We Blog CRM

Last week, Aprimo Inc., a consumer and business-to-business marketing solutions company, announced that they will now offer a data synchronization application called Aprimo Marketing Studio On Demand with Salesforce CRM. The Studio on Demand will be a part of Salesforce’s AppExchange 2. Their goal is to improve companies’ lead management process by allowing them to integrate marketing with sales. Aprimo and Salesforce both expect that this change will help companies increase their profits by getting more leads.

Aprimo Marketing Studio On Demand will have an integrated user interface with Salesforce CRM so that business users can see a contact’s marketing activity. Users will also be able to drop contacts into a marketing campaign or send marketing-related emails. Marketing and Sales departments will have direct access to one another.

Rob McLaughlin, the co-founder of Aprimo, commented on the CRM Studio On Demand application. He said, “The connection between marketing and sales is much broader and deeper than just lead management. For years, Aprimo’s solutions have led the way, tearing down the silos between sales and marketing to foster sales transparency. Now, we provide insight into everything from marketing campaign calendars to a centralized digital asset repository for content sharing, all the way to marrying online and offline marketing contact history. By creating this unified view of all sales and marketing content, Aprimo ensures that every lead is prioritized, resulting in a higher rate of sales success and increased revenues.”

The Aprimo Marketing Studio On Demand is available on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange 2, which is the “world’s leading marketplace for partners to promote their cloud computing apps to customers,” according to Kendall Collins, the chief marketing officer at Salesforce.com. With the Studio on Demand application now integrated into Salesforce’s AppExchange 2, marketers will be able to effortlessly share data with Sales while building relationships with both the sales department and their customers. Marketers can now develop more specific and effective campaigns because they will be able to target their leads better.

Aprimo and Salesforce decided that integrating their two applications was necessary because marketers needed an easy way to find new markets to reach prospective customers. Both companies expect this new enhanced product to help with lead management, brand management, campaign management, social marketing, and more.

Salesforce and Aprimo’s product has already been a success, as Open Solutions Inc. started to use the Aprimo Marketing Studio On Demand for AppExchange 2. Deborah L. Katz, their Vice President, said, “The integration will allow us to automatically provide access to marketing activities and pass leads on to our sales and account management teams and the two-way automation will cut back dramatically on lead action time. Our culture of continuous improvement always has us looking to partner with best-of-breed technology vendors to deliver the best service to our clients. Aprimo has definitely proven to us that we made the right decision.”

The Aprimo Marketing Studio On Demand with Salesforce CRM is available today on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange 2 website.

Salespeople have to stay on the move to make the deal, and now have more freedom than ever to do so. Mobile devices can come with tools to help at every moment of the sales process, from pulling up important lead information from CRM systems to displaying business statistics. Here are four innovative sales applications to step up your sales team.

Proposable.com

Through this website, you can create online sales proposals to send to your clients. Proposal templates can be customized and saved. Because the proposal is delivered online, you can now monitor and analyze much more information about the deal. You can check which client viewed the proposal and for how long. Instantaneous notifications inform you even about which section of the proposal is most seen. This allows you to focus on the right customer in real-time as soon as the potential buyer views or adds a comment to the site.

Packages start at $19 per month and go up to $79 per month, each with a 30 day free trial.

Sybase Mobile Sales

This is a CRM app that allows access to SAP sales data from a mobile at any location. You can receive all SAP alerts or notifications. The app works on iPhones and Windows mobile phones, while a version for Blackberry will be released later this year.

The app is $15 per user per month, or $405 for a perpetual license.

Mimiran Sales Compass

This software organizes and analyzes your business sales statistics. Your sales representatives are provided with all the necessary market information. Selling prices can be optimized among the sales team with the software’s analysis of historical pricing data and competitor’s rates. Sales decisions can be made more quickly and efficiently with Sales Compass Target Pricing; it can dramatically reduce the time needed for back-and-forth deal approvals.

The app costs $99 a month for the first user, and $49 for each additional user.

Salesforce Chatter

Salesforce.com’s customer relations management solution, as released today at Salesforce’s Cloudforce 2010 conference, is now available for Salesforce’s 77,300 customers. The application allows employees to maintain business profiles, make status updates, and collaborate. Client information can also be kept and updated. Indeed, it is Facebook for business. The uses of Chatter may expand further into business needs through the ChatterExchange category of AppExchange, where apps can be downloaded. Some 50 apps are already available, such as FinancialForce Accounting Chatterbox (accounting software), and Cloud Apps Carbon ’10 (helps to find ways to reduce operation costs).

