Every once in a while, I get a request to add a “Related List” for items that are not direct relationships within ServiceNow. One little-known (and underutilized) feature of ServiceNow is custom-defined relationships.

Here are a few use requests that we often receive:

• Show all fields that exist on a given form, across all form sections (this is a part of our Administration EXCELerator)

• On a Change Request, show a combined list of Incidents AND Problems (and Incidents related to those problems)

• Add a list of notifications (and allow a new one to be created) from an Event Registry entry

I’m one of the ServiceNow Discovery Implementation Specialists, so in this post, we’ll take a look at how to show recent ECC queue entries for a given MID Server.

This is a classic problem: I’m looking at my MID Server list, and one is down, so I want to know the last transaction it processed. I could go to the ECC transaction queue and try to search/filter, but I could bring the data into my context — MID Server form I’m currently looking at.

In order to set this up, we need to go find the query that will result in the correct list.

Here you see that I’ve filtered to “Topic != HeartbeatProbe>Topic does not contain queue.>Agent = mid.server.CloudSherpas-MID1″, and this is where we want to start.

Let’s Right-Click on the last breadcrumb and “Copy query.”

I end up with:

topic!=HeartbeatProbe^topicNOT LIKEqueue.^agent=mid.server.CloudSherpas-MID1

The next thing we need to do figure out how to make this dynamic.

My MID Server name is “CloudSherpas-MID1,” so in looking at my MID Server record, I see that in the “Name” field.

This brings us to our missing link: the Relationship entry.

Let’s navigate to System Definition > Relationships and open a new form.

Here are the important parts of our form:

1. Name: what should we call our new related list?

2. Applies to table: where do we want our new related list to be available?

3. Queries from table: what kind of records should we display?

4. Query with: the code to run against the database to return the correct result set

So now that we know what the fields mean, here’s how I’ve filled out my form:

You’ll notice that in the “Query with” field, I did nothing more than copy & paste what we filtered to earlier. Why go to all the hard work to re-filter, breadcrumb by breadcrumb in code, when I can just paste it in?

The only update I made was to replace the hard-coded MID server name, and make this query dynamic. As a result, we can infer that these two objects are available:

• current: the query being run (“Queries from table”)

• parent: the form where this related list is showing (“Applies to table”)

Here, I’ve simply grabbed the “name” of the MID Server record I’m looking at, and appended it to the end of my query.

Now, let’s save it, and add it to our form, and see how it works.

Excellent! We now have a short list of the most recent transactions that particular MID Server has processed.

Since the ECC Queue table on a busy instance can get very sizable very quickly, we need to make sure we put a reasonable default filter on it. Here, I’ve set a “Created on Today” filter as the default. You also may want to Personalize > the List Control and turn off the buttons (you see the “new” button here), depending on your particular use.

In summary, when you need a related list that’s indirect (or in our case a text-match, instead of a sys_id-match), grab a pen and paper, draw out the tables (and the columns) that contain the relationship, and filter away!

Secret weapon: Should your sales program be stocked with geniuses?

Sales-wise, Apple continues to throttle the competition: it’s a master builder of the category killer. Want to bring a new smartphone to market? It will be judged against the latest iPhone. Same again for any tablet or laptop. And then Apple markets the debut of every new iPhone or other device to within an inch of its life. What’s left? Oh yes, revenue: Apple is the most profitable company in the history of profitability.

In recent years, of course, Apple has also branched out into retail. The Apple Store offers a quick way to get your Apple fix–in either sense. But from an employment standpoint, a recent New York Times exposé noted the lack of sales commissions–unlike, for example, a Verizon store–and general low levels of pay, plus the cult-like corporate culture, lack of promotion opportunities, and relatively high levels of employee burnout.

Despite that work environment, the Apple Store is yet another sales juggernaut for the company, and at least some of that success comes down to its Genius Bar, which is Apple’s fancy name for its tech-support desk, where Apple owners can troubleshoot their products with an “Apple Genius,” a.k.a. computer repair person.

What makes the Genius Bar tick, and what lessons does it offer to other businesses who want to not just better support their customers, but move more products? To answer that question, take a look at the latest version of the Genius Training Student Workbook from Apple, which Gizmodo recently got its hands on. While the manual doesn’t deliver unknown Steve Jobs management secrets or other potentially earth-shattering knowledge, it does offer four takeaways that can help make any sales program better:

1) Customer Empathy Sells

According to Gizmodo, Apple’s training materials promote a form of psychological sales jujitsu:

Sales, it turns out, take a backseat to good vibes–almost the entire volume is dedicated to empathizing, consoling, cheering up, and correcting various Genius Bar confrontations. The assumption, it’d seem, is that a happy customer is a customer who will buy things.

Takeaway: Don’t discount the power of a satisfied customer. Apple has some of the highest customer satisfaction scores in the market. While customer satisfaction might not be sexy, it sells, and costs far less than trying to attract new customers.

2) Don’t Waste Customers’ Time

Indeed, just look at the Genius Bar reservation service, which allows customers to book a time to speak with an Apple expert about any issues they’re having with an Apple product. When it comes to customer service, most businesses–including cell phone carriers and cable providers–send the wrong signals, telling customers that when you have to wait in a queue, the problem isn’t the wait; it’s you. Consider how many businesses badger you in a phone queue to hang up and use the self-service tools on its website.

Apple, meanwhile, allows you to schedule a service appointment at its store, when it’s convenient for you, which means the problem can often be resolved on the spot. No doubt this psychological “we’re here to serve you” also entices people to buy more.

3) Memo To Salespeople: Get Selling

What else accounts for Apple’s retail sales magic? Cue Gizmodo: “Maybe it’s because the products sell themselves. Maybe it’s the zealot fan base. Or maybe the blue-clad [Genius] agents really are inside our heads when we walk away from the Bar.”

Of course, sales are the Genius Bar employees’ ultimate remit. Despite heavy use of such words as gracefully, empathetically, persuasively, and respectfully, the Genius Training Student Workbook continually hammers home that “Everyone in the Apple Store is in the business of selling.”

4) Make Selling Easier

But it’s essential to note that Apple salespeople aren’t going it alone. Furthermore, the Apple Store isn’t succeeding just based on empathy, product design, store design, or customer service, but a combination of all of these factors. Viewed another way, these factors help salespeople be more productive. The same goes for CRM and SFA tools, which are designed not to replace salespeople, but rather to help them sell more.

Never underestimate the power of a highly motivated–and properly trained–salesperson to close more deals. But the last lesson from Apple is also that the best way to help salespeople sell more is to build a product or service that people want to buy.

LEARN MORE

Cloud Sherpas is one of the world’s leading cloud services brokerages and helps businesses adopt, manage and enhance their CRM investment by identifying desired business goals, finding the right tools and technology for the job, and delivering rapid implementations that remain focused on achieving the desired business capabilities.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Randy Lemoine.

The Content Management System (CMS) is a ServiceNow application that allows organizations to create a custom interface in the ServiceNow platform. Included in the base ServiceNow instance, it supports both static and dynamic web methods, and can be used for a variety of projects, such as an employee self-service portal, which is what we most commonly see. However, there are also opportunities to use the CMS to customize login pages, search pages, Livefeed and social IT or even to build an entire website. Set-up usually requires a ServiceNow system administrator and web development skills.

The business case for a CMS project can feel a bit fluffy, but deploying CMS in your environment creates brand parity or, as we like to say, “brand reflective support.” Why is this important?

It can positively impact your end-users’ support experience. Your organization may use several different tools, and this can create a fragmented support experience. The CMS in ServiceNow can aggregate these tools into one streamlined portal, improving system cohesion and creating a more usable and user-friendly experience.  Additionally, if you support multiple entities with different brands, the CMS can also be used to establish branding for each entity within the same ServiceNow instance. This functionality provides an even greater level of end-user centricity.

It offers your IT department a quick win. A CMS project can be completed very quickly and create a lasting impression for your end users. This can promote more credibility and further establish your organization as best-in-class.

It motivates end-users to use electronic means to get support. You rely on your end-users to employ the appropriate tools to request support, and users respond positively to interactions that are in line with their company’s brand. By using a CMS to create a more user-friendly portal, you can improve user adoption and increase electronic IT interactions.

So what should you consider when planning a CMS?

Pay attention to user interface dynamics. Since you are really altering the ServiceNow interface (which of course is the reason for deploying CMS in the first place), you must pay attention to the way your users utilize and interact with the system. Make sure it really meets the expectations of your user community.

