tenure as the CIO, I’ve had to contend with IT systems that simply weren’t designed to cope with the sheer volume of customers the company had acquired. We were not able to handle the rapid growth and expansion into new territories. The impact to the business was dramatic. The impact to the customer was worse. For example, we were losing our footing as a family-run business with a reputation of unsurpassed customer service and slipping into another faceless company which lost customer information, and billing customers was error prone. We needed to take action to get our feet back under us.
My first priority was to organize an evaluation of CRM platforms. We looked at all the usual suspects – Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and salesforce.com – plus some industry-specific applications. We had a level playing field, with no biases toward any vendor. We didn’t care if the final solution was “on-premise” or “cloud-based.” But, it had to be versatile enough to suit our business. After eight months, we selected Salesforce because we felt that it not only matched our initial requirements, it also had the flexibility to handle our future growth.
My next step was to engage a salesforce.com partner to help with the planning, implementation and roll-out. I selected Bluewolf, and worked with them for four months to map our business processes and carefully plan the project. We produced what Bluewolf terms “The Blueprint” – a comprehensive document detailing all our requirements and how we would implement them. The rollout was divided into multiple phases. We rolled out the first phase – Service Cloud – to address customer support, account enrollment and termination. Later phases would roll out Sales Cloud and our new custom ERP system for billing, invoicing, sales and marketing. It was during this period that I attended Cloudforce New York in November 2011 and saw a demo of Cloud Extend for Salesforce. I was immediately hooked.
Salesforce is a great platform, but I still faced some issues with making our customer service department more efficient. This was due in part to the customization of Salesforce and the complexity of energy supply billing. For example, we had many processes which required multiple steps from the user, e.g. create the account, associate the appropriate physical delivery location, link to the utility account, etc. These complex processes were required for the proper functioning of the system, but also proved cumbersome and prone to errors. Reps were often entering the same data in multiple locations. The process simply took too long – customers would wait on hold for ten minutes! While Salesforce had gone a long way towards improving our customer service I could see that:
Data entry was somewhat inefficient, error prone and redundant;
We were wasting a significant amount of time resolving routine billing inquiries, resulting in poor customer service.
Many processes were overly cumbersome and confusing and therefore not completed properly which resulted in poor resolution to customer cases.
When I saw Cloud Extend, I knew it would be a way to automate the tasks of our customer service agents to resolve our outstanding issues. With fantastic support from Active Endpoints, I created our first Cloud Extend guide in a couple of hours. To complete the guide I realized that I needed some search functionality. Active Endpoints took my feedback and created a search component for me that I could then add to my guide. After a few days of testing, I published my guide into our production Salesforce org.
The effect was instant and I immediately saw our call center productivity improve. The agents are now efficient and there’s no redundancy. They follow the guide and make decisions that determine what objects need to be created, plus they have the ability to dynamically add objects, as they see fit. Data is entered only once and propagated. In a few clicks, the agents can create a whole billing hierarchy within Salesforce.
There has also been an improvement in data quality. This is because we’ve eliminated duplicate customer records, such as duplicate accounts for gas and another one for electricity. It just doesn’t happen anymore. We also don’t get the angry calls from customers who say “Hey, I cancelled my service over a month ago, but I’ve just got another bill.” This is because the most efficient customer service process is completed EVERY TIME since we’ve added Cloud Extend, so when there’s a hand-off from one agent to another, no one drops the ball.
The benefits we’ve achieved are outstanding. We’ve seen a 20% increase in agent productivity, reduced our customer call waiting times to virtually zero and reduced the time it takes to create new accounts by 95%. What used to be a 10 minute process is now just a minute and a half.
We’ve started phase two and will implement Sales Cloud with Cloud Extend this summer. We plan to utilize the opportunity management capabilities in Salesforce this summer and Cloud Extend to guide our sale reps through the lead processing and opportunity creation process. Salesforce was a great foundation, but the addition of Cloud Extend has energized our implementation so that we could reach full power (pun intended). Cloud Extend has given us the ability to simplify very complex processes, increase productivity and increase customer satisfaction while giving our business the tools it requires to continue our strong growth.
