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 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 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!

At dSales we have been looking a lot at web chat technologies and their application as another sales and service channel – LivePerson is a particularly successful provider that we have been working with especially because of their integration with salesforce.com.   It seems that this chat has not really caught in in Australia like in many other countries and I’m trying to figure out why – it can provide significant uplift in sales conversions and increase in service agent productivity.

Anyone got any thoughts?

Recently saw salesforce.com’s presentation on the Service Cloud, which included discussion of integration with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  The concept of monitoring what your customer base is saying about you in the cloud and reacting appropriately is  getting a lot of attention at the moment.

Certainly the ability to find out more about your customer contacts through the various social & professional networking apps makes a lot of sense – a lot of us look up people on LinkedIn before making initial contact to get some idea of who we are dealing with.

And I also buy in to exposing solutions to customer issues on the web in a way that is easily searchable – if you have a problem with a product, you are more likely to search for a solution in Google than to start with the manufacturer’s knowledge base, so if your company’s solutions are out there in search engine land they are more likely to find them.

But I’d be interested to hear other ways that people are using their customer relationship systems to interact with social media…

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 read an interesting post on the SmothSpan blog about the relative importance of multi-tenant architecture given the ability for cloud scaling.

It also references the Atlassian blog post from today which is really interesting as it makes the case for single tenancy.

The latest trend in application delivery is  bit like back to the future – once upon a time, companies that wanted computer processing power used time share or bureau services to access part of a mainframe’s processing power unless they could afford the millions of dollars in capital investment required to buy their own mainframe.    As mini computers became available, more and more organisations could afford their own processing plant on-premise.  Hence the rise of Digital, AS/400, Sequent, Pyramid, Sun….  Then the rise of PCs meant that processing could be split between the client side and the server and further decentralised.

All the talk about cloud computing, software as a service, computing as a utility, on demand all harks back to the timeshare model – you access the processing power that you need on a time-share, pay as you go scalable model.  Except now, it’s not a mainframe at the back end, but data centres full of servers that have been virtualised (another mainframe concept!) to provide these services.

As the quotable Larry Ellison said late last year:  “The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion.”

I wasn’t sure what the definition on Sales 2.0 was, so I looked it up  in Anneke Seley and Brent Holloway’s new book Sales 2.0:

“Sales 2.0 is the use of innovative sales practices, focused on creating value for both buyer and seller and enabled by Web 2.0 and next-generation technology. Sales 2.0 practices combine the science of process-driven operations with the art of collaborative relationships, using the most profitable and most expedient sales resources required to meet customers’ needs. This approach produces superior, predictable, repeatable business results, including increased revenue, decreased sales costs, and sustained competitive advantage.”

It’s a fantastic book for any business interested in improving sales enhanced by technology. You can buy it straight from Amazon below:

I’ve recently started working with dSales, a consulting practice specialising in leading edge processes, technology and skills development to increase sales conversion rates, improve resource productivity, and enhance the customer experience across distributed sales and service teams.   We often enable this processes with technology based on salesforce.com.