CRM News Feed

This week we rolled out the Public Knowledgebase with
Solution Categories on the Successforce.com site. As an administrator this might
be interesting to you for two reasons.

First, it gives you a new way to deflect questions
and make your users more self-sufficient. The Public Knowledgebase is the exact
same knowledgebase that salesforce.com’s support team uses, only this way you
can find answers to your questions immediately vs. logging a case and waiting
for a response. You might add the link to your intranet, as a custom link on your
salesforce.com homepage, or include it your emails when replying to questions.

The second reason this might be of interest is that
this is native Salesforce functionality available to all Professional and
Enterprise Edition customers. It’s very easy to add it to your site and once
you have it set up, all the administration is done from within salesforce.com. Click here to begin the setup process.

A lot has happened since last year’s customer relationship management survey. The biggest news is Oracle’s US$5.85 billion buyout of Siebel Systems. For Oracle, this new move comes on top of its acquisition of PeopleSoft in December 2004 for $10.5 billion. Siebel adds 4,000 customers and 3.4 million CRM users to the company’s customer base. Despite all this activity, there is still a lot of confusion about what CRM is all about.

A Vancouver, B.C.-based financial institution has added call center functionality to its front office so it can intercept and organize the majority of its incoming customer calls. Canadian Western Trust provides financial products like mortgages, mutual funds and stock incentive packages to independent financial advisors, who then sell them to their clients. Earlier this year, Western Trust reviewed its business units and decided there was a better way to handle questions and concerns from those advisors than just routing them through a switchboard.

Many customers today use Salesforce to manage new partner registration and recruitment programs. To this end, companies use Record Types, Page Layouts, Custom Fields, Lead Processes, Web to Lead, Find Duplicates, Lead Conversion, Assignment Rules, Reports/Dashboards and Workflow to streamline new partner recruitment. Here are the steps and the recommended approach to make it happen in your companies.  First, create a Record Type called new partner registration. Note that multiple Record Types can be used to support customer leads, partner recruitment, and deal registration business models. Each record type is assigned a Lead Process. Here is an example of how multiple record types with corresponding lead processes are set up in Salesforce.

Download leadprocessimage.gif

Since a partner registration process would be different from a customer/product lead process, it’s important for you to define the steps required for your company to approve partners. Suggested steps in a partner registration process include: submitted registration, registration reviewed, partner contacted, references verified, partner qualified, contract signed, approved or not approved.

Then, add all the fields/questions you want completed by new prospective partners when they apply. Some partner registration specific questions include: # of employees, markets covered, and partner program interest. Using Salesforce’s Assignment Rules and Workflow tools, you decide who is notified, who qualifies, and who approves new partner registrations. These users can easily be set up to receive tasks or email alerts. Once the registration forms and all the approval rules have been created set up the Web-to-Lead form and start the recruitment process. All new partner registrations leverage the same tools available to find duplicates and conversion to an account/contact.  Finally, track registration and ramp up statistics through custom reports and dashboards. Here is an example of a partner recruitment dashboard measuring registration statistics by partner type and by program. Download dashboardimage.gif

Qualified partners are then set up as users and they are able to work more closely with your company through the Salesforce Partner Portal. 

The coming year is going to see the fruition of several dominant trends that have been percolating just under the surface of CRM specifically and enterprise software markets generally. It’s going to be an invigorating and challenging year because many software companies will need to re-invent themselves to sustain their current sales levels or even hope to grow. At the center of CRM best-of-breed vendors re-inventing themselves is a complete services focus, and that strategy will pervade every other aspect of many best-of-breed companies’ efforts to continue selling.

Sales configuration systems reduce complexity and improve productivity by helping salespeople match customer needs to unique products and service offerings.  The business value comes from reducing the order rework expenses associated with misconfigured sales orders and from potential revenue enhancements generated by larger sales order sizes and increased sales win rates. If you find your organization has a 25 percent or greater sales order error rate, then read on for a tip on potentially reducing your order rework expense by between 50 to 70 percent. 

Sales configuration systems are used to configure everything from computers to telecommunication equipment, to other complex products. They are used to configure ship-to-order products which are stocked goods that have little variability other than a predetermined set of options (e.g., appliances and computer peripherals). They’re used for configuring assemble-to-order products which are configurable offerings made up of standard components (e.g., trucking, computer systems and telecommunications) and engineer-to-order products which are configurable offerings that consist of standard and custom-engineered components (e.g., aerospace devices, power generation equipment). However, they are not just for organizations with product configuration problems; they can help configure pricing and discounts, and create customized financing plans.