For more information about Plymouth Rock Energy and how businesses and residential customers can save money on gas and electricity bills, please visit www.plymouthenergy.com or call 855-32-POWER (855-327-6937).
It’s safe to say that Salesforce.com has changed the face of enterprise applications. By being the first to put software in the cloud and make it available via affordable subscriptions, sales organizations of all sizes are able to rent full-featured commodity software and have it available the next day. Because of Salesforce.com, there’s now a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application for just about everything. Even Oracle, SAP and Microsoft are making their applications available as SaaS.
But little did we know that as Salesforce.com was kicking off the cloud commoditization trend, they were leading us down the nefarious “lock ‘em in” path of the very companies Marc Benioff was deriding for their on-premise “software” ways. Can anyone say Microsoft .NET?
Quietly, or maybe not so quietly, Salesforce.com has been encouraging the use of APEX, a proprietary programming language, like C#, that only they support. Today, according to Salesforce.com, more than 340,000 APEX developers have written 2 billion plus lines of APEX code. On the surface, this appears to be a good thing as APEX provides the developer (usually a consultant) with a tool set to customize Salesforce.com to meet the company’s needs.
Not so fast! What about the idea of consumerizing IT? What about commodity SaaS?
Let’s not let IT muck up SaaS with a bunch of proprietary middleware.
For context, PSA is a well-established insurance and financial services firm that was founded in 1928. We’ve since grown to 160 employees serving businesses and individuals with a broad range of products. We’re ranked as one of the top 100 insurance brokers in the United States as well as one of the top 100 in retirement planning with over $1 billion in assets under advisement.
It’s safe to say, we know how to sell. And we thought a CRM app — designed to improve customer sales, service and support — would effectively sell itself to salespeople. But three years ago, when we first made Salesforce available to our employees, they just weren’t buying it. Instead of immediate acceptance, our users expressed resistance. Their primary criticisms revolved around the value of Salesforce. Most viewed it as unnecessary data entry at best. As a result, few used Salesforce when it debuted in 2009.
Looking back, we made a number of mistakes with our initial Salesforce deployment. It offered very little customization out of the box and was not integrated with our agency management system. And it was optional, so users didn’t have to use it if they didn’t want to. When we re-launched Salesforce in May 2011, we took a much different approach to putting CRM tools in our employees’ hands. First, we integrated Salesforce with our agency management system via Informatica Cloud. We also customized Salesforce extensively with the help of Silverline CRM, a customization firm in New York City that focuses on the financial services industry.
Additionally, we used Cloud Extend for Salesforce to make it a lot easier for our users to use Salesforce. Given the variety of our user population, ease of use was a must. PSA has some tech-savvy users, the kind who won’t give up an iPhone without a fight, but we also have some very successful, more traditional salespeople who have amassed a sizable book using “Post-It” notes, notebooks, Excel spreadsheets , Outlook reminders and other home-grown systems.
The user experience we wanted to emulate was an airport kiosk. That is, we wanted to give our users a simple, Q&A-style user interface — Salesforce asks the questions, the user provides the answers. Basically, the UI leads the user through a given CRM process, from creating a lead to pursuing a cross-selling opportunity. And while users see a very straightforward and simple UI, complex logic and algorithms are at work behind the scenes to route users through precise CRM workflows.
And that’s the role Cloud Extend plays for us. It provides an easy to use, kiosk-style UI on the front end to shield users from the complexity of the Salesforce engine on the backend. That simplicity and ease of use are essential to driving broad adoption and use. And by turning CRM tasks into programmatic processes, salespeople and other customer-facing PSA employees can more fully engage the client and rely on Cloud Extend for Salesforce to prompt them for the important fields and information we use for the immediate opportunity as well as for future sales and marketing efforts.
