Jeffrey Schwartz (Redmond Channel Partner, Editor-at-Large Redmond Magazine) wrote a recent article for Redmond Channel Partner Online, titled Dynamics CRM Facelift Brings Confidence to the Channel. I read the article, hoping to get some insight about the upcoming "Salesforce.com Challenger", but I think I'd be discouraged if I were a Microsoft partner. The whole article seemed to be an endorsement for Salesforce.com.
Here were some of my favorite quotes:
""I just went on a call for CRM and the VP of sales just keeps pushing Salesforce, Salesforce, Salesforce and he'll find a flaw in anything else no matter what you implement," says Jeffrey Goldstein, managing director of New York-based Queue Associates Inc., a Gold Certified Partner.
Forrester Research Inc. analyst William Band says while Microsoft Dynamics CRM has gained appeal, outpacing Salesforce.com could be a high bar to clear.
"In order for Microsoft [Dynamics] CRM to become a billion-dollar business, the market has to grow more or somebody else has to lose a lot of market share," Band says. "I don't know that there's that much space in the marketplace for Microsoft CRM to get that big. I don't know where another billion would come from."
A further source of frustration for Goldstein is the $49 per month price tag for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, which he says is far less expensive than Salesforce.com, yet customers aren't swayed by that. Price and feature comparisons are not the issue, Goldstein says. "The problem we run into is so many VPs of sales and ex-sales people just have a history with Salesforce. They just ask for it by name and they just refuse to use anything else," he says.
So what's in this upcoming release for Microsoft CRM 2011? According to the article, here are the key features:
"Outlook Integration: Users can manage their CRM interactions from within Outlook. CRM data can be treated like any other Outlook data.
Ribbon: The Office Ribbon added to the new Outlook also will be added to the new Dynamics CRM client.
Role-Tailored Design: Users access relevant forms based on their role in the organization and are restricted from accessing data they're unauthorized to view.
Inline Data Visualizations: Users can create charts, drill down into them and share them.
Real-Time Dashboards: Customers can provide real-time dashboards to assess business performance.
Solutions Management: Developers and IT managers can package up all customizations and install them into the system and they can stay protected from others inadvertently overwriting them.
Field-Level Security and Record-Level Auditing: Important to any organization where privacy and/or compliance are required."
This isn't exactly material that will steel market share from Salesforce.com. These features have been standard with Salesforce.com for more than 5+ years. By comparisson, in it's upcoming Winter'11 release, Salesforce.com is deploying:
Chatter: Probably the most talked about Salesforce.com feature in the past few months, Chatter asks the question, "What are you working on?" It brings social media into the CRM tool, giving Salesforce.com a Twitter or Facebook like facelift. It seems to be making a real difference in user adoption among the companies that are deploying it in production.
Outlook 2010 Integration: This release will have a number of key (and much needed) improvements related to Outlook 2010 integration, including: email added indicators, improved Outlook administrator settings, increasing # of characters supported in the Subject field, 64-bit OS Support, simpler synch features and scheduled sync functionality.
Reports, Dashboard Improvements: Salesforce already has very powerful reporting and analytic features built in. In the Winter'11 release, there are a number of improvements targeted toward this Salesforce.com feature: drag & drop report columns, drag & drop dashboard features, improved report sorting functions, ability to run Dashboard reports as "current user", ability to change the running user in real-time, improved chatter integration, and more.
Improved Search functions: ability to search Content (document libraries), improvements to the advanced search features.
Improvements to the Change Sets deployment features
Improvements to Sites (web site hosting inside Salesforce.com), including support for 30x redirection
These are just a few of the features that Salesforce.com is rolling out at the request of Salesforce.com Customers (via their IdeaExchange forums). On top of all this, we're going to see some nice new functionality related to VMforce, Chatter, calender scheduling, consoles, and more.
Salesforce.com weighs in with a heavier price tag, but it remains easier to implement, easier to customize, and contains more functionality "out of the box" than it's Redmond competitor. Salesforce.com remains my preferred CRM in the competitive marketplace.
She writes, "Having been a salesforce.com Administrator for over 5 years with a detour to MS CRM 3.0 in the middle, I have a hard time believing MS will be able to challenge salesforce.com. The inherent difference that I see is Microsoft is still too concerned with maintaining control of the CRM through IT Departments and IT consultants. This slows innovation, internal busines change, and most strikingly, empowerment of the business Users.
"The reason so many business users/departments now pay for their salesforce.com licenses and the support staff is that they want to quickly respond to changing business climate. They do not want to go through 2-4 weeks of CABs, written requests, funding allocation and final review while waiting to have the dropdown choices in one field change.