Remember that simpler is better. More CMS pages creates a more complex end-user experience as well as a more complex system to manage for your administrators. Intentionally limit the number of CMS pages you present and the number of “mouse-clicks” required. Less is more, and that is exactly what we recommend to our customers when we work with them on a CMS project. In fact, many customers have been able to deploy a fully functioning, end-user relevant experience with just two CMS pages.

To streamline the process and effort of designing, implementing and maintaining a CMS, we developed our CMS EXCELerator. This project is typically 50-55 hours and includes a pre-packaged best practice configuration designed to speed adoption and reduce ongoing ServiceNow administration. You can learn more about this approach in our recent webinar, Unlock the Power: 50 Hours to CMS Success.

Have you deployed a CMS project? What are some some ways you’ve found value in this project?

Look internally rather than externally

You’re nearly done with a project when, almost like clockwork, it happens: someone asks the dreaded metrics question, “What metrics do you recommend we use?”

I imagine people ask me this (many times very late in the game) because of my team’s consulting experience and expertise in the industry. They ask hoping that we possess some sort of magical answer to this question, but, in reality, we don’t.

Defining metrics is not easy because they are so specific to their respective organizations.  Many people have a tough time digesting this because they think, rationally, that other companies must be using metrics that should directly translate into their environment.  In some cases this is true, but in most cases this thinking does not apply.

So what can be done?  The simple answer is to look internally rather than externally.  I have my clients do this by looking at two areas of their businesses: corporate goals and system expectations.

In order to get good metrics, you must first define solid “base metrics.”  Base metrics are metrics that will yield other metrics over time and that we define to validate the operation, success and adoption of the implemented system.

Let’s look at base metrics in an organization as they relate to corporate goals and system expectations.

Corporate Goals

Let’s say you are implementing a new CRM system.  What metrics from the corporate level would we need to collect?

The answer is a bit loaded, as it depends on the system and what the expectations are for this system. However, it also depends on the corporate goals themselves.  Let’s say that the corporate goals for this year were to:

• Increase revenue by 7%

• Increase profitability by 4%

So, you have to ask yourself, “How would the CRM system help me meet these goals?”  The answer will tell you what metrics you need to collect.  You can’t just collect high level metrics (e.g. total sales) to satisfy this requirement, but rather you will have to drill down and get specific information in areas like:

• Costs

• Expenses

• Payrolls

• Sales

As you can see, the metrics are based on your goals, but you still need to get data to validate this information.  Too often we take metrics that are too high level for this validation when we really need to drill down to the next level.  One way of doing this is to build a table and define the requirements for each area of the company to meet the goal. You can then develop metrics based off this need and the baseline to which you will compare the metrics.

A common problem with metrics is lack of access to the data.  In many cases, I have seen data sprinkled across the corporate environment in multiple locations including:

• Multiple CRM instances

• Proprietary Mainframes (e.g. Green Screens)

• Excel documents

• 3rd Party Locations

My point here is that, when you implement a new system and say, “why can’t I get my metrics?” it is because you do not have an infrastructure to support the metrics, at least not automatically.  Therefore, you are bound by the system.  However, when you are aware of this, you can determine your metrics because you now know the constraints of the system.  In our example above, the goal is to increase profitability by 4%, but if we don’t have access to expenses, then we cannot collect this metric.  You see, as concerned as we are about what we can collect, we are even more concerned about what we can’t collect.

In my previous blog posts, I have repeated the mantra: “Don’t try to fit a round peg into a square hole.”  The same is true for systems.  Ever try to collect metrics in a system that you use for sales even though it’s really meant for something like finance?  Sure, we all do.  The inherent problem is that, although these areas  (in this case finance and sales) share some common entities between one another, the way their data is collected, used and disseminated is completely different.  Therefore, when you are doing analysis on the sales data from a finance system, you could be going down the wrong path because the data was collected following finance rules and methods, not sales rules and methods. The problem here is that even though you might be collecting the right metrics, you are doing so in the wrong way.

What’s Next

Metrics collection is not static, it is ongoing. Also, metrics types change. As a result, the information we discussed above is only a starting point.  What comes next is up to you.  However, it is essential to remember a few things once you setup your initial (base) metrics:

1. Make sure you have something against which to compare the metrics (a baseline).

2. Make sure the metric is valid (e.g. collect a metric because it is a need, not because it is an industry standard).

3. It’s okay to retire metrics (some metrics are short term and its okay to stop collecting them).

4. As you continue to adopt your new system, you’ll see new metrics you would not be able to envision as you rolled out the application. Make sure to account for these new metrics.

Learn More

Cloud Sherpas is one of the world’s leading cloud services brokerages and helps businesses adopt, manage and enhance their CRM investments by identifying desired business goals, finding the appropriate tools and technology for the job and delivering rapid implementations that remain focused on achieving the desired business capabilities.

We are now in June, Microsoft’s fiscal end-of-year, and we all know what that means: deals galore to be had by customers faced with renewing their Enterprise Agreements (EA). Today, I offer a word of caution because that “great deal” may be no deal at all once we peel back the layers.

Does Your Organization Have an EA-P or an EA-S?

First, it’s important to understand that there are two main kinds of EAs. The first we will call an EA-P, for Enterprise Agreement Perpetual. This EA is the most common, and companies with this agreement outright own the software that was released by Microsoft during the term of the EA. Basically, you own the software forever.

The second kind of EA is an EA-S, for Enterprise Agreement Subscription. These are not as common and are really not advantageous for a customer because, as you can imagine, the customer does not own any of the software. This means that if the customer decides to leave the EA, it must either uninstall all of its software or purchase the software outright, usually at full list price. It is essential that customers understand which EA they have so that they know what their options are when renewal time comes around.

So, with that in mind, what kinds of options do customers have and of what do they need to be mindful? First, many customers with whom we speak do not even know that they do not have to renew their EA, provided they are in an EA-P. Somehow, Microsoft fails to tell customers that this is one of their options, and customers fail to remember that, under the EA-P, they own the software they are already running.

In this case, if the customer does not have any plans to update the current systems in the next several years, there is no reason to fork out the big money for another EA. In this situation, customers should evaluate what systems they do want to upgrade, and sign a Select Agreement with Software Assurance for those systems. This allows a customer to upgrade to the latest version during the terms of the agreement and still maintain full support. Choosing this option enables customers to only upgrade what they want to, or must, upgrade. Customers who go this route need to be very careful though, as Microsoft is ramping up its audit programs, and the customers could open themselves up to this practice: http://goo.gl/yJ7PM

What Microsoft’s “Great Deals” Really Mean

Because it is Microsoft’s year end, customers can be assured that they will be offered “great deals” by Microsoft to sweeten the sale. One of the main incentives Microsoft is offering customers is its “Office Free65” campaign, which informs customers that, if they renew their EA, Microsoft will give them Office 365 E3 for as low as $1 per user per month! Wow, what a deal! Or is it?

There are a number of problems with this “great deal.” First, customers need to realize that Microsoft has just convinced the customer to pay for Microsoft Office twice: once under the core EA and again under the Office 365 subscription! The same goes for all of the customer’s core system Client Access Licenses (CAL) such as Lync, SharePoint and Exchange. Further, Microsoft is locking the customer into a multi-year commitment (three years) to the Enterprise level CALs and/or Office, which means you are potentially paying hundreds of dollars per year for the on-premise solutions too.

Lastly, Microsoft knows they need to make up for the steep discount on Office 365 somewhere else, and they often do this through the Enterprise Operating System licenses (Windows Server, Exchange, Lync, SharePoint, etc). What customers need to remember is that they are paying for these Operating System licenses outside of the CAL licenses and discounts, so every time the customer needs to install a new Server, they will pay steep prices for those licenses for the term of that EA. So, adding this together with the “discount” on Office 365 definitely changes the meaning of a “great discount.”

Know Where Your Organization Stands

The bottom line is, customers need to understand exactly what their rights are and what leverage they really have when negotiating with Microsoft. Keep in mind: that really great discount on Office 365 will be made up somewhere else in the EA on another line item; you just have to know that and look for it. As a customer, there are a few thing you need to ask yourself (and Microsoft) in order to protect yourself against these practices:

• What am I really signing up for?

• What is my real overall cost per user?

• What is my organization’s real upgrade initiatives over the term of the EA?

In addition to asking these questions, customers should also calculate a 4 or 5 year ROI model, because all the discounts you may be getting this year will not be the same after this EA expires – and so you will need to negotiate all over again.

