Salesforce.com can be extended to be interactive with your customers via a secure customer portal.  This allows for your customers to manage information about themselves via a login and view of shared Salesforce.com information.

Managing Cases

The standard customer portal allows for Case record management via a self-service portal.  When this is set up within your Professional or Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition, users can login to a portal site hosted on your site.  They can create new Case records or manage existing records to see progress and resolution on their issues.  This is valuable for keeping a place that your customer can see historical and current issues with your company.  It provides great value to the business relationship.

Custom Portals

If you want to create more self-service for your customers, then a custom built portal would be required.  Other data objects and fields, either standard or custom, can be shared out.

Depending on your business processes, you may want to share out invoice and accounting information with a customer.  Or you may have project information that is being managed in Salesforce.com that you want to status a customer on and allow for self-service.  They can view current status or input comments to the current project information.

There are many possibilities.  The value-add depends on what is important in your business relationship with your customers and how it might also help increase productivity for your team.

There are likely opportunities which make sense for creating a portal for your customer with the rich information resident in your Salesforce.com system.  Look for the return-on-productivity or return-on-investment to design a customer portal.  Feel free to connect with us if you would like help.

How would a customer portal be valuable for your business?

What Salespeople Want

Salespeople do not want a CRM system as an end in itself.  However, they will use it if it helps them:

• Close more deals
• Be more productive
• Track their progress
• Get more sales meetings
• Help them remember
• Have freedom

These are the reasons your sales team will use your custom system.  Often when launching, you may experience resistance because they cannot see the connection between this software and what they want.  Managers want something different.

What Managers Want

Managers are bought in because it helps them with the things that help them do their job.  Salesforce.com helps them to:

• Track activities in real-time
• Forecast revenue
• Create predictability
• Keep accountability
• Measure performance
• Improve process

It is a different set of interests.  Salesforce.com is the ultimate management tool with regards to the things managers want.

There is a disconnect for what appeals to managers and salespeople.  Aligning sales requires a focus and leadership around the things that salespeople care about.  Otherwise, adoption can be hindered from a lack of enthusiasm and usage.

Salesforce.com Is Only Good If…

Salesforce.com is only as good as the data that is put into it and the timing of the data.  Zig Ziglar stated, ““You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want”  In the case of getting what you want – sales adoption – help your sales team get what they want by ensuring the customization of your systems and process are clear, simple and useful.

Build the system as you go.  Avoid developing in a silo.  Salesforce.com is a platform that can be changed ongoing in real-time as your sales team uses it.

Leadership is also required.  All requirements are not necessarily good requirements.  There needs to be a guiding framework and roadmap to keep things simple in design and effective.  Mindlessly adding new fields as you go can encumber adoption as well.

The challenge is creating a system which is desirable to use and adds value to your salespeople.  Great design will do much in the way of helping managers get the information they are seeking.  They can trust Salesforce.com for making decisions and plans.

We have seen our share of sales organizations work through alignment.  If you see a lack of alignment and adoption, then focus on the usability and design of your system before driving a top-down management mandate.  It will serve you well.

How well is your sales team aligned?

Our Salesforce.com consulting clients vary in how they do business and with this comes implementation successes and obstacles in our many stories.  Though Salesforce.com is a system which can automate many processes, many things have to come together to make it successful in your business.

From our vantage point we have seen some obstacles to implementation that are worth noting as you are seeking to grow your business.  Consider the following:

1. Lack Of Salesforce.com Design

You can build your system field by field and keep throwing requirements together as you go along.  You may end up putting pieces on the board for the puzzle at the expense of truly building a complete picture.

Your Salesforce.com system should have an overarching strategy supported by its design.  The interdependencies of your system will reveal poor design over time.  Furthermore, as you add more complexity, you create more work for your team.  Now there are more fields that need to be filled out for every interaction.  The details should be considered for their merit and the design should reflect an integrated approach with the simplest path possible.  Good design does this.  There is such a thing as overengineering and creating a lack of adoption from a lack of motivation.

2. Loss Of Momentum

Launching Salesforce.com is a rigorous push towards a goal.  There is a lot of hard work to make it work in your organization.  When there are stop and go type of activities, then enthusiasm can wane and requirements can get lost quickly.  Momentum is critical for implementation.  Salesforce.com is as much a people and organizational management issue as it is technology which should bend to your processes.

