CRM videos: Glengary Glen Ross, the social customer and ball tossers

“Put the coffee down.”

I always loved that line, and that movie. I’m a fan of David Mamet’s in fact. So, when I came across a YouTube video the other day by Wallstrip spoofing the famous Alec Baldwin scene from Glengary Glen Ross, I thought it was worth passing along.

The video’s been around for a while, as have the others I’ve embedded here, but they’re definitely entertaining.

In fact, anyone involved with CRM 2.0 or curious about it has probably seen the advertiser/consumer bit from Microsoft Digital Advertising. It definitely makes its point, as does the SAP ball throwers.

Enjoy. Continued »

Steve Cakebread on SaaS, sales performance management

Steve Cakebread has seen a thing or two when it comes to the CRM market. He was chief financial officer at Autodesk before moving on to the same position at Salesforce.com, leading it through its initial public offering and eventually serving as president and chief strategy officer.

He is now chief financial officer at Xactly Corp.

He talked with SearchCRM.com about his career, the trajectory of Software as a Service (SaaS) and the emerging market for sales performance management software.

In this 13-minute podcast, appropriate for both IT and business professionals (particularly those in finance), Cakebread discusses:

• CRM’s biggest surprise
• The attraction of SaaS for CFOs
• The drivers for sales performance management software
• How sales performance management software is being purchased and who’s paying
• Why customers aren’t necessarily getting those kinds of features from their core CRM or SFA vendors.

 

 Standard Podcast [12:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Antenna’s Dexterra acquisition and the CRM impact

I saw yesterday that Antenna Software and Dexterra software are joining forces.

Jersey City, N.J.-based Antenna is acquiring Bothell, Wash.-based Dexterra for an undisclosed sum. It follows Antenna’s earlier acquisition of Vettro in November.

While the companies are really mobile middleware players, this is an important development for the CRM market. I talked with Sheryl Kingstone, an analyst over at Yankee Group about the deal.

“We’ve been waiting for consolidation of this middleware market for a while,” she said. “It was Antenna, Dexterra, Sybase and a bunch of smaller players. Now it’s coming down to Antenna and Sybase.”

When it comes to mobile CRM, enterprises really need to pay heed to the mobile middleware vendors, Kingstone said. In fact, SearchSAP.com just had a story on how SAP is relying more on partners for its mobile strategy — with NetWeaver mobile taking a back seat. As Kingstone pointed out, Oracle’s mobile strategy has primarily centered around the apps themselves.

“To really make mobile CRM effective, you need to look at it outside the box and at the process,” Kingstone said. “Don’t just take an SFA app and throw it on a mobile phone and expect people to use it. You need to look at what [the] sales person needs — sales data, pricing data — things that are outside of different applications.”

That’s where the mobile middleware providers come in. They can bridge the applications, operating systems and mobile devices. The proliferation of smartphones is adding another level of complexity as well and has a few companies abandoning laptops for their mobile sales force and moving exclusively to smartphones.

Ultimately, the Antenna/Dexterra deal should be good for end customers, Kingstone said.

“I think it’s better to have fewer, stronger players,” she said. “From an enterprise standpoint they should take a look at these vendors before they implement a project.”

Salesforce.com as ‘The Pusherman’

Today Salesforce.com is releasing a free edition of Force.com, its SaaS-based platform.

I was talking about it with Jo Maitland, executive editor of our new Cloud Computing site, who blogged about the SaaS platform release over on The Troposphere. She makes a good point. It’s an age-old trick. Offer up the first taste for free to get people hooked and then charge them for the rest.

Just like the pusherman we were warned about in elementary school. Continued »

SAP adds to the SaaS multi-tenancy debate

SAP’s John Wookey broke his silence this week on the company’s latest SaaS plans.

As he told SearchSAP.com, SAP will release SaaS-based business applications to augment customers’ existing Business One deployments. Additionally, the new SaaS apps (no word on when they’ll be released) will be multi-tenant, abandoning SAP’s earlier commitment to “isolated tenancy.”

The multi tenancy and SaaS debate has been ongoing for years, lead primarily by Salesforce.com, which contends that a SaaS application that is not multi-tenant is not truly SaaS. Continued »

On Microsoft CRM resources

We tend to be a little more news and trends focused here on the Voices of CRM blog, but today thought we’d pass along some useful resources for Microsoft Dynamics CRM users.

