We Blog CRM

Last week, Salesforce.com announced that one of its customer relationship management (CRM) and Force.com customers, Granicus, built 20 custom CRM applications in 20 weeks on Force.com, Salesforce.com’s enterprise cloud computing platform. Granicus is an award-winning cloud computing provider that needed to manage its growth with these applications. Granicus built and delivered these apps five times faster because of Force.com’s advanced capabilities as opposed to traditional platforms.

Granicus has grown rapidly in the past three years. The cloud computing provider needed a way to streamline its business processes, including sales, finance, human resources, marketing, project management, technical support and deployment departments. Granicus was able to build and deploy applications to manage this growth and control its business processes by using Salesforce’s Force.com platform. Efficiency and productivity dramatically increased within Granicus’ departments because of these applications, allowing the company to expand and achieve its goals.

Some of the customized applications that Granicus built on Force.com include a human resources app, which makes hiring and recruiting processes faster and easier. Granicus also built a regionalized accounts application, which allows the company to assign accounts and run reports. Another custom app is the sales proposals app, which creates proposals and determines client product configurations. The sales proposals app was built in only one week.

Granicus executives are very pleased with Salesforce’s Force.com platform and the new CRM applications. The program and API manager at Granicus, Jay Killian, commented. She said, “The secret to making your company successful on Force.com is to find a specific business problem to solve. It’s easier than you think to get started with a proof of concept app and then get it rolled out. To manage our fast growth, we built 20 custom apps in 20 weeks and now have our entire company on Force.com.”

The cloud custom application deployment was a success. Now, Granicus can build a sales proposal in 10 minutes instead of 2 hours. Project deployments were streamlined through a web-based tracking tool. Also, workflow was automated and Granicus now has the ability to quickly and easily develop applications without taxing resources.

Cloud computing giant, Salesforce.com, has been recognized as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for sales force automation. Gartner, the research firm, explains: “Leaders demonstrate a market-defining vision of how technology can help the top sales executives achieve business objectives. Leaders have the ability to execute against that vision through products, services and demonstrated solid business results in the form of revenue and earnings. Leaders have significant successful customer deployments in North America, EMEA and Asia/Pacific in a wide variety of vertical industries with multiple proof points above 500 users.”

Salesforce has been the recipient of a slew of awards and accolades, according to Forrester and Gartner. Salesforce was recognized as the ‘CRM Site for Mid-Sized Organizations’ and ‘CRM Suite for Large Organizations’ in June of 2010. Salesforce was also dubbed ‘CRM Suite Customer Service Solution’ a month later.

Much to Benioff’s excitement, Salesforce also swept the competition at the 2010 CRM Market awards and took home the gold in ‘Enterprise Suite CRM’, ‘Midmarket Suite CRM’, and ‘Small-Business Suite CRM’.

Alex Dayton, EVP of CRM at Salesforce explains: “We believe salesforce.com’s Magic Quadrant position reflects our continued leadership in the industry. And as we continue to innovate, delivering additional functionality like Chatter to customers at no additional cost, we are driving even higher levels of customer success with the Sales Cloud.”

Cars.com is the most comprehensive destination for those looking to buy or sell a new or used car. Today, the site lists more than 1.8 million vehicles from 12,000 dealer customers, classified advertisers and private parties. That is a lot of inventory to keep.

It hasn’t always been easy for Cars.com to manage the highly dispersed workforce or learning how to efficiently process hundreds of thousands of transactions each year while still managing to gracefully revamp existing business processes to accommodate differences between B2B and B2C interactions. So they decided to find a better way to manage it all – with a cloud (of course) CRM solution.

Cars.com deployed Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition and Salesforce CRM Service to more than 180 employees across the U.S and took about three months to complete with the assistance of Model Metrics – a CRM consulting firm and salesforce.com partner specializing in on-demand solutions. A painless implementation was one of the big bonuses for this big move.

Since implementing Salesforce CRM Service, Cars.com has changed the way it does business. The company is more efficient, with agent productivity climbing and shaving off case-handling time by 3.5 minutes per request. Additionally, they’re getting more bang for the buck since their peak agent capacity has jumped dramatically.

Thanks to their newfound team effectiveness in recent months, Cars.com has also been able to enjoy a new level of flexibility in its case management processes. With Salesforce CRM Service allows all case details to be captured and stored in a consistent way – hurray for standardization!