Salesforce Chatter access is free to all existing Salesforce customers. Otherwise, Chatter-only licenses are available for $15 per user per month.

Today, Salesforce.com’s CEO and chairman, Marc Benioff, donated $100 million to the University of California in San Francisco Children’s Hospital. This is a private donation from Benioff and his family, and is both the largest donation that they have ever given and the largest donation that UCSF Hospital has ever received.

The new children’s hospital will be named for the Benioff family. The Benioff hospital will be an expanded and updated version of the current hospital. Construction is set to be completed in 2014. There will be 183 beds, an on-site helipad, and cutting edge technology to help the critically ill children in the SF Bay Area get the attention and the care that they need. UCSF will also launch an interactive website for the hospital, which will be powered by Salesforce.com technology. The Benioffs will introduce the website today at Salesforce.com’s conference in San Jose.

“The Benioffs’ extraordinary generosity will have a direct impact on the many thousands of young patients cared for at UCSF Children’s Hospital each year,” said Mark Laret, CEO of UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Children’s Hospital. “UCSF and the Benioffs share a commitment to performing at the very highest level, and we look forward to realizing our joint vision of creating the world’s most advanced children’s hospital at Mission Bay.”

This is not the first donation that the Benioff family has made to UCSF. Lynne and Marc Benioff have supported many research projects and have endowed four departamental chairs at the hospital. Lynne, Marc’s wife, is a member of the UCSF Board of Directors which explains their dedication and interest in the hospital, among other things.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com

The Benioff family is extremely dedicated to philanthropy in general. Marc has even written two books on integrating business and philanthropy. The first book is titled Compassionate Capitalism and the second is The Business of Changing the World. In both books, Marc emphasizes the importance of companies incorporating philanthropy into their business models because they have the power to change the world. Marc follows his business model with Salesforce.com. He has a 1/1/1 policy where 1% of the company’s time, 1% of its equity, and 1% of its products are given to the community. Salesforce.com has followed this model since its first year. The UCSF donations were not connected to Salesforce.com- it was completely out-of-pocket. Benioff’s generosity is both impressive and inspiring. He even says that he plans on donating a majority of his fortune in the future to the community.

Marc Benioff said, “In business, we say that people overestimate what you can do in a year and underestimate what you can do in a decade. This is true in philanthropy as well.”

The Salesforce.com CEO is following in Bill Gates steps as a major tech leader introducing the business industry to philanthropy. If more would follow in their footsteps, it is incredible how much could be accomplished. Major players in the technology business could change the world as we know it.

Reportedly, Marc Benioff loves Apple. He loves iPads. And he loves Japan.

In a recent guest column by the Salesforce executive, Benioff describes his 3-week stay in Japan that coincided with the release of the iPad. He watched as the Japanese people completely ate up the iPads in stock and revered the new device.

To him, Japan represents a fundamental IT market that will readily accept Cloud 2 development and social networking. For one, cloud computing allows software to be easily ported to the Japanese from the US. The software can be updated immediately and without cost. Japanese people have also quickly adopted social networking sites (such as the local website Mixi) due to their “community-based culture.”

Benioff partly attributes the success of Salesforce.com in Japan (its second largest market after the United States) to his own past experiences in the country. Other companies have been unable to get into the Japanese market because “it’s notoriously difficult for many Americans to navigate.” Most entrepreneurs wrongly focus on China or India, despite the fact that Japan represents the second largest IT market in the world.

He also describes how much he loves Apple, how Apple is so in-line with his own Salesforce dream, and how, in slightly unrelated news, Apple has passed Microsoft in market cap. I certainly hope Steve Jobs is compensating Benioff for his wonderful PR work.

Granted, Salesforce.com has success in Japan, but I am uncertain of Benioff’s real understanding of the country. I do not pretend to be any sort of expert of Japanese culture, but there is an unhealthy undertone on the flipside of Benioff’s corporate executive perspective. He loves Tokyo for its “frenetic charge that’s even higher than New York City.” How can that ever be healthy? The suicide rate has been over 30,000 per year, every year for the past decade, which is double the US rate. Over the financial year of 2009, a record 269 of 927 applicants received compensation for job-induced mental disorders. That same year, the deaths of 159 workers were attributed to karoshi, the Japanese term for overwork. The work ethic issue in Japan has only gotten worse since the global recession, as the unemployed and young feel the pressure to find work.

