Salesforce Journey : From CRM to SCRM & becoming a Social Business Strategist Vendor

I attended a Salesforce.com presentation here in Hamburg two months ago and was positively surprised at the genuine way Salesforce Germany presented their company and its (S)CRM-cloud services to the audience.  

Salesforce has been on a shopping spree now for the last two years so I decided to review and log in, hopefully most if not all, the services available to this “Group of companies” they seem to be building at the speed of light! One can also wonder if the integration of all these added services are as swift as Marc Benioff’s proactive, agile and moving forward shopping style! Their latest acquisition is GoInstant a powerful co-browsing interactive Internet tool sharing! GoInstant lets you engage and interact with family members, friends, customers in a “dead-simple & frictionless way”! No software is needed, no downloads!

 

Having an issue with signing documents? Marc Benioff comes to your rescue with Docusign a platform that let you receive and sign any document online on any device thus anywhere! Need to buy a house on the go: No problem, just sign electronically with Docusign and you are ready to go!  Now let’s say you are stuck in Hamburg like me today and would love to spare yourself the exhausting over the pond ride to San Francisco via London or Copenhagen but still need to hold this important meeting while enjoying the commodity of communicating, sharing any form of content via a video conferencing webinar: Here comes Marc Benioff’s help handy again with DimDim, which has also been acquired by Salesforce! 

 

But there are much more tool; here again all of them listed for you with a slide with this slide including the companies’ respective logos:

 

 

1. Buddymedia including Profilebuddy, Reachbuddy, Conversationbuddy, Buybuddy Conversionbuddy, Analytics & Dashboard tools included and allowing user to create and deploy customized interactive content on social network, share the content on the networks, generate engaging conversations, create and manage effective social media campaigns, drive content across social networks and finally analyze your interaction within your network!

2. DimDim: version collaboration, recently acquired by Salesforce, is a video content sharing for webinars & webmeetings of all sorts.

3, Docusign: makes it easy and fast to get your documents signed. Whether you need to close a big sales contract, keep your company trade secrets safe with an NDA or buy a home, Docusign is the easiest, fastest, most secure way to get a signature—anytime, anywhere, on any device.

4. GoInstant: Truly interactive co-browsing is now possible! GoInstant lets us engage and interact with our partners or potential partners in a dead-simple & frictionless way. No clunky software or downloads, just the click of a link and you are sharing in no time!

5. Desk: Ealier known as Assistly is for companies that support a worldwide market and in need of a solution to manage their support communications. Now there is one: with Multilingual Customer Support, you now can support your customers in a language they understand.

6. AppExchange: Need an app? Find, try, and install the right apps—plus find developers and services—for your business.

7. Chatter: Bring the power of social networks inside your company with Chatter—a free, private and secure social network just for your business. With Chatter.com you can connect with your coworkers to work together and be more productive. Updates on the people, projects, and files that you care about most are automatically pushed to you, so you always know what’s going on

8. Data.com: The trusted, proven cloud database for all your social enterprise data.

9. Do.com: Easily create and share tasks, projects, and notes with your team so you always know what needs to get done, no matter where you are

10. Force.com: is the proven cloud platform to automate and extend your business and deliver the social enterprise.

11. Heroku: Build powerful customer apps in Ruby or Java, and instantly deploy and scale them to millions of users.

12. Radian6: Make sense of the social media buzz with social monitoring. Listen, measure, and engage with your customers across the social Web.

13. Remedyforce: was developed by BMC Software and salesforce.com to revolutionize your approach to IT service management. You get ITIL functionality out of the box. Plus you gain peace of mind because it’s built on the Force.com platform.

14. Rypple: Build a results-driven culture with social goals, real-time feedback, open recognition, and easy coaching.

15. Sales Cloud: Give reps and execs what they need to connect with customers and close deals faster.

16. Site.com: Design and publish websites, social pages, and mobile experiences in lightning speed with the first Web CMS in the cloud. It’s built for social, so you can easily add Twitter streams, Facebook likes, and more.

 

Did I forget anything? Please let me know and drop me a note: would also like to read about your personal experiences and thoughts on Salesforce.com and all the acquisitions it has done so far! 

 

2 Main Issues to Consider While Migrating To CRM Salesforce Cloud Computing

I just returned from a Salesforce presentation: Social Enterprise Essentials: a fine event organized in the SAS Radisson hotel here in Hamburg City with wonderful people among others: Kerstin Daher and Ulrich Hoffmann: “Welcome to the age of the networked enterprise”:

• Sales Cloud: as a sales enterprising tool
• Service Cloud: innovation and customer service / care
• Chatter: a private social network for business
• Force.com: cloud platform for custom app development
• Radian6: seminar & case study around the international CEBIT computer show in Hannover.

