So lets begin. A common use of Cloud Extend is to guide portal users through the process of quickly setting up a Case object in Saleforce.  So when the customer calls the support hotline, they are dealt with promptly rather than kept on hold for an eternity.

There are three main considerations in this type of Cloud Extend application:

1. The Process Guide
2. Validating Data Entry
3. Ensuring Business Rules are followed

So let’s address each of these items in turn.

The Process Guides

With Cloud Extend, you can build a process wizard that will guide a Portal user (or any other Salesforce user) through a series of steps. The steps can be a combination of screen steps (which prompt the user to enter data and make choices), automated steps (which do work for the user by creating Salesforce objects, sending email, creating tasks, etc), and data decision steps. Here is a sample Cloud Extend guide:

Cloud Extend guides can be run from a Saleforce portal, in which case a portal user is guided through a process to enter data and create objects in Salesforce.   The Cloud Extend guide will have access to any Salesforce objects and fields to which a portal user has access.

Now let’s examine the second of our three considerations – validating data.

Validating Data Entry

Since a Cloud Extend guide walks a user through all of the data entry steps, and Cloud Extend screens can contain detailed instructions on how to enter the data, errors in data entry are greatly reduced. In addition, Cloud Extend guides can automatically enter data and create relationships between objects based on the context of the Cloud Extend guide.

Of course, there are still times when users will make errors or do the wrong thing. You can design Cloud Extend screen steps so that any data field is required to be entered correctly before the Cloud Extend guide will advance (even if the data field is not a required field in the underlying Saleforce implementation). This is useful because a data field may not always be required (so it not practical to make it a required field in Salesforce), but in the context of a particular step in a process, the data field is required:

It’s always useful to perform data validation on entries for data fields (for instance, to ensure a due date for a Task is not set to a date prior to today). Salesforce has excellent facilities for defining validation rules in the Saleforce implementation, and Cloud Extend honors all Salesforce validation rules.   If a user attempts to enter data that causes a validation rule in Saleforce to fail, the Cloud Extend guide will not advance, and instead will prompt the user to correct the entry.

Now onto our last consideration – business rules.

Applying Business Rules

Because Cloud Extend guides can branch based on user input, many “business rules” (such as “do X if the customer is calling about Product A”, “do Y if the customer is calling about Product B”) can be implemented directly in a Cloud Extend guidance tree:

Cloud Extend can also perform flow decisions based on the values of data fields in Salesforce. Therefore, business rules such as “Do X if this is a Large Company, Do Y if this is a Medium-Sized Company, Do Z if this is a Small Company” can be implemented easily:

And data decisions can also be based on the value of fields in Salesforce.   For example you can set the threshold values or parameters for the business rules individually per process – i.e. the process of lead qualification for one client might define a Large Customer as over $1B in annual revenue, while another client might define a Large Customer as over $50B in annual revenue.

Putting it Altogether

The final step is to combine the three items to create efficient support processes.  For example one customer in the energy industry created a set of guides to handle account creation and querying that drastically reduced call waiting times and increased support throughput (for full details see the guest post here). Another customer in the telecoms industry wrote guides that revolutionized their case resolution processes and  improved service levels by 90% (read more here).

So no matter your industry or your type of Salesforce portal, you can supercharge your CRM with the easy to use Cloud Extend.

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Supercharging Salesforce Portals to Improve Customer Service

It’s really impressive to hear how they’ve used desktop and mobile wizards to handle customer billing and support issues. In fact, it wouldn’t be boasting to say that Cloud Extend has revolutionized the way they treat their customers. The full details are in the the press release below.

So check it out and see why Scancom’s Managing Director Chen Kotecha said, “Cloud Extend is a must have application for anyone who uses Salesforce.”.

High praise indeed.  Thanks Chen.

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Cloud Extend Enables Scancom to Improve Customer Service Levels by 90%!

See Cloud Extend Mobile for yourself in this quick video.

As always, we appreciate Vance’s attention to Cloud Extend and Active Endpoints.

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How Cloud Extend Mobile Optimizes SaaS Access for Enterprise Mobility

If the meeting is small, say two or three people, then the whole process doesn’t take very long. However things get out of hand when the guest list gets longer. The preparation and followup time quickly escalates to consume a significant portion of my day. But I really want to be selling, since I’m a sales guy, not doing the admin. In an ideal world I’d like to automate this type of activity to maximize the best use of my time.