Or, of course, you can choose Google Apps for Business: $50 per user, per year…done!

Capturing more market share starts by knowing the top 10 marketing program questions to ask.

The best way to solve any business challenge begins by asking the right questions.

So, what are the top 10 questions that the best CRM consultants ask when they meet with you to improve your marketing program?

Let’s start here:

1) Execution: Do you launch marketing campaigns quickly?

Delivering marketing messages quickly is essential for maximizing campaign relevance. But taking time to first test and refine marketing campaigns, using small groups of users, also makes them more relevant. For example, Cloud Sherpas worked with a division of global credit information group Experian to help it more quickly test campaigns (on thousands of people) before fully unveiling them (to millions).

The result has been more relevant campaigns, leading to stronger customer uptake and higher revenues. In other words, the best marketing groups can quickly test, hone, and then execute campaigns — all before the message grows stale.

2) Campaign ROI: Do you measure the revenue generated by marketing?

Today, only about half of our customers can connect the dots between each and every marketing campaign — and the leads it generates — through to sales. All businesses want to do this, but it can be a challenge.

Well, some industries have it easy. Consumer products manufacturers, for example, can use email marketing campaigns — and coupons — to trace consumer uptake and revenues.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, pharmaceutical manufacturers must attempt to influence the prescriptions that physicians write, because they typically can’t access data about who’s using their products. In fact, they usually only get access to brick-level data that shows how their products are prescribed based on zip code. Even so, they excel at measuring every possible ROI angle, and it’s a model for success that any industry can emulate.

3) Selling: Do you “sell” leads to sales and track the success/failure of every lead?

Another problem can be cultural disconnect. Marketing gathers the leads, then hands them to the sales team. The sales team looks at the leads and says, “How do we know if these are any good?” Time is money, and salespeople want proof, or else leads go out the window. That was the challenge faced by software and services giant Citrix, which saw a high lead-rejection rate by salespeople, backed by complaints of overspending on leads that didn’t matter.

To address this challenge, Cloud Sherpas helped Citrix design a lead-nurturing program. Now, instead of simply gathering and handing off leads, the company’s marketing program works closely with sales users to gauge which leads succeed and why, to continually hone and improve the quality of the leads that marketing supplies (or chooses to withhold). The result has been not just increased uptake of leads by the sales team, but also greater productivity and higher revenues.

CRM ANSWERS? ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

The above are just three of the top 10 questions that our consultants ask when working with organizations to improve their marketing program.

How did we arrive at this top 10? At Cloud Sherpas, we’ve taken our experience of working on over 2,000 projects with more than 800 customers — including the likes of Panasonic, Genzyme, The Hartford and AXA — and distilled it into our CRM Excellence Framework.

The framework helps organizations understand, “What’s the next, best step that we should take to make our sales or CRM program better?” Because to succeed at CRM, that’s the first question you should ask.

LEARN MORE

Work with Cloud Sherpas, one of the world’s leading cloud services brokerages, to better adopt, manage and enhance your CRM investment by identifying desired business goals, finding the right tools and technology for the job, and delivering rapid implementations that remain focused on achieving the desired business capabilities.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user James Cridland.

Changes in the country’s health laws offer upsides for proactive insurers.

Health insurers: Are you ready to sell to individuals?

In the United States, under President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, health insurance marketplaces are due to take effect on Jan. 1, 2014. Previously known as health insurance exchanges, these marketplaces will offer standardized, government-regulated healthcare plans.

The exchanges are designed to strengthen consumer protections while reducing risks for insurers — any insurer who offers plans via the marketplaces isn’t allowed to turn down anyone based on preexisting conditions — by ensuring that no one gets to cherry-pick customers.

To date, the majority of health insurance has been sold to businesses. But with the introduction of health insurance marketplaces, as well as the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that all U.S. residents purchase health insurance, the market for individual health policies is set to spike.

CRM Mandate: Get Member-Centric

Selling health insurance directly to consumers is common in the United Kingdom. Even though all residents have free access to the National Health Service (NHS), people can purchase supplemental or private insurance from the country’s big four health insurers —  Bupa, Axa PPP, Aviva and PruHealth — or smaller niche players.

In the United States, capturing the new-subscriber market will require health insurers to get more member-centric. In 2010, for example, I noted that to capture new customers, insurers would need to focus on streamlining their contact center processes, consolidating data, retooling systems to maximize member-centricity and controlling product proliferation, by keeping plans and options clear and simple.

Arguably, little has changed since I made those recommendations, except for the Supreme Court ruling that the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that all Americans must purchase health insurance will stand.

Affordable Care Act: New Business Opportunities

Accordingly, health insurers now have three opportunities for using CRM to better target, attract and retain new subscribers:

Growth: Increasing the number of people who subscribe to your health plans is a surefire way to boost the bottom line. But what’s the best way to sell to new subscribers — perhaps online, or via agents and brokers — as well as design effective incentives and create sales teams from scratch to sell your new offerings? For help, take a page from the pharmaceutical industry. After gaining FDA approval for a new drug, for example, Cloud Sherpas customer Vertex rapidly implemented a new CRM system to enable its nascent sales team to begin immediately selling the new product.

Efficiency: Imagine you double the number of subscribers to your health plans. Cue double the number of calls to your contact center. What’s the best approach for handling those types of increases? Historically, we’ve found that health insurers chronically under-invest in the customer experience. The better approach is to invest wisely in better agent development and coaching, and refine test service tier structures as well as service channels. Here’s the ideal: Every incoming call gets successfully resolved by the agent who picks up the phone, the first time.

Customer satisfaction: The Affordable Care Act will make it much easier for consumers to switch plans. Accordingly, the most successful insurers will be the ones that offer top-notch service, for which consumers are already willing to pay more. Accordingly, give subscribers a clear way to make contact and understand what your plans are offering. Provide great self-service capabilities. Finally, ensure that the first contact center agent they come into contact with rapidly resolves their questions and concerns — be that on the phone, via email or on a social network.

As that implies: Be where your customers are, which is also where potential subscribers will be researching what you offer. Today, that means maintaining a strong presence on social media channels.

Ready To Compete?

Good and bad examples of the above opportunities abound, especially on the customer-care front. Search Twitter for New York’s EmblemHealth, for example, and the insurer appears to be absent. Not so its customers:

I’ve been on hold for nearly 3 hours, waiting to talk to someone at #GHI #EmblemHealth re: $35 dental claim. #SoPissed twitter.com/amandabertram/…

— Amanda Bertram (@amandabertram) April 20, 2012

Contrast that with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota:

The MN Senior Games are coming soon! Are you participating? Tell us which event(s)! ow.ly/lkUJ6

— Blue Cross of MN (@BlueCrossMN) June 4, 2013

Going forward, as more people purchase health plans directly — instead of having to settle for the options their business has picked for them – expect the most customer-centric insurers to win. As a healthcare subscriber, would you want it any other way?

Learn More

Cloud Sherpas is one of the world’s leading cloud services brokerages and helps businesses adopt, manage and enhance their CRM investment by identifying desired business goals, finding the right tools and technology for the job, and delivering rapid implementations that remain focused on achieving the desired business capabilities.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Okko Pyykkö.

One of the most challenging aspects of configuring software is defining your requirements. Once you know what you are trying to solve, you can put in place your plan to solve it.

So what are some top challenges that we see when determining project needs, and how can you ensure your requirements analysis is successful? It is important to get the process right, so here are some tips to help you get started.

Tip 1: Clearly define process owners and engage stakeholders who are committed to making decisions.

It can sometimes be difficult to gain stakeholder and project sponsor commitment, but it’s important to get the right people involved. Involving too many people can be chaotic and time-consuming, but involving too few people may not provide the correct information. You need to know who the key stakeholders are for each application.

Another reason organizations struggle is that they over-think or over-engineer the tool to manage human behavior. Assumptions are made about what functionality is actually needed, but without a clear understanding of how your end users do things today, you may end up over-complicating the entire process.

Start with generally accepted KPI’s to analyze your process and it’s deficiencies. Consider process improvement and training alongside additional configuration in the platform.

Tip 2: Review your current process and delivery model. Gain feedback from your end users to ensure real needs are met and to prevent over-engineering.

One behavior we see a lot is an over-zealousness around improvement rooted in an inconsistent understanding of the project’s objectives. What is your current maturity level and what is your desired maturity level for post-implementation? What are your current pain points and wish list items? Which of these are reasonable to incorporate into this current phase of development? How will these changes impact your organization’s business processes?