One of our featured partners on the AppExchange is Firepond, Inc. which provides a Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ™) application that fits within the Salesforce Opportunities tab. In fact, Firepond has designed the integration and interface so that users are unaware they have launched a separate application. Using Firepond OnDemand inside of Salesforce is a very user friendly experience. Users can configure complex products and services, develop detailed quotations that include itemized discounts, charges, and fees and generate professional, dynamic reports that can be given to a prospect either as a printout or via e-mail. Firepond refers to these features as time-with-the-customer tasks. Your salespeople will no longer have to wait to hear back from engineering whether a configured product can be built, or wait to hear what the pricing would be. Now, those decisions can be encapsulated within the data that drives Firepond OnDemand. Salespeople access their Salesforce solution, access Firepond OnDemand through the Opportunity tab and promptly deliver a complete and accurate proposal to their customer. Data produced by Firepond OnDemand can be exported back to Salesforce and used in reports, forecasts, etc.  For a demonstration of how to streamline your sales solution configuration to quotation process, visit Firepond OnDemand in the AppExchange.

Have a CRM question? Askwendy@crmsuccess.com.

The European Commission today cleared Oracle’s proposed US$5.85 billion acquisition of business-software rival Siebel Systems, the last regulatory hurdle for the deal. EU regulators said they examined the deal carefully to see how powerful the new company would be in the European market for customer relationship management software and if the tie-up would cause wide-ranging “conglomerate effects.” The Commission said the transaction “would not significantly impede effective competition.”

Salesforce.com
System Update

On
Tuesday December 20^th, some salesforce.com users experienced
intermittent access (between approximately 9:30 am and 12:41 pm ET & 2:00
pm and 4:45 pm ET) on one of the company’s four global nodes.  The root
cause of the intermittent access was an error in the database cluster. Salesforce.com
addressed the issue with the database vendor. By Tuesday afternoon EST, the
system was running normally for all users.

All four global nodes are currently operational and
running normally.  There are no outstanding issues in the system at this
time. No other aspects of the system were involved.

We
apologize to any customer who was inconvenienced.

Update 12/23/05: For a more detailed explanation, steps taken to mitigate risk of recurrence, and new
outage communication procedures, click here.

salesforce.com offers an
Offline Edition of its application for use by mobile salespeople. It provides
access to Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, and Activity history, within a
familiar salesforce.com interface, and bidirectionally synchs with
salesforce.com’s classic "online edition".

There is the catch:
You have to synch it, both before you go on the road, and when you get
back!

Here is how you can
ensure you never work with stale data again! Be a hero, and recommend this to
all your Offline users: Schedule the synching using Microsoft Windows
Scheduler. For example, schedule offline to popup every day at 3pm, to remind
you to click the synch button.

Follow the following link
for instructions on how to schedule the launch of Offline Edition: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308569&FR=1&PA=1&SD=HSCH

Incidentally, this can be
applied to Lotus Notes synching as well, if you are using Linkpoint360’s
salesforce.com plugin for Lotus Notes

Today the
Personalized Account Review was sent out to all Salesforce.com Administrators
and those opted in to the Admin Newsletter. If you didn’t receive
the Personalized Account Review and want more information on opting in, click here.

Bruce Cleveland, Siebel senior vice president and general manager, Products, takes time for a chat with CRMGuru.com founder Bob Thompson on Siebel’s beginnings and its future under the Oracle umbrella.

While most organizations claim to be customer-centric, many still fail to get to grips with even the most basic customer experience issues, says Jeremy Braune.

In this inaugural edition of Gurus on the Case, an automotive service/repair shop owner seeks help to grow his customer-centric business more profitably. Read how four gurus would meet the challenge.

If Customer Experience Management can get past four hurdles, writes Adam Ramshaw, it will be a significant driver of company profitability and value in the medium term.

As Oracle prepares to digest Siebel, Jason Stamper and Angela Eager ask what went wrong at Siebel, and what the deal means for customers.

Announcing that the company he founded in 1993 had finally succumbed and agreed to a takeover by Oracle, Tom Siebel said: "Today is a great day for Siebel Systems’ customers, partners, shareholders, and employees." Perhaps he had time to come to terms with the idea of being bought by his former employer and erstwhile competitor, Oracle. Anyway that day has come, and for $5.85bn, the deal was done.