Luckily for me there’s a great new feature in Cloud Extend that can make this all happen. Cloud Extend has the ability to do searches and then iteratively run a process on the search results. And the best thing is that it’s so easy to do. So for the remainder of this blog post I’m going to explain how it works using my “pre-meeting planner” scenario as the example. There’s a video that illustrates all the action and a complete sample guide to download to try it out for yourself. It’s an excellent example, if I say so myself.

The pre-meeting planner helps a sales rep get ready for a meeting by considering whether additional Contacts should be invited to, or briefed about a sales meeting. It also lets the sales person review recent support Cases in order to head off any outstanding issues that could potentially derail the meeting. Finally the guide highlights the best marketing materials to take to the meeting. The screenshot below illustrates the beginning of the process:

So as I said before, Cloud Extend can now search for objects (we give you a visual search builder), and then display the results. The sales rep can then select all objects returned from the search, or a subset of the objects as shown below:

The Cloud Extend wizard then walks the rep through the process of calling the contact, recording the notes, sending a calendar invite, if appropriate, for each selection in the list:

Then the guide does a similar search as before, but this time looking for Case objects associated with the Account. That way, the rep can review all recent support Cases to ensure that there aren’t any lingering customer service issues that will derail the sales meeting:

As with Contacts, the rep can then review each Case individually, and then escalate the Case to a support manager if required:

And that’s all their is to it. It now only takes a few minutes to prep for a large meeting. Everyone is kept in the loop, all the notes have been recorded and any outstanding issues have been addressed. Perfect. My sales meetings should be smooth sailing from here!

“But wait!” I hear you cry. “Can’t we do this with Visual Flow?”

I’m sorry to report, “No“. Some of our larger customers have reported that this type of “Search, get list of Objects, then work on Objects iteratively” is not available in Salesforce Visual Flow, and when they have inquired about this type of functionality, they have been told it is not on the Visual Workflow roadmap (which at the time of writing, currently extends through 2013).

Incidentally, another item not on the Visual Workflow roadmap for the foreseeable future is flow persistence – that is the ability for a user to pause work in a guide, do other work in Salesforce, and then return to the guide at a later time. Again Cloud Extend comes to the rescue. Cloud Extend is stateful, meaning that the Sales rep can paused guide, go off and do other work, then resume working on the the guide at a later date at the SAME point where they left off. With Visual Workflow, the flow would have to be restarted and all previously completed steps would have to be repeated. Of course Visual Workflow would also have to “undo” previous steps too!

So I hope you enjoyed this blog post and remember to try out the guide in your own Cloud Extend environment.

To watch a video of the pre-meeting planner go here. And finally, click here to download the completed pre-meeting planner guide sample.

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It’s So Simple, It’s Childs Play! Looping Through Salesforce Records With Cloud Extend.

We’ll be at salesforce.com’s Dreamforce ‘12, the world’s largest cloud computing and enterprise technology event, this week and we’d love to see you! Come find us at Dreamforce:

• Customer presentation: Plymouth’s CIO, Jonathan Adlerstein, will be speaking on Thursday, September 20 at 9am (3005/3007 Moscone West Level 3), about how Cloud Extend simplified very complex processes, improving call center productivity by 20% and reducing customer waiting time to zero. Register before the seats fill up (session registration requires a valid Dreamforce conference login).
• Stop by our booth (#1540) for live demos of Cloud Extend Mobile and to meet our execs. And of course, pick up a flying, screaming Cloud Extend monkey!

Can’t make it to Dreamforce this year? Check out the recent Cloud Extend reviews on AppExchange, including one entitled “Best Money I’ve Ever Spent.” Or drop us a line, we’d be happy to set up a web demo for you.

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Plymouth Rock Energy Selects Cloud Extend via Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, Speaks at Dreamforce ‘12

Let’s assume you have an enterprise application and want to provide a good mobile experience for it. Conventional wisdom says that you have to have a development team create a native mobile application in order to provide the best mobile experience. Conventional wisdom is wrong.