Our friends over on the IT Bookworm Blog, recently posted a free chapter download from Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Unleashed on the evolution of Microsoft’s product. Brent was also good enough to point to the ample content on Microsoft Dynamics CRM we have on the SearchCRM.com site.

While we’re on the subject of Microsoft CRM resources, also be sure to check out the ITKnowledge Exchange’s questions and answers on the subject.

Meanwhile, the xRM Virtual User Group is offering up a session on developing an xRM tool (Microsoft’s latest positioning on using Dynamics CRM as a platform for developing other applications).

Finally, the Microsoft Developers Network notes that Microsoft has released Rollup 4 for Microsoft Dynamics 4.0.

Hopefully this will be of some use to you and let us know if there are more Microsoft CRM resources we can provide.

Where’s SAP’s CRM message?

For a company that proclaims itself the leader in CRM, it sure didn’t have much to say about the subject at its recent Sapphire conference in Orlando.

SAP released its Business Suite 7, which includes a new CRM update, in February. But you wouldn’t have known it listening to the keynotes this week. While last year’s conference featured some significant news with SAP’s partnership with RIM to run SAP CRM natively on the BlackBerry, this year featured nary a word about CRM.

Continued »

Is Salesforce.com simply shifting its maintenance to partners?

Denis Pombriant has an interesting note on his blog today.

He says that effective today, Salesforce.com will start charging its partners for support.

Denis writes:

Effective May 1, 2009 and with a 60 day grace period, Salesforce.com will begin charging its developer partners for support.  I have not seen a press release but I have a data sheet on the offering.

And

The grace period starts today and the fees start July 1, 2009.  There will be three levels of service - Partner Premier, Partner Basic, Single Cases and Community.  Fees range from free to $24,000.

Given Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff’s pronouncement earlier this week of “The End of Maintenance” it would certainly appear that instead of turning to customers to boost its margins, Salesforce.com is instead turning to its partners. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and many an SAP executive have long maintained that the SaaS business model can be very difficult to turn a profit with. One would imagine it’s especially difficult if you can’t charge those maintenance fees of 22% of net licensing as Oracle has always done and as SAP will eventually do once it clears up these KPIs with SUGEN. Dennis Howlett over at ZDNet posted a blog entry yesterday citing research being conducted by Jason Carter noting that companies are no longer getting their money’s worth out of maintenance. He posts a chart showing a radical decline of research and design spend as a percentage of maintenance revenue.

Is Salesforce.com just shifting the costs?

Benioff joins the software maintenance fray

There’s been a bit of a brouhaha in the blogosphere over software maintenance fees this week.

The Salesforce.com CEO got things started when an internal corporate memo was “leaked” to members of the press and analysts, notably Vinnie Merchandani and Chris Kanaracus at NetworkWorld.

Here’s an excerpt from Benioff’s email:

Let me tell you about a customer that I met on our Cloudforce tour. This customer currently uses Siebel software to run her call center.  She pays more than $15 million a year for the privilege of having to implement the updates that Siebel sends her.  That does not include backup. Or disaster recovery. And of course, it does not guarantee that she will be using the latest technology.  The maintenance agreement only assures her that her outdated software will continue to work.  She is paying tolls on a road to nowhere.

Continued »

Brent Leary on CRM for SMBs

The recession has companies worried about their customer relationships more than ever and that’s encouraged small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to start taking a closer look at CRM software.

While consolidation has been a major factor in the market for CRM software for large enterprises, start-ups are cropping up all the time to serve the SMB sector.  SearchCRM.com sat down with Brent Leary, co-founder and partner of CRM Essentials LLC, a CRM consultancy and advisory firm focused on small and mid-sized enterprises that provides training and best practices for implementing CRM software and CRM programs.

In this 15-minute podcast, Leary discusses:

• The current state of adoption of CRM software among SMBs
• Best practices for SMBs deploying CRM software
• What SMBs have learned about CRM failure from their enterprise counterparts
• The effects Web 2,0 and social networking are having on managing customer relationships and how SMBs can and are taking advantage of it

 

 Brent Leary on CRM for SMBs [17:37m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download