Tom Siebel was once Oracle’s top salesperson, and while there he came up with a new sales force automation application that he brought to the attention of Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison, and as the story goes, Ellison thought about bringing it to market but later ditched the idea. Tom Siebel promptly left Oracle in 1990, and three years later founded Siebel.

Siebel grew rapidly, floated in 1996, and from sales of just $8m in 1995 topped the $2bn mark in 2001. Thanks in no small part to Tom Siebel’s evangelism, ‘customer-centric business’ was the catch phrase on the lips of every discerning enterprise.

Like everyone else Siebel had a tough time during the dot-com crash, but it was hit particularly hard as at around the same time numerous analyst reports started to expose grand, enterprise-wide CRM projects that had spectacularly failed.

Gradually it dawned that many of those failures were down to companies not addressing the business process and cultural change needed to successfully implement CRM: technology does not do it on its own. In tandem, the CRM software companies improved their user interfaces and ease of use, and began introducing vertical templates, pre-built integrations and improved management tools that made projects easier to handle. CRM appeared to be back.

But already bloodied, Siebel was also by now facing a new threat from the hosted CRM vendors: most notably salesforce.com but also RightNow, salesnet and others. In the traditional client-server CRM space competition was growing too, from SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, Microsoft and mid-market players such as Sage, FrontRange and many others. By 2004, Siebel’s sales had slumped to $1.3bn as customers increasingly looked to one-stop shops and hosted alternatives for their software needs.

Victim of change

Siebel had grown very big in an incredibly short time, and it suddenly started to look lumbering and slow to react when once it had been so nimble and innovative. It was particularly slow to fully recognise the huge growth that would be seen in hosted CRM and a monthly licence rental model by salesforce.com et al. By May 2004, Tom Siebel could see that Siebel was in trouble, and he could see too that the industry had changed. He split his role as both chairman and CEO, becoming chairman while a new CEO was brought on board. Change was afoot.

The company’s second quarter figures this year put the final nail in the coffin. Sales were up from $301.1m to $313.6m as a result of improved maintenance, but licence revenue, the real arbiter or performance, fell 17.4%.

Commenting on the results, Siebel’s CEO George Shaheen said: "I’ve made a commitment to shareholders to improve Siebel’s financial performance over time and we are taking the necessary steps to achieve this goal. Although we’ve made some progress, we still have more work to do." In the end there just was not enough time.

As Tom Siebel said on the conference call on the announcement of the acquisition by Oracle, "What really brought this together was a shift in market dynamics we’ve seen in the past three, four or five years." He argued that businesses used to want to buy best-of-breed software from best-of-breed vendors, but now they want to buy integrated applications suites from fewer vendors: "An integrated family of applications that minimise their cost structure," as he put it.

Market consolidation

There has certainly been a huge wave of consolidation in the applications industry as customers have demanded integrated applications suites from fewer vendors, and the larger vendors have hoovered up the competition to keep their own growth ticking along.

But while all of the large vendors have been making acquisitions, Oracle has played the biggest role in driving that consolidation. Its hostile acquisition of PeopleSoft, which had already bought JD Edwards, showed how determined it was to gain muscle through acquisitions in order to better compete with enterprise applications market share leader SAP. It has followed that up with the acquisitions of Retek, Siebel and many more in-between.

So why did Oracle want Siebel, knowing as we do that the company faces serious challengers on several fronts? "In a single step, Oracle becomes the number one CRM applications company in the world," says Oracle’s Ellison. "Siebel’s 4,000 applications customers and 3.4 million CRM users strengthen our number one position in applications in North America and move us closer to the number one position in applications globally."

Oracle also notes that CRM is the largest and fastest growing of the major segments of the enterprise applications businesses, and it quotes IDC figures that estimate it to be worth more than $8bn in 2004, expected to grow to $10bn by 2009.

Predictably, the new wave of hosted application providers were dismissive of the deal. Greg Gianforte, CEO and founder of RightNow Technologies, said: "On demand delivery is the future of the software industry… it will be very difficult for any of the old client-server vendors to make the transition. Siebel was ahead of most, and they failed."

Marc Benioff, salesforce.com CEO, was typically sardonic about the deal, commenting: "Oracle put Siebel investors out of their misery. We have been doing that for Siebel customers for years."

As you would expect, there were critical observations about the deal from more traditional client-server CRM software vendors, too. Michael McCloskey, CEO of midrange CRM vendor FrontRange Solutions, noted: "I don’t think the move by Oracle is going to change things in the foreseeable future. As with other enterprise players, its technologies are too heavy and not geared to meeting the very different needs of the mid-market."