The primary problem with adapting an application to a smart phone is the small screen real estate. The best way to optimize the mobile experience for this small screen is to show the user only what they want to see. Asking an expert mobile developer to create an ideal mobile experience is a flawed approach. They may be able to show some fancier graphics than what would be shown in a mobile web application, but they have to write a single application that will work for everyone. For most enterprise applications, there is just too much data and the developer can’t know for sure that any of it is irrelevant. Only the user knows that.

So, the best approach is for the user to think of the situations when they need to use their enterprise application from their smart phone, such as recording results from a sales call in a CRM after leaving a meeting. Then, for each of these situations, the user can create a custom mobile experience that shows them exactly the data they need to see or update. The user also adds questions to their mobile app, to accommodate common variations to the scenario that they encounter, with each variation showing appropriate screens. Allowing many users to customize their experience in this way produces a result that is far superior to than anything that a small number of developers could design and build.

A great experience also demands quick changes to adapt to changing needs. Deploying and maintaining native applications for the growing multitude of mobile operating system versions is so unwieldy that developers, by necessity, have to roll out changes slowly and infrequently. By contrast, using customization by the end-user as the means of improving the experience means that HTML 5 can be used (it is more than powerful enough) and changes can be made whenever there is need for it, without creating an untenable tangle of native application versions.

So, the key to an optimal mobile experience is in providing a mobile application design environment that is so simple that anyone can use it to create exactly what they need. This is what Cloud Extend does for Salesforce. Check it out!

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The Right Way For Cloud Applications To Go Mobile

Mark Taber, CEO, Active Endpoints, says, “We’re honored to be recognized by MassTLC as a Leadership Awards finalist amongst some of the most notable companies on the Massachusetts tech scene. Building on last week’s announcement of Cloud Extend Mobile, this nomination is further validation of how Active Endpoints exemplifies cloud innovation and continues to push the envelope to make it even easier for users to fully realize the power of cloud-based enterprise apps.”

To learn more about Cloud Extend Mobile, feel free to view and share this two-minute video.

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Active Endpoints Named Finalist in Mass Technology Leadership Council Leadership Awards for Innovative Technology of the Year, Cloud Computing

What does this mean for sales and customer support staff?

• No more waiting: Users can now perform their daily tasks, such as updating information and scheduling next steps while on the go, on their favorite device, a smartphone.
• Take Salesforce on the road: Wizards built to streamline and simplify sales and customer support tasks in Salesforce can be accessed anywhere, anytime.
• No coding or IT support needed: Sales and field support teams can create mobile-optimized interfaces for qualifying leads, identifying cross-selling opportunities.

Try the new Cloud Extend mobile capabilities today, or watch a two minute video to see how they can help sales and support staff do their jobs better.

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New Cloud Extend Mobile Simplifies and Accelerates Daily Work

Here, I’m going to walk through an example of how to use Cloud Extend to set up a new case in Salesforce. You can also check out the related video, Initiating a Support Case.

This scenario begins with someone from Acme Dynamite calling in to open a new case. As the customer support agent, the first thing you do is open the Acme Dynamite account screen in Salesforce and expand the Account Wizards section to run the New Case Set Up wizard. The wizard then walks you through each step of the set up process:

• Step 1: Identifies why the person is calling. Options appear as on-screen buttons for “paid ad listing,” “free listing” or “other.” This call is about a paid ad, and clicking the “paid ad listing” button takes you to the next step.

• Step 2: Confirms who is calling, with options for “customer” or “sales rep.” This caller is a rep calling on behalf of the customer, so click “sales rep” to get to the third step.

• Step 3: Confirms the sales rep you’re talking to is the account owner listed in the Account Detail section of Salesforce. If not, update the record here using a pop-up “lookup user” window that lists the company’s sales reps. Click “continue.”

• Step 4: Sets up the case in Salesforce for a new paid listing. First, select the account contact for this case using a drop down box that lists the Acme Dynamite contacts. Then enter a free form text description for this paid listing and click “continue.”

• Step 5: Confirms a new case has been created and provides the case number as well as link to the new case. Click “done” to complete the wizard.

At step 5, you can also click on the link to the new case, which opens in a new browser tab. You’ll see the case details you just gathered from the New Case Set Up wizard. You’ll also have access to any Cloud Extend wizards you create for cases – for instance, a wizard to walk customer support agents step-by-step through case resolution.