You need to start with dialogue in order to establish a framework to develop your requirements. Go after the big picture first. Start with process flows, major functionality, relationships between tables and forms first, then approach the finer details.

Tip 3: Have a framework in place to address elaborate requirements as well as planning.  Avoid “big” steps. Let continual improvement mature when you are at a more consistent pace.

In this planning phase, it’s also important to review the platform in order to uncover features and functionality and to understand how they align with your customers’ current processes.

Tip 4: Rapid prototyping is an effective way to gather feedback. A visual can speed up requirements development by providing a cleaner view of the user experience.

You can elicit and refine use cases and user feedback based on this rapid prototyping. Ask your users the same questions in different ways in order to get them to refine their answers when they are struggling to come to a decision or detail their needs.

Following these tips can help you bridge the gap between organizational requirements, best and common practices and the opportunities the new software presents. The most successful implementations are those that balance these three areas and find the sweet spot in the middle.

What are some ways you’ve improved your requirements planning?

The concept of effectively configuring your Account/Customer hierarchy structure in Salesforce might seem like common sense, but in many larger organizations it is a hotly debated concept that requires quite a bit of planning to get right.

Imagine a large National or Global account, like an oil refining/energy producing conglomerate.  Let’s call it “Global Oil.”  An organization like this would have multiple locations across the world and each location would have a different address, different types of Contacts, possibly different industries and different relationships with your organization.

How do you market to this “Enterprise” and all of its components? How do you maintain clean data? Where is your customer “Master?” It’s tricky, isn’t it? Below are a couple different Account Hierarchy options for large organizations to avoid these problems.

Option 1: One Salesforce Account per Enterprise

With this option, there would be ONE Salesforce Account record for Global Oil. All of the Contacts that work anywhere in the world for Global Oil would be related to this “Enterprise” account, all of the Opportunity records would be contained at this level and all Phone Calls/Emails/Site Visits/Calendar Events would be related to this Global Oil account.

This is typically done to simplify senior management reporting.  Many times, an organization does not have an effective BI platform and reports are too difficult to compile for National Account planning, so the first thought is to merge all activity into one account.  It is also thought to be effective in providing a simple 360 degree view of the customer. I disagree with this assumption. I believe that it causes more complexity than it is worth for the end users.

Pros:

• Simple to find the customer.
• Fewer customers in the system makes for Clean Account specific reports and lists and is very good for “Enterprise” level reporting.
• A lot of Enterprise specific information will be in one place.

Cons:

• You need multiple addresses for the customer which means you will need to implement an “Addresses” custom object to handle this, which makes the system more complex, or rely 100% off of the Contact addresses, which can often be unreliable.
• Information overload makes it difficult for users to quickly understand what is going on with their specific Contacts and their specific Opportunities.
• You might need to implement an Account mashup Visualforce screen to logically display the information to the users to assist with searching and filtering data.
• You lose out of the box functionality with Salesforce.
• Data skew – when too many records are associated against one account, performance might be affected in Salesforce for searches, queries and reports.
• Not very good for more granular reporting for your Accounts (e.g. Opportunities in the Southeast), unless you force users to enter this data every time they create an Opportunity.

Option 2: One Salesforce Account per Location (Recommended)

This option involves creating one record for every physical location for your customers(e.g. Global Oil – NY HQ, Global Oil – Energy Orlando East). This option is a LOT more specific than Option 1 and provides much more granular detail.

This option involves utilizing a combination of the Account Name field (e.g. “Global Oil – New York City”), the Account Site field to designate the type of location and the address fields to provide location granularity.  This is how Salesforce describes the often forgotten Account Site field:

Pros:

• True Account ownership allowed.
• Granular sharing rights (based on Account ownership above) or criteria based sharing rules.
• Granular reporting by location, industry, Last Activity and other Account attributes.
• Utilize out of the box Salesforce functionality like Account Hierarchy and reports.
• No messy “Address” related list through which to sort.
• View only the deals/communications/contacts, etc. related to that location.
• Simple data migrations and integrations based on address.
• Utilize Salesforce with standard fields and no custom objects.
• Customer contact organization charts built per location to know exactly who you are meeting with at a site.

Cons:

• More data for users/administrators to maintain. More possibilities of duplicate Accounts to merge.
• Harder to find records by searching.
• As with Option 1, if Enterprise reporting is needed as well (it probably will be), a mashup or a BI solution will most likely need to be implemented to visualize all data for the Enterprise in one location.

Other Variations

Obviously, there are other variations to this concept and which one works best for your organization depends on a multitude of factors such as your business structure and the amount of customers you have.  For example, you might want to segment your Account records by region (e.g. grouping all locations of a retail bank into one “Florida” account) or by Business Unit / Product Line (e.g. Houston Energy Division and Houston Water Business Unit for Company Y).

Need assistance with this or need a mashup built to visualize the data?

Cloud Sherpas Certified Salesforce.com Technical Architects created this solution, and can help your organization with this task should you have a similar need. Contact us at (888) 260-7660 for more information.

Starting a Communications Plan

If you’ve ever been told you’re going to need a communications plan to do change management, but you don’t really know what that means or where to get started, you’re not alone.

Here are a few tricks to establish a communications plan for a small project or for the base of a much larger project.

Step 1: Define your streams

First thing’s first: You need to know the audience with whom you are communicating. This means that you have to define the streams of communication. A stream can be anything from a group of executives or end users to a department such as Human Resources or Finance to a third party of consultants or vendors.

Streams should be comprised of those individuals who are working on the project, will be recipients of the project’s deliverable (e.g. an end user for a CRM application) or will be supporting the project in a secondary manner (e.g. a vendor supplying a service for the deliverable).

When you define these streams, it is important to remember the following:

1. You can share the same information with multiple streams, but the messages should be customized for each one

2. You might have to create sub-streams (e.g. End users vs. Super Users)

3. Don’t make too many streams

Step 2: Create a matrix

One of the tricks to managing streams (knowing what you sent, when you sent it and the streams to which you sent it) is to use a communications matrix.

A matrix is easy to set up using a spreadsheet or a word processing application and should show the who, what, where, when, why and how of your communications plan. Below is an example of a communications matrix:

You can also get more specific than the example above by adding additional rows for your particular needs.  Communications matrices are not difficult to create; however, they require you to know what exactly you need to communicate to your streams. This can be a bit more difficult to define.

The ultimate goal of a communications matrix is to be a roadmap.  The communications manager should be able to come back to this matrix and know:

1. What they sent

2. What they need to send

3. Who they need to send it to

4. When they need to send it

Step 3: Define your communication medium

A communication medium is nothing more than the system you will use to communicate with your streams.  Email is the most common system used, but this is really not the best way to execute communications because many emails go unread due to information overload.  Have you ever had an employee say something like: “I had no idea the system training was today,” and you replied: “Did you check your email?” This is an example of email overload and represents a potential failure in your communication delivery.

One of the best ways to communicate is to use the system (or medium) that you are going to install.  For example, the CRM application Salesforce has a social media function that can be set up immediately.  This feature, called Chatter, allows you to get your new users into the system almost immediately.  The advantage to this approach is that you are using the exact application you are implementing to communicate with your streams about the project.  Therefore, you are increasing adoption rates because the end users are becoming comfortable with the new features and feel of the application and you are successfully getting your message out because the end users are using the “new toy.”

This is just the beginning

Developing a sound communications plan takes much more than these three steps, but they are a good start.  As I mentioned earlier, a plan like this works best when used for a small project with only a few users, not for a much larger project. However, this plan can be a springboard for the larger projects and is a good start for developing a solid communications plan.

Learn More

Cloud Sherpas is one of the world’s leading cloud services brokerages and helps businesses adopt, manage and enhance their CRM investments by identifying desired business goals, finding the appropriate tools and technology for the job and delivering rapid implementations that remain focused on achieving the desired business capabilities.

SaaS IT Service Management is no longer experimental. Gone are the days of early adopters in the ServiceNow community. Now, more customers are moving away from traditional IT Service Management tools. More organizations are recognizing the value of solutions like ServiceNow as they face increasing constraints on systems such as Capex or Opex. In particular, the flexibility and scalability of SaaS IT Service Management, along with the ability of these solutions to impact user adoption and implement better processes, are becoming increasingly valuable for these organizations.