Enterprise CRM player Onyx, which has been transitioning into a customer-centric process management software company, said it does not know why everyone is saying that customers want large, integrated suites in the first place. "There are some customers who want fewer choices, but we find more often that the opposite is true," says Richard Furby, Onyx managing director, EMEA. "They don’t always want a massive suite, in fact what they want is flexibility and agility."

Meanwhile, James Utzschneider, product marketing manager, Microsoft Business Solutions Group, says: "Internally at Microsoft, we are a Siebel shop and have been for five or six years. But at our annual sales conference this past summer, we unveiled the new version of Microsoft CRM to 10,000 of our sales people and [Microsoft CEO] Steve Ballmer asked them if they wanted to use it. The applause was deafening… so Microsoft now has 20 internal projects where we are deploying Microsoft CRM across the company."

No guarantee of success

While it is hardly surprising that the competition would seek to criticise the deal, there are nevertheless some questions that need to be asked. While Siebel gives Oracle a major CRM boost and is expected to give Oracle and SAP level pegging in the CRM market share stakes this year - with 15% each according to AMR Research - even their size is no guarantee of future success as both are under pressure from those on-demand vendors and others.

That the new model is a threat was evident when SAP admitted recently that it was planning a hosted CRM service this year, and Microsoft has recently started hinting at an on-demand CRM push. Here Oracle will want to make as much progress as it can with Siebel’s offering in this space, Siebel OnDemand. Trouble is, it is based heavily on technology from rival IBM.

Siebel OnDemand realised $202m in total contract value during the second quarter and has 40,000 users. It experienced 252% year-on-year growth and grew 21% in the second quarter of 2005 compared to the preceding quarter. Siebel claims it had a 58% win rate against salesforce.com during the second quarter.

Described by Oracle president Charles Phillips as one of Siebel’s "jewels", it is also a source of contention because it is IBM-centric, based on DB/2 and WebSphere and hosted in IBM data centres. "We don’t know enough about it yet," admits Phillips.

But there are fundamental differences between Siebel OnDemand and Oracle’s own hosted applications. Whereas Oracle has taken its standard applications and offers them as a service over the Internet based on a single tenancy architecture, Siebel uses a multi-tenant model.

Customers want their own instance and the ability to manage their own database, according to senior VP of Oracle Applications John Wookey, although he said there is growing interest in multi-tenancy from larger customers.

Oracle maintains that the way customers are viewing the on-demand model is changing because where the utility model was considered advantageous on cost grounds, now it is being viewed as a way of transforming IT services.

Oracle is keen to establish its hosted credentials, pointing out that it has offered a hosted service since 1999. However, its single-tenancy model is a world away from the multi-tenant architecture on which the on-demand sector has been built. Besides, Oracle’s hosted business has only around 500 customers, primarily running HR in hosted mode, although Oracle says they are large customers and the business is growing 60% per year.

Oracle is looking to integrate with Siebel CRM OnDemand, but that will be a challenge given its IBM affinity. "We are continuing to improve our relationship with IBM," says Wookey, citing its decision to provide native support for Oracle applications on WebSphere. "We will continue to work on that. We will make Siebel OnDemand decisions later."

However, there was a hint of possible changes to come when he said, "There are licence advantages when we use our own technology so that is something we’ll work on."

One consolation must be that SAP is in the same position of only recently realising the value of the on-demand model. Where SAP appears to be developing its own solution, by acquiring an established solution Oracle has gained an upper hand.

But aside from the on-demand applications, what other integration should Oracle and Siebel customers expect? Ultimately Oracle has said it will incorporate Siebel’s CRM applications into its Project Fusion, which is designed to bring together the best aspects of Oracle’s acquired applications: including PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and now Siebel.

But in the meantime Oracle also plans to continue selling the suite via a dedicated sales force, at least initially, and it will safeguard the Siebel offering because it plans to make it the centre of its own CRM plans. This makes perfect sense, because Siebel’s CRM functionality is superior to Oracle’s.

However, while that might be good news for Siebel customers, it raises questions for former PeopleSoft CRM customers who could be using CRM functionality from Vantive, PeopleSoft’s newer model or JD Edwards’ You Centric-based CRM software. These could be sidelined, as could the existing Oracle CRM applications.

A key issue for Oracle and its customers, then, is just how well it will manage the integration and redevelopment of the Siebel product line along with its other home-grown and acquired products. It is a huge challenge. For CRM alone there are seven code bases to contend with. Outside of CRM there are also additional code bases to add to the mix as a result of other acquisitions such as the Retek buy.