Of course, your wizards can be as simple or elaborate as you’d like, with steps that reflect your unique support processes. As with all Cloud Extend wizards, customer support wizards 1) display only the information agents need at a given moment; and 2) automate tasks they need to perform during and/or after the call.

Check out our other wizard examples and ideas in the Use Cases section of our website. Or post a comment below or give us a call at 781-547-2900 to  brainstorm other ways we can make life easier for your Salesforce users.

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Initiating a Customer Service Case with Cloud Extend

Of course, you can use this approach without a wizard and work all of the the steps manually in Salesforce.  However, the wizard ensures our team follows the best practice and walks each sales person through the telesales process, step by step.  The wizard automatically updates contact records and creates follow-up activities in Salesforce and the rep never has to touch separate screens.

As “three-touch telesales” suggests, our sales people try to reach a customer or prospect three times in the course of a given call campaign for a particular vertical market. Typically, the goal is to set up a meeting or demonstration, either in person or online.

To that end, we design our three-touch campaigns with some key ingredients, including:

• Develop scripts for live conversations.
• Develop scripts for voice-mails, with a different script for each successive message.
• Track call outcomes and note whether we spoke with contact, admin or other person; got a wrong number or left a voice-email message; etc.
• Perform follow-up activities such as schedule a meeting or send additional information, or suspend email marketing if the contact is no longer interested.
• Update records to reflect changes in lead status, add new contacts, and capture other relevant information gleaned from each call.

Again, you can do all of those things manually in Salesforce, without a wizard. But it’s a lot to juggle and remember. In the heat of the moment, for instance, the telesales rep may promise to send the prospect an analyst report but completely forget about it by the end of the call. Or the rep may leave a voice-mail message that repeats a previous message, fail to update the lead status, change the contact information, etc.

A wizard simplifies things by:

1) displaying only the information the rep needs at that particular moment

2) automating tasks that he or she needs to perform during and/or after the call.

For more best practices and uses, please visit the Use Cases section of our website.

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Three-Touch Telesales

The first step, in terms of automation, that most VPs of sales take is adopting a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Salesforce.com has made it incredibly easy to adopt CRM by offering their software as a service with virtually no upfront investment. But while Salesforce may be a great system of record, it’s not a sales force automation tool per se. As a result, the typical sales person, both the technophiles and technophobes, see limited value.

If the goals of CRM adoption are to improve efficiency, generate more revenue and increase customer face time, then a v.p. of sales will quickly become disillusioned. Sales people will inevitably enter data sporadically. Forecasting will be inaccurate.  Revenue goals will be missed.  User adoption will be low and ROI will be minimized. You can fire the sales person, claim their incompetence, or blame them for not following procedures but it will all be for naught. Every v.p. of sales is allowed to do this exactly once before they become the target of the CEO’s wrath.

Instead, anybody championing CRM needs to look at and promote it from the sales person’s point of view. Make their life easier and you will be amazed at the results. I’m a big fan of letting computers do the mundane, mind-numbing chores that human beings – and sales people, in particular – just don’t want to do. And in sales organizations, there are thousands of ways that automation can be applied to simplify lives and improve bottom lines, including general use case scenarios such as:

• Improving efficiency – Automating manual tasks such as information collection and report writing accelerate turnaround times, improve accuracy and help sales people maximize the time they spend with customers and prospects.
• Generating revenue – As more companies try to leverage their existing client base, automated systems help with direct sales reps’ efforts to cross sell and upsell the various products in their portfolio.
• Onboarding and adoption — Automation ensures that new hires are productive immediately by giving them the account plans, guides and tools that reflect the expertise of the most seasoned account execs. The same automations encourage technology adoption by making it simple and easy to use.
• Messaging consistency — Companies spend countless dollars to reach the right audience with the right messaging. In the marketing department, automation makes messaging more consistent.

As technologies like Cloud Extend make it easier for sales, marketing, customer service and other business users to automate tasks by themselves – without training or IT intervention – the opportunities will continue to multiply. And the costs for pursuing those opportunities will be modest. Companies won’t have to spend thousands of dollars in consulting fees. Instead, the sales team can do it themselves, in a matter of minutes. Sales people will buy in from the beginning. Only then can you truly leverage the power of their relationships and the latest in automation.

