What I’m finding is that many don’t really know what Force.com is and what it’s capable of. I also find that it’s hard for clients to make sense of much of the marketing information that’s available from Salesforce.com. This is my observation, not a criticism, about the source of some of this confusion.

In my opinion there are two major issues driving questions from clients and consultants.

First. Salesforce.com sells their Sales and Service Cloud for roughly $125 /user/month for their Enterprise edition. Clients often buy Enterprise if they want the option to integrate with other systems using API calls or want to be able to customize Salesforce using Apex and Visualforce. These options are not available in the Professional edition of Sales and Service Cloud. This means that many clients end up buying Sales Cloud Enterprise at $125 because Professional at $65 does not give them the flexibility they need.

In my experience, I have found many clients that don’t need all the Sales & Service options they pay for and this often drives them to look at less expensive options and in some cases other tools like Sugar or Zoho.

Second. Sales & Service clouds are ONLY sold by Salesforce.com direct sales force while OEM and Value Added Resellers sell solutions that are built on Force.com. This doesn’t mean that Salesforce.com’s direct team doesn’t also sell Force.com, but it’s been my experience that most direct sales people are more familiar selling Sales & Service cloud because for many years Salesforce.com did not have a channel. Additionally, Force.com sells for $50 vs. $125.

Obviously an intelligent reader’s first question is going to be ‘what’s the major difference between Force.com at $50 and Sales Cloud at $125?’. This is a very good question.

In the following video, Introducing Force.com, I go into some detail about the differences between Sales Cloud and Force.com. For my reader’s I will summarize it very briefly.

Force.com is essentially the “Platform” or development environment on which everything else at Salesforce.com is built on. This means the Core Database, Customizable User Interface, Customizable Programming (Apex & Visualforce), Security, etc.

Force.com does NOT include what Salesforce.com calls their Sales and Service objects. These are Leads, Campaigns, Opportunities, Products, & Contracts. These standard objects are very useful and powerful and are not available in Force.com, however, more and more clients realize they need a tool that allows them to build what they need for their business rather than using off the shelf objects.

Force.com is a great solution for these clients. Force.com is also very easy to customize and configure so it’s usually a few hours of consulting to create exactly what the client needs.
Many of these clients find that it makes more sense to do some lite configuration of Force.com to give them the features they need and not pay for the features they don’t. They also find that buying Force.com at $50 vs. $125 gives them quite a bit of budget maneuvering room.

As you will see in the video I mentioned above, Force.com has much more capability included than is excluded. That said, it’s very helpful to talk through the business issue you’re trying to solve to see what approach makes the most sense.

I hope this answers a few questions and opens increases your comfort level with Force.com

If you would like to talk further just schedule a call with me and we can discuss your unique situation.

Force.com is a powerful development platform for enterprise cloud applications. This short but detailed introduction helps explain some of the similarities and differences between Salesforce.com Sales Cloud and Force.com. The intention is to help clients align their application needs with their development costs. Steve Snapp from Integrated Sales Management shares some ideas that have helped our clients develop powerful yet easy to use Cloud applications on Salesforce.com Force.com platform.

For more insights on Salesforce.com Force.com visit our Resources and Blogs or Contact Us.

Increasing User Adoption in Salesforce.com is important for many of our clients. Steve Snapp from Integrated Sales Management shares simple best practices and techniques you can use in your company to increase user adoption. This video focuses on the use of Visual Force pages that will help your company better solve the problem of providing tools your users can use to help them save time. This video will also touch on some basic ideas that have helped our team better understand our clients issues and create elegant solutions that solve a real need.

For more insights on CRM Best Practices please visit our Resources and Blogs or Contact Us.

Increasing User Adoption in Salesforce.com is important for many of our clients. Steve Snapp from Integrated Sales Management shares simple best practices and techniques you can use in your company to increase user adoption. This video focuses on basic ideas that will help your company better solve the problem of providing tools your users can use to help them save time. We will also highlight techniques that you can use to integrate other data sources like ERP Software and provide significant insight to your CRM users.

For more insights on CRM Best Practices please visit our Resources and Blogs or Contact Us.

