Thursday, December 13, 2012

Signs you need a CRM

First posted on Salesforce's BLOG, here is an excerpt... (go to their BLOG for full story)

You’ve probably heard the adage “what got you here won’t get you there” as it applies to career success. The same wisdom also applies to a growing business.
In the early stage, you may get along well enough using familiar tools like Excel or post-it notes to track your customers and incoming orders. As your business grows, however, so does its complexity. You’ll quickly discover that you need more scalable ways to track your customers and transactions to stay competitive.

Businesses ready for this shift will experience sometell-tale signs. Being able to read these signals early will save you from the chaos and inefficiencies that come with being a growing a business without a processes built for scale.

Here are the 7 signs that you are ready to trade in those old Excel spreadsheets and start managing your customer relationships in a more efficient way:

1. Your team does not have a single source of truth.

2. Lack of visibility into your sales teams’ activities.

3. Reporting and analysis is time-consuming and painful.

4. You are losing data.

5. You are not staying in touch while on the go.

6.  You treat every customer the same.

7. You don’t have a plan to scale fast.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

What Enterprise 2.0 could learn from the social web… (Part 1)

Enterprise 2.0 is a great term, because its meant to be a catch all phrase for so much -- customer relationships, content, knowledge, projects, files, e-commerce etc... However, my point today is not to address what it is (or isn't) but rather to elaborate on how to make enterprise web deployments successful, and in particular, what we can learn from the social web, in this regard.

Enterprise 2.0 systems tend to be systems of record, and are therefore record-centric. Records can provide a great context for information -- who created it, what accounts they're related to, their status or category. However, until recently this data was both accessible and useful only to users with access and a knowledge of the system. Through social processes like Salesforce.com Chatter and initiatives by other vendors to "feed enable" their applications, it is now possible for typical business users to easily access and get value from these systems using new social, collaboration features.

The graphic below illustrates the different forms of content available in the enterprise and potentially what is possbile through simple social enablements like share, "like" and follow.



We see enterprise data on two axis, one is shelf-life, or the amount of time content may be relevant to an organization (we can think of "long-lived" content as organizational "knowledge" like best practices, document templates or old proposals) and the other axis is the community that it is relevant to -- stretching from individuals to the whole enterprise. The illustration above attempts to show different points on a collaboration continuum and also suggests that with social capabilities enabled (like sharing, following, "liking" and tagging) real-time access, relevance and use of enterprise 2.0 data/systems becomes more collaborative and even more likely.

We plan to add to this conversation around social best practices for deploying enterprise 2.0 in your organization, in the coming weeks. If you'd like to join the conversation please post your comments or contact us, directly.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Productivity TV - Videos we like and How-Tos for QuickBase Productivity

Featuring videos on Zero Inbox, Prezi - the new Powerpoint, Best of Salesforce.com videos and several QuickBase demos on productivity in minutes.

Thursday, September 09, 2010

4 QuickBase templates that can get you going... (Salesforce Lite & Proj Mgmt)

These templates provide a QuickStart to organizations interested in using QuickBase for project management, customer relationship management, tasks, time and invoices and knowledge management.

Get a 30 day FREE trial of QuickBase ---  http://bit.ly/QBFreeTrial

Monday, September 06, 2010

6 SaaS Metrics You Should Track - ReadWriteCloud

Good article on the key metrics to be on top of if you run a SaaS business.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/09/6-saas-metrics-you-should-trac.php