Electronic signature platforms: Close deals faster
December 12, 2008
Are you looking for ways to reduce your deal close time? Setifi Co-Founder John Stojka brought to my attention a new post over at the Closing 2.0 blog that highlights how to do just that.
Sertifi provides an electronic signature platform that is now available on the Force.com AppExchange.
I’ve been hearing good things for quite some time now about digital document management and electronic signature systems but have yet to hear of a local company who uses them extensively. Is the paperless office a reality in your company?
Post thoughts to comments.
Some excellent with your lunch?
December 11, 2008
Mmm, toast and tea.
James Kobielus of Networkworld (and the aptly named James Kobielus blog, where I found the story initially) has written something excellent. Part prognostication and part analysis, James’ article is about the state of SaaS as it is at the moment and how it stands to challenge competitors with it’s pricing scheme and challenge potential customers to make the switch in a tough economy. I’m convinced.
Now I just need a small business to switch over, ooo, and I could make some testimonials!
Read it here.
Googles for everyone!
December 9, 2008
Let’s have some link spam. (I like the story under “link” the most)
Announced Sunday under the dreary cloak of the very early hours of greenwitch mean time, Salesforce has pulled tighter into the embrace of it’s fast-stepping dance partner’s arms. Salesforce has announced that it is set to integrate itself more closely with Google, connecting Force.com to the Google Apps Engine.
So let me see, you have oranges; which are delicious and citrusy and you love the taste of them (oh it’s the holidays getting to me) and you’re mixing it with chocolate; something we know goes great everywhere and never lets anyone down?
Lovely. A Force.com Terry’s Chocolate Google Orange for everyone.
Another willing convert… NBC!
December 5, 2008
Not much for me to say about this, but Salesforce has bagged another big contract in NBC Universal.
Market downturn! Stock markets crashing! CRM down $30!
Yet, still securing giant multimillion dollar contracts? The world economy is crashing and Salesforce is bucking that trend too, sheesh.
TMCNet has coverage!
You have been invited to join the (Product here) Group…
December 3, 2008
Martin Courtney from WhatPC? has given me some food for thought about the social networking rush for CRM’s and other marketing tools to exploit this vast uncharted sea of online communities.
He raises some good points, the social networks of the web are vast, sprawling, barely contained user-created worlds. Usually when a corporation decides to step in and sift around in an environment like that, it is never to the benefit of the users, and there are almost always unpleasant and unforseen side effects. That’s not even considering the privacy issues.
Web-centric companies these days are a lot more knowledgeable than those who ruined my fun in past (oh, I’ve seen this happen) so I’m interested to see where they go with this. Will their marketing be too intrusive? How many online communities will be sacrifices in the experimentation? Will these companies slowly and carefully integrate, doing their best not to step on any toes?
I’m curious and optimistic. Here’s the article for you to mull over.
Just what I was thinking…
November 28, 2008
Larry Dignan’s got a post over at Seeking Alpha that talks about something that I’ve been discussing with a few friends lately; Salesforce.com (Force.com!) seeming resistance to the great blunder that’s killed our markets.
I’m partial to the whole distributed income thing, if we imagine a company 100 customers paying $5 a day and five can no longer afford your service, you’re down $25 opposite that imagine a company with 10 customers paying $50 a day and 5 stop being able to afford the service. Seems like a depression-proof system? Hmm, didn’t the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company make it through the depression only to find chewing gum standard issue in World War 1 ration packs?
Hm, issuing a Salesforce account with your business license? Big dreams. Have a read through Larry’s post.
I don’t know if you know, but Harrahs is kind of a big deal.
November 27, 2008
So we’re fresh off the megadeal that is the Force.com/Harrah’s situation (See! I said Force.com, I’m adapting Marc!) and someone’s already talking about the Force’s next move! The Industry Standard just ran an article about Salesforce deployment to India, a place I feel “the model” will go over extremely well.
This touches on something I think a lot of people are missing about the way Salesforce.com has set itself up as something to buy. One of my biggest hobbies is gaming, and there are a lot of parallels with the way Xbox Live or SecondLife are set up with the way Salesforce offers it’s services.
With Xbox Live I pay a nominal flat fee per month to access a variety of extremely useful enjoyment-enhancing features (like playing online with friends, the ability to connect to my msn chat, etc.) If I chose to, I can spend extra money buying additional components for my games, picking up things to streamline or just personalize my themes and characters, expand on game content, and all of that stuff is optional. This means if I want my Xbox Live to cost $10 this month, I just don’t buy anything extra.