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Relationship selling and the role of technology

Watch this video on YouTube.

The guide designer runs within Salesforce. It’s another tab in the Salesforce interface, so you never have to leave Salesforce to do your work. The design environment itself is WYSIWYG – highly visual with much of the design work performed via point-and-click or drag-and-drop. And you don’t have to know about variables or object IDs or any other programmer constructs.

Everything in Cloud Extend is based on guidance trees that walk users through a process step by step. Each subsequent step is a branch in the tree, which is based on answers to previous questions. When you’re creating wizards, you’re basically working with two basic types of steps in Cloud Extend:

• Screen steps present users with a question or prompt to answer.
• Automated steps do work in the background for the user, e.g., scheduling a meeting or updating the lead source.

Cloud Extend is natively integrated with Salesforce, so you simply select the Salesforce actions from a drop-down list to include them as automated steps in your wizard. For instance, you can design a wizard to automatically search LinkedIn, send email from a Salesforce template, set task reminders, etc. And the list is extensible. Anything that’s available via Salesforce APIs can be implemented. You can even implement automated steps to other cloud or on-premise applications.

Along those integration lines, Cloud Extend inspects  the Salesforce data model when you install it in your Salesforce org. So Cloud Extend finds any custom objects, custom fields and custom pick lists you have defined and makes them available within the guide designer. Of course, you can create a screen step that asks for information that has not been defined and wizard users will just enter that info as free form text.

The guide designer keeps you focused on what’s immediately relevant to your wizard design. As a design metaphor, guidance trees tend to break down when they get big, especially when it comes to layout. It’s just hard to work with an entire tree all at once. In contrast, Cloud Extend lets you expand those parts of the tree that are relevant and collapse the parts that are not. Cloud Extend also lays out the tree for you automatically. And you can always preview individual wizard steps — or the entire wizard – from the user’s point of view.

Behind the scenes, information collected by Cloud Extend wizards is written to Salesforce. As a guide designer, you don’t have to interact with a separate database. And all of your existing Salesforce reports will work, unmodified. Cloud Extend does track and report on some process data that can help with future guide designs. For instance, you can report on wizard activity, e.g., who has been running a wizard and for how long. You can also report on wizard outcomes like how many leads were qualified using a specific lead qualification.

There are other tools out there that let IT people collaborate with business people to automate tasks in Salesforce. Cloud Extend is not one of them. Cloud Extend is designed specifically for sales, sales operations, marketing, customer service and other business people, so they can automate tasks on their own – without coding, training or help from IT.

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Wizard Writing Basics for Salesforce Users

Today, everyone interacts with enterprise applications in their work life, from Global 2000 companies to mom and pops from sales representatives to health care providers to service technicians to retail clerks. Quite a number of these applications are from SAP. Few like the experience. Enterprise applications have not kept pace with how and where we do our work in the 21st century. This is in sharp contrast to our consumer life. Applications like Facebook and Twitter are fun, reliable and easy to use.  The IT departments of most companies, big and small, are still in the dark ages, writing Java code, creating messes, the way they did in the 80s. This is why we are all so frustrated. There is a better way.

Everyone today (sales, customer service, health care, HR, accounting, etc.) can select the Software as a Service (SaaS) application of their choice, “an anchor application,” along the same lines as Facebook and Twitter are anchor applications at home. There are literally thousands of SaaS applications for just about everything we do, many attractively priced. Once you subscribe to SaaS, subject matter experts can easily customize the experience, creating scenario-based mobile user interfaces (UI), no developers needed. The result would be almost immediate; successful meetings, improved customer service, better patient care and yes, a better quality of life.

However, before we throw the entire IT department under the bus, let’s make sure we acknowledge the fact that Facebook and Twitter are great applications not just because of a pretty UI. Robust runtimes underlie their platforms. To those people screaming, and rightfully so, for the consumerization of IT, I’d encourage an alternative definition: “enterprise-enabling consumer technology.”

There is no reason everyone can’t have the consumer-style UIs and usability features. But good consumer-like technologies are also backed by a set of enterprise-grade IT sophisticated capabilities – exception and error handling, rollback and compensation, persistence, clustering, redundancy, scalability, security, visibility, etc.