Cars.com is looking forward to evaluating additional ways to use CRM software to automate their growing business to simplify call handling and improve responsiveness to customer requests.

Salesforce.com has moved beyond providing customer relationship management software as a service and wants to be simply the provider of enterprise software as a service. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, recently posted an image of two mockups for Salesforce.com ads and asked for feedback. For the first time, it is a refreshing change to see a billion-dollar software company reach out to the community like this – but beyond social media this shows how Salesforce.com is moving from being a customer relationship management focused player, to being a true multi-disciplined technology company. The question asked by Benioff offers a real insight into where Salesforce.com is.

Clearly it is seen as the quintessential SaaS company — but out of necessity for continued growth, it has moved beyond this — Chatter, the AppExchange, Force.com, VMforce are all examples of Salesforce.com wanting to be much more than a simple (or even complex) sales tool. Initially Force.com created a programming platform to allow Salesforce.com customers to significantly broaden the functionality of their applications while the AppExchange created a marketplace for developers to sell those applications. More recently Chatter has sought to broaden the impact of Salesforce.com by creating a social feature set while VMforce moves decidedly down the stack in an effort to offer a platform as a service.

Which is why the simple question posted on Facebook is pretty telling — the cutlines under the ads tell of two fundamentally different propositions –- one limited and focused on sales, the other offering a broader enterprise toolset. I expect the messaging from inside Salesforce.com to becomes less sales-centric going forward as the product and the target market becomes broader.

This is more than just Salesforce.com grappling with its market perception however. Others in enterprise software consider it a threat as well. For example, Microsoft’s patent infringement lawsuit and IBM’s product related reactions to Salesforce’s move to the cloud give an indication of just how seriously the rest of the industry regards the company. While it was a CRM company only, the threat vector was only directed in one specific area, but its moves of late to become a player at every level of the stack has made the industry sit up and take notice.

Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing company, received two awards at the American Business Awards last week. Salesforce received the prestigious Stevie Awards for the Most Innovative Company of the Year and the Corporate Social Responsibility Program of the Year at the eighth annual awards ceremony. Both awards were granted in the 2500 + employees categories.

The Stevie Awards recognize positive contributions of various organizations. There were over 40 categories and 2,700 entries from organizations of all sizes. Over 200 business executives voted to determine who would win each Stevie Award.

A Stevie Award

Salesforce.com received the Most Innovative Company of the Year award for its groundbreaking and comprehensive CRM technology. The winning nomination stated that Salesforce.com won for “redefining the enterprise software industry with cloud computing.” Salesforce.com also took cloud computing to the next level, Cloud 2, with Salesforce Chatter.

The receipt of the Corporate Social Responsibility Program of the Year award was no shock because of Marc Benioff’s well known dedication to charity. He has made many large personal donations of his own in addition to ensuring that part of Salesforce.com’s profits go to charity. Benioff created the Salesforce.com Foundation which emphasized the 1/1/1 integrated philanthropy model, which says that powerful companies should use their resources to give back. Salesforce.com gives 1% of its time, 1% of its product and 1% of its equity to various nonprofits. Benioff’s 1/1/1 model has also inspired many other companies to do the same. The Salesforce.com Foundation received the award for “affecting change for social well-being. To date, Salesforce.com employees have contributed more than 192,000 hours of volunteer service, more than 8,500 nonprofits run their operations with donated Salesforce.com products, and more than $20 million in grants awarded to nonprofits since the Salesforce.com Foundation was created.”

Salesforce.com is very excited to have received these two coveted Stevie Awards. Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s CEO, said, “We are extremely proud to win Stevie Awards for attributes we consider core to our company’s success- innovation and corporate philanthropy. We thank our customers for being the catalyst behind our innovation as well as our employees who have proven that integrated philanthropy can truly make a difference.”

These awards are two of many that Salesforce.com has received recently. Salesforce is rapidly growing as one of the most powerful and influential companies in the technology industry. Find out more about their products and charity on Salesforce.com. Also, you can read more articles about Salesforce.com here.

FirstRain Inc., a technology and marketing company, announced the release of their free application for Salesforce.com. The application, entitled FirstRain Snapshot, will help businesses with customer relationship management (CRM). It will help business professionals connect with their customers because the application will provide customer insight and information about business competitors.