"IT Departments that are focused on quickly managed innovation, not just control, do not find their business users purchasing SaaS programs like salesforce.com outside of IT. The innovative IT Department welcomes the SaaS programs and seeks full integration between all the information systems to materialize the competitive advantage CRM offers."
Spot on.
I used to be a Microsoft Dynamics CRM User myself, although that was way back in version 1.2 days, before the rebranding to "Microsoft Dynamics". Back then, the product was simply horrible.
Although I'm a Salesforce.com Evangelist (some call me "fanboy", but I'm too old for that moniker), I watch the evolution of Microsoft CRM closely. Why?
First, because I believe competition is good. It helps drive innovation. Salesforce.com has emerged as the clear front-runner on the multi-tenant, highly-reliable, highly available CRM platform. They've pushed beyond that with their Force.com development platform. As high as they are in the cloud, I want them always watching with one eye below, to see who's coming up to unseat them.
Secondly, I generally like Microsoft products. There, I said it. I've used OpenOffice, Google Docs, and Zoho Docs, but business needs always brought me back to Microsoft Office. The web-based apps just don't meet the breadth and depth of functionality in Office. When I need to make that professionally looking Word document (formatted just so, quickly and painlessly), or crunch serious numbers, formulas and data, or build a slide deck that wows and amazes, I load up Microsoft Office. I also use Outlook, Visio, Project and SharePoint heavily. They are critical tools in my daily work.
So truth be told ... I want Microsoft CRM to be successful. I believe they have the best chance to provide that clean, elegant, seamless integration between my CRM tool and all of my daily productivity tools.
There are signs that Microsoft "gets it", and wants to realize that vision, too. At Microsoft's Worldwide Partners conference this week, Business Division President Stephen Elop described a suite of interacting Microsoft programs, all accessible through the cloud. Marketing, Manufacturing, Sales, Procurement, Service, Accounting, Distribution, Human Resources, Collaboration, Service Delivery all in one tightly integrated cloud-based tool set? Sign me up!
I don't anticipate Microsoft realizing that vision any time soon, but they need two things to win me back to doing a serious evaluation of their CRM offering:
1.) The Microsoft version of Salesforce.com's "IdeaExchange". Microsoft is very much out of touch with the needs and interests of it's user community. The IdeaExchange has proven to be the ideal tool for crowd-sourcing new features and functionality, and influencing the Salesforce Roadmap. Every company should have one of these, and Microsoft needs it desperately.
2.) Tight integration with the other Microsoft produtivity products I use every day: Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Project, Visio and SharePoint. I want the functionality of these products in the cloud, fully accessible through and tightly integrated with my CRM. Without hiring an army of IT consultants, Only then will I be free of my desktop, and able to access all of my work needs from any computer in the world. The company that implements this seamlessly (or comes closest to that) will capture my CRM interest.
Thinking about deploying Salesforce Ideas for your organization, but worried that your users won’t use it? An Anonymous poster to yesterday's Force Monkey blog is:
I'm the Salesforce admin and also most of the support staff for a company of ~75. I've thought of putting ideas out there for the company through the support portal. My question to anyone that's done it- does it actually get used? I could point it out to everyone but I'm fairly sure I would be met with blank stares and it would sit untouched...
My feedback? Yes, it will get used – if deployed right! One of the organizations I administer has 120 users, and they've been using Salesforce Ideas since the product went beta last November. They've averaged 12 ideas per month -- not bad!
On the other hand, if you just turn the feature on, and do nothing else, it will sit untouched.
Like so many other aspects of a CRM project, it’s not simply a matter of deploying a new feature and hoping people come along and use it. User Adoption requires careful planning, preparation, and follow-through. Here are some “Best Monkey Practices” for getting Salesforce Ideas up and running for a small (< 100 users) organization.
First, for readers who don’t already know ...
What is Salesforce Ideas? Ideas is an “online suggestion box”. You're licensed Salesforce.com Users can submit an idea, which creates a forum for discussion. Other users can discuss the idea, promote it, or even demote it. As Ideas are voted on, their score value changes. The most popular / best ideas get higher scores and “bubble up to the top”. The concept is designed after Salesforce.com’s highly successful IdeaExchange, which I’ve blogged about previously.
Ideas is a standard application meaning it’s FREE with your Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited editions. New organizations have the feature activated automatically, but you may need to enable the feature manually if you were a Salesforce.com customer prior to product launch (Summer'08 Release). To enable it, click Setup -> Ideas -> Settings -> Enable Ideas. You may need to tweak the settings in various custom profiles, as well: the Ideas app must be marked Visible, Ideas tab settings may need to be marked “Default On”, and the Standard Object Permissions may need to be set appropriately (Read / Create for standard users, Edit / Delete for your “Idea Managers”).