We shifted into a conversation about tools that reps could really use to be more proactive and better business resources to their clients.  I shared some ideas from our Salesforce.com App Medical Sales Coach and we began to discuss the value of what we call “Actionable Intelligence”.  To put it simply, our goal in the conversation and with our app is to create a tool that really helps reps sell better by taking sales data that is available in their accounting system or Laboratory Information System (LIS) and present it in a way the reps can take action on.

The big idea to increasing Salesforce.com User Adoption is giving users something they need in a format that provides them immediate value.

Many of our clients integrate back office data from systems like SAP, Oracle, Great Plains, and other sources of accounting data.  This client, in fact, gave these reps a lot of reports on a weekly basis but we what we have found is that some are missing the most valuable component.  That component involves giving reps data that is pre-interpreted, or does the thinking for them.

This means we take the raw accounting data (invoices, products, etc.) and roll it up into “metrics” that reps can use to immediately determine if their customers are growing or declining and why.   The big idea is to tell them what really matters in their account and territory and why.

Of course many organizations have this data available in Business Intelligence Systems but our goal is not to give reps a data analysis tool.  We want to give them a simple Red/Green indicator that a client is healthy or unhealthy and why.   This involves comparing the accounts total sales year over year and month over month and providing Red/Green trends.  These same trends are calculated at the product or test level as well.

It’s important to me that this blog not be a glorified commercial but provide ideas that you can use in your business.  To that end, I will provide some screen shots with some best practices that we’ve learned.  I’ll also share some of the lessons we’ve learned and if you find that you’d rather buy the app than build this yourself then we’ve got a win/win.

The Red/Green trends I mention above gives the rep the bottom line detail they need as well as the ability to dig a little to figure out what adjustments they need to consider in their sales approach.  It also gives them an early warning if something starts to slip with the customer.

As I said earlier, our goal is to help our clients give sales reps tools that make them better business people by anticipating changes with their physician customer and take action when a client begins to trend in an unwanted direction.

Actionable Intelligence or Interpreted Data is not new!  Our goal was to make is very easy to integrate data from various back end sources so sales reps can do what they do best – grow their territory.  This same information can also be used to help reps plan their time in territory more effectively and create route plans that drive more revenue.  

If you trying to determine if this something you can build yourself or purchase an app, please schedule some time with me to discuss our approach and we can help you determine if this app is a good fit or what would be involved in building your own solution.

We’re happy to share the approach and architecture we use to help you determine how this solution will help your reps.  Just schedule a call with me and we’ll walk through it.

He said he was running into a sales meeting with the President and asked if I could quickly give him my opinion on Salesforce implementation principles that drive Salesforce user adoption.  So I said two things:

1. Implement Salesforce using a Crawl, Walk, Run approach
2. Focus on giving the users REAL value

For the sake of my reader I’ll explain further.  The big idea in any Salesforce implementation, in my opinion, is to find something that truly benefits the user.  In many cases Salesforce, with its tremendous features, provides real value simply because of the capabilities it provides.  That said, many companies still struggle to get the results they want from it.  In my experience most of this occurs because one or both of the principles I mentioned above is violated.

I believe that most companies try to implement too much change too soon and they don’t have a clear picture of what drives real value for a sales user.   In many cases Salesforce is implemented because management wants a software tool for sales management and this takes priority over creating a tool that sales people can use to increase their individual sales.

In my opinion here are a couple of ideas that can help companies identify these benefits that will get sales people excited about using Salesforce.

