Customer-centric CRM
The prospect of implementing a CRM solution evokes in the mind of many CTOs a disturbing vision of prolonged struggles to assimilate back-office applications, along with the uncomfortable feeling that, despite the efforts, achieving the ultimate objectives of better customer care and increased sales revenues could remain a pipe dream.
If the above scenario hits a nerve, you should consider Salesforce.com’s upcoming Enterprise Edition.
Targeted at larger organizations, Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition is a hosted, Web-delivered CRM solution that promises painless XML-based integration with existing and future applications. In addition to offering sales-force and marketing automation and solid customer support capabilities, Enterprise Edition simplifies administrative tasks, improves on security and separation of duties, and offers centralized customization.
With the new version, due in March, Salesforce.com is proposing a Copernican revolution in CRM, focusing on customer-centered business processes and ignoring technical restrictions posed by existing software, such as back-office applications. The solution’s open architecture, based on Web services and XML, eases the building of programmatic links to other applications using the optional Salesforce.com Web Services Integration Kit.
Another option, the Data Junction Integration Toolkit, which administrators can install on their desktop client, simplifies creating scheduled data exchanges between Salesforce.com databases and just about any other data source in your company.
In addition, Salesforce.com includes functionality for linking (with minimal programming) other Web applications. For example, you could automatically create HTML forms and add them to your Web site to collect leads that will immediately flow to Saleforce.com and be assigned to a sales rep according to predefined criteria. Or, using a similar technique, you could give your customers self-service access to Salesforce.com, allowing them to search a database of common solutions or open a new support incident.
One welcome new feature is the capability of defining price books, or lists of products, that sales reps can reference when creating a new opportunity.
Companies with international customers will appreciate the support for multiple currencies and languages and the capability of converting automatically between them according to a centralized exchange rate table. We could easily create price lists in Euros and U.S. dollars, and set the exchange rate between the two currencies.
Using price books, sales reps can easily retrieve product codes and descriptions, indicate the quantity ordered for each item, and have Salesforce.com automatically calculate the potential revenue represented by an opportunity.
Interestingly, sales reps can also define a delivery schedule that specifies how many shipments to make for each product and how frequently. For consumables that need constant resupply, delivery scheduling feature is a real timesaver, giving sales reps a simple way to enter complex orders such as “quantity 200 shipped weekly for the next 24 months.” Naturally, Salesforce.com will do the math and adjust the revenue amount on the opportunity. Moreover, using sales reports, managers can analyze revenue forecasts for each product and assess their impact on each fiscal year.
Price books are an example of the CRM-centered approach of Salesforce.com. The price book contains only the information that sales-oriented processes need, leaving other data to the care of back-office applications.
However useful, price books don’t give an overall view of sales efforts. For that, Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition offers powerful marketing campaign management that simplifies creating a marketing campaign, assigning tasks, and keeping an eye on returns.
Creating a new campaign is as easy as entering basic data such as name, dates, and expected revenues and costs in an online form. Marketing managers can assign related activities (such as creating mass e-mail or preparing a Web site to support the sale of a new product) to their staff and easily monitor their progress, because Salesforce.com groups those activities by campaign.
In our testing, we created several sales opportunities, using price books for our products and linking each opportunity to our marketing campaign. To make the test more interesting, our opportunities included products in different currencies. On the campaign page, Salesforce.com had inserted a line for each opportunity with the value of each sale in the original currency. Moreover, the campaign summary showed the expected sales revenue accurately converted in U.S. dollars. Managing and monitoring a multinational marketing campaign could not be easier.
Enterprise Edition earned our top score because of its ease of use, consistent interface across modules, and powerful integration and administration features. The solution leaves little to be desired, except offline capabilities. An upcoming offline client (we previewed an early version) should become part of the solution later this year at no additional cost.