Now that you have it enabled, what next?
Step One: Customize the App
Salesforce Ideas is pretty good “out of the box”. It has some nice built in features – but you will almost certainly need to customize it for your organization.
1.) Setup Categories: If you’re a small organization (like Anonymous, with 75 users), start with just ONE category: “Salesforce”. Every idea submitted by your user community is feature or customization request directed at you, the Salesforce.com Administrator. Later on, after you have healthy user adoption, you can expend to other categories ("New Product Ideas", "Company Ideas", etc.). Click Setup -> Customize -> Ideas -> Fields -> Categories.
2.) Setup Status: Similar to Cases and Opportunities, Ideas have a "Status". As Ideas move through the evaluation, planning and implementation cycle, their status should change. Users monitoring this idea pool will want to see those changes. Here are some suggested picklist values for Idea Status:
- Fresh Idea: Default for new ideas - Under Review: Ideas that have been prioritized / put on a "project board" - Coming Soon: Someone is actively working to get that idea implemented - Now Available: Idea implemented!
To set the Status fields, click Setup -> Customize -> Ideas -> Fields -> Status.
3.) Set the Half-Life value of the ideas (Setup -> Customize -> Ideas -> Settings). Set this to a relatively high value (30 days) if you expect a low submission rate of ideas (less than 10-20 a month). The half-life value affects the score weighting, as ideas are promoted / demoted in the system.
4.) On that same setup screen, click "Enable Text-Formating, Images and Links". These will allow "savy" users to submit some colorful, clearly illustarted ideas, using pictures and hyperlinks.
5.) Make sure the Idea tab is visible on each application (Setup -> Create -> Apps -> Edit each app used in your organication). For instance, at my organization, Manufacturing runs a custom “Asset Tracker” application, Sales runs the standard Sales Force Automation (SFA) application, and Customer Support runs a custom case management application. I edited each of these apps and added the "Ideas" object to the Tabs associated with each application.
6.) Custom reports and dashboards are a great way to encourage and monitor user adoption. Salesforce Labs makes it easy with an Ideas Dashboard available on the AppExchange (click here to download),
7.) While you're on the AppExchange, you may also want to consider downloading the Ideas in Action custom app, as well. It’s a handy tool for tracking the projects and work associated with user-submitted ideas.
8.) Create email templates, workflow rules and/or apex triggers: Small organizations will want to create email templates and use workflow rules to automatically send the System Administrator (or other Idea Manager, if the process is managed by someone else) an email whenever a new idea is submitted. You may want to CC the originator of the Idea, so they know that their Idea has been submitted. Larger organizations may want to use something more pratical, like scheduled reports.
Step Two: Prime the Pump Enter a half-dozen or more ideas as a way of "priming the pump". Don’t be sparse on these – include all the features that you turned up in step #1: rich-formatted text, pictures, and links. Your demonstrating, by way of example, the detail and clarity you want to see ideas submitted by your user community. Submit ideas that you that other users have mentioned to you in past conversations -- stuff that's already on your "to do" list.
Step Three: Inform and Train Your Users Prepare a training presentation for your user group. You might include this Salesforce.com Ideas promo video from YouTube:
You should also check out the Ideas Learning Center for other Salesforce resources to include in your training.
Have a team meeting of all your Salesforce.com Users to announce the new application and train them on its use. If you can’t fit all your users in one room, schedule smaller department-size meetings. Bring bagels, cream cheese and fruit for morning meetings, pizza or finger sandwiches for afternoon meetings – that always gets attendance up!
After the first wave of training is done, send out a mass email to all users, including the training slides. Inform the user population that, going forward, all change requests and/or customizations MUST be submitted through the Ideas tab.
Step Four: Lead the Horse to Water You’re still going to get users asking you for feature changes, customizations, etc., the way they’ve always done it in the past (email, hallway conversations, coming to your office, etc.). Acknowledge them, just as you’ve done, but also ask the requestor to submit their idea on the Ideas tab (“Lots of folks are vying for changes, and I’m using the Ideas tab as a way of keeping track of them. Adding your request to the Ideas tab will ensure that it gets worked on as soon as possible.”)
Step Five: Make Him Drink You’ve laid down the law, now follow-through. Don’t work on any change requests from your user community UNLESS it’s documented as an Idea. At the very least, give your documented ideas higher priority and attention than non-documented ones.