I see this a lot when speaking with customers interested in migrating to ServiceNow. They tell us that their current solution is something that might be working FOR them, but it is not scaling WITH them. How do they take their current processes, expand on them and take them to a more flexible solution? Lucky for them, it’s now easier than ever to migrate to the ServiceNow platform.

Better Practices + Better Functionality = Improved Processes
ServiceNow implementations might have been experimental three years ago, but now there are turnkey approaches and best practice guidelines built largely from these early adopter experiences. The barriers of entry have been broken down, and now IT managers are seeing how they can get more value out of a tool with more capable processes than anything else on the market.

Companies are migrating their processes from tools they have used for six or seven years to get to ServiceNow’s usable, flexible platform. They are implementing more sophisticated workflows with best practices and good processes. We are seeing more mature needs from ServiceNow customers and, as a result, the ServiceNow product functionality has evolved to meet these needs. ServiceNow can do things like consolidate instances with common practices and offer a support strategy, something other ITSM tools do not provide the means to do.

We’ve worked with our customers to leverage ServiceNow’s functionality to do some pretty cool stuff. For example, UCLA implemented a customized ServiceNow IT service management solution using a ServiceNow multi-tenancy framework. This resulted in a governance model that established a common approach to organizational needs and met the unique needs of various departments.

This ability to not only migrate to a more cost-effective tool, but also to improve processes simultaneously is why we are seeing more and more aggressive movement to the ServiceNow solution.

Going PaaS Made Easier
Building an application quickly and building an application that has business value are two different things. ServiceNow’s platform supports an agile, rapid development approach. ServiceNow’s agile approach means you can quickly create a mockup to get a better idea of your needs. This approach helps you achieve a better set of requirements so that you can not only accelerate your time to value, but also ensure the completeness of your solution.

ServiceNow PaaS is an area in which we are going to see quick growth, which is something we are really excited about. Historically, it’s been a more challenging business case to replace informal spreadsheets or simple workflow-based processes – in many cases it was simply cost prohibitive. However, ServiceNow’s recently announced platform pricing model is going to lead more customers to retire those informal, spreadsheet-managed activities in order to implement a complete end-to-end workflow. Organizations are quickly finding that they can use more workflow automation.

I’m excited to see how ServiceNow will further evolve in the future as it continues to adapt to the ever-changing IT landscape. What is the biggest change you’ve seen in ServiceNow?

Cloud Sherpas has done dozens of Media Sales implementations, ranging from niche players to household names, and from traditional print to cutting edge technology. Regardless of the technology, most Media companies share a common set of challenges: Complex inventory management, data-driven revenue recognition, and a team selling model that involves specialists from multiple territories or platforms.

Inventory Management

Online advertising sales involves selling a particular location (e.g. a home page banner) for either a defined period of time (e.g. from 6am to 9pm, daily, for three months) or for a given number of impressions (e.g. 1,000,000 impressions, or 100,000 click-throughs, whichever comes first). In the first case Salespeople need to know what inventory is actually available to be sold, and whether it has already been soft-committed to other customers. In the latter case, Salespeople need to know whether the network’s forecasted viewership is large enough to support what is being sold. Consider an example:

The home page banner receives 1M impressions per day, about half of which are between the hours of 7am and 6pm. We have already sold a solid block of time (7am to 12pm) to one customer for the next 90 days, which leaves us with about 750k impressions per day to sell. Another customer has already been sold a guaranteed 20M impressions over the next 30 days.

Do we have enough inventory to sell 20M impressions over the next 30 days? No. Do we have enough inventory to sell 20M impressions over the next 90 days? Yes. Should we over the customer a discount on their service in order to get them to commit 25M over the next 90 days (because we have spare inventory)? Maybe.

Inventory management is nearly always handled by a Publishing system such as Google’s Dart for Publishers. Integration with Salesforce is usually handled via a mashup or synchronous API calls, in which the requested inventory and number of appearances is sent to the publishing system and the available inventory per day/hour is returned and displayed to the Salesperson.

The actual available inventory (the list of ad locations and the estimated daily impressions) is usually integrated from the publishing system and made available as Salesforce Products.

At some point in the process the entire Salesforce Opportunity, including the Opportunity Stage, is sent to the publishing system. This has the effect of “booking” the sale with the publishing system which updates the available inventory as either a soft or a hard booking. More complex implementations will also periodically check on the status of an Opportunity to determine whether inventory has recently become available to fulfill the customer’s request; In that case a soft booking would be recorded and Salesperson would be notified to contact the customer and get a signed contract.

Inventory reconciliation and Revenue Recognition

In the example above, the customer who bought a guaranteed block is easy to account for: Revenue is recognized daily once we confirm that product was actually delivered. Depending on your accounting policies you may need to recognize revenue pro-rata based on the actual delivered impressions or you may be able to recognize 1/30 of the revenue each day.

The customer who buys a number of impressions is more difficult: You will need to recognize the revenue pro-rata based on the number of impressions delivered, which may be more or less than your forecast. You also need to re-forecast the remaining days on the contract, since most publishing systems will re-prioritize the remaining days in an attempt to deliver everything that was promised to the customer. This in turn has the effect of making inventory available (or unavailable) for other customers.

The solution in Salesforce is usually to load daily “actuals” for each Opportunity. Some customers are okay with the Opportunity value (and the related Sales commitments) changing as actual delivery numbers are received. In that case an integration can be used to update the OpportunityLineItemSchedule records in Salesforce with the actual delivered quantity. In other cases customers prefer to use a custom object for reporting on Actual (delivered) and Estimated (forecast) impressions and revenue. In either case Salesforce’s standard Forecasting capabilities are often augmented with standard Reporting, with or without Apex development to create custom summaries and rollups to match the complex accounting calendars often used by Media companies.

Commission and Revenue Allocation

Media companies tend to work with multiple assets (e.g. multiple website brands) and multiple media formats (e.g. print, online, mobile, video), and they tend to sell in teams. A typical mixed-media organization might have:

• A customer engagement manager, who receives commission for all sales
• A global print salesperson, who receives commission for all print sales
• A regional print salesperson, who receives commission for print sales in her region
• A website specific salesperson (serving a single web brand), who receives commission for sales on his website. The commission pool is split with the video salesperson if video is included.
• A mobile generalist salesperson (serving all mobile brands), who receives commission for all mobile sales. The commission pool is split with the video salesperson if video is included.
• A video salesperson, who receives commission for all sales that include video, including mobile and web. She receives higher commission for mobile than for web.

As you can see, the amount of commission will vary based on the business unit of the salesperson, the product being sold, the location of the inventory, etc.

This challenge is often addressed by leveraging Salesforce’s standard Account team. When an Opportunity is created or updated, we generate a series of daily entries with: The Product being sold, the Salesperson, the Opportunity, the Date, and the amount of Revenue/Commission allocated to that Salesperson for that line item, for that day. The object is often updated when Actual delivery numbers are received to show the difference between forecast and actual commission or to recalculate commission forecasts on the fly.

LEARN MORE

Work with Cloud Sherpas, one of the world’s leading cloud services brokerages, to better adopt, manage and enhance your CRM investment by identifying desired business goals, finding the right tools and technology for the job, and delivering rapid implementations that remain focused on achieving the desired business capabilities.

Headed for extinction?

Characterize the decline of traditional media: fast or slow?

At Cloud Sherpas, we have a number of clients who operate in both the traditional and “new media” spaces. Both sectors face intense competitive pressure in the battle for viewers’ eyeballs, advertising revenue and customer data.

In the face of our ongoing digital revolution, of course traditional media channels — print, radio and TV — are being forced to reinvent themselves to compete. Take the cord-cutter movement, which refers to the growing number of people who use alternative means to access digital assets. Personally, I’ve kissed my cable subscription goodbye in favor of an Apple TV that accesses my Netflix subscription.

These digital disruptions have driven traditional media outlets — often still quite lucrative by Wall Street standards — to consolidate, cut costs and find new, more viable business models. And success stories have already emerged. Conglomerates are buying up local radio stations and running them from a central U.S. location; why employ DJs in every outlet? Meanwhile, The New York Times and Britain’s Financial Times have created paywalls to protect their digital assets, and resulting revenues have been better than expected.

Moving forward in today’s media space, however, will require all players — old and new — to keep refining their customer-facing business strategies. Here’s how Cloud Sherpas’ media customers are using CRM to address these challenges and achieve greater growth, efficiency and levels of customer satisfaction:

Growth: Relationship Management, Integration

Media outlets seeking growth are now pursuing convergence. The idea is simple: make multiple media properties more attractive to advertisers by offering integrated advertising and marketing campaigns across multiple outlets and formats.