Oracle has been going all out to reassure customers that Siebel products will be maintained and developed. At a meeting for Siebel customers during Oracle’s recent OpenWorld conference, Oracle’s Phillips gave an assurance that the existing Siebel architecture would continue to be supported, including support for Siebel on IBM DB/2.

"There is no need for anyone to worry about disruption," says Phillips. "If you were thinking about buying Siebel for a specific functional need, go ahead. You will continue to receive enhancements and support and it will be integrated with Oracle applications and infrastructure. All products will move forward but there will be a path to Fusion too."

CBR Opinion

Though all large acquisitions carry considerable risk, Oracle claims that it was able to digest its PeopleSoft acquisition faster and more efficiently than it had expected. The Siebel acquisition makes Oracle the market share leader in CRM software - a high-growth segment - and takes it that bit closer to arch rival SAP in the overall enterprise applications business. Meanwhile, although customers are right to ask questions about the future of their Oracle, PeopleSoft and Siebel applications, there is no reason to panic: Oracle has committed to support Siebel for the foreseeable future. Longer term, while Project Fusion is a massive undertaking for Oracle with considerable challenges, it also aims to bring together among the best HR, CRM, ERP and systems software in the industry. Meanwhile, expect Oracle to make yet more acquisitions.

By Jason Stamper

http://www.cbr-online.com/article_cbr.asp?guid=B1BABC91-C588-4D40-ACEC-585371F145B4

What
better way to start off the New Year than with the excitement of salesforce.com’s Winter ’06 release! As with all of salesforce.com’s releases,
the upgrade path is seamless. When you log in on Monday, January 9, 2006, the
fresh, new look-and-feel and all the popularly requested features of Winter ‘06
will be right there at your fingertips.

Make
sure your organization is ready for the new release with our prep list:   

1.
Educate yourself on the new features and functionality in the Winter ‘06

release  

• Print out the Admin Preview and highlight important sections
• Dig into the Release Notes for more detail
• Find additional resources and best practice ideas on each of the Feature Detail Pages

2.
Identify which features your company should consider adopting and pitch them to
the appropriate executives.

• Potential features might include Campaign Management, Customizable Forecasting, Territory Management, or Service and Support.
• If you don’t already have a process in place, it might be worth watching a presentation from Dreamforce to learn how other companies prioritize new features and manage change.

3.
Highlight two or three new features which will help make your reps more
productive and find ways to drive adoption

• Potential features might include Outlook Edition 2.0, Recurring Events, or the new Report Finder.
• To introduce these exciting features to your team you might refer to the best practice post
  on creating a monthly newsletter as well as the post on sending mass
  emails to your users from within Salesforce.

4. See
how new AppExchange Builder can help you customize Salesforce in new and
exciting ways

• Potential features might include Dependent Picklists, Image Fields, Custom Lookup Fields, Record Types and Workflow on Custom Objects, and Custom Objects now available in Team Edition.
• While most of these features are fairly intuitive you’ll find training and documentation on the feature detail pages.

5.
Browse the AppExchange directory for additional on-demand apps you might want
to install

• Potential AppExchange apps might include Channel Sales, Project Management, and HR applications.
• Watch the training on how to install new applications into your Salesforce account.

How many of your leads could be slipping through the cracks every month? You could be missing opportunities if you’re slower to respond than your competition. With real-world insight, this webcast will help you map out a plan for effective lead management, including your process workflow, team structure, and the technologies needed for implementation.

Unisys is a worldwide information technology services and solutions company serving tens of thousands of clients around the globe. This case study illustrates an example of a worldwide information technology services and solutions company that raises the bar for excellence in business consulting through the use of content-centric collaboration applications for Web publishing and project management. The Unisys experience is documented in this case study, providing an excellent example of an organization that has increased global identity and targeted marketing through efficient Web publishing and automated new site generation, enabled advanced collaboration and innovation across geographically diverse project teams and achieved interactive customer relationship management (CRM) by integrating clients into project management business processes.

This web seminar will provide an overview of how sales organizations can enhance interactions with their customer by unifying their real-time Web Collaboration solution with their CRM solution. The webinar will provide an overview of benefits of the two solutions and how sales organizations are weaving together a winning solution to personalize the prospect’s buying experience and leverage team-selling to improve and accelerate their sales process and improve close ratio.

This webcast will discuss how to optimize your sales effectiveness using lead management, multiple sales workflows, key usability features and powerful business intelligence.