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!

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.

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’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.

I’ve recently started working with eOriginal, a digital signature and vault solution that has had great success in North America, particularly in consumer lending but also in government, health and transport/logistics.  This sort of product offfers some fantastic benefits for companies that generate significant numbers of agreements or other documents requiring signature.  In addition to reducing the cycle time for execution of documents, the cost savings on printing, couriering, filing and retrieving documents makes for a pretty compelling investment case, particularly since eOriginal is an on-demand SaaS offering.  It’s easily integrated with loan origination and other document production systems.   The electronic vault technology is the only solution accepted in the U.S. for purposes of securitising pools of financial instruments and is covered by an impressive portfolio of patents.  It ensures that the electronic originals are tamperproof as well as providing for transfer of ownership of documents.

Australian legislation, through the Electronic Transactions Act (1999), enables electronic signatures as a mechanism for execution of most kinds of agreements, but we seem to be in the very early stages of adopting this technology.  I’d be interested to hear your thoughts about why the adoption has been so limited?  And of course,  if you are interested in the solution feel free to contact me!

I just posted a note the other day looking for information about how people were using social media in relation to CRM – it didn’t take long before I saw this post on Anneke Seley’s Sales 2.0 blog:  Social Networking in Sales.  It has some great concrete examples of sales teams using LinkedIn and Twitter with measurable results.

Once upon a time, I started a consulting business providing services to implement large accounting, HR and manufacturing systems, later called ERP. We started the business focussing on Oracle Applications, and then, when PeopleSoft came to Australia we signed up as their first implementation partner here. PeopleSoft was started by Dave Duffield, and moved from an upstart challenger to Oracle and SAP by entering the HR & Payroll market first (now called HCM for Human Capital Management) and then expanding into accounting and other applications. The company was very successful and after a long battle were eventually swallowed by Oracle.

Now Mr. Duffield is back, doing it again with Workday, an ERP application delivered using a SaaS or on-demand model.  The company has raised several substantial rounds of capital and already has started accumulating an impressive customer list include some Fortune 500 companies.  Interesting, they list on their customer list some of the major SaaS players such as salesforce.com, Xactly and Astadia, who are using Workday for their back office functions.

I am watching with great interest.

I’ve been getting up to date on the latest research and information on sales effectiveness in organisations and the stats are remarkable. A recent study by Ernst & Young of medium size businesses ($25m-$1b) in the U.S. and Australia  indicated that 72% said their 6 month revenue forecast was out by more than 30%, and that another 14% didn’t even know how reliable their forecast was.  78% said they had no or only rudimentary sales processes, and in many cases those processes are developed in isolation from understanding the typical buyer’s .

I’m a strong believer in CRM applications and their ability to help manage leads and opportunity pipelines (as well as the whole customer lifecycle), but the reality is that a whole lot of organisations could benefit from some basic work around optimising revenue generation and developing their sales process before trying to whack in a CRM system.    Simple questions like:

• What problems does your product or service solve for a potential customer?
• What is the profile of those types of customers?
• What are your conversion rates at each stage in the sales cycle?
• Based on conversion rates, how many leads need to enter the top of your sales funnel to hit your revenue targets?
• How are leads nutured so that when a sales rep calls on them, the prospect is receptive? (Or, how do you help them become aware that they have a problem that you can solve?)   

are only the tip of the iceberg in improving your organisation’s sales effectiveness.  The stats also show that organisations that have done the work, with mature sales processes average more than 4x better conversion ratios than those that haven’t.  At any gross margin, there is huge potential for massive profit improvement, even in ‘hard times.’