If you’re chocolate maker Hershey, for example, and want to highlight a new confection, you could phone up each local media outlet. Or you could work with an organization such as News International, which offers one-stop buying across radio, TV and newspapers, in both electronic and digital formats. To get the most bang for your buck, the latter approach is the surefire winner.

Successfully offering these type of consolidated services, however, will require media organizations to master:

• Integration: Advertising has historically been sold in silos. Beyond the cultural change required to offer converged advertising, giving self-service customers (advertisers) a single view of availability and customer demographics across multiple channels and advertising platforms will require CRM system integration.
• Relationship management: Historically, sales were transactional — advertisers phoned up to buy ads. But with integrated campaigns, you don’t just want one-off transactions, but to build up bona fide relationships with customers. Accordingly, media businesses often benefit from bolstering their CRM account and call planning capabilities.

Efficiency: Self-Service, Ruthless Consolidation

Media organizations today tell us that they want to find better ways to make their sales teams — and sales processes — much more automated, efficient and productive, so they can cut costs. Organizations can achieve this efficiency in two ways:

• Customer self-service: On the self-service front, the most successful media companies today — Facebook, Google, Twitter — rarely have a human involved in selling advertising. Instead, the vast majority of advertisements come from customers going online and scheduling their own ads. The question for traditional media outlets now is: How can they best follow suit, in part via self-service portals?
• Ruthless sales force consolidation: Consolidation is the flipside of the convergence growth strategy, which seeks to drive higher margins by combining outlets. For example, at Cloud Sherpas customer A&N Media, publisher of such papers and websites as The Daily Mail and Metro, the business is asking: Why have multiple, redundant sales teams selling our newspapers?

Customer Satisfaction: Data Still King

Who’s a customer today? Media outlets typically have two different types of customers: readers/viewers and advertisers. Social media, however, has stirred up the pot; sometimes a customer is both at once. Some viewers also aren’t just targeted with advertising, but tracked for lucrative — at least, at scale — data-mining purposes. As the famous phrase about Facebook goes: “If you’re not paying for something, you are the product.”

That’s why outlets such as Facebook and Google are so valuable: because of the data and targeted advertising they deliver. While “pay per click” has long been a favored online metric, Facebook’s research has shown that even without clicking, social media advertising influences consumer behavior. Digital outlets also offer new forms of customer intelligence. TiVo, for example, is cross-referencing subscribers’ viewing and shopping habits, while Twitter plans to launch a system to serve up advertisements tied to what users are watching on TV.

As that suggests, to media customers’ level of satisfaction with your products and services, media players must find better ways to share rich information back with advertisers, mash-up customer data in new and valuable ways, and use CRM systems to deliver related sales and services in an easily accessible manner. That’s one of the most effective strategies not just for engaging customers, but keeping them coming back for more.

Learn More

For our view on technical solutions to media industry challenges, see Ernest W Lessenger‘s recent post on our Technical Architect forum.

Cloud Sherpas is one of the world’s leading cloud services brokerages and helps businesses adopt, manage and enhance their CRM investment by identifying desired business goals, finding the right tools and technology for the job, and delivering rapid implementations that remain focused on achieving the desired business capabilities.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Thomas Leuthard.

Are your metrics effective?  How do you know?

Most of us think we know the effectiveness of metrics, but we really don’t.  Why is this?  Because we never established an initial point to compare where we are (the baseline) to where we will go (the metric) and to know if we are actually at the point where we wanted to be (the goal). It’s important to establish a baseline because this is how we correctly determine the effectiveness of our metrics and, in turn, the effectiveness of our project or deliverable.

So what’s the problem?  Usually we either don’t establish a baseline or we forgot to establish a baseline and then make up what we perceive it to be instead of determining  what it actually is, which means we can never correctly define our success.

Obviously it’s important to create a baseline, but how do we do this?  Here are 5 tips to get you on your way:

1: Define what you’re collecting today

A common mistake when defining a baseline is to look at the metrics you have right now, place a stick in the sand and say “This is our baseline.”  Although those metrics are certainly part of the baseline, I assure you they’re not all of it.

You can’t just concentrate on the official or standard metrics, you also have to find out what information is being collected.  This could include human resource information, production data or survey information, and it may touch the new system directly or it might be secondary.  When collecting this data, it is important to make sure that it is:

• Collected in regular intervals for at least one year

• Used in your day-to-day business processes

• Valid

If the data does not meet these criteria, it should not be considered in your baseline.

2: Understand the need of today, not the need of tomorrow

Too often, when we establish a baseline we are thinking about where we want to be rather than where we are right now.  A baseline is right now,  so you need to define the baseline in terms of absolutes. Additionally, you need to be specific because in order to measure success you need to know exactly where you stand. Specifics that can be used to define a baseline might be:

• Our company made $12.61 million ending 05/31/13

• Our company has 20 outside sales reps, 10 inside sales reps and 4 value added resellers

3: Validate current metrics

All companies collect metrics, that’s a given. However, few companies actually validate these metrics. In many situations companies are simply collecting metrics for the sake of collecting metrics and then using them as part of their baseline.  Sound crazy?  It is.

Before accepting a metric as a part of your baseline, you need to make sure that it has a business use/need in your current environment.  Keep in mind that  many metrics are collected because they are “industry standards;” however, they might not be “standard” for you.

4: Do not use benchmarks

It might sound a little peculiar, but many times organizations use benchmarks to define their baselines.

When you boil it down, a benchmark is simply what your competitors or similar organizations use/do.  While benchmarks do have their place in the change management process, they are not recommended for use in the baseline stage.

Remember: a baseline is about your current environment, not that of someone else.

5:  Do not define the baseline after the fact

Whatever you do, don’t define the baseline after the fact.  A baseline needs to be defined well before the implementation begins.

In many cases, we try to define a baseline after the project has been implemented.  A manager, for example, tries to think back to the way it used to be and this causes him to guess.  What often happens is something similar to this conversation:

Manager: “How much did we do in sales in March 2012?”

Salesperson: “About $900,000”

You can see the problem here:

1. We’re guessing

2. We could be over or under or near the real value

3. If we go with this guess we are making conclusions based on a guess rather than on hard data

These problems illustrate the need to define your baseline at the start of the project, not the end.

Why Establish a Baseline?

You’ll never be able to measure success without knowing your past, and a baseline is one way to make this measurement.  Remember: the measurement is only as good as you make it, so take your time, research, validate and don’t guess when you establish a baseline.

Learn More

Cloud Sherpas is one of the world’s leading cloud services brokerages and helps businesses adopt, manage and enhance their CRM investment by identifying desired business goals, finding the right tools and technology for the job, and delivering rapid implementations that remain focused on achieving the desired business capabilities.

The secret to great customer service? Start by sharing information with your sales and marketing friends.

Want to create a service program that excels? Don’t start with technology.

To maximize your bang for buck, start by asking the right questions. Understanding the problems you need to solve, as well as the resulting business benefits, will help you design a better service program, focused on targeted improvements that produce specific results.

Accordingly, what are the top 10 questions that the best CRM consultants ask when they meet with you to improve your service program?  (If you’re interested in hearing more, we’re hosting a webinar on this topic soon. Reigster here.)

Let’s start with a few questions:

1) Sharing: Do you share business information between sales, marketing and services?

Sharing information between all customer-facing functions — marketing, sales, service — helps improve each one. From a service standpoint, sharing also helps create persuasive new sources of revenue.

For example, Cloud Sherpas helped Panasonic’s Toughbook division — maker of ruggedized laptops for use in harsh environments — to create better CRM processes for tracking warranty information and customer interactions. While that account information is owned by the service department, Panasonic began sharing it with the sales team for lead generation, to help them identify when they should reach out to the customer to offer extended warranties or discuss replacing their laptops. In fact, many customers welcome Panasonic’s more proactive “are you ready to replace?” outreach, and do in fact purchase new machines with less delay.

2) Offers: Do you provide personalized customer offers based on profile and history?

Many companies view specialized sales offers as the domain of, well, sales. But the service center can also be a persuasive channel for “special offers,” provided that they’re highly relevant.

For example, Cloud Sherpas helped Bose — maker of the Wave radio and other high-end stereo equipment — improve its service operations. This began by helping Bose create processes that enticed new customers to share their contact information, as well as details of the products they owned. With this information, Bose could provide a much more compelling service experience and more rapidly diagnose and solve issues the first time.

