While reading Steve Anderson’s blog (http://gokubi.com), I was inspired to put up one of our screencasts.
Anand was nice enough to put together a great screencast about creating a basic Apex trigger. This dives into some code but isn’t too technical that the average Salesforce admin can’t understand it. Take a look!
After a few years of CRM consulting and quite a few CRM implementations, we have started to see some distinct patterns emerge which can help us predict which organizations have a better or worse chance at CRM success. Listed below are some of most significant indicators of an organizations ability to effectively absorb a CRM implementation:
1. Executive Buy In – A project may not always have the full participation of the Executive Director, however, at least one valued executive should participate as a member of the project team. If a top level executive is not involved in the project, it either indicates that the project is a.) Not considered a high priority for the organization –or- b.) Will not lead to high impact for the organization.
2. Flexibility – The 80/20 rule applies here. It will take the CRM consultants 80% of their time to tackle the 20% of Organizational requirements which do not fit neatly into the CRM software’s capabilities. Organizational flexibility on the 20% can free up the CRM consultants to spread their time more evenly over the project and accomplish more for the budget.
3. Participation – CRM technology can only be configured effectively through an interactive design process. We typically state up front to our clients that we expect them to contribute X hours towards the project. Without this participation, your CRM consultant will be guessing and the more they guess the more likely they will be off target from your Organization’s expectations.
4. Clear Goals – An organization must have a clear understanding of what it hopes to gain from a CRM project. If the organization is struggling to define its direction or mission, then it cannot effectively embrace a new CRM platform. Clearly defined goals can lead to clearly defined requirements which are essential to a successful CRM project.
5. Quadruple Constraint – Any technology project faces four specific constraints: time, money, quality, and scope. At some point in every project one of those variables will need to be negotiated to ensure project success. Rigidly locking in on all four constraints is impossible and will doom a project to failure from the start.
6. Organizational Buy-In – The worst situation for a consultant is to enter an organization where there is heavy resistance to a project. The consultants will have to work twice as hard to make the project succeed and they will spend most of their time fighting through organizational resistance. Ensure that all of the key stakeholders (at all levels) are bought in to the process and understand the value of the project for them and for the entire organization.
7. Transition Plan – Has the organization identified a project owner or advocate to run the CRM project after the initial implementation is over? The most successful organizations typically identify a person to play this role and make it a substantial portion of their job description.
8. Reasonable Expectations – This is the most critical element to project success. An organization must have a reasonable picture of what a new CRM system can accomplish in the short term. The solution will evolve over time; however, there will definitely be bumps along the way. Sticking through the transition bumps and keeping reasonable expectations about progress is perhaps the single most important success indicator.
The above list is not meant to be exhaustive. It is only a set of the most common success indicators we consider as CRM consultants. When the above attributes line up, we get pretty excited about a project. Those are the types of organizations which can most effectively embrace a CRM implementation and use it as a real innovation platform to accelerate their mission!
All the buzz last week was about Google’s announcement of its new cross-social networking platform Open Social (see ReadWriteWeb for more information). Salesforce is one of the founding partners and promises to create the ability to integrate social networking data (Plaxo and LinkedIn) into the business enterprise domain. For me personally, I was all aflutter by the idea. That is, until I saw the cheesy Google Campfire video and the sf.com demo (minute 43). While Theikos demo’d an interesting contact cloud application - which I have little doubt most nonprofits could not afford - it did not show much in the way of how Open Social was going to hook into sf.com.
The more I got to thinking about this, the more all this bugged me. Sf.com doesn’t natively have the ability to do contact-to-contact relationships (similar to the account-to-account relationships in the Partner utility). I’ve been told repeatedly by the great folks at sf.com that it’s a B2B application, and so there wasn’t much customer demand for C2C (reciprocal) relationships. So if sf.com has been working with Google on this for the past several months (year?), why is there no native C2C relationship building functionality in this release, or even on the roadmap?
Vis-a-vis the Theikos demo, I’m left with the question: Will sf.com’s ability to hook into the Open Social platform rely on costly third party vendors to access C2C relationships? Or is this finally the business case that sf.com has been waiting for to finally offer it as a feature (yet where’s the promoted Idea?)?
Since Dreamforce, there has been a lot of talk about how Apex will help nonprofits better leverage Salesforce. Oh yeah, did I mention Apex is available for all nonprofits: http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/upgrade. For more info see: http://tinyurl.com/2ej42w . Over the weekend, sf.com released Winter ‘08 with all sorts of goodies that I think will be valuable for many of us. See Features page: http://blogs.salesforce.com/features/winter_08_release/
While I am very grateful for the donation of Apex to nonprofits, I would love to see the addition of other features in future releases (either donated or at a reduced cost):
And please please…add roll-up summaries to all objects. (Pretty please).
What are your the features that you find most valuable?
With the full launch of Apex and the announcement of Visualforce, many Salesforce administrators are asking us about the future of S-Controls. (Note: S-Controls are client side JavaScript snippets which allow you to override layout elements and perform more complex business logic on the Salesforce.Com platform.) S-Controls are not going away anytime soon. Here are a few reasons why S-Controls are going to be around for at least a few more years:
Don’t get me wrong … someday down the road Apex & Visualforce will eventually replace the need for S-Controls; however, a lot needs to happen before that day comes. So, for now, you don’t need to make re-writing all of your S-Controls a top priority.
I want to show you how a particular nonprofit is using Apex code: the Center for Employment Opportunities (http://www.ceoworks.org). They demo’d their Salesforce configuration at the NYC Nonprofit User Group (run by Lisa Glass-Kornstein, just back from her honeymoon!). They use Apex to do complicated business logic like cross-object verification and data transfers based on triggers. I know Jessie Grenfell from CEO is going to update this presentation, but I figured I’d get it out there so people can see it.
Are you using S-controls or Apex in your organization? What business process are you solving with these tools?
By rob