The goal of FirstRain Snapshot is to increase sales, revenue productivity, and customer satisfaction. The Salesforce CRM application enables users to stay updated on their customer’s business and activity. FirstRain Snapshot gives businesses real-time and up to date information so their employees are always informed, ready to discuss the latest hot industry topics, and identify trends easier. It also helps professionals understand sales risks, manage sales opportunities better, and develop competitive and complete solutions to help their company prosper.

Penny Herscher, the President and CEO of FirstRain, commented on their CRM application. “The FirstRain snapshot shows salespeople key customer developments and risks that are impacting their opportunities and sales campaigns- and so instantly helps them have more relevant conversations with their customer. Since it’s an integrated application within Salesforce CRM, the snapshot is easy to use in a salesperson’s everyday workflow.”

Essentially, FirstRain snapshot for Salesforce CRM takes the effort and time of finding the latest information out of the equation. It does all of the work for you- and for free! Its comprehensive account intelligence allows salespeople to focus on the customers or to work on major accounts. Herscher said, “With FirstRain Snapshot in Salesforce CRM, sales professoinals don’t have to spend hours scouring the web or wrestling with hard-to-use, out-of-date databases. A summary of what’s hot and the latest developments for an account are available instantly at no charge.”

FirstRain will host a free webinar for their Salesforce CRM App. Penny Herscher will represent FirstRain on the webcast, which will show users how they can conduct major account analysis with Salesforce CRM. The webinar will happen on July 27, 2010, at 1:00 p.m. PDT. The registration link is here and the webcast link is here.

Salesforce CRM users can find the FirstRain Snapshot application on Salesforce’s AppExchange.

Following in Salesforce.com’s footsteps with AppExchange, Microsoft will create its own CRM application store. The Microsoft CRM 2011 marketplace will be available in beta form in September, then generally available by the end of this year.

The CRM app store will allow Microsoft partners to sell applications to complement Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft’s complex and innovative customer relationship management solution. Microsoft plans to extend the availability of the CRM App store to 40 other markets, including Brazil, Costa Rica, Chila, and Australia, by the end of the year.

The app marketplace will begin online, following Salesforce.com’s release of AppExchange in September. Microsoft is trying to keep up with its main competitor, Salesforce. Analyst, China Martens, commented on this issue. She said, “[The Dynamics Marketplace is an] important integration, since one of the reasons some customers talk about going with Salesforce.com is being able to easily identify a whole ecosystem of complementary apps and extensions around its CRM- something Microsoft does well to emulate.”

Apparently, the Microsoft CRM App store has been in the works for a while. Microsoft plans to release it alongside an updated version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which will integrate better with Microsoft Office, Outlook, and Sharepoint. Microsoft is smart to keep their CRM applications connected to their Microsoft products, such as Office, because Salesforce.com does not have the same advantage.

Microsoft plans to price their CRM app store similarly to the prices of Salesforce’s applications, but the exact pricing model is currently unclear. This new Microsoft CRM App store could help Microsoft get a leg up on Salesforce.com, but unfortunately Microsoft has a long way to go. According to IDC, an analyst company’s, report, Salesforce had $885 million in application revenue in 2009. Other companies followed, including Oracle and SAP. Microsoft came in fifth on IDC’s report, at $139 million in application revenue. Microsoft probably anticipates that their CRM App store will help them climb the list a little higher.

If you are interested in learning more about other CRM vendors, check this free report of the Top 40 CRM Software Vendors.

On Tuesday, Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing company, announced that over 10,000 people went live on the GA release of Chatter in its first week of availability. Chatter is Salesforce’s latest cloud social networking application. Salesforce’s Chatter is a new way to work and collaborate.

Chatter has similar features as Facebook but it was designed for business users. Users can create profiles, status updates, and view or update news feeds. It is even compatible with the iPhone. Many companies are thrilled with capabilities of Salesforce’s Chatter and have jumped at the opportunity to integrate it into their systems. The founding partner of Sequoia Wealth Management Group, Matthew Schafer, said “The market demands of today mean that our competitive advance lies in our ability to arm employees and teams with accurate, real-time information. With Salesforce Chatter, we can stay on top of what’s going on with customer accounts to deliver an unrivaled client service experience. The combination of Chatter’s social networking features and real-time access via the iPhone app are invaluable because they have accelerated our productivity and bolstered our ability meet our clients’ needs quicker.”

The overwhelming positive response to Chatter shows how the technology industry is rapidly adopting Cloud 2 applications. Cloud 2 apps, including Chatter, help companies increase their productivity, collaboration, and efficiency. Employees get to know their colleagues better, can follow the progress of projects, and share application data or documents. Salesforce.com’s Chatter is taking business processes to the next level.