Android and iPhone smartphones are really cool, but are they any better than an old BlackBerry for doing real business on the road? I don’t mean browsing consumer-oriented sites, watching movies or playing games, but using critical business applications. Have you ever tried to navigate your back office enterprise applications on the road, or even the more modern cloud-based applications like Salesforce? They are virtually unusable! Even the soon-to-be-released touchscreen version of Salesforce may work on an iPad, but it’s terrible on a smartphone.
The reason is simple: It’s not the devices, but the applications! IT-developed applications are still in the dark ages compared with the consumer world. Traditional applications are great at storing data, keeping it safe and clean. But when it comes to the way we want to interact with them on the road, no dice. The apps themselves aren’t formatted properly for new mobile screens, so they look awful. The on-screen keyboards that dominate make it difficult to enter information and navigation is kludgy. As a result, the efficiency and productivity advantages of mobile go out the window. So how can you and your team be efficient with inefficient tools?
Let’s say you’re sitting in a coffee shop, preparing for a meeting with a customer or a prospect. An enterprise application like Salesforce should make it easy to access everything that’s related to the opportunity, including hints around messaging as well as cross-selling and up-selling. And after the meeting, Salesforce should let you take notes right then and there — while it’s still fresh in your mind and the creative juices are flowing — not later when you get home or back to your desk.
Salesforce and the thousands of AppEx developers/consultants that comprise their ecosystem, however, have designed their applications for people sitting at a desk, not for people on the go. So, the pain points that sales organizations face concerning best practices for cultivating business, generating revenue, improving efficiency, adopting sales tools, messaging consistency, etc.? All those problems get magnified when salespeople are no longer tethered to their desks.
If they are going to succeed on the road, salespeople need a new interaction pattern that leverages their smartphones’ built-in device capabilities, such as voice-to-text dictation, and automated processes — that they or their managers design themselves — without AppEx coders who are back at the office.
Can Salesforce be adapted practically to mobile? Absolutely. That’s what a big part of what we do today!
The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg makes a great point in Take a Note: Typing With No Hands: from a usability standpoint, voice input on a smartphone or tablet is usually quicker and more accurate than typing on a virtual keyboard. Actually, I’d suggest that usability improvements for mobile phones and tablets can go even further than voice-to-text dictation. To really make life easier for mobile device users, you’d want to combine the smartphone’s voice to text capability with the touch screen.
Much of what we do on mobile devices goes beyond email, tweets, Facebook posts and other content creation tasks to include process-driven interactions like making an online purchase or working with an enterprise application. In those cases, we’re navigating question-oriented trees with yes/no or multiple choice answers. That type of procedural activity can be accomplished much more easily and quickly by touching a button on a screen — a “thumb click.” And the combination of voice-to-text and thumb clicks has the possibility of completely changing the way we interact with both business and consumer applications.
At Active Endpoints, we are taking this hybrid usability concept even further. Beyond supporting voice-and-touch input, we will make it possible for you to create your own wizards that combine voice and thumb clicks to automate and simplify the activities you do on an everyday basis. Doctors, for example, could use a wizard to guide them through the patient intake and initial examination processes, prompting the doctors with common questions and answers for their particular practice. Some questions might be answered by speaking into the smartphone while others may answered with a thumb click. With a bit of integration on our end, that information can be put directly into their back-end application and combined with automated steps for doing things like scheduling a follow-up visit, issuing prescriptions, referrals to another physician. This will make life easier for everybody – no IT required.
Everyone says their software is easy to use. And when it comes to anything related to “process” or “workflow,” everyone claims that a non-technical business user can use it. Certainly we claim it, and so does salesforce.com when they talk about their Visual Workflow product (actually some presenters from salesforce.com have admitted that the tool requires some programming prowess, but I suspect they were not following the company line).
