Organizing your Salesforce Orgs

Does this sound familiar? You’re moving from an independent instance (or org) of Salesforce CRM to the consolidated corporate org.  While there will definitely be business benefits in terms of visibility, reporting, customer/prospect communication, support, responsiveness, enablement and general leverage of corporate resources, it still represents a potential loss of autonomy. But it’s the right strategy for your business. Or is it?

Whether you ended up with multiple Salesforce orgs through mergers and acquisitions, separate brands or divisions, or through organic growth: at some point your organization is going to need to determine what is the right approach to multi-org consolidation. Here is an overview of 3 approaches to consider.

Salesforce.com Multi-Org Consolidation from Darren Cunningham

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The Benefits of a Single Customer View

social crm dissertation wordle (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

The promise of a single customer view is nothing new to CRM. But is there a comprehensive list of the benefits that such a promise might be able to deliver? Today on the Informatica Perspectives blog, Dina Elsokari took a crack at not 10, but 12 benefits.  It’s also notable that she talked about single customer view benefits without once mentioning cloud master data management or any associated technology for that matter. Well done!

Here’s her list:

1. Increase upsell and cross sell opportunities
2. Identify your most valuable customers
3. Higher customer retention
4. More targeted product development
5. Clearer targets for your marketing initiatives
6. Increased ROI on marketing campaigns
7. Credible forecasts
8. Respected reporting
9. Supporting data for a possible merger or acquisition
10. A sales culture, not a data gathering and cleansing culture
11. An increased adoption of Salesforce
12. Controlled risk

Be sure to check out the entire post and provide your feedback here.

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Congratulations to the 2012 Best of AppExchange Award Winners

Every year Salesforce announces the top partners by AppExchange category based on the quantity and quality of reviews. Today they blogged the winners. Congratulations to these partners who continue to demonstrate such a high degree of cloud customer adoption and success.

Sales: There are multiple winners in this category based on functional area.

Overall winner: Adobe EchoSign (They have now won 7 years in a row!  I actually thought the award had only been around for 5 years. Hmmm…. They have an astounding 2040 reviews for their electronic signature application.)

• Reports and Dashboards: Hoopla Scoreboard by Hoopla Software (we have the big screens running in our office!)
• Methodologies: Opportunity Management Optimizer by Sales Optimizer
• Geolocation: Geopointe by Arrowpointe
• Quotes and Orders: Configurator by Big Machines
• Compensation: Xactly Incent by Xactly

Customer Service: Clicktools Surveys and Scripts by Clicktools

IT and Administration: Informatica Cloud Integration for Salesforce (Informatica has been recognized 5 years in a row as the top cloud integration solution!)

Marketing: Marketo (Big win over Eloqua in a very competitive category – congrats!)

Human Resources (HR): Jobscience for Professional Recruiting by Jobscience

ERP: Ascent by Precisio Business Solutions (I’m interested in feedback on this app. Thought you’d see Financial Force here.)

Collaboration: SpringCM Free Content Management from SpringCM

Analytics: Sales Pipeline Visualization by SalesClic (First I’ve heard of this app – looks interesting.)

Congratulations to all of the winners and thanks to the Salesforce users who took the time to post their reviews!

 

Related Articles:

• AppExchange Customer Choice Award Winners 2012 (blogs.salesforce.com)
• Oracle Buys Eloqua: Winners and Losers for B2B Marketing Automation (customerthink.com)
• Top 10 Things You Can Do With Salesforce (blogs.salesforce.com)

In(tegrate) the Cloud 2012 Highlights

Every year WordPress sends a year in review summary of your blog. They do a nice job with it.

Here are a few highlights that I thought were worth sharing:

• The busiest day of the year was July 23rd, when I posted Cloud Data Replication for Better Business Intelligence.  I’m not sure if it’s the topic or the use of the Salesforce.com logo that drove the traffic that day.
• None of the posts that got the most views in 2012 were written in 2012.  Hmmm…I’m not sure I feel great about that.
• Twitter was the top referring site most in 2012. Alltop was number two.
• Cloud computing is the most popular topic I’ve written about, followed by SaaS, PaaS and Cloud Integration.

Here’s the most popular video first posted on the site. Thanks for reading – Happy New Year!

#DF12 Presentation: Power the Connected Enterprise with Cloud MDM and Integration

The video of 3 great enterprise customers sharing their Salesforce integration and master data management stories at Dreamforce 2012 is now posted. You can read a blog post on two of the companies that presented so far:

• OppenheimerFunds Dreamforce Story: Lay a Foundation of Trusted and Complete Customer Information for Salesforce
• Interstate Batteries Dreamforce Story: How Can You Be #1 Without Trusted Customer Information?

And here’s the video (slides are here):

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• Informatica Positioned in Leaders Quadrant in 2012 Master Data Management of Customer Data Solutions Report (virtual-strategy.com)

Stuck in the Post Dreamforce Cloud #DF12

Have you recovered from Dreamforce 2012? Next week I’ll be at Oracle Open World talking about cloud integration and to be honest, I’d much rather write about the Marc Benioff show than register for Larry’s World at this point. (Although, I do wonder if we’ll see the 2nd tweet from Mr. Ellison and what his position will be on all things cloud this year. Remember the @Benioff  boot out last time around? Some classic tweets.

I guess like a lot of people you could say I’m stuck in the PDC (Post Dreamforce Cloud) at this point. I’ve been spending time in the Dreamforce Chatter org reviewing sessions, watching YouTube videos and reading a plethora of blogger opinion about the conference (see links below).  Sound familiar?