While I think that the vast majority of Java developers can and should be made obsolete, and yes even those low cost ones in India and China, the tried and true enterprise IT policies and best practices that have evolved over the last 30 years need to survive. Rethinking “consumerization of IT” opens the door to a union that takes the best of consumer technology, which empowers users with the latest and greatest business features, and combines it with the enterprise-grade capabilities that IT demands. Think of it as consumerization without compromise. Technical issues are abstracted to the point that regular business users can get their work done without help from IT. Meanwhile, IT can rest assured that all of their service availability, uptime, security and other concerns are being met in full.

Given the overwhelming workloads in most IT departments, IT should be all in favor of consumerization and giving their users more control. I am not sure anyone will miss those Java developers.

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Consumerization of IT

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.

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New Cloud Extend Meeting Follow-Up Wizard Improves Sales Effectiveness

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.

Watch this video on YouTube.

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:

1. Enter general meeting notes as free-form text.
2. Enter new contacts, including first name, last name, email address, business phone and title.
3. 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.
4. 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.

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Free Wizard Makes for Priceless Meeting Follow-up

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.

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Big Data Interaction for Sales and Service Teams, Mobile Users and the Rest of Us

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:

Denise Carbone, leader, Chicago User Group
Julia Napolitano, leader, Wisconsin User Group
Nicki Klinkhamer, leader, Chicago Suburban User Group
Eric Dreshfield, leader, Evansville, IN User Group

Our infamous screaming, flying Cloud Extend monkey made a special appearance at happy hour; he couldn’t resist the cupcakes!

Next on the Cloudforce Social Enterprise Tour is Toronto on June 6^th. We’ll be there and hope to see you, as well!

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Cloud Extend Live at Cloudforce Chicago

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.

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Call Centers, Sales and the “Social Enterprise”

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.

Watch this video on YouTube.

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.

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Lead Qualification and Process Progress for Salesforce Users

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 Fuel Corp delivered coal and heating oil to homes and businesses in New York City. Many years later Plymouth Rock Energy was formed to expand into the deregulated energy market and 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 hundreds of thousands of 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 experiencing growing pains and 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, duplicating efforts and spending far too much time to resolve issues. While Salesforce had gone a long way towards improving our customer service I could see that we needed a better way to manage data entry and resolve customer service inquiries.

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 85%. 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).

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Energizing our CRM with Cloud Extend for Salesforce

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.

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Two Billion Lines of APEX Code, Really?

Can a successful, sales-driven organization swing and miss on a CRM deployment? Absolutely. At least that’s what I confirm below and in the video that discusses the first time we rolled out Salesforce at my company, PSA Insurance and Financial Services.

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.

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Simplicity Equals Success When Considering Salesforce CRM

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!

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Equipping Today’s Road Warriors for Mobile Sales Success

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.

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Riffing on Mossberg: Hybrid, Voice-and-Touch Input for Ultimate Mobile Usability

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.

Watch this video on YouTube.

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.

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Cloud Extend for Salesforce Battles It Out With Salesforce Visual Workflow

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.

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Keeping the Business Life Blood Pumping

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.

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Anti-BPM rant makes a key point: add process to Salesforce, don’t replace it

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!

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Active Endpoints and PSA Financial Present Cloud Extend for Salesforce at DC Metro Salesforce Users Group on February 23

Watch the replay of the panel discussion for yourself and read about Michael’s insights from the event. Details are in the media advisory below.

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Active Endpoints CTO Presents on Cloud Computing Panel

Since writing that post, I had some additional thoughts on the topic. Cloud computing is traditionally broken into infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service. The problem with that division is the middle layer — it is just too hard to define. It is akin to “Middleware” which is anything in between the database and the actual application. That is such a catch-all that it is hard to make any clear statements about it. It is more about what it isn’t than what it is — i.e. it isn’t the bottom layer and it isn’t the top layer, so it must be Middleware, or PAAS.

With Cloud Extend, we have a system that allows people to create custom applications that guide users through their work. The key thing in this description is that we allow other people to create applications. That would seem to imply it is a PAAS offering. But there are also PAAS offerings that present a programming environment that use Java as a the programming language and large APIs such as J2EE or Spring. It is hard to see the similarity between the simplicity of creating guidance trees and the complexity of writing a J2EE or Spring application. Perhaps we need a new class of software. I’ll have to think about that. Any ideas?

