Force Monkey, Inc. (?)

Over the past few months, I've been working with an increasing number of Salesforce.com developers and customers, helping them navigate complex CRM deployments on the Force.com platform. Despite the dismal economy, I'm busier than ever. In fact, I've been so consumed with an increasing number of projects, contracts and clients, that I've decided to incorporate my practice.

This isn't the first company I've founded. In my college, I started a small "business" with 6 close friends. It was a gaming company called LIONE Rampant, and we ran it quite successfully for seven years. As we grew older, finding girlfriends and wives, we decided we were getting too old for that "silly gaming stuff". We sold the company -- to some of our then-customers -- and went off to get "real jobs". These new owners, in turn, ran the company for seven years and sold it to some of their customers. It delights me to see that a business venture I created has "stood the test of time", and is still operating more than 20 years later, even if I'm not directly involved with the business. Not many companies can say that, gaming or otherwise.

I don't game any more (well, maybe a few FPS and MMO hours, here and there). Instead, I spend a lot of my time developing applications, helping companies get more from their technology investments, consulting on best practices for operational management, process improvement, and CRM deployments -- particularly on the Force.com platform. I've decided it's time to put more formality in my business practice.

I'm researching the the different legal structures, and trying to determine the best one for my practice: sole proprietorship, LLC, C-Corp or S-Corp. The business entity types are all familiar to me from long-ago days, when I was researching how I should incorporate LIONE Rampant. That company was founded as a C-Corporation, but I'm leaning toward an S-corporation for this current venture.

I reached out to my Twitter network, asking how they managed their own consulting / software development companies:



As always, they were helpful and eager to share.

Jeremy Ross (@jeremyross) operates his business as a C-corporation. That means his business is taxed at the corporate rate, and there is the risk of double taxation when paying out dividends to shareholders. Those can be minimized, but it seems like more overhead than I'm willing to adopt.

Scott Hemmeter (@arrowpointe) is the owner of ArrowPointe (http://sfdc.arrowpointe.com/). He's published several Force.com applications, making them available through the Salesforce AppExchange. He also provides consulting services on the Force.com platform. From our past conversations, I feel his business model is closely aligned to what I'm looking to do. Scott started as an LLC, but changed to an S-corporation, because it has some tax advantages over the LLC.

Uncle Sam considers LLC Owners to be self-employed, which means they must pay a 15.5% "self-employment tax". The entire net income of the business is subject to this tax. In an S-corporation, only the income that is paid to the "employees" is subject to the employment tax. Other income, paid to the owners as a distribution, is not taxed. I don't mind paying my "fair share", but if I can find a way to reduce my taxes, well, that's just more money I'll use to help stimulate the economy!

With an S-corporation, there is a bit more overhead: I'll have to form and work with a "board of directors", for starters. There are more record keeping rules to keep up with. I'm familiar with those burdens, having maintained the books and organized 7-years of LIONE Rampant BOD meetings. It sounds like a lot of work, but it's really not.

I've a bit more research ahead of me, and I'll probably talk with a CPA before I formally file this week. I must confess, I'm excited about the prospects of my new venture.

Are you managing your own consulting practice? I'm curious about your operations, and the legel business entity that you've adopted. Please share your comments below.

What's On Your Summer Reading List?

It's summer time, and I'll be spending a lot of time pool-side with the kids. Here's my summer reading list (many based on recommendations from you!):

• Art of the Deal, The
• Attitude 101, by John C. Maxwell
• Cash Flow Quadrant
• Covert Persuassion, by Kevin Hogan
• Dog Eat Dog, and Vice Versa
• Eat That Frog
• Getting Things Done
• How to Win Friends and Influence People, By Dale Carnegie
• How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships
• No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs
• Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds
• Selling the Invisible, by Harry Beckwith
• Selling to Big Companies, by Jill Konrath
• Richest Man in Babylon, The
• The Millionaire Next Door
• The Way to Wealth
• What To Say When You Talk To Yourself
• When I Say No I Feel Guilty
• Think and Grow Rich
• The Way of the Superior Man
• Dan Kennedy's The Ultimate Sales Letter
• CopyBlogger
• The Psychology of Influence
• How to Survive Office Politics
• How to Climb the Corporate Ladder
• How to CYA
• Do It Now
• Getting to Yes
• Difficult Conversations
• Never Eat Alone
• Is That Your Hand in My Pocket

What are you reading?

It's really nothing personal, but I don't want to Stay-in-Touch

Do you have users that create contacts in Salesforce.com, but don't need the "Send Stay-in-Touch" pop-up messages?

Sales professionals and account teams may benefit from the "Send Stay-in-Touch" pop-up feature, because it prompts them to periodically check-in with their contacts and keep the contact information up-to-date.

However, other users groups in your organization may need the ability to create Contacts, but have no interest in the feature. Support teams, for instance, who might deal with customers on a "one-and-done" basis may need to create a contact to associate with their Case, but not need to do periodic follow-ups with that contact after the case is fully resolved.