Avoid momentum loss by being responsive to generating and delivering requirements.  Within the scope of work to make Salesforce.com work, it is important to keep accountability with everyone involved.  Anyone that does not do their part of customization, development, testing, validation and training can bottleneck the entire implementation process.

3. Fear Of Failure

Salesforce.com started a revolution.  Now instead of the old days of having to be perfect in our requirements, we can be flexible and fail quickly.  The reason is that Salesforce.com affords iteration quickly.  It is less about perfect software coding and more about clear business process thinking.  If you are unclear on your thinking, this shows up.  However, that is ok.  You can change things quickly.

It is amazing how many people are still focused on perfection.  It is costly in this age of speed.  It is better to put things into play and get feedback quickly.  You can change them in Salesforce.com to get to perfection after your plans meet reality.

A great way to do this is to launch and watch how users are working in the system within your process.  If they tend to not use features, have a different way of doing things or complain about how things work, then changing Salesforce.com with high responsiveness can bring delight, buy-in and eventual perfection.  Using Salesforce.com is the key issue.  Your users and your customers will help you shape it.  Having a talented implementation team will help you get perfect over time.

4. Complex Not Simple

Salesforce.com solves many problems.  If you presume one solution that is more complex than another, then you have embedded those options into your business.  For example, if you choose a route of custom developing a document merging system rather than using Conga Composer, then your team has to live with the results.  The choice is less than optimal.

Obstacles in a lack of sound advice or knowledge can take you down a pathway which is not only inefficient but cumbersome and a deterrent to adoption.

Simple means there is awareness of options and elegance in the design approach.  Instead of 4 fields, you opt for one that makes sense and gets to the goal.  If there are endless data trails you will never look at then the work over time of your users is for naught if there is not analysis and action behind their efforts.  Think simple.  There is likely a solution already built which integrates that can be easily plugged in or pulled if it doesn’t work.

Push Through The Obstacles

Salesforce success is not an elusive goal.  It is an obstacle which needs to be pushed through with determination, leadership and change management.  If you have weak leadership and management then the obstacles will be daunting.  However, if you are clear on the goal and collaborative then you can push through the various obstacles which inevitably come up when dealing with people, process and systems.

Think about thes 4 key obstacles and commit to leading through the changes in order to make Salesforce.com work in your organization.

What obstacles are you facing?

However, if your process is not contingent on a large flow of inbound marketing prospects, then you may want to structure your Salesforce.com system to capture Opportunities immediately to work.  This would be the case for a situation where there is a long sales cycle, few prospects and a high dollar transaction.

Let’s take a look at the opposite situation: short sales cycles, many prospects and lower dollar transactions.

Salesforce.com Lead Management

If you sell something like software subscriptions, online training modules or a digital product, you can easily generate prospects from a trial offer or giving something of value first.  Your site visitors would exchange contact information for your value offering.  Ideally, you might have a marketing automation system to help further nurture and qualify the best prospects.  In conjunction with this system, the tracking of prospects would be primarily around the Lead Status picklist field in Salesforce.com.

The values in the Lead Status field should be set up much like Opportunity Stages.  You might have a sales qualification team that works with pre-qualified Leads.  Their job is as follows:

1. Follow up on Leads that have not been contacted.
2. Assess their buying criteria based on specific qualification criteria:
   1. Their budget
   2. Their authority
   3. Their need
   4. Their timeframe
3. Assign the Lead Status based on the qualification criteria scorecard
4. Set the next step:
   1. A follow-up Activity date
   2. Lead Unqualified status
   3. Convert the Lead to an Opportunity for senior sales members

Your sales process depends on clear definition of the Lead qualification criteria and management by your team.  A marketing automation system can set the Lead Status criteria and trigger Tasks for your pre-qualification team when the prospect is ready to be contacted as well.

As each of the Lead Status values are set, a report a filtered view of all Active Leads should be generated to monitor real-time information of the Lead pipeline.  This gives you effective management control of your front end sales process.

Team selling becomes much more effective with a qualification process that is managed well in Salesforce.com.  The process and strategy for driving this result pays large dividends as you segment your inbound marketing leads and focus them specifically for the ensuring sales conversation.

How do you manage your lead qualification?

To know what is happening, your ability to be plugged into your team’s pipelines, service, or operations a click or login away.  Here is how to ensure you are operating in real-time with your team in Salesforce.com:

1. Manage By Dashboard Metrics

What you measure gets done.  If your team understands that you are monitoring data in real-time from specific metrics in your reports and dashboards then this reinforces their behaviors towards the actions you want them to focus on.  Be sure to have well-defined metrics that matter on a real-time basis.  This can be anything leads/day/person to completed tasks by person per day.  Ensure your reports and metrics account for your revenue, loyalty and marketing goals.  The right behaviors will follow.