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MassTLC Software Development Summit

Take a few minutes to hear Michael’s talk, as he presents a new programming paradigm for non-programmers. Details are in the attached media alert.

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Active Endpoints Introduces a New Programming Paradigm for Non-Programmers

Wow, what a shock. I’ve only been going to corporate conferences and analyst conferences for the last several years and I’ve gotten used to having to sit through hours of abstract motherhood-and-apple-pie claims intermixed with meaningless marketecture diagrams. So it was a breath of fresh air to go to a conference where people actually describe their technology in enough detail to understand what it really is, and to hear concrete claims that they can actually back up.

I was also pleased to be able describe and demonstrate guidance trees at the conference. I don’t normally talk about guidance tree technology as a programming language, since the technology is targeted to non-programmers (or even technophobes) and that kind of person is likely to be scared off by talking about it as a programming language. However, programming language researchers have a broad view of what constitutes a programming language (anything with control flow counts) and they have always been interested in approaches that would allow non-programmers to effectively write programs.

I described guidance trees as a “new programming paradigm for non-programmers.” I got a lot of positive comments about the technology and no one had seen anything like it before, which is quite unusual, since researchers always like to be able to say: “Isn’t that just like X?” My favorite comment was from an attendee who was surprised that I had had the gall to use the overused “paradigm” word, but by the end of the talk, he was convinced it really is a new paradigm — and an exceptionally valuable one at that.

Watch the video to see if you agree. I’d love to hear what you think about this new technology that forms the foundation of our latest product, Cloud Extend for Salesforce.

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Programming language researchers get a look at guidance trees

Podcast highlights include:

• Why PSA decided to use Cloud Extend for Salesforce as opposed to custom coding
• Which sales guides are being used to ensure sales reps are maximizing initial opportunities
• How sales guides are being used to cross-sell additional insurance and financial services
• What benefits are expected, including the increase of the lead-to-close ratio

Next steps:

• Listen to the podcast: http://bit.ly/PSACloudExtend
• Download the transcript: http://bit.ly/PSACloudExtend
• Try Cloud Extend for Salesforce free at no risk: http://www.cloudextend.com/salesforce/trial

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PSA Financial Podcast Available on How Cloud Extend for Salesforce Helped Improve Sales Rep Productivity

Available now on salesforce.com AppExchange, Cloud Extend is already being validated by customers and channel partners alike, as the press release below elaborates.

If you’re attending Dreamforce ’11, the cloud computing event of the year, stop by our booth (#8). We’d love to show you the power and simplicity of Cloud Extend for Salesforce and how you can leverage it for your SaaS application. And for your time, we will give you a super cool monkey that screeches and flies. Just what you want! If you were unable to make the trip to San Francisco, give us a shout or send us an email; we’d love to set up a few minutes to share Cloud Extend for Salesforce with you in an online demo.

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Active Endpoints Unveils Cloud Extend for Salesforce at Dreamforce ‘11

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Neil Ward-Dutton from MWD Advisors reviews Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com

Our CTO, Michael Rowley Ph.D., will be presenting Cloud Extend on May 5 at the Red Hat Summit in Boston. The theme is “Your Cloud Application Isn’t Done Yet,” meaning that your SaaS application is probably not done until you have added some level of customization. See Lori MacVittie’s insightful review of Could Extend here: http://bit.ly/llIJ8M.

Principal Analyst Mike Gualtieri from Forrester Research, Inc., will be featured in a related live webinar on May 4, “3 Steps to Get Business Users on Your Side,” on how to encourage business users to design SaaS process applications—at the heart of Cloud Extend and its underlying design technology Socrates.

Stop by booth 204 for live demos of Cloud Extend, Socrates and ActiveVOS BPMS. And for the chance to win an iPad, which coincidentally, is what we will use to show you the power of our products.

Details on the events are in the attached announcement. We hope to see you, live or virtually, next week!