1. Help them sell more!  This starts by doing a lot of work for the rep.  I’m a big believer in giving reps actionable intelligence from other systems right in Salesforce.  This means using data integration to integrate accounting, ERP Software, and sales data warehouses directly into Salesforce.  But more importantly, it’s formatting or “interpreting” the data in a way that allows the reps to use the info immediately.  By giving them data that is already interpreted for them they can immediately take action on it in their territory.  Here’s an example screen from one of our products that helps reps clearly see sales trends with customers they should know about and take action on.
2. Eliminate Non-Selling Activities!  Salesforce is very easy to tailor to reduce cumbersome or repetitive tasks.  With a little bit of examination it is easy to determine what tasks are being duplicated and workflow or visual force pages can be created that make these tasks one button operations that speed up the rep.
3. Give the rep time back.  Sounds obvious but in many cases reps are asked to do a lot of activities and we can streamline many of these based on what I mentioned before.  But I believe if you tie the use of Salesforce to “Giving time back” and mean it, they will be eager to use the tool because it benefits them.  I included an example of a territory planning tool that we’ve created to help reps maximize their time in territory.
4. Give to Get.  In many cases if we give the reps the tools they need we will also get the information from the rep such as activity or call notes that management also needs.  It’s also so much easier to get this info from a tool that’s being actively used by the reps and provides real value.

In closing the main point here is to identify key business processes that can be implemented and enhanced very quickly and provide real value to users like sales people and help them increase sales and productivity.  With these ideas in mind our clients can drive the sales behavior necessary via analytics and dashboards that help them increase sales and create very happy users.

Well, no one, I’m thinking.  Should I be concerned that I used to have braces and a mullet?

I digress.  But that’s not what people mean when they talk about Social Networking for Business.  I have been struggling for a few years to really understand how Social Networking fits in and I’m not going to suggest by any means that I’ve figured it out.

So I was reading a book called “Eat People” by Andy Kessler a few months ago and he described Mark Zuckerburg’s vision for Facebook.  He relayed a story where Mark had not studied for an art history class, or even been to class, and decided to create a facebook-like page as a “study guide”.

He sent a link of the “study guide” to all the students and asked them to make comments on certain pieces of art, etc.  Long story, short:  Mark got an A in the class, but even more interesting is that the entire class had the highest total score of any class for that subject.

Why did this happen?  Well, Kessler goes on to say that what Mark was trying to create was a way to “absorb” what was happening with the art pictures.  Rather than reading a text book, the web interface he built made it easy for people to absorb or consume what was relevant and important.

This is one of the ideas that’s core to Facebook.  It’s easy to absorb what’s happening with your 600 closest friends.  So does that mean everyone should have a business Facebook page?

That’s not the point I’m trying to make.  What I think is now more possible with tools like Facebook, but not necessarily Facebook, is using the power of collaboration in a way that makes it easy for people to “absorb” what’s happening in their business with customers, employees, vendors, etc.

In the enterprise software world I play in that’s Salesforce’s Chatter.  We are just beginning to see how our clients are using Chatter to collaborate more seamlessly and with less effort.  It’s exciting to see a simple idea provide some real value.

We have recently created a very simple tool that leverages Chatter that allows our clients to improve their internal request process for changes in Salesforce.  This includes basic things like adding fields, data, customizations, etc.

We call this Request/Release and have essentially taken an AGILE development concept and combined it with Chatter to enable our customers to collaborate better internally and enable us to contribute as well.  This accelerates the speed at which we identify and enhance new ideas and include a larger group of people without the complexity of large groups.  It’s a form of crowd sourcing for internal requests that improves the quality of ideas our clients generate and accelerates the implementation of these ideas.

By the way, it’s free!!

I’ll continue to blog on this as we enhance it further.  Please check back for new updates.

Thank you for reading this.  I hope it gives you some ideas!

Developing Customized CRM for Your Business

By collaborating with companies and relevant subject matter experts in individual industries, ISM can create CRM software that’s right for you at a much more affordable cost than new, from-scratch applications. Recently, we’ve partnered with a number of companies in diverse industries to develop industry-specific vertical Force.com applications, including Medical Sales CRM for Salesforce, Contract Manufacturing CRM, Defense Industry CRM, and Private Equity CRM. Our Open Development program for Mobile CRM is available right now.

Choosing the Right Consultant for CRM Software

Here are a few questions from IT authorities who’ve seen CRM failure and CRM success.

Can the consultant provide a complete service package?
ISM specializes in providing everything the customer needs. We don’t just turn software on and disappear – ever.

Does the consultant listen effectively?
Call us up – we specialize in listening to your sales process, concerns, business goals and needs.