2. Integrate Website Metrics

If your Salesforce.com API is enabled, then your website metrics need to feed Lead and Contact records to monitor behaviors.  This helps to set up your sales response appropriately.  This requires custom software development to drive the right data with the right scheduling.

3. Measure Activities

Every task needs to be assigned and every activity needs to be recorded to drive the fidelity of Salesforce.com as a reliable data source.  Each person who has a conversation or performs an action with an Account, Lead, Contact or Opportunity needs to log this.  By so doing, others on the team can count on the temperature of your relationships and act accordingly.

4. Capture Integration Activities

Any custom or standard software that integrates with your Salesforce.com system likely logs activities.  These are powerful indicators of what is happening as your Leads and Contacts interact with marketing, proposals, signed documents, or the array of other third-party AppExchange software integration options.  Ensure that your integrations are creating the real-time picture of what your customers, prospects and partners are doing with your interactions.

Better Judgment And Actions

We live in a real-time world.  If your organization is using Salesforce.com and your applications are tightly integrated, then your team should know when to act and what to decide.  This helps create an interactive experience with your customers and prospects.  Salesforce success depends on setting up your people for timeliness of information to act as well as providing a way to act in real-time.

How is your organization doing in real-time?  Feel free to comment.

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In our Salesforce consulting work, many of our customers are seeking advice on whether to choose Salesforce.com or another CRM.  The truth is that there are several systems which will work based on clear requirements around your business process.  Typically, a Salesforce roadmap will help clarify this issue as well.  Multiple software choices can enable the business process which comes from the roadmap.

It is easy to get into a feature comparison between systems.  However, from our work and perspective, the features are abundant.  CRM companies have to be rich in features just to be in the game today.  It is a mature market and the barrier to entry forces vendors to be competitive.

Furthermore, most companies do not utilize the full array of features.  Much like users of Microsoft Word, they use a small subset of what is available.  They use what they need to get things done.  In fact, too many features can be distracting and impede productivity, collaboration and selling.

Where technical analysis is required, we encourage this.  Let’s assume there is parity in features between today’s CRM systems.  Here are three business considerations we would offer:

1. Salesforce.com is the leader.  The leadership position of a technology is important.  It provides a common platform which has many additional business benefits.  There is not a competitive second option to Facebook.  It is the platform where the world connects socially with friends and fans.  Likewise, Salesforce.com’s scale and user base creates commonality on the journey for business success.  The community around the technology affords a wealth of thought leadership, best practices and consultative advice.  From the user groups around the country to Dreamforce, you have extended support from the community.
2. The ecosystem to grow with.  When you start, there will be some preliminary requirements which help to structure the system to work the way you need it.  As you and your team use Salesforce.com, there are inevitably new requirements.  You will want new functionality.  The AppExchange contains thousands of third-party applications.  Instead of the old days of custom development of software which was costly and timely, you can access what you need from a marketplace and plug and play.  This is highly strategic for growth.  Apps are available to help you automate more of your business as you use the system.
3. The platform for development.  As you continue down the growth and adoption path, you may want to integrate with other business systems or websites.  With Salesforce.com Enterprise edition, scripts can be developed which work with the API (application programming interface) to automate your business processes.  This affords you to use Salesforce.com as a platform for integrating your entire business over time.  The opportunity to do this allows you to further leverage mission critical systems in your business to work with your CRM to support multiple processes.  Information can be shared across your business seamlessly this way.

These are some high-level reasons which can help frame your decision for a CRM system in terms of business strategy.  While you might entertain a cheaper option, the hidden costs can surface later as you seek to grow your use of the system without the inherent ecosystem and platform options that Salesforce.com has established as the leader.

We have implemented multiple CRM systems.  The technology is highly similar.  The business factors may be something which has added weight in your decision making.

What are some considerations you have for choosing a CRM system?  Feel free to comment below.

Custom software involved managing a developer or set of developers on a long project cycle.  The coding of software required well defined requirements.  Unfortunately, this takes cycles as well on the front end.

Custom software development is both brittle and expensive.  It is brittle in that when a change was required, which is inevitable with business, then the systemic impacts created work across the system as well as failures if the coding was not malleable to absorb new changes.  Change created ripples in development.  This creates costs in time and money.

