We're Growing

MondayCall Solutions is growing and we need great staff to help us meet the needs of more Salesforce customers.  We have a great team in place already and are looking to expand our team to meet the demand.  In particular we are looking for:

• Developers and Architects - we're looking for rockstar coders and architects who enjoy building technology for customers that come from a variety of industries.  Apex, Visual Force pages, Salesforce.com integration work and similar skills required.
• Project Managers - some of our projects are straightforward and some are complex.  We want project managers who are experienced in salesforce.com to drive project success from idea to reality
• Business analysts/consultants - we want experienced, certified experts who understand business process and are great with customers.  We are looking for more people with experience in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Partner and Customer Portals, Chatter and more.

Check out our jobs page at http://mondaycallsolutions.blogspot.com/.  If you fit the bill or know of anyone who might, please let us know!

An Offer for our Small to Medium Business Salesforce.com Community (SMB)

While we have customers in the Fortune 50, one of our fastest growing segments is Small to Medium Business (SMB) customers.   Salesforce.com provides a great platform for businesses of all sizes.  Many cloud solution providers started with building their businesses with SMB customers.  It makes a ton of sense because:

• SMB don't typically have the time and resource for large, upfront investments in infrastructure
• SaaS platforms are incremental by nature and are perfect for fast growing SMB businesses
• SMB requirements can be sophisticated, depending upon the business.  By renting enterprise-level software at the level they need, they get the best of both worlds

In working with a number of SMB customers we've come up with what we think are "Eight Easy Best Practices For Small to Medium Businesses".  These are tried and true best practices that we've seen in the best small to medium businesses.  Many of these best practices can be implemented by a Salesforce.com customer themselves or with help from a consulting partner.  This document should get you started and help you with both the technical, process and organizational requirements that a good CRM implementation requires.

If you would like a free copy, send us a note to info@mondaycall.com.  We'll be happy to send it your way.  

Jack of All Trades

The process between a buyer and seller can range from simple, faceless, impulse transactions to complex, multi-year, high touch, committee purchases.  The challenge for a CRM tool like Salesforce.com is to be able to offer the proper infrastructure to support a wide range of selling processes.  Companies frequently evolve their sales process.

For example, a company may decide that the key to success is to lower their cost of sale by moving a high-touch sales environment to a more scalable approach, perhaps with a more inside sales focus and a streamlined product and service mix.  Alternatively, companies may wish to become more high-touch if they want to embed themselves more closely to the customer (typically a large scale enterprise) with the hopes of adding significantly more value of the customer, raising switching costs and capturing cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.   Many companies do both, by segmenting their market with enterprise/named accounts and small to medium business companies (SMB).

Salesforce.com can handle both situations.  On the one extreme, we've worked with customers who use Salesforce.com as part of their transactional system.  By using Salesforce.com's API's, they are able to focus their precious development resources on key business logic and presentation and let Salesforce.com handle the standard account, contact, lead management.  Further integrations into order entry and finance can help dramatically lower the cost of sale and increase scalability.  We've done several projects for Internet companies who used Salesforce.com as part of their B2C infrastructure.

On the other hand, we've worked with companies who have a complex, relationship-based sales process.  One such example is FreeWheel, where we helped build out their sales and service infrastructure using Salesforce.com. FreeWheel sells industry leading technology and services to manage advertising and operations for some of the largest companies in the world - companies like AOL, ESPN and Turner.  While they already know every potential customer, the sales process is complex.  Their customers are global and have many departments (and partners) that may benefit from FreeWheel's solutions.  We worked with them to create an infrastructure that modeled all participants in the sales,  customer management and support processes.   To read more details, please see the FreeWheel case study on the MondayCall website.

To a company that is driven by customer success, having accurate tracking and the automation to back it up means better customer service, increased customer satisfaction and increased sales.

Administration Ownership

Management and administration of a CRM application is an often overlooked and highly underfunded responsibility.  In many cases, the sales and service leadership in an organization believe that administrating a product like Salesforce.com is easy and straightforward.  

In truth, the application is on the whole fairly easy to use, designed well and by being a SaaS solution, removes much of the IT administration burden.

But the role of Salesforce.com administrator is much more than a few minutes every day.  It doesn't matter what business you are in, if you are in a competitive business then things are changing every day.  The sales and service organization is never static -- territories change, processes change, organizational structures change, products and services change, etc.  The CRM system you or a consultant configured will rarely stay in place for long.  This is one of the great advantages of cloud solutions, is that you can continue to tweak and reconfigure every day to be responsive to your market demands.

Keeping up with the current CRM infrastructure can be time consuming (e.g. adding territories, adding new fields to capture and report on new information, creation of reports that provide new insight) by itself.   The appropriate time should be allocated for that.  Looking for new opportunities to take further advantage of the platform you already purchased is another skill that will help you continue to scale and defeat the competition.

We've seen a variety of models that have worked well.  They each have their advantages and disadvantages.