I cannot help but be reminded that we are in Germany and that charm and chivalry remain integral part of our French vocabulary! There is no need to get into the details of these applications since there is plenty of information on the pages attached to the links provided above! These topics were addressed quite thoroughly during this very well organized one day infomercial.

 

Salesforce is using this Cloud tsunami development to certainly establish a stronger business base in Germany and Europe with a significant deployment of man power hosting an event this year in Hamburg city with roughly 250 in attendance.

 

Well done Salesforce for putting together a sales oriented IaaS, PaaS and SaaS package ready to go: it is undeniable that those tools are in place and ready to unleash their power if implemented properly! The need for Cloud CRM is there and the trend not to be stopped! Add BYOD to smart phones & tablets commercialization and you’ve got the right foundation for a Salesforce thriving business potential and its US$ 3B turnover if I understood the presenter correctly!

 

Well done Salesforce for buying Radian6 last year and adding  Heroku  and  Ripple to your 2012 cloud shopping tour, obviously en route to moving from traditional CRM to a more social CRM or SCRM. I was impressed by the morning Radian6 presentation, which completely convinced me of the most “in real time” detailed analysis utilizing countless internet sources of information! It is also worth adding that Salesforce updates its platform three times a year definitely trying to keep up with the relentless social media pace moving forward at the speed of light!

 

Salesforce is mostly keeping up but I was a bit disappointed though when asking about full integration of social media new comers such as Google+, Pinterest and Pinwheel! For now the social media platforms being taken into consideration are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Klout more is probably coming but without any concrete information on future developments.  

 

Salesforce did a great job at presenting an installed and operational cloud structure but did not initiate us to the two main challenges to be faced when

a) implementing a social business / enterprise culture 

b) migrating from legacy structures to PaaS and IaaS,

which are both the foundation for a successful social cloud migration! When I challenged one of the presenters with these two core issues I was kindly requested to “find out more from their service partners” and was told that Salesforce is not responsible for creating a social enterprise or migrating from legacy systems! Correct! However, these two main issues remain and furthermore what happens if a company decide to do a U-Turn and retreat to its former legacy system?  

 

 

Who is going to write a company culture book and educate both staff and management that it is mandatory and obligatory in a 21^st century hyper connected company to share strategic customer information? How are we going to motivate sales, marketing & customer service among others to share their confidential customer data and transfer it to a centralized cloud database? Not that easy Salesforce  and we know how much silo thinking isolates information and keep it to itself! The real answer is obviously the undeniable need to create first the right company culture. There is no need for cloud or centralized strategic information if company staff and management are both reluctant to share knowledge and business insight!

 

I regret that QR codes were not put on our badges, which would have helped the networking and exchange of information between participants. A well deserved mention to Claudia Hilker, who managed to pull off a 30 minutes presentation on social media strategy! Well done Claudia and thank you for the book! Looking forward to getting a free copy of the latest “advanced” version!

 

Thank you again to Salesforce and the hospitality extended to all of us with great drinks and good choice of food: Well done and compliments for a well-organized event!  

Branding a Crucial Marketing Tool for Success!

I spent the last six months of this year assisting an English company developing a branding campaign starting from very little, but with a good trademark logo. What helps a company establish a new name on a market often saturated with products, goods or services?  How do we make a difference in order to secure vital sales after we launch a new product or service on the market?  Is gathering business cards at international venues and making a few phone calls afterwards sufficient to establish new sales locally and/or internationally?  Here are a few points I introduced and worked on while assisting the development of a trilingual website, as well as marketing brochures in German, French and English:
• Develop a unique selling proposition (USP) which will help differentiate you from the competition, e.g. Dominos Pizza’s famous “You get fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less – or it’s free” USP is worth billion US$ to the company selling around 400 million pizza every single day worldwide! (http://bit.ly/ucZvYw )
• Where possible create your own product segment with unique features and services in order to eliminate unnecessary competition.
• Polish your reputation while working on the uniqueness of your brand.
• Be different, unique and differentiate yourself from the crowd.
• Develop a social media plan using both website and communication platforms to blog and vlog (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Stumble Upon and Word Press).
• Suggest an RRP structure to your entire distribution network! You’d be surprised how many new companies don’t!
• Show a serving attitude and develop an “after-sales, service-oriented philosophy” with state-of-the-art maintenance, workshop, repairs, spare parts availability update and renewals.
• Make selling to the end-customer one of your main concerns within your distribution network.
• Listen to what your customers say about your product or service, and take criticism very seriously; this will help you develop your brand and communicate solutions to problems you might not be aware of!
• Use your logo and social media links on all collateral and correspondence items (business cards, flyers, direct mailing, etc.)
• Deliver more than your product or service promises, and make your customers’ problems on all levels your own problems!  This will carry your brand a long way!
• Remember the Godly admonition: “Give and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you.” (Luke 6:38: KJV).

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