Customization With Salesforce.com

Ultimately, the system to run your business needs to capture and enable business process.  This has been the great contribution of Salesforce.com to today’s fast-moving marketplace.  We are able to iterate and make change quickly without the cycles inherent in custom software development.

For example, say that your customer service process needs some tweaks.  You learned this from repeated engagements with your customers and you want to be able to capture more information as well as assign tasks based on certain business rules.

Adding the appropriate database fields and creating those rules can be done with customization in Salesforce.com.  It can be reviewed, tweaked and redesigned easily.  The collaboration and feedback loop helps to drive towards perfection.  Using the system allows for continual refinement.

This same problem would have required exacting specifications in the past.  If you missed, then changing the code was a lot of effort.  You were beholden to the old platforms.

Automate Your Business

You have the opportunity to be in continual discovery and refinement today.  This allows you to get started and be imperfect.  Perfection comes from using your Salesforce.com system and percolating the required changes within a rapid customization cycle.  This allows for more latitude in clarity of requirements which saves cycles and helps to hone your business processes over time.

With such powerful capabilities, we often have to give our customers perspective.  When we build and implement custom software, it can cost tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars.  It is customized and the coding is specific to your business.  The trade-off is that the framework, requirements and build cycles take on a completely different set of costly rules.

If the goal is for automating your business and driving collaboration, sales and execution, then Salesforce.com’s platform for customization saves you massive amounts of time and money.  You can keep pace with the relentless reality of change and manage it with a flexible system that can bend to your requirements.

Question: How often do you find yourself changing things to get work done more efficiently?  How do you manage this change?

In a connected world, there are too many factors continually changing.  Having a perfect understanding of how your business processes should run is made by discovery and implementation.  Thus, it is a poor strategy to custom code a system to enable business processes unless you have perfect requirements.  For changes take time and are costly.  You can easily paint yourself into a corner based on suppositions which change from many factors in your business.

Salesforce.com allows for iteration.  You can implement and tweak as you learn more about factors such as:

How your team adopts your system

What fields are unnecessary or create more friction than benefit

What the customer experience requires for success

What metrics are important

In the new economy, customizing with an agile system is the best strategy for managing change and speed.  The ability to change quickly rather than define perfectly allows you to flex on what you think may work, but needs to be tested.  Of the three types of systems:

A system which works one way for everyone

A system that is custom developed for your way

A system that can be changed continuously

You tend to outgrow Number 1.  Number 2 restricts you and takes lots of time and money.  Number 3 affords you greater opportunity for success in your business as you grow.

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Today, people are changing more than their jobs.  They are changing their minds, budgets, and needs constantly.  Sales cycles are more complex.  Information and contact must be timely, relevant and stand out.  Furthermore, sales has become collaborative.  Teammates, vendors and resources must all be pulled together for the project known as a sale.

The organizations that are using technology to enable collaboration, speed and timely delivery for nurturing the customer’s buying process are in phase with the modern economy.  Timing has become critical.  Salesforce.com is the leading CRM designed to help sales teams nurture and win customer relationships effectively.

The Old Model

A decade ago, people felt an increase in productivity from having a Palm Pilot.  They could manage tasks, calendars and notes for assisting their workload.  However, as handheld devices became connected, the Palm Pilot’s limitations became apparent.  Having one would be an antiquated scene.  Today, if it is not connected then it is a mere toy.

Likewise, older sales software systems like ACT or Goldmine centered around individual organization.  Eventually they introduced servers to manage some collaboration.  The individual lone wolf salesperson liked the independence.  Collaboration was not of interest.  They wanted to protect their relationships and their results such as activities and results.

Operating in a disconnected and independent fashion worked for a slower moving economy.  We had much less than one hundred emails a day to deal with.  Our information stream was coming in much slower.  The customer was moving slower.

Today’s Customer

As the internet, commerce, technology and communications moved forward, speed has increased dramatically.  Speed has changed our behaviors.  We are reacting and using heuristics to make decisions or remain in indecision.  As customers are examining a product or service, they are requiring just-in-time interactions in the form of written and visual communications as well as timely calls or mailings.  Their buying process has to be experienced in a concerted fashion.  Today’s enterprise must market in a one-to-one mode.

It is easy to cater to one person.  However, infuse multiple prospects, competitors, and speed into the challenge of sales.  Sales execution becomes even more important.  If you close too heavy and too soon, this can ruin the buying process.  If you neglect the customer when they need information, this has the same effect.

