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.

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…

It has been quite interesting over the past few weeks as I have been immersed in delivering salesforce.com extensions in enterprise clients.  While the product initally aimed at the SME world it has gained acceptance at some of the largest companies around particularly in business units that are not prepared to wait for 2-3 years for a new core system to be developed and deployed.

There is no doubt that force.com provides the capability to deliver highly usable, robust applications in  a fraction of the time that it used to take in the ‘olden days.’  At enterprise level however there are still the challenges related to release management and IT governance.  Although the issues of creating multiple development and test environments are now handled by the vendor, you still have to migrate and check what code and configuration exists in each of multiple environments, as well as figure out ways to manage regression testing as you release new capabilities into a live system.   The Force IDE, Metadata API and other tools cover quite a lot of the objects and code that need to be managed, but not all, and this is where some rigour and discipline is required.

Here at dSales we have been developing a set of tools and processes to help our clients manage this situation.

If you have any useful experience in this regard I’d love to hear feedback.