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CTO Michael Rowley Presents Cloud Extend at Red Hat Summit and JBoss World 2011

From data-centric to process-centric

Many people have recently discovered the value of moving away from data-centric applications to process-centric applications. Salesforce.com is essentially a data centric application. The sales rep can use Salesforce to essentially do whatever they want at any time. Sales managers, sales operations, and other executives have to depend on training programs as the only way they can get the sales reps to follow the process that is known to provide the highest likelihood of a sale while also providing enough visibility to the executives so that they can accurately predict future revenues. The problem is that training doesn’t work very well. People forget the training or interpret it incorrectly. They are especially stymied when they run into a situation that doesn’t happen every day. The right way to handle the situation may be in some sales manual, but that has probably been safely tucked away behind their employee orientation packet, never to be looked at again.

The right approach is to move from data-centric to process-centric. This means that the user should be guided to do the right things at the right times. However,  the user does not want to give up their application UI and be forced to use the UI of a BPMS or workflow product. One of the key design principals of Cloud Extend is that users stay in the application they know and love, but that application includes a panel that guides the user to do the right things at the right times. In the case of Salesforce.com, that panel contains a sales guide and it turns a completely data-centric application into one that can be driven by process.

Sales guides contain more than just instructions. They can also collect information and make changes to the Salesforce object that they are embedded within (automatically recording all activities in Saleforce.com – greatly reducing manual data entry by sales reps). Because of this, using sales guides improves the consistency in how the Salesforce fields are used across the sales organization.

But who creates the processes?

Not some business analyst that has gone through weeks of training learning tools and techniques. No, the right person to create such a process is the person with the most knowledge of the effort at hand. In the case of sales, that person would likely be a sales executive or sales operations manager, and last I checked, those people haven’t signed up for many BPM courses.

What they need is a tool that they can use just by knowing the screens and questions that the sales reps should see. The creation of the sales guide should be so intuitive that no manual is necessary. If you’ve read anything I’ve written recently or seen any of my latest webinars, you’ll probably guess how we manage that. The basis of the guide designer is Socrates. With a combination of Socrates embedded right inside of the Salesforce UI and automated steps designed specifically for Salesforce.com, anyone can easily create and deploy sales guides, without training, in minutes.

Integrating SaaS applications

Cloud Extend can also be used for SaaS integration. In addition making changes to Salesforce objects, guides can call out to external systems or other SaaS applications. However, even when multiple SaaS applications are being integrated, one of the applications acts as the anchor application. The anchor application is the application that the end user is used to using and which is extended to include guides. The other applications are used through automated steps in the guides.

This asymmetry is key. Each role uses the UI of the application they are most familiar with, while using the data and capabilities of other applications. A sales rep uses the CRM application UI, but also causes appropriate changes to be made in a separate financial application. Someone in the finance department would use a guide that is embedded in the financial application, but also uses data and causes changes to be made to CRM objects through automated steps.

This approach is also clearly different from the approach used by many SaaS integration vendors, who perform batch synchronization of data between applications after the fact. That is an approach that suffers from the numerous problems associated with redundant, out-of-date data. With the Cloud Extend approach, the APIs of the non-anchor applications provide real-time access to data it is possible to have a single system of record for any kind of data.

Take a look

Most of what we are excited about with Cloud Extend is how well it integrates into Salesforce.com and how easy it is to create new guides. Neither of those are things that it is easy to really understand until you’ve seen it, so I’ll encourage you to take a look at the video that you can find at the Cloud Extend page.

Post from: VOSibilities, the Active Endpoints BPMS blog

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Cloud Extend brings process into your cloud application

Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com gives sales managers and other domain experts the ability to deliver to their users knowledge and interactive guides in an effective manner, without involving developers.

We appreciate Chris’s mention and recommend reading his article to see how we are helping customers get the most out of their on demand CRM and what the future holds for Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com.

Post from: VOSibilities, the Active Endpoints BPMS blog

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PCWorld: Cloud Extend “makes Salesforce.com easier to use”

Conversations we like to join:

- Comparing the value of on-premise and SaaS applications
- Extending the value of cloud applications
- Simplifying the creation of custom applications
- Consumerizing enterprise applications – a megatrend for the software industry
- Adding value to SaaS applications by ISVs and consulting firms

Learn more and register for the early access program at http://bit.ly/CloudExtend.

Click “View” below to read the entire press release.



Post from: VOSibilities, the Active Endpoints BPMS blog

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Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com Boosts Sales Team Productivity