The "Stay-in-Touch" pop-up feature is enabled by default across all profiles, but you can easily disable it in the User Profile (click to enlarge):

Is it a Lead, Account, Opportunity or Contact?

Inspired by my recent Twitter conversation with New York Private Investigator, Michelle Pyan (aka @michelle_lpi)

I've worked with a few clients who, for various reasons, have a lot of trouble with Salesforce.com terminology. Often it's because Salesforce.com has roots in Salesforce Automation, and these users don't come from a traditional sales background.

That's the power of Salesforce. It's such a powerful platform, and it can be customized for any business, and just about any application.

Yet many new users stumble with the Salesforce terminology right out of the gate. They're eager to get started, to get their data added to Salesforce -- and get stuck asking, "Umm, is it a Lead, an Account, an Opportunity or a Contact?"

When explaining Salesforce.com to new users, I'll often use the fish model:

Lead = Something swimming in your favorite fishin' hole.
Contact = Fish.
Account = School of Fish.
Opportunity = Fishing rod.
Closed/Won Opportunity = Lunch.
Closed/Lost Opportunity = The one that got away.
Campaign = Planning and preparation for the big fishing trip.

Since the third grade, the fish is about the only thing I can draw that people will recognize it for being just that: a fish. As I describe these terms, I'll sketch them out on a whiteboard. The visual presentation delivers a lot of "Ah-ha!" moments, and users walk away with a clearer understanding of how to enter data into these standard Salesforce objects.

Do you encounter a similar struggle with your new Salesforce.com users? What tricks do you use to bring clarity on these terms?

Why Analytics Help

Lately, I've been getting a lot of requests to help organizations with data analytics and reporting aspects of their CRM solutions. I'm very encouraged by this, because it means companies are using their CRM for more than just managing customer relationships better. They are also using these tools to understand and improve their own business processes better!

A methodical analytics process is important, because it forces you to (1) define goals for your organization, (2) monitor and track performance against these goals, and (3) drive continuous process improvement based on objective, measurable results.

Let me share some of the results from the “Great Dashboard Clean-Up Project”, which I’ve talked about in past blogs.

On this project, I've worked with a number of cross-functional areas -- but this post will focus on work done with Support team. Our Customer Support organization receives high accolades from customers with respect to our response and handling of cases. It's really nice to get this unsolicited feedback from Customers, but the division manager wanted to track the teams’ performance with more objective data.

Together, we defined some Key Response Areas (KRA) for his team:

Time to Respond: After a Customer contacts us (through email, phone or web), how quickly does the support organization respond to that Customer?

Time to Restore: If the call is related to an operational issue or problem with our product “in the field”, how quickly does Support restore that equipment to full operational service?

Time to Resolve: How long does it take for the Support team to fully resolve (close) a Customer case?

We set goals for each of these KRA. This was very easy, as the organization already had internal, implied Service Level Agreements (SLA) documented. We simply “fine-tuned” the definition of those metrics, and published them to Customers:

Time to Respond
o Email / Web – contact and/or reply to Customer within 24 Hours
o Phone – if unable to answer immediately, call back within 15 minutes

Time to Restore
o Sev-1 (Critical Priority) Cases – Restore service within 4 hours
o Sev-2 (Urgent Priority) Cases – Restore service within 6 hours
o Sev-3 (Standard Priority) Cases – Restore service within 24 hours

Time to Resolve
o Sev-1 / Sev-2 Cases: Close within 7 days
o Sev-3 Cases: Close within 14 days


Here’s where things got a little tricky. While we had customized our Salesforce.com CRM system heavily to support our business needs, there was no customization centered around many of these SLA metrics. For instance, we could easily count the number of cases received from each Customer, and even identify how those cases originated (email, phone, web) -– but we had no fields tracking if phone calls were missed / returned within 15 minutes, or if email / web inquiries were responded to within 24 hours. We had Case-related fields tracking when a case was opened and closed, but for operational problems in the field, we had no date/time fields tracking when service was "restored".

Fortunately, Salesforce.com excels in this area. It was very easy to add some custom fields tracking all these SLA metrics. We also added some workflows and apex triggers that automatically populated the fields based on various conditions.



With these metrics in place, we created reports and dashboards to benchmark the Support Organization's current performance. We immediately saw that we were, in fact, doing very well across these metrics. Phone calls were answered (or callbacks returned) within 15 minutes 96% of the time. Email and web based cases were responded to within 24-hours 70% of the time. Operational issues were being restored and resolved within SLA almost 90% of the time. This all validated the compliments and feedback we had been receiving from Customers directly. But it was just the starting point for our project.

Now that we were measuring the data, we could easily zero in on the exception / failure cases. Why did we fail that SLA? What changes could we put in place to prevent us from failing in a similar way next time?

We’ve had this program in place since January, and the results (from our Support Operations SLA Dashboard) speak for themselves:



Across every metric, across every SLA, our Support Team has steadily and consistently improved in it's performance. All of this is through our CRM business analytics and service improvement program.

How about you? Are you getting the most from your CRM?