Does this sound like a minor issue? In fact, based on Bose’s ongoing analysis of customer service calls, it knows that numerous service calls stem not from a product fault, but simply because a customer can’t connect their audio gear to other components. Understanding which Bose products these customers own enables the audio manufacturer to solve the customer’s problem. But in a cross-sell twist, Bose can sell them the required cable and connection guides too.

3) Measurement: Are specific mechanisms in place to capture best-in-class customer care?

No service program can excel unless you define what makes an excellent customer experience. That starts by measuring the customer care your company provides. For one of Cloud Sherpas’ customers, a large biotechnology firm, this measurement isn’t optional. That’s because the company’s customers have a disease — only affecting a few hundred thousand people in the world — and rely on this company’s drugs to stay alive.

To better serve these customers, the biotech company worked with Cloud Sherpas to create a CRM system that ensures that its personnel provide an excellent customer experience. Service personnel are highly dedicated to making sure that customers aren’t just doing well — taking their medicine in the appropriate way, not facing shortages — but also thriving. In this equation, customers are critical, but so are customer service personnel. That’s why the company carefully monitors the call center, including agents’ job satisfaction and attitude toward customers. When service excels, everyone wins.

CRM ANSWERS? ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

The above are just three of the top 10 questions that our consultants ask when working with organizations to improve their customer service effectiveness program.

How did we arrive at this top 10? At Cloud Sherpas, we’ve taken our experience of working on over 2,000 projects with more than 800 customers — including the likes of Panasonic, Genzyme, The Hartford and AXA — and distilled it into our CRM Excellence Framework.

The framework helps organizations understand, “What’s the next, best step that we should take to make our sales or CRM program better?” Because to succeed at CRM, that’s the first question you should ask.

LEARN MORE

Join Cloud Sherpas CRM veterans Matt Johnson and Yaron Wilf on Tuesday, June 4 @ 1PM ET for a complimentary webinar identifying the right processes, capabilities and cloud technologies to achieve call center efficiency and effectiveness. Register here.

Work with Cloud Sherpas, one of the world’s leading cloud services brokerages, to better adopt, manage and enhance your CRM investment by identifying desired business goals, finding the right tools and technology for the job, and delivering rapid implementations that remain focused on achieving the desired business capabilities.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user bengrey.

A higher-level view can help you get the job done more quickly.

Do you want to implement a new CRM system, but don’t where to start, or what might be the best technology for the job?

Businesses approaching CRM for the first time — or updating their CRM programs — often work with Cloud Sherpas to create a strategic plan for their CRM implementation. They need details: business case, budgets, a prioritized list of actions to pursue (in the short, medium, and long term), as well as where to begin.

Accordingly, we’ve created the Cloud Sherpas CRM Program Discovery, which enables businesses to focus on the four most essential steps to CRM project success:

• CRM direction: Confirm that senior managers are in agreement
• Capability requirements: Define high-level business requirements and outcomes to be achieved
• Technology validation: Using a vendor-neutral perspective, identify the best technology for the job, as well as any needed data integration
• Program definition: Create a prioritized plan involving short, medium, and longer-term actions

Build On CRM Project Success Benchmarks

We’ve built our CRM Program Discovery using the experience we’ve gained from successfully delivering hundreds of CRM projects over more than a decade. We’ve distilled that project knowledge into our CRM Excellence Framework, which we use not only to benchmark organizations’ CRM, marketing, sales, service and social capabilities against their peers, but also to give our clients  a blueprint — including industry-based variations — to maximize their CRM implementation success.

The resulting takeaway from the CRM Program Discovery is two-fold:

1. Prepare organizations for successful CRM program execution
2. Ensure a high probability of achieving targeted business objectives through planned CRM changes

Identify Optimum Approach In Weeks, Not Months

Using our CRM Excellence Framework helps businesses hit the ground running. For example, we recently met with a well-known U.S. customer service firm that wants to implement Salesforce Service Cloud, but first needed to build a project plan, including a solid business case, budget and prioritized implementation steps. A large consulting firm told the company it would require 22 weeks to complete a related effort. We detailed a project to do it in just 6 weeks.

That speed is possible because we’ve built the tools required to ensure that these types of CRM strategy efforts progress as quickly — and reliably — as possible. Rather than conducting a laborious current-state analysis, future state definition and gap analysis, we can quickly move to address the gaps, because we’ve already identified the best CRM practices that organizations and industries should be using.

Focus On High-Impact Business Outcomes

Our CRM Program Discovery process helps clients agree, based on business needs — and how the business intends to be successful — what the “future state” of the CRM program should be. Where agreement is concerned, senior managers must also buy in, because for the past 15 years, numerous analyst firms’ CRM studies have identified that the number-one predictor of project success is ensuring that senior managers are in agreement about the CRM program strategy. So we make a big deal about that, because frankly, it’s a big deal.

We also keep the CRM Program Discovery focused on specific business outcomes. Customers often tell me that they want to create a 360-degree view of the customer, for example, after which I always ask: Why, what’s it going to do for you?

Don’t target abstract concepts or buzzwords. Instead, identify which CRM capabilities — across marketing, sales, service, social — will enable you to achieve your specific business goals. Examples of such business outcomes often include increased customer wallet share, greater sales team efficiency and enhanced up-selling and cross-selling.

Drill Down

Not every business requires a high-level CRM strategy. In fact sometimes the next, best step for a business’s CRM program — especially if already established — will come from targeting very specific marketing, sales, service or social capabilities, or some alignment therein. That’s why, beyond offering a high-level CRM Program Discovery, Cloud Sherpas also offers Discoveries that focus specifically on marketing, sales and service and social business. These frameworks help businesses identify the next, best steps for their CRM program, such as improving lead management (marketing), relationship management (for sales teams) or case management (for contact centers).

But for any business just beginning a CRM program, the Cloud Sherpas CRM Program Discovery will help best set your program’s strategic direction. Interestingly, about one-third of our CRM Program Discovery projects involve current clients who are creating a new, strategic plan for the second or third time. As your business changes, your CRM program will often need to evolve to support your new business direction and goals.

Start by spending a little time to build a strategic implementation plan — focused on business outcomes — that will help you not just avoid potentially costly mistakes, but achieve maximum results with cloud and social CRM in minimal time.

Learn More

Cloud Sherpas is one of the world’s leading cloud services brokerages and helps businesses adopt, manage and enhance their CRM investment by identifying desired business goals, finding the right tools and technology for the job, and delivering rapid implementations that remain focused on achieving the desired business capabilities.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user U.S. Army.

It’s getting colder and darker here in the Southern Hemisphere, which means it’s time for the Summer ’13 release of Salesforce!

There are some very exciting and major changes in this release and the notes are well worth a read in detail.  Here is a quick summary of what’s new:

• Salesforce: Salesforce Communities will become generally available. This new capability will replace Customer and Partner Portals (although existing portals will remain available). SMS-based identity confirmation will be the default, the personal currency conversion display will be optional and the setup menu will be reorganized to use goal-based categories.

• Sales Cloud: Opportunities will now support splitting credit between team members.  Pricebooks will be customizable and support the kinds of standard functionality on other objects like Custom Fields, Record Types and Page Layouts. Shared Activities can now be related to up to 50 people (instead of the previous 10-person limit) and Collaborative Forecasting will now support Forecast Quantities and Quotas,

• Service Cloud: New Service Cloud features include Chatter Answers to unify cases, questions and answers and Salesforce Knowledge; an enhanced Case Feed publisher that can be modified using the page layout editor; the ability to report on Live Agent chats and look and feel improvements to the Service Console.

• Analytics: Improvements to Analytics include more flexible security for Report folders and increased availability of Dashboards to customers through Portals/Communities and through mobile devices.

• Salesforce Touch: A new version of the Salesforce Touch apps will be available for mobile users.

• Force.com: Salesforce Canvas is now Generally Available allowing you to easily integrate off-platform applications into your Salesforce organization.

• Site.com: Site.com will now be available in Sandboxes and will support IP Address restrictions (like Force.com sites, which is useful for intranet deployments). Most importantly, it can be used with Communities, the Portal replacement product.

• Chatter: Changes in Chatter include the ability to add your own extensions to the “Chatter Publisher,” an improved feed to search and filter posts and enhanced management of hashtags, now known as Topics. These changes put Chatter on its way to becoming the primary interface of Salesforce.