While Japan is a technological giant, its population is decreasing. In 2009, there was a net decrease of 29,119 (out of a population of 127 million). The population is aged, with 22.2% over 65. The tendency to invest in countries like China and India over Japan is understandable, cultural barriers or not, when the country is shrinking.

Benioff’s adventures through Japan give him a skewed viewpoint. I would think that the executive of Salesforce would be treated excruciatingly well in Japan’s corporate circles (“In Tokyo I enjoyed dinner with one of my friends, John Hinshaw, the global CIO of Boeing…I met with John Roos, the new United States Ambassador to Japan…then-Prime Minister Hatoyama requested a meeting with me”, etc). Japan isn’t a place where “Zen” pervades everything (Benioff references the term, along with temples and gardens, as another reason why he loves the place).

We don’t doubt that Japan is an IT giant. Japan does love Apple products as much as Benioff. But there are fundamental issues with Japan’s growth, with Japan’s pace of work, with Japan’s cultural mentality that make it a questionable future investment.

Viridity, an energy consumption management software provider, plugs for Hubspot inbound marketing integrated with Salesforce.com.  The small company of 11-25 employees saw enormous lead generation growth in the 8 months of using Hubspot Large. Jason Bailey, Viridity’s multimedia specialist, states that the company’s lack of integrated marketing tools was a hindrance. Now, on their website, Hubspot and Salesforce.com tout the company’s growth as a case study in the product’s success.

Bailey lauds Hubspot for its easy, clean interface and fully integrated tools. Hubspot’s CMS is a content management platform, which allows employees to work on company websites without HTML knowledge. Advertising content such as blog posts, press releases, and landing pages is readily produced. Marketing analytics helps organize incoming traffic that may come in from various sources. The lead tracking tool checks on any developments from prospective or already obtained leads.

The integration with salesforce.com sales (Hubspot-Salesforce closed loop marketing) also made for an efficient sales process and dynamic between marketing and sales. Hubspot marketing sends its generated leads from white paper or forms over to Salesforce.com in an automated system. The system checks for duplicate leads and converts those into automated updates for each lead. Status can also be changed from the Hubspot or Salesforce.com dashboard. Potential customers are monitored for “lead strength,” the sources they came in from (showing the advertising tools that have the greatest ROI), and any additional data available that may be helpful for the Salesforce.com sales representative.

Viridity

Viridity in particular claims to have increased organic traffic seventeen-fold in the past 6 months, attracted 350 leads in the past 6 months, developed a stronger email marketing campaign, and achieved an almost 15% conversion rate for landing pages. Bailey attributes this sales success to the different, integrated functions of Hubspot.

Android is quickly catching up to its competitors in the Applications arena. Salesforce.com’s has launched a Chatter Developer Challenge, and programmer Jeff Douglas has created a Chatter Android App. The Salesforce.com Chatter application for Android was built on the Force.com platform and uses Force.com Remote Access Applications with 3-legged OAuth for security.

With the Salesforce.com Chatter Android Application, users can:

• Display Chatter NewsFeed
• Update Chatter Status
• Store Chatter NewsFeed in local SQLite database
• Customize a project or object that you are following and view its Chatter Feed
• Store project Chatter Feed in local SQLite database

Jeff Douglas has also posted a video to show the functionality of the Salesforce.com Chatter Application for Android:

Salesforce.com Chatter Android Application

The Android Chatter application uses Google App Engine to tie the application together as a security model. The application uses OAuth to authorize access to Force.com and for access to Chatter feeds the application uses Force.com Remote Access Application.

For more information about the Salesforce.com Chatter Android Application by Jeff Douglas, visit: http://blog.jeffdouglas.com/2010/06/06/salesforce-chatter-for-android/#

Hoover’s Inc. announced updates to its Access Hoover’s 3.0 thanks to Salesforce.com’s AppExchange 2. Hoover’s will be expanding their database of enterprises from 65 million to 85 million. Hoovers is a business solutions provider that provides its users with insight and information about companies, industries and key decision makers.

“Access Hoovers is one of the most popular applications on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange 2,” said Chief Marketing Officer at Salesforce.com, Kendall Collins. “The new features and functionality contained in Access Hoover’s 3.0 will help customers who need greater depth of insightful business information and more time-saving functionality.”

Hoover users now have access to more companies and people, thereby enhancing their CRM initiative. Hoover’s can now also map industries as well. Hoover customers will be able to optimize their sales strategy thanks to the Salesforce.com database. Along with an extended customer base, Hoover users will be able to generate more leads and close sales faster.