Tracking the customer’s movements and responding with value at the right time is a process which must be refined and mastered for sales teams to succeed today.  Synchronizing movements on a team must be done from a collaborative and agile environment.

Furthermore, as the sales process has become more complex, sales roles from qualification to nurturing to account management require different skill sets.  Coordinating specialists on a team is critical for sales success.  Team selling requires task assignments and accountability.

As customers prefer communications via email, productivity gains must be realized.  As sales processes are executed, precision and consistency of communications for branding, positioning and nurturing the customer’s decision-making must be done quickly.  If a knowledge worker takes 20 minutes to write an email, they are limited in the number of touchpoints per day to move their pipeline forward.

A System For Speed And Nurturing

Salesforce.com introduced Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as the business platform for collaboration, speed and team selling.  As data is managed by a sales team, real-time updates are provided across the enterprise.  This is both for tactical execution as well as management reporting.  Data is real-time and sales people adopt the tool from the productivity value gains.

Communications is critical for selling.  Working internally as well as with the prospect with activity records available for everyone on the team creates efficiency to leverage towards engaging the customer precisely.

Furthermore, having a set sequence of tested and branded communications automates the sales communications process.  The majority of communications will be via email, the preferred method for most customers today.  Salesforce.com contains a repository of email templates for customization and personalization to streamline email communications.  A simple button click sends an email which traditionally would take dozens of minutes to type.

The sales opportunity is managed as a systematic project with a goal and deadline.  Each salesperson is empowered with the ability to delegate quickly and have visibility on execution within a customer’s buying experience.  Managers have real-time data on both the activity level as well as forecasting, pipelines and any other metric vital for sales success.

Scalability in the sales organization leads to enabling marketing and customer service processes within one customer environment.  Data is transparent and management decisions can be made analytically rather than solely by intuition.

Salesforce.com not only provides individual productivity increases, but it also solidifies the organization’s approach to sales as a process which becomes a repeatable system for selling.

The customer experience is managed with speed, consistency and refinement.  Anything short of this SaaS technology creates wasted work in the organization.  Knowledge and data are not growing in and across the selling operation for continuous improvement and honing in on an optimized business methodology.

With over one million users worldwide, Salesforce.com has become the standard for selling.  Its agility and alignment with how customers buy makes it the tool for adoption in an organization who is serious about moving their selling from mere art to a science.

Your tools are commodities. Everyone can get access to them today. In fact, everyone does access the tools. The case, more often than not, is that they are underused, misused or irrelevant in most people’s business. The tools are a lot like sports equipment. There is a lot of hype to get someone to buy a workout machine, tennis racquet or bike. Visit the typical person in 6 months, and you find them as artifacts in de facto storage.

We live in an age of abundance. Tools are cheap and ubiquitous. If tools were the answer, then everyone would be wildly successful in their business. Such is not the case. There is typically a giant blind spot which makes success elusive. It has to do with strategy. Strategy is the enabler for making tools part of a system which makes money. Strategy comes from thinkers that can see the opportunities and deliver specific, relevant and timely systems to exploit those opportunities. Strategy comes from talent, not tools.

Putting the pieces together is much more of a challenge in an age of abundance. As tools continue to commoditize and approach in many cases, a zero price point, the real challenge lies in creating the processes which drive business results.

Social media does not make money for most businesses. Strategic lead nurturing does. Adwords is often expensive and wasteful. Relevant campaigns to connect and entice a clicker is what makes the return on investment.

From the outside, successful businesses and people look like they can be mimicked if we acquire the same accessories and tools they use. It is a grave misconception. Under the hood, they have refined an art form into a system. An actress makes her lines look easy. To be like her would mean to start the journey of countless iterations and working on the minutiae which separates mediocre from great performers. So it goes in today’s economy.

The truth is, talented people can take multiple tools to achieve the same result. A tennis pro can use any racquet and still outplay the vast majority of people. A world-class cook can use Wal-Mart cooking utensils and deliver a much more elegant meal than a housewife who has Williams Sonoma class cookware. It’s the player, not the racquet. It’s the cook, not the cookware. So it goes, it’s the talent, not the tools. Perhaps your success is only elusive because you see the gadgets and not the goal. Get the right talent and let them leverage the tools to help you. Focus only on the talent you truly have, which is likely one or two specialties. Strategy always trumps good tools.