To bring back some of the #DF12 energy, today I hosted a webinar focused on some of the Dreamforce data management highlights. The presentation congratulated the 2012 Informatica Cloudy Award winners and featured live demonstrations of two of the hottest topics at the Informatica booth:

• Salesforce and SAP integration
• Master Data Management for Salesforce

You can download the slides and watch the recording here:

Informatica Cloud @ Dreamforce 2012 from Darren Cunningham

Denis Pombriant wrote one of the best summaries of Dreamforce I’ve seen so far here.  I also enjoyed his interview with Brent Leary from CRM Essentials.

Related articles

• Dreamforce 2012: Before and During (blogs.salesforce.com)
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• Event Report: Dreamforce X (#DF12) Emerges As The South By Southwest (#SXSW) For The Enterprise (forbes.com)
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Salesforce Customers are Asking for Big Data Management #DF12

Two things stuck out for me at Dreamforce 2012:

1. What an amazing ecosystem Salesforce has built. The Cloud expo was packed with high-quality booths and there were over 3000 people at the partner keynote! Congratulations to the partner success team and kudos on the newly designed Appexchange.
2. How important cloud integration / enterprise connectivity has become to Salesforce customers, partners and prospects. These two slides from that same partner keynote say it all:

When it comes to the back-office, Big Data Management apps top the list of Salesforce customer requirements. Oh, and by the way, all new cloud applications must connect across the business.

Today two post-Dreamforce 2012 articles caught my attention that address the need for cloud integration head on. In his post – Plumbing the Salesforce Clouds is Your Business, Mark Smith from Ventana Research notes:

“The challenges your organization faces with data are getting larger, and the financial benefits of data in the cloud, such as reduced TCO and reduced implementation fees, are substantive. Too much time and too many resources are wasted in manual approaches where data is transitioned inconsistently and incorrectly. Automation helps organizations rationalize their overall information management efforts.”

Joshua Greenbaum at Enterprise Applications Consulting has this to say his his article, Salesforce.com, Enterprise Platforms, and the End of the End of Software:

“And the tools are there, or on the way. Hence the refrigerator pitch, though it was interestingly devoid of details on just how easy it will be to build an integration framework that could tie together a Pandora-like pure cloud environment or a more common hybrid cloud/on-premise environment. But heck, that’s really hard. It took SAP years to get NetWeaver out of slideware mode and into simple and easy to implement mode, despite all their efforts. So I don’t expect Saleforce.com to settle this issue in just one Dreamforce. It will take a while, no doubt.”

I’ll write about the Informatica Cloud integration and MDM session later this week on the Perspective blog. In the meantime, I’ve embedded the slides below so you can see for yourself how three enterprise organizations have taken advantage of data integration, data quality and master data management technology to drive overall Salesforce adoption and success. It’s Big Cloud Data Management in action!

Power the Connected Enterprise with Cloud Integration and Master Data Management (MDM) from Darren Cunningham

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Cloud Master Data Management from Informatica

I’ve written about the topic of cloud-based master data management (MDM) in the past:

1. 2012 Cloud Data Integration Trends
2. What do Salesforce.com Customers Care About?

This week Informatica announced the availability of a new Cloud MDM solution for salesforce.com customers. Here are a couple of perspectives on the news:

1. Will Salesforce be the Catalyst to Propel MDM to the Cloud?
2. Mind the Gap: How Sales Operations Can Overcome Five Customer Information Gaps in Salesforce

If you’re new to the topic of MDM and want to learn why a cloud-based solution built natively on force.com is so relevant to salesforce.com customers, be sure to check out this video:

Cloud Data Replication for Salesforce Analytics and Compliance

I moderating a webinar last week that featured two great salesforce.com customers sharing their experiences with Informatica Cloud data replication. The webinar also featured a demonstration of cloud integration in action.

One of the customers shared their insights in this brief video:

Here is the recording of the cloud integration webinar:

And here are the slides:

Informatica Cloud Data Replication for Salesforce from Darren Cunningham

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Are You Ready for #DF12?

Dreamforce is two weeks away. Are you ready?

Dennis Moore just posted this practical list of suggestions on the Enterprise Irregulars blog:

• Sit on the aisle in the general sessions – you may get in Marc @Benioff’s keynote!
• Bring your own backpack so you don’t get your bag mixed up with 50K+ others.
• Bring an extension cord with multiple outlets (and an appropriate adapter for your nation).
• Plan an extra five minutes for walking. Better make that ten. Or fifteen.
• If you’re driving in, carpool. You’ll have interesting things to talk about when stuck in traffic.
• You can watch most of the keynotes on monitors throughout Moscone, in comfort and while discussing with colleagues.
• Bring a couple of Granola bars (or your favorite alternative) for when you get stuck without a chance to get a meal.
• Comfortable shoes. Loose-fitting and dark-colored pants (for sitting on floor). Layers.
• Don’t try to follow #Dreamforce or #DF12 on Twitter. Your head might explode from the volume. Follow @mkrigsman and @rwang0 instead.

On the last point, I think Mark and Ray are great and do agree with following them (and a few others). That said, I think it’s worth checking in on the #DF12 feed periodically to get the pulse of  what’s happening at the event and get  real-time updates on keynotes and individual sessions.

I posted some resources on the Informatica Perspectives blog on what promises to be “the cloud computing event of the year” and have seen some great posts on the same topic since (see below). Salesforce has also been posting quite a few promotional videos. They’re clearly looking to set new attendance records for the conferences 10th anniversary.

Related articles

• 10 reasons to attend Dreamforce X #DF12 (blogs.salesforce.com)
• Dreamforce ’12 preview: Get ready for next version of Salesforce platform (zdnet.com)
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• Salesforce.com: 5 nagging questions ahead (zdnet.com)
• Learn How to Network at Dreamforce (blogs.salesforce.com)
• Dreamforce 2012 – A List of Great Resources #DF12 (insideview.com)