One of the oldest investment groups in the country has made a bold move to the cloud, under the leadership of visionary CIO Scott Stewart.

http://www.cio.com.au/article/350426/wilson_htm_signs_16m_5-year_deal_cloud/

A colleague of mine recently gave a presentation about the impact of social media to me and several other business owners.  He owns a small retail chain with particular appeal to the inner city younger demographic, and uses Twitter extensively to communicate with their followers.    When several of the group expressed skepticism about who actually has time to follow all this stuff, let alone respond, he gave us a simple example – he tweeted saying that he was in the middle of a presentation and wanted feedback about the importance of social media.

Even though it was 5pm on a Sunday afternoon, more than a dozen responses were received in the first 3 minutes!  (And of course the responses were consistent – get with it or your business will be obsolete before long.)  He then quoted the statistic that under 25s consume 16 hours of media a day, in about 7 hours.  They are on-line with Facebook, Twitter and other sites, while watching TV and texting.   I wonder if kids’ brains are changing to enable them to process more streams of information?

Congratulations to Inika for making BRW magazine’s 2010 Fast Starter List!

As I speak to more customers and prospects it amazes me how many substantial organisations still do not have access to the basic marketing and sales metrics they need to effectively run the revenue generation side of the business.   By basic metrics, I mean KPI’s like

Marketing

• How many leads are generated?
• Where are the leads coming from?
• How many turn into opportunities or actual sales?

Sales

• What is the sales pipeline for the next x months?
• What deals are closing this month?
• Which deals are not moving through the pipeline?
• What is the customer problem that we  solve for each of our deals?

Although the most effective organisations are adopting ‘Sales 2.0′ approaches to improving sales effectiveness, it seems the vast majority are still using spreadsheets to give them some idea of the sales forecast and don’t have a sense of the basic mathematics that define their sales funnel.

Salesforce.com is rolling out their Spring ‘10 release that includes a whole variety of new capability, as per usual.  One in particular has caught my interest – the Process Visualiser.   This product enables you to visually represent and map your business process components ranging from forms to activities to approvals to design and simulate the process flow before deployment.    The possibilities are endless, but given the flexibility of the force.com platform, might include processes such as:

• Sales: Call scripting and sales methodology automation
• Service: Customer issue resolution and product returns
• Finance: Billing and collections
• HR: Employee onboarding and performance management
• Legal: Contract management and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance
• Operations: Surveys and supplier management

The full Salesforce.com press release is here

I am looking forward to trialling this capability with a customer soon.

Anneke Seley, author of Sales 2.0, recently posted a summary of a presentation at Dreamforce on how Salesforce.com uses their own products to manage their sales team.   She makes a great comment about why a lot of organisation don’t get the most out of their CRM applications:

“Most companies don’t have a clearly defined sales strategy and process that helps their sales reps sell and their customers buy.  They don’t focus on designing business processes before rolling out new technology.”

At my company, in the CLOUD, we strongly agree with this sentiment.  Getting your processes right and strong executive management support are critical success factors.  Without them, the technology isn’t going to improve anything.  In our implementation work, we spend a lot of our time up-front, doing a deep-dive into your business process (whether sales, service or marketing) to identify what can be improved and to ensure that the application supports that process effectively.

I just returned from Salesforce.com’s annual conference – Dreamforce, in San Francisco.  Something like 15,000 people attended and the scale and hype were impressive.   Marc Benioff launched the Collaboration Cloud with Salesforce.com’s next product, Chatter, which is essentially a Facebook-like collaboration application.  I think it may have some opportunities inside an enterprise as a way to share information with your teams, but time will tell.  As many observers have noted, the “cloud computing” hype has reached a near crescendo, which can only result in unmet expectations in the short term.  It’s interesting though, when I mention the term to non-IT people, most of them have never heard the term.   Even Salesforce.com is a company that a lot of people are unfamiliar with outside the technology sector.

Regardless, apart from the “Chatter” hype at the conference, there were a lot of incremental product announcements that should render the core Sales and Service applications even more useful.  And I was impressed by the range of vendors marketing applications around the Salesforce.com eco-system.  I’ve wondered about the consulting model around these products, as it doesn’t always seem practical to have the same sort of leverage that you could build a business around with typical Enterprise Applications  (and pre ‘ERP’).   But in talking to some of the large integrators in the US, it appears that it is much the same in the enterprise.  Although configuration times are shorter and there is less IT infrastructure to worry about, that extra effort can be re-focussed in business process design, change management, and user adoption which traditionally got short-changed.  This will be an area of emphasis at in the CLOUD

In The Cloud is my new company – we focus on helping enterprises increase agility and reduce costs through the deployment of software-as-a-service and cloud based applications.  Initially we are providing implementation and development services with Salesforce.com, as well as working with organisations to identify components in their application architecture that may suit development or replacement with internet delivered applications.  We will be adding competencies in Google Apps, Amazon web services as well as some other specific niche SaaS applications in the near future.

I have been working with the team at LoyaltyTech, a company that delivers business and technology solutions in the demand chain – e-commerce, loyalty programs, customer analytics, and social network integration – paticularly in multi-channel retail environments.    Australian retailers have lagged behind North America and Europe in their adoption of these strategies.   DTDigital recently posted on how important it is for Australian companies to pick the pace and predicts that this will be the year it happens.

In recent visits with customers and prospects,  I’ve found that many of them don’t have an appreciation of how cost-effectively some of these initiatives can be implemented to provide a measurable increase in revenue and lifetime value of customers.  Improving your customer’s experience doesn’t have to cost $1m and can provide multiple opportunities for increased loyalty and cross/up sell.  Contact LoyaltyTech to learn more.

I’ve recently become  more active in Melbourne Angels, the local group of angel investors that is part of the AAAI (Australian Association of Angel Investors).  The angel investing community in Australia, while active, has been fairly informal in the past.  The AAAI has been busy over the past couple of years trying to put together a structure to help us get more organised and raise awareness among entrepreneurs and government about what we are doing.

What’s great about the angel group for me is that provides the investors with the ability to pool their resources, both experience and $$, to make more effective investments.   For entrepreneurs, a group of angel investors provides a way to get exposure to and feedback from a variety of difference experiences and people who have a lot of knowledge from multiple industries of what it takes to successfully start, build and exit a business.

Anthill Magazine recently posted some of our group’s panel feedback from a Pitch Club event.  It’s not my best performance but it was a great night and an opportunity to see a lot of business ideas in a short time!

If you are looking to raise early stage capital, you are welcome to make a submission to Melbourne Angels.