Hoover’s 3.0 with Salesforce.com has updated duplication alerts so that customers can duplicate records that are identified by exact name match. With enhanced organizational tools, sales team can focus on unique leads instead of sifting through duplicates.

The new CRM tool has improved prospecting capabilities, giving users the ability to import one or more records directly from Simple Search results.

“With the release of Access Hoover’s 3.0 we’ve listened to our customers and responded to their needs by arming sales teams with quicker access to more of the right data and tools in one place,” said VP Marketing for Hoover’s, James Rogers. “With Access Hoover’s for Salesforce CRM, clients can now generate stronger leads, deepen existing relationships and boost retention, ultimately driving more growth for their business.”

Hoover 3.0 on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange will help sales teams optimize their sales strategies and have greater access to valuable lead generation information. For more info on Hoover’s 3.0 visit: www.hoovers.com.

Microsoft Corp. is suing Salesforce.com Inc with the accusation that the customer relationship management (CRM) giant has infringed nine patents for ways to make software more efficient.

The complaint targets the customer-relationship management software that is the hallmark of Salesforce.com’s business. It seeks a court order that would prevent the San Francisco-based company from providing features that Microsoft claims it invented.

Salesforce.com, the biggest seller of internet-based customer relationship management software with $1.3 billion in sales last year, was founded in 1999 and offers software that businesses subscribe to and use over the web for running marketing campaigns and tracking sales leads. It competes against Microsoft’s Dynamics software in the CRM market.

“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,” said Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel for intellectual property and licensing. Microsoft “cannot stand idly by when others infringe” our intellectual property rights, he said.

The complaint was filed in federal court in Seattle after more than a year of talks, according to Microsoft, the world’s biggest software maker. The CEO of Salesforce.com, Marc Benioff, has said he wants customers and software developers to write online applications on his system, dubbed Force.com, much like the way personal computer programs run on Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

New players join Oracle Siebel, Microsoft and Salesforce.com as the market seeks to empower agents and deliver next-generation service. There aren’t a lot of commonalities between the listed vendors in Magic Quadrant except that they have systems to help customers post-sale. To be fair, very few enterprises have cookie-cutter customer service requirements and these vendors try to cater to those unique needs.

The 2010 report includes 15 vendors which meet Gartner Research VP and Distinguished Analyst, Michael Maoz’s criteria for coverage. These vendors all have at least 15 customer references, have had at least five new customers for CSS in the past four quarters in at least two geographic regions and generate at least $7 million in software revenue for core CSS from new clients during the past four quarters. They are also evaluated on their cross-channel customer service efforts and whether the provider is creating or following industry leas as well as the vendor’s relationship with third-party consulting firms and systems integrators and own professional services. Lastly, Maoz’s report also took social integrations capabilities into account.

In his report, Maoz writes that four major initiatives will dominate overall customer service strategies through 2013: tying together service interaction channels; integrating social CRM capabilities, analyzing the customer experience; and apply business rules and knowledge in real time. The current leaders in the 2010 Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers rank as so: Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Oracle (Siebel), Pegasystems, RightNow Technologies and Salesforce.com.

Last year, Pegasystems was the sole resident of the Visionary segment because of their idea of matching business rules to specific customer service processes. Maoz lauds Pegasystems for its renewed emphasis on customer service contact centers, a long tail of customer success stories, and a jump in revenue.

RightNow Technologies has focused on the business-to-consumer customer service center where there’s not a need for deepened industry knowledge of expertise, noting that Microsoft and Salesforce.com are more general purpose solutions in this regard as well. However, Maoz points out that RightNow (with its acquisition of HiveLive) and Salesforce.com (for its development of Chatter) are making strong social plays even if they seem to be heavily weighted on the sales side.

The Challengers are Amdocs and SAP. Maoz writes that SAP has yet to tap into the large B2C contact center market but praises their community efforts. Amdocs, on the other hand, is well regarded as a telecommunications contact center provider but does not offer the same resources to other industries.

There are plenty of Niche Players who provide value but “just not to everyone”. They rank: Astute Solutions, Chordiant Software, eGlue, Jacada, Neocase Software, Oracle E-Business Suite, Portrait Software and Sword Ciboodle.

In larger trends, there seems to be more of an interest in improving the agent desktop rather than replacing it. There is a big desire to make things simpler for the service agent – how can they make agents feel smarter and less exposed to the customer? Understanding customer intent and applying the right rule in real time will boost agent confidence and losing the customer’s trust is probably the biggest problem companies are trying to work through.