These are just a few highlights of the changes that will result from the Summer ‘13 release of Salesforce. Please read the release notes for complete details on all of the changes or visit the Summer ’13 mini site at Salesforce.com.

Need assistance with any of the new Summer 13 features?

A Cloud Sherpas Certified Salesforce.com Technical Architect wrote this post and can help your organization with this task should you have a similar need. Contact us at (888) 260-7660 for more information.

With today’s technology, the customer’s voice is stronger than ever and salesforce.com is emphasizing this change with its new customer company initiative. According to Marc Benioff, salesforce.com CEO, becoming a customer company requires organisations to connect with customers in an entirely new way through social and mobile cloud technologies.

On 28-30 May salesforce.com will bring this message to Australian audiences at the Salesforce Customer Company Tour at CeBIT in Sydney. Salesforce Customer Company Tour at CeBIT, which will be held at the Sydney Convention and Entertainment Center, will provide companies with the knowledge they need to tap into the power of social and mobile cloud computing and connect with their customers in an entirely new way. The event will feature live keynotes from salesforce.com executives including Vivek Kundra, EVP of Emerging Markets, in addition to specialised breakout sessions, live demos of cutting-edge technologies and real customer stories from around the world.

Cloud Sherpas has you covered

Cloud Sherpas is thrilled to be a platinum sponsor at Salesforce Customer Company Tour at CeBIT in Sydney. In particular, we are excited about the presence that Cloud Sherpas will have throughout the event. Many of our own staff and clients will present in various breakout sessions throughout the week, one of the highlights being a presentation by our Senior Mobility Consultant Dale Rankine called “The Mobile Lens.”

Make sure you stop by booth CE02 to learn more about Cloud Sherpas, our practice and how we are helping companies across Australia and across the globe transform their organisation. Or catch us at any of the events listed below:

Lean In Networking and Drinks
Tuesday, 28th May
4:30pm – 6:00pm
in the Salesforce Cloud Expo of CeBIT

The Mobile Lens – Dale Rankine, Senior Mobility Consultant, Cloud Sherpas
Tuesday, 28th May
4:45 pm
in the Partner Theatre at the Salesforce Cloud Expo of CeBIT

Workshop 2 – Cloud Security – Steven Herod, Certified Technical Architect, Cloud Sherpas
Thursday, 30th May
9:30am
Location will be announced as part of the printed schedule
Make sure you join Cloud Sherpas for our presentations throughout the event and at our booth in the Salesforce.com Cloud Expo to have all of your complex CRM questions answered.

Not yet registered? You can do so here.

We hope to see you there!

Last week, close to four thousand IT professionals descended upon Las Vegas to gather, discuss and learn ServiceNow and ITSM best practices, trends and developments at Knowledge13. The five-day event offered education, training and networking to IT professionals using cloud services for enterprise IT service automation.

Cloud Sherpas recently announced that sales in our ServiceNow business unit would increase by 150% and that certainly wouldn’t be possible without the ever-growing ServiceNow customer base which is front and center at the yearly Knowledge event. Attendance has historically doubled year-over-year. Knowledge13 was no exception as the event’s 4,000 attendees doubled that of Knowledge12; moreover there were more people who attended pre-conference training this year than attended the entire Knowledge11 event!

I was lucky to be involved in several discussions with top ServiceNow executives, industry analysts, media, customers and prospects. From these discussions, I gained insight into some of the hottest topics in the industry. Below are a few key takeaways from my time at Knowledge13.

User Experience Matters.
End users drive the support organization. Just like any software platform, user adoption is paramount to the success of ServiceNow. IT Professionals are learning more and more that brand matters to end users and can drive a more user-friendly, positive service experience. Brand parity however doesn’t stop at the user interface, it cascades into end-user expectations in the IT support lifecycle. You can learn a lot from the way your company interacts with your customers. If you provide highly online, mobile and brand-aware methods of interaction for your customers, you can expect your end-users will be expecting something similar when working with IT.

Key Takeaway: when interacting with IT, end-users expect a similar experience to that offered to your organization’s external customers.

Big Data hits ITSM.
How does analytics play into ITSM and IT automation? Ten years ago, IT was all about the “T” – the technology. Now it’s all about the “I” – the information.  Access to actionable data enables IT professionals to impact performance, drive down costs and improve the quality of the service they provide.

Yet improving performance measures can only be done when those measures are accessible, manageable and transparent, which is a big part of what ServiceNow does. And companies like Mirror42 are providing a more comprehensive analytics package to provide best-practice KPIs, analytics, scorecards and dashboards.

Key Takeaway: Transparency and accessibility to accurate and actionable measurements should drive all action in the business of managing IT.

ServiceNow: Phased is better.
As a flexible, scalable solution, ServiceNow enables companies of all sizes to transition and transform their IT. There are over 22 ServiceNow applications that can be deployed very rapidly. But just because you can deploy rapidly, doesn’t mean you should. Start where you have the most profound opportunity to improve and align to better practices, get a foundation in place and stabilized and then move onto the next phase. As with any improvement activity, you need to take the time to understand how you do things today and what you want from your enhanced environment. The workflows are key.

Key Takeaway: Don’t take too big of a bite. Start with a managed scope and progressively increase your scope over time. Often the most is learned through doing!

What was your biggest takeaway from Knowledge13?

Why do CRM projects fail? A client recently asked me why CRM implementations fail even when the business makes a significant investment in the solution. It’s a valid question and this happens more often than it should because of four areas that organizations don’t properly address during the implementation: resistance, communication, buy-in and program management.

Why Resist?

As I quickly explained to my client, 39% of employees resist change, so what do you think happens if 60% are using the system and 40% are not?

There are several reasons for resistance, however the primary one is that employees do not want to leave their comfort zones. People get comfortable using Excel and Outlook as a CRM and they might fear a new system because the one they have “works just fine the way it is.” This comfort zone defines how people in an organization work, and if they are managing this comfort zone correctly they are considered experts in the office. Given this, why would users want to move out of the comfort zone? The answer is simple: they don’t.

Get in the Know

As the conversation continued, I asked my client how his employees learned of the system and he responded mostly by word of mouth. This is a big problem because it means that communication around the new solution – if there was any at all – was done in an ad hoc manner. Simply put, this type of communication means that the employees are not “in the know” until the application is almost sitting in their laps.

Due to the lack of structured communication early on, a typical user in this situation would most likely end up with a higher level of discomfort and an increased sense of loss when finally informed about the impending system launch. This discomfort results in employees using the application in a reduced capacity or abandoning the new solution completely to revert back to the old method.

One way to avoid these problems is to implement a change management program. Change management is not user training, but rather it is user enlightenment. The goal of change management is to empower your employees as early as possible in the CRM project implementation by using analysis, sponsorship, communications, process, metrics, measurement and training in a proactive manner. In many cases, when you don’t have a change management program the end result is user resistance, if not revolt.

A change management program stops the revolt because employees are “in the know” early and they receive communications often.

Buy-in and End Arounds

You have a change management plan and your employees are being eased into the system with regular updates and digestible training, so you’re all set right? Not just yet.

CRM can fail in the later stages of implementation because of a monster known as “buy-in.” The problem with buy-in is twofold: monkey see/monkey do behavior and end arounds.

Monkey see/monkey do is self-explanatory but very real in many corporate environments. For example, typical monkey see/monkey do behavior and end arounds in the corporate environment include:

• Managers or executives mandating that a system is used but not using it themselves

• Managers or executives using end arounds such as:

  • Sending Excel files to a staff member to be entered into the system

  • Sending emails with their needs

  • Requesting reports and processes in the old style

Employees see this behavior and begin to mimic their superiors and use end arounds to avoid the new system. The result, of course, is poor adoption of the application. Thus, a lack of buy-in through monkey see/monkey do behavior and end arounds can kill a robust system before it even gets off the ground.

Change Management is a Program

The final reason why CRM fails is program management. Change management is a program that must be managed by someone – it doesn’t just happen on its own. If the change management program isn’t managed by anyone, there will be a lack of accountability and guidance for the changes that are happening. In other words, without change management governance, each team member will march to his/her own drum. As my client put it: the technology is only as intelligent as the end user, otherwise it’s just a cool car without a driver.

Learn More

Cloud Sherpas is one of the world’s leading cloud services brokerages and helps businesses adopt, manage and enhance their CRM investments by identifying desired business goals, finding the appropriate tools and technology for the job and delivering rapid implementations that remain focused on achieving the desired business capabilities.