So, when everyone claims some subjective characteristic like “ease of use” for their software, how can you tell who is telling the truth? I know what I would want: a side-by-side comparison. Walk me through what you have to do with each product in order to accomplish the same goal. And, of course, it has to be honest. You can’t show a side-by-side that claims that one product requires five steps to do something, when there is actually a way to do it in two steps if you know the software well. Unfortunately in this industry, people just don’t do side-by-side comparisons.
Today that changes — at least for these two technologies. Here is a side-by-side video comparison of Cloud Extend for Salesforce and salesforce.com’s Visual Workflow.
I have to commend my colleague Clive Bearman. He spent weeks learning Visual Workflow so that he could do an honest job of showing what you have to do in order to use it. There are all kinds of things that couldn’t be put into the side-by-side, like how hard it was for Clive to figure out what he had to do in Visual Workflow. I suppose he could have put together a video that talked about all the things he tried and all the places he looked before he figured out what he needed to do, but that would have been pretty boring to watch, and anyone could have claimed that they would have found it faster.
Luckily he has created the video so that you don’t have to watch the whole thing in order to get the point. He starts by showing how quickly and easily you can create a small process using Cloud Extend. He then shows the same process being developed using Visual Workflow, which takes much much longer — in fact, when he is only about half way through building the Visual Workflow equivalent, he gives up and skips to the end. Nonetheless, the Visual Workflow section is still longer (and more painful) than most viewers would be willing to sit through. But there is enough there that you can verify that nothing is being made up and no steps are missed. Those really are all the things you would need to do to get Visual Workflow to work.
So I hope you enjoy seeing a clear comparison between two technologies that make similar claims and (dare I say it)how easy it can be with Cloud Extend.
If information is the life blood of business, then information collection is the heart that pumps life into every team and geography.
However, the mind-numbing, mundane tasks associated with entering information into a CRM sucks the souls out of business people, especially sales people.
Repetitive, routine work crushes creativity, and sales people just won’t do it. This is a problem that applies to every sales team, and I’ve spent most of my professional life managing sales teams. Communication is especially vital when you have distributed teams because you miss the hallway conversations that help you to understand what is going on and so can’t begin to assist without having accurate, up-to-date information recorded in applications like Salesforce.
Beyond business predictability and forecasting, information helps you to identify opportunities and overcome obstacles. Sure, you’re accountable for providing an accurate forecast if you’re a sales manager. But nobody wants an accurate forecast that predicts you’re going to be 50 percent of quota. You really want to discover new ways to find new opportunities, close more opportunities, generate more demand and drive more revenue.
When I manage sales people, a key way I add value is through “brainstorming” with a set of facts. At IBM, we had regimented processes to collect those facts including a signature sales cycle with well-defined sales stages and countless spreadsheets with pivot tables, and at the end of the day, it was unmanageable and out of date. The reports may have been accurate around the time of the forecast, but they didn’t stay accurate going forward. Keeping accurate, current information was still a challenge even when practices and procedures were in place.
How do we fix this? It is clearly not by demanding more reports. We need to find a way to make it easier and more relevant for the sales executive to capture accurate and up-to-date data. The solution is through empowerment, not top down mandates. Business users and sales executives need to be able to self-author their own wizards, or process automations, to simplify their lives, and thereby benefit the company as a whole.
I have to say that I agree with much of what he says about the claims made by BPM methodologists. Their claims often boil down to the business equivalent of motherhood-and-apple-pie statements – better customer experience, more revenue, greater efficiency. The problem is that, although the benefits really are possible, the claims are often too abstract and broad. This over-hyping naturally leads to disillusionment – a pattern that has been formalized in Gartner’s hype cycle (which is one Gartner theory that I completely agree with). The hype cycle is more typically associated with technologies than with methodologies, and so it is that BPMS technology is also ready to weather the trough of disillusionment to make it to the nirvana-like plateau of productivity.