Does the consultant communicate clearly?
We’re communications specialists, going beyond the technology to the real reason CRM works: aligning your people and sales processes for success. Check out our free CRM Workshop Planning guide. It’s easy to understand and easy to implement.

Can I work with the consultant?
According to Destination CRM, it’s critical to go with a consultant who fits with your company’s philosophy and culture. Contact us now and see how we can work together to develop a winning CRM for your business.

The right answers to these questions will guide the choice of who you choose to help develop your customized CRM software and implementation plan.  Please call us at 877-553-0485 or email us today to determine which CRM product right for your business.

We’ll be our presenting our new offline iPad app Mobile CRM HD for Salesforce CRM at Dreamforce. We would love to see you and talk to you! Please stop by Booth 33 in the Exhibition Hall to check out our new iPad app that offers disconnected, offline access to your Salesforce data in addition to traditional mobile connectivity.

ISM highlights Industry Vertical Force.com Applications

We’ll also be sharing the vertical industry-specific applications we’ve created on the Force.com platform. Stop by Booth 33 in the Exhibition Hall to check out: Office Suites CRM, Medical Sales CRM for Salesforce, Private Equity CRM, Contract Manufacturing CRM, Litigation Support CRM and Defense Industry CRM. By collaborating with companies and relevant subject matter experts in all of these industries, from administrative offices to defense contractors, ISM produces tailored business applications that meet their needs at a fraction of the time and cost of new, from-scratch applications.

Talk to ISM About Industry Vertical Development of Your Own CRM software

We are known for our consulting and development excellence and we’re looking for industry partners that can help us develop industry vertical CRM software with potential beyond just one company. We focus on the alignment of people, process and technology, developing not just an application that works, but an application that helps your employees to work better and your business to thrive. If you’re looking to develop CRM software within Salesforce.com that you think could also work for others in your industry, we’re interested in talking to you, the subject matter expert, to co-develop a customized, marketable Salesforce.com application.

Book at an appointment with us while you’re at Dreamforce here, or just stop by and meet us at Booth 33.  If you aren’t attending the conference, you can click here to contact us or call us at 877-553-0485.

Overall, the idea of turning work into play with rewards is catching on, especially with the iPad. In July, the most popular presentations at the Mobile Health World Conference in Boston covered “gamification” in mobile healthcare apps for iPad. Gamification is the idea that you can include the elements which make games fun and addictive in work that isn’t traditionally thought of as a game. Great iPad apps for healthcare or sales can use game play mechanisms for non-game applications to make the app for iPad stronger and help people to accomplish more.

Use Carrots not Sticks for the iPad to Build Sales Performance

Traditional methods of incentivizing or motivating sales reps for better performance include “stick” methods like “walls of shame” or using basic statistics from their Salesforce to identify sales “winners” and “losers.”

ISM is focused on creating relevant apps with great data that reps can share in a way that makes it easy for them to use. When we give data to a rep in a CRM system, including Mobile CRM HD for iPad, we’ll automatically build in quick, easy ways to know whether it’s valuable for sales reps to pay attention to or not. You’ve got talented salespeople and employees. In a lot of cases when you look at what they’re actually doing, you find they spend too much time on things that aren’t really important. You can make it easier for them and more fun to perform by offering a lot of different “carrots” combining information and incentives. We’re big fans of “carrot” concepts at ISM.

Making a Great Sales App for iPad

According to motivation/performance guru Daniel Pink, “Gamification could go either way — toward 2.0 if the rewards are the point of the exercise, towards 3.0 if the rewards are a form of feedback, information, and a way to make progress and achieve flow.” In other words, the “game” part of the App should fit with the work that’s being done and make it easier, not harder, for sales reps to do their jobs.

This is where ISM’s experience comes in. We’d like to hear how you see the iPad working to improve your sales and work for your sales reps. If you have any stories about “walls of shame” or a “gamification” of your sales process where the sales reps came out as winners, post a comment below, or we want to hear from you. We’re gearing up for Dreamforce, August 30 – September 2 in San Francisco, where we will showcase our Mobile CRM HD iPad App.  Let us know if you are going, we’d love to meet you.

To learn more, please visit our Mobile CRM page.  Or call us at 877-553-0485, or email us!