Posted by Sid Lejfer on Wed, Feb 17, 2010
A dropped fly ball in baseball, a fumble or interception in football, or a turnover in basketball, all can be momentum killers. It is difficult to regain your momentum when a negative change happens in a positive pattern.
The same is true with implementing and maintaining a CRM System. You can take all of text book steps for selecting, implementing, and maintaining a CRM system, but something unexpected happens. Let me give you a few examples and suggested remedies in regaining your CRM momentum:
1. Change in the executive management team. One of the important steps in getting approval of a CRM system within an organization is executive sponsorship. As an organization, you want to make sure you have broad based support for a CRM system so if any one executive leaves, your have organizational commitment to move forward with your CRM system.
2. The CRM advocate who initiated and drove the project leaves the company. As noted above, the key is to get broad based support for your CRM initiative throughout your organization. If one person leaves, other people within the organization will step up and drive the process.
3. Major shift in the way your business goes to market. With the pace of technology and changes in the economy, business needs change all of the time. You can protect yourself by selecting a CRM system that is flexible and can be modified very easily.
4. You are acquired or merge with another organization. Again, if you have selected a CRM system that is flexible and modified easily, you will be able to make rapid changes to adjust to requirements of your consolidated entity.
5. You company has financial issues. This is a difficult one to address. Depending on your contract arrangement with your SaaS solution, you will be able to decrease the licenses you have on a yearly basis. This will allow you to control the cost. In addition, the maintenance cost of a SaaS solution is less expensive than an on-premise solution and upgrades are included. SaaS solutions definitely give you more flexibility if your company goes through a financial issue.
6. Technical issues with your system. Solutions like Salesforce CRM provide a company with a solid technical solution with great up-time. The key is to take a phased approach to your implementation, have a pilot program and address any technical issues that come up, and properly train your staff. This approach will avoid any momentum killers.
7. Poor data quality. You can have the very best CRM system in the world, train all your people properly, and have an initiative that fails because of poor data quality. People get frustrated when they are working on a system that does not provide them with accurate information. To avoid this momentum killer, you need to address data quality issues before the data is imported into the new system. There are a variety of data cleansing solutions and approaches to addressing this issue.
8. Poor end user adoption. One of the biggest momentum killers is the final step - poor end user adoption. This can occur for many reasons. You need to make sure that end users are involved in this process from the beginning, the system addresses their day to day needs, and easy to use. If you address these three steps, you will have good end user adoption.
By being aware and limiting your momentum killers, you will have a useful and productive CRM System.
Posted by Bill Goulette on Mon, Feb 01, 2010
Scribe Insight is an affordable, on premise ETL (Extract - Transform - Load) middleware that works very well with the majority of possible data sources. Early on, Scribe had the only software that one could use to load data into Dynamics CRM versions 1.X and 3.0 because of a connector they built for it, but enough with the history lesson.
As Salesforce.com grew in popularity, Scribe developed a connector for it also. One can use the connector by selecting it from the available adapter connections when developing a DTS in the workbench or when creating a publisher that queries Salesforce. In both instances, there is the ability to specify the URL in the connection information. I will spend a paragraph or two pointing out a few of the often overlooked aspects of the URL used in these connections.
When defining the connection to Salesforce.com you may specify a Salesforce.com sandbox instance. This is done by taking out the 'www' the URL in the connection string and replacing it with 'test' (i.e.: "https://www.salesforce.com/services/Soap/u/14.0" now reads "https://test.salesforce.com/services/Soap/u/14.0"). The username and the password for the sandbox connection will then work. Often times, a person will use the sandbox's username and password and get a failed connection error and will realize after some troubleshooting that this little setting change was overlooked. Of course, when the work you have done is ready for production, be sure to change this segment in the connection string back to 'www'.
Salesforce.com upgrades its application on a regular basis repairing issues and making new functionality available to their user base. Salesforce.com releases are represented in the connection string at the end of the connection string. You will notice that the version that is defaulted to 14 (i.e.: "https://www.salesforce.com/services/Soap/u/14.0"). In order for existing publishers and DTS packages to take advantage of the new features provided in the new versions of Salesforce, the URL must be manually modified to reflect the new version. These are commonly referred to as endpoints. (At the time this blog article was written, the current version was 17.0).
Interestingly enough this change must be made to all of the connections that connect to the same Salesforce.com instance. Part of the reason that the costs can be kept affordable is that the licensing model they use is based on licenses purchased and not on a per-connection basis. As a result, if you do not change the end point for all the connections that connect to the same Salesforce.com instance, Scribe will multiply the amount of licenses that it thinks you need by the amount of distinctly different endpoints that your integrations are are using.
For example; an organization has purchased 100 licenses of Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition but is using endpoints 16.0 on older integrations and 17.0 for all the new ones. Scribe is now going to count 200 licenses and give you a licensing error in the alert log in the Scribe Console. This is easily remedied by manually making the suggested adjustment from the above paragraph, but it will give your integration administrator a bit of work to figure out the problem.
Posted by Sid Lejfer on Thu, Jan 21, 2010
One of the excercises that our prospects go through when selecting a CRM solution for their business is a Total Cost of Ownership Calculation. This is a very important step in comparing an on-premise CRM solution to a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution.
In the case of calculating the cost of an on-premise solution, the obvious costs include the following:
- Allocation of the hardware cost, both for the server and end-user computers;
- Allocation of the software cost, again, both for the server and end-user computers;
- Allocation of the NOC expenses, including rent, personnel, and other related infrastruce including firewalls, security software, disaster recovery, and UPS;
- The cost of the personnel to maintain the system both from an administrative and support;
- Upgrades. Is is the most overlooked and underestimated cost of maintaining an on-premise system. There are the obvious 20% annual maintenance fee that software companies charge. But you must include the cost of the consultants and internal personnel you need to perform the upgrade. Overtime, upgrades include the upgrading of the actual software product, underlying database, operating system, and various batches required throughout the infrastructure. You need to consider down time and loss of prodcution in your calculation.
- The Aggrevation Factor. Ah, yes, the aggrevation factor. What does it cost your organization in personal and financial manpower to go through an upgrade process. Those valuable resources can be used elsewhere within your organization.
One of the advantages that SaaS provides an organization is the seamless upgrades provided as part of your subscription cost. You really need to consider this as one of your decision criteria.
Some of our clients have actually switched from an on-premise solution to a SaaS solution, cost justifying the switch by eliminating the annual maintenance and upgrade expenses.
Please go to our website at http://www.harvestsolutions.net/ and download our total cost of ownership calculator. Although it is difficult to quantify an aggrevation factor, you must include some soft cost in the upgrade process.