Salesforce.com is thrilled about the reaction to Chatter. Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s chairman and CEO, said, “We’ve never seen this kind of excitement around a product release before. The rapid adoption of Chatter is simply amazing.” Many companies, including Google, are trying to follow in Salesforce.com’s footsteps as they have realized the opening market for social collaboration tools in the workplace.

Salesforce Chatter is now generally available on Salesforce.com. Chatter is free if users already have Salesforce CRM and Force.com licenses. Otherwise, it costs $15 per user per month.

Last week, Salesforce.com countersued Microsoft for patent-infringement. Microsoft sued Salesforce first, in May, over intellectual property infringement. These customer relationship management (CRM) competitors are battling it out over patent violations. Microsoft and Salesforce are both seeking an injuction and monetary compensation for the violations.

Microsoft claims that Salesforce’s CRM software violates nine Microsoft patents. Microsoft wants Salesforce to stop using any technology that violates Microsoft’s patents. This in addition to monetary penalties could hurt Salesforce.com drastically while giving Microsoft a leg up in the CRM solutions arena.

Horacio Gutierrez, the Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing for Microsoft, commented on the law suit. He said, “Microsoft has been a leader and innovator in the software industry for decades and continues to invest billions of dollars each year in bringing great software products and services to market. We have a responsibility to our customers, partners, and shareholders to safeguard that investment, and therefore cannot stand idly by when others infringe our IP rights.”

Salesforce was not willing to negotiate so the two companies will be going to court. Salesforce decided to hit Microsoft back on Thursday, when the law suit against Microsoft was filed. Salesforce claims that many Microsoft products, including SharePoint Collaboration and .NET platform, violate Salesforce’s patents.

The fight is getting ugly as Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, called Microsoft a “patent troll” and an “alley thug”. Microsoft has filed four other patent-infringement suits in the past. Both companies represent a large part of the CRM market and they are direct competitors. It is likely both companies feel threatened by the other and this is the reason that the patent fight is becoming so intense. In history, the longer-standing and wealthier company, which in this case would be Microsoft, would win. On the other hand, Salesforce is a strong and growing company with one of the best prosecuting attorneys in the U.S., David Boise.

Whichever company loses will be hit hard; especially Salesforce because the company is newer and relies heavily on their CRM applications, which are in question.

Yesterday, Salesforce.com and BMC Software announced that their alliance has affected IT departments’ decision to use cloud-based IT service management and Cloud 2 applications. Salesforce.com has been selling the BMC ServiceDesk on Force.com, since April, and customers have quickly adopted it. Because of the major influx of sales on Force.com, Salesforce and BMC decided to resell the BMC Service Desk.

Hundreds of companies have signed up for the BMC software free trial or demo of the cloud computing solution. The software is intended to improve customer service and the value of IT operations at a low cost. The BMC Service Desk on Force.com also includes self-service capabilities, a consolidated service desk, and inventory management features. It allows IT managers to personalize the software to meet the needs of their company. The BMC Service Desk also has reporting capabilities, wizard driven tools, and social applications, including Salesforce’s latest- Chatter. Chatter is a Facebook-like social network application that includes profiles, status updates, and news feeds allowing employees to collaborate easily.

Two of Salesforce and BMC’s newest major customers include Allied Wireless Communications Corp and Lumen 21. Eduardo Don Jr., the CEO of Lumen 21, commented on the impact of adopting the BMC Service Desk. He said, “With Service Desk on Force.com, we’re getting a consolidated service desk that is both simple and affordable. As a cloud-based ITSM solution from two industry leaders like BMC and Salesforce.com, we’re confident that the pay-as-you-go pricing and lack of hardware or software costs will help Lumen21 reduce costs and improve service levels for our customers.”

IT departments are rapidly moving into the Cloud 2 arena because it is a fast, easy, and low-cost solution that is really the future for major business companies. BMC and Salesforce are both confident and excited about the resell agreement between them.

“Through our resell agreement with Salesforce.com, we are making it easier than ever for customers to simplify and automate their IT,” said John McMahon, BMC’s senior vice president for worldwide sales and services. “Our combined sales teams are bringing BMC’s cloud-based IT service management solutions to the world via the proven Force.com platform.”

The BMC Service Desk on Force.com is generally available now on BMC Software and Salesforce’s websites.