But I’d like to zero in on the key points that Theo makes about BPMS technology in his original post – specifically this line:
“[BPMS technology] assimilates and copies most corporate functions with the promise of workflow, dynamic case management and customer focused processes. But so does salesforce.com so why aren’t they BPM ? I wrote two years ago about how they understood process better than half the vendor circuit when they created their Visual Process Manager. “
Theo is on the right track here. The key question is: what application does the user work with most? The answer with a BPMS has typically been that users should use the BPMS UI for starting processes, running reports, working with task lists and ultimately doing work by claiming tasks and filling out the forms that are embedded in the tasks. As Theo suggests, this means that the incorporation of a BPMS seems to mean that you have to assimilate and copy most of your corporate functions. Naturally, this is a deterrent to adoption – both due to the effort, but also because the users are happy working in their CRM (or other app) and don’t want to replace it.
What this implies is that users should be able to work on processes without having to leave their primary application. Process design and execution should be embedded.
When it comes to applications, salesforce.com is the 800 pound gorilla. So is salesforce.com’s Visual Workflow product the right way to incorporate business process automation in Salesforce? It isn’t if you want processes to be created by the person who knows what the process should be – the subject matter expert. For that, you should use Cloud Extend for Salesforce. It is so dramatically easier to use that we recently posted a side-by-side comparison of building a process with each of the two technologies so that you can see for yourself. You’ll be amazed at the difference.
Cloud Extend does not try to make it possible to create any possible kind of business process. This is OK because Theo is right that Salesforce itself provides key benefits like having a single view of the customer – all that is needed is a better way to guide its users to do the right things at the right time, and to do some things for them automatically. This means that the most important characteristics of the technology need to be a completely seamless integration with Salesforce and a design tool that can be used by subject matter experts. Cloud Extend achieves this partly because it does not try to handle more complex business processes, which would require capabilities like event handling or message correlation.
So stop concentrating on BPM as a methodology or even on using a BPMS to replace the applications that your employees use on a day-to-day basis, and start thinking about how you can leverage those applications but allow your subject matter experts to spread their expertise to everyone and improve your productivity.
I’m excited to announce that Justin Hoffman, Marketing Director for PSA Financial & Insurance Services, will be presenting the value his team has realized in Cloud Extend for Salesforce at the Washington DC Metro Salesforce Users Group in Arlington, VA on February 23. If you’re in the Washington DC Metro area, we’d love for you to join us…it’s hard to pass up a live customer demo and free food! Click here for details and to register.
Justin will demonstrate a process wizard he built to capture new lead information consistently, show how it was built and discuss lessons learned working with Cloud Extend for Salesforce. We believe PSA’s story perfectly exhibits the ease of use, simplicity and flexibility of Cloud Extend for Salesforce to drive best practices and enforce data consistency across sales and marketing for companies of all sizes.
Details are in the media advisory below.
If you can’t attend the meeting and would like to see a demo of Cloud Extend for Salesforce via web meeting or speak with Justin about his team’s experience, I’d be happy to connect you. Send us an email!
It’s safe to say that Salesforce.com has changed the face of enterprise applications. By being the first to put software in the cloud and make it available via affordable subscriptions, sales organizations of all sizes are able to rent full-featured commodity software and have it available the next day. Because of Salesforce.com, there’s now a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application for just about everything. Even Oracle, SAP and Microsoft are making their applications available as SaaS.
A guest post by Justin Hoffman, Director of Marketing, PSA Insurance and Financial Services
Android and iPhone smartphones are really cool, but are they any better than an old BlackBerry for doing real business on the road? I don’t mean browsing consumer-oriented sites, watching movies or playing games, but using critical business applications. Have you ever tried to navigate your back office enterprise applications on the road, or even the more modern cloud-based applications like Salesforce? They are virtually unusable! Even the soon-to-be-released touchscreen version of Salesforce may work on an iPad, but it’s terrible on a smartphone.
The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg makes a great point in 
If information is the life blood of business, then information collection is the heart that pumps life into every team and geography.