Say I’m strapped for cash, say the economy is down, let’s say my fun (advertising/sales) budget is thinning out and I just need want to play online (get my CRM platform) then I can unsubscribe or peel off excess things that aren’t essential to my business and get them later because it’s not like my data is going to vanish (watch the paragraph blur together), it will just be a bit of a hassle to update the database a few months down the road when everything is running smoothly again. Salesforce is a flexible platform that can change as your business needs it to, even if that means getting smaller for a while.
That’s why this is the best system around at the moment. Instead of dropping $5,000 on an Xbox (and another $650 on a warranty and service agreement) and a license to acquire up to (50) additional games and download up to X patches or Y gb of content over the next 3-5 years before the whole things goes out of date, I just buy the system and get the games, features, upgrades and optional components I want as I need them. I don’t have to drop an oversized and expensive sum on something that might not be what I need 12 months let alone 5 years.
Sorry for editorializing, but it seems like there are a lot of old guard out there in the software industry (and software media) who just don’t get the new model, they still see things like Google and Salesforce as some kind of a big scary risk that could ruin your company if the wind changes too quickly or if it happens to rain on tuesday.
If I’m right and Force does well in India it’s because a ton of people running small businesses with small overheads are going to look at an affordable product using their existing infrastructure (a PC), a product they can upgrade over time as their company grows and think: “Wow, that’s a good idea.”
A virgence in the Force. SFDC morphs into Force.com
November 25, 2008
I received a copy of a press release yesterday talking about how Harrahs Entertainment (known for its casino empire that includes Caesars in Vegas) is anteing up and using the Force.com platform to more efficiently run and integrate a variety of its businesses.
While it was interesting to hear that Salesforce is making in roads into another well known, well established company, it wasn’t exactly eye popping news – we expect to hear this type of thing every week at this stage of the game.
However, what did catch my eye was the wording of the release. While I don’t like to include too much if any press release material on in my posts, I’ve included the snippet below for reference as there are some interesting takeaways.
Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced that Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc. has used the Force.com Platform to build applications designed specifically for managing room reservations, air travel programs and player relations.
Points to Ponder:
- 1. It’s becoming more and more obvious that Salesforce.com is morphing into Force.com. As noted in the comments to this post, Salesforce is shifting its focus from being a CRM company to being known as a platform company.CRM, while still SFDC’s primary business and likely the main driver behind its ongoing growth, is taking a back seat to Force.com and the idea of cloud computing(click the link and note the branding / copy of the header).
- 2. Salesforce.com may be suffering or may suffer soon from a lack of brand focus during this transition. Personally I’m a big fan of SFDC (that much is obvious) and I hope the company continues to flourish rather than making the mistake so many other big brands have made in the past. Currently, I think the company is running the risk of breaking one of the 22 imutable laws of branding, that is: trying to be all things to all people. If you look at the current www.salesforce.com home page, you’ll see what I mean. The title you’ll see in your browser says: “CRM – The leader in Software-as-a-service SaaS”. The next thing you might notice is that the AppExchange is now know as the Force.com Appexchange (if you click through you’ll see a tagline urging us to: “Expand beyond CRM”). Further down the page we see the line “The Leader in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) & Cloud Computing“. And the list of other small and not so small details goes on.
It’s interesting watching this shift and my bet is that Salesforce.com will be able to pull it off.
The new direction is a good one in the sense that if the transition is completed successfully and with the right timing, Salesforce will have effectively opened itself up to a bigger market – this could also be a double edge sword as the company no doubt knows. By trying to be all things to all people, you often end up pleasing no one. My bet is Salesforce will be able to make the transition work. It has strong leadership that understands technology and has proven its foresight in the past.
That’s enough from me for now on this one. Post your thoughts and responses to comments.
43? Yeah, that’s the four before the three
November 24, 2008
Not much to say about this bit of news, if you were paying attention to the business side of Salesforce this week then you noticed when Salesforce.com (CRM) stepped on market expectation’s neck and brutally roared it’s dominance over all the other tribes.
A few days late, sure, but still awesome news.
Zoho Hindsight
November 19, 2008
Jeff Grosse of CRMFYI was spurred to review the dealings of Salesforce and Zoho over the past few years after a computerworld editorial declared Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff an official member of that particular blogger’s “bozo hall of fame”.
Benioff’s apparent failure to secure Zoho’s participation/submission is quite the flub to the blogger but no skin off of Jeff’s nose. I think it’s a good breakdown of events, so if you’re interested in the corporate mergers/business battling, have a look.
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