Step Six: Keep Preaching from the Soapbox Whenever an Idea is implemented, make a big deal of it! Send out a quarterly email / mass mail announcing all the new Idea(s) that have been implemented. Consider announcing "prizes" for the best idea (highest score value) each quarter. It doesn't have to be fancy -- a box of donuts or a team pizza party is pretty cheap for even the tightest department budgets. At the very least, make sure your Idea submitters get name recognition for their ideas. And, of course, every newsletter should also include a marketing pitch at the bottom: "Do you have an idea, suggestion, or feature that you want to see added to Salesforce.com? Don’t delay, add it to the Ideas tab today!"
Whenever you start working on an Idea, be sure to update its status. Users will be monitoring those status fields, to see which ideas are on the way -- and where there idea is in the "pecking order".
Consider implementing workflow rules that send email status updates back to the idea creator, whenever the status of their idea is changed. (“Thanks for your idea submission: XYZ. This idea has been updated to "Coming Soon!"). Frequent communication and feedback fosters strong user adoption.
Finally (this one's for Michelle), recognize that your role in all this is not just that of a "System Administrator". You're really a "cat herder". Herding cats is not easy. They're stubborn, proud, defiant ... and some cats (especially those you report to) have really sharp claws. But with constant coaxing, encouraging, prompting and maybe just a dash of catnip, you'll get them all moving in the same direction eventually.
SalesForce.com IdeaExchange – it’s one of the best kept secrets that New SalesForce.com (SFDC) Users and Administrators should learn about and take advantage of. Do you know about it? Do you use it?
The IdeaExchange is a forum where SFDC users and administrators can submit product enhancements, or “ideas”. In addition to submitting these ideas, SFDC Users can also promote ideas they like, and demote ideas they don’t like. These votes are tracked with a score value as users vote them up or down. Through this voting, the most popular ideas bubble up to the top.
What a great tool for SFDC Product Managers to get user input and feedback on the product! In fact, SFDC product managers frequently review and comment on ideas posted in the IdeaExchange, fostering an open dialog between SFDC Customers and the SFDC Product Development Teams.
You don’t need a Salesforce.com account to browse the IdeaExchange, but only SFDC customers with an active user account can post, comment, promote and/or demote ideas in the forum.
At the top of the Blog, I reference IdeaExchange as one of the best kept SFDC secrets. I don’t know if your experience is different, but I kinda stumbled on the IdeaExchange by accident. One day, while logged in to my administrator account, I was clicking on various links and images to see where they would take me. Eventually, I clicked on the AppExchange logo, and from there I clicked onto the SuccessForce.com link. There are a lot of really GREAT resources on the SuccessForce website, but the one that caught my immediate attention was IdeaExchange.
It was the images in the IdeaExchange that caught my eye most. When posting an Idea, Users have the option of also uploading an image to emphasize or illustrate their idea. A picture is worth a thousand words (and it draws peoples attention). Add a picture to your feature request / product enhancement – maybe with a little Photoshop editing to show how you want the feature to work – and BAM! You’re able to communicate your idea that much more effectively.
When browsing the IdeaExchange, you can select tab filters to view “recently submitted” ideas or “most popular” ideas. On each idea, you can also view the comments, feedback and opinions that other users have weighed in with. In your forum profile, you can see a historical record of ideas that you have commented on or promoted. You can even look at the profiles and “idea stats” of other users in the IdeaExchange community – to see which ideas they’ve submitted, how those well those ideas have been promoted, etc. You can see the “Top Idea Users”, both those casting the most votes and those creating the most popular ideas.
It wasn't until DreamForce 2007 that I saw the real potency of IdeaExchange. DreamForce is the annual user convention in San Diego, and this past fall it attracted over 7000 SFDC users. During his keynote presentation, Marc Benioff announced some of the new features in the upcoming Winter’08 release. His presentation included screenshots of how these ideas had originated on the IdeaExchange. These were ideas that had "bubbled up" on the IdeaExchange, and very likely a many customers at the convention had even voted up some of these ideas. As the features were announced, the user group applause and excitement was electric!
The Take Away for Customers? We hear what you're asking for, and we deliver.
If you haven’t used the IdeaExchange, set some time aside to take a tour of it. Run some keyword searches on SFDC features that you use, and see the ideas SFDC users are talking about related to those features. Don't stop there ... get involved! Register your IdeaExchange community profile, and chime in with your own comments. Promote ideas that interest you. If there is a feature that you want or need, but you can’t find it with the forum search – post your idea to the user community. Salesforce.com really listens to its community base, and if the Idea reaches critical mass, you’re very likely to see it announced in an upcoming release.