• Insourcing
• Complete outsourcing model
• Strategic outsourcing

The insourcing model basically means that you hire in-house for all administration tasks.  As in any case where you have employees, you have optimum control of your resources, when you need it.  You also build expertise in both the CRM tool and in how it is applied to your specific business which is an optimum situation.  There are several disadvantages to this model though.   Your organization may not be large enough to require a dedicated administrator.  If you have one administrator you also need to consider risk mitigation - what if that person you hired ends up being suboptimal, or more commonly, how would you handle the situation if that administrator leaves.  For organizations that have multiple administrators this problem is alleviated.  If you work with a consulting organization you can cross-train another consultant or two to be up to speed.   For a part-time, insource model, you must understand that Salesforce.com activities will compete with other responsibilities and so you must make sure that enough time has been allocated so that everything you feel is important can get done.

The opposite extreme is a complete outsourcing model.  Many firms recognize that their core competence is in their business and not on Salesforce.com administration and are happy to outsource all of the non key aspects of their business.  The advantage is particularly acute if only part-time assistance is required - while you pay more per hour than an employee you don't have to deal with overhead.  In addition, consultants are experts in their field, so you know you are getting someone who should know how best to apply Salesforce.com to your business.  The disadvantage is that you may not have as much control over the administrator as you do over your own employee. In working with a partner you need to understand when the consultant is available and what you expect with regards to response time.  Expertise in your industry is another consideration.  On the one hand, some consultants know more about your industry than you do, having worked at your competitor's or in similar industries. On the other hand, they may never get the opportunity to live in your organization day-to-day to help them be ultra-responsive to your business needs.

The strategic outsourcing is intended to get the best of both worlds:  insourcing for cost and responsiveness benefits and outsourcing for things that are expensive.  It is very common to have consultants come in to do an assessment and configure the system optimally for the administrative owner to operate.  In addition, consultants can come in to do "peak" activities like a big data import, big data cleansing operation, a customer portal set up or to write some code to trigger a certain workflow activity. This is a strategic use of expertise.   Risk mitigation must be taken into consideration.  For some activities, particularly code development, you need to consider how the system will be maintained and improved.  The project rarely ends when the code is completed.  New bugs that are found must be fixed, new features need to be added because the opportunity cost of doing so is high.  Again, one option is to train someone internally to handle this or to plan to arrange for ongoing support to further improve the system.

The most common model though we see is the strategic outsourcing model.  However, one size never fits all, even for companies within the same industry or of similar size. 

Wall to Wall With Salesforce.com

MondayCall Solutions and Salesforce.com hosted a customer event at the Tied House in Mountain View, CA.  The main topic covered included how companies can go wall-to-wall using Salesforce.com.

Using an integrated solution helps companies solve their sales and support operational issues more efficiently and more effectively.  Erick Sturm of CAPS (Computer Air/Power Systems) was the guest speaker extraordinaire.  CAPS was moving from a paper-based sales process to one that was highly automated.  MondayCall and Erick worked together to create a solution that reduced creation of quotes from hours to 20 minutes.  In addition, CAPS can now get up to the minute forecasting data rather than wait for month end spreadsheets to be consolidated.  As part of this solution, CAPS used/created Salesforce.com integrations with with FinancialForce.com and Conga for quoting.  The details are documented in this case study available on the MondayCall Solutions site.

It was a great event and a great chance for customers to interact with MondayCall, Salesforce.com and most importantly each other.

Salesforce for B to C: Person Accounts

Salesforce was born from innovators in the enterprise software space - most notably from Oracle.  The salesforce.com application was heavily geared to helping business-to-business organizations, particularly very large multinational corporations, succeed. While the high end b-to-b market is huge, there are several trends that have blurred the lines between b-to-b and b-to-c to create more market opportunities for CRM vendors:

• The Internet has helped accelerate the disintermediation between providers and purchasers
• A relentless focus on customer relationships and service has become the standard way to do business

In particular with Salesforce, a cloud solution became a very convenient way for smaller organizations of all types to get even the most sophisticated software for a small monthly fee.  Included in this very vibrant industry are many b-to-c companies, the so-called 'mom and pop' stores.  They too have a sales process and customer management process (albeit with consumers) and as well deal with partners that provide supplies and provide channels for distribution and scale.

Person accounts are a great way to help organizations better support managing consumer relationships.  Whether you are an Internet b-to-c or a local store selling to consumers or a broker working with high net worth individuals, person accounts help you manage relationships with individuals who may not be a part of an organization (or account). 

Combined with Salesforce.com's API for integration, Salesforce.com can serve as a valuable platform to support B-to-C internet based businesses.  Start ups in particular can leverage much of the Salesforce.com platform to handle incoming registrations, manage people, handle workflow rules (including email alerts), handle support cases and more.  These features can save valuable development time in markets where time to market is key.

Person accounts do have some limitations.  First of all, person accounts are not available in all editions. As of this writing, person accounts are available in Enterprise, Unlimited and Developer editions.  Other differences include: person accounts can only be merged with other person accounts and person accounts have a different layout than Accounts/Contacts because of the different data that it tracks.  Once person accounts is turned on, you cannot turn it off.   There are a number of other minor differences that you can find out more by looking at the Salesforce.com help or by looking at their published Person Account Cheatsheet.  

Dreamforce 2011

MondayCall Solutions exhibited at Dreamforce 2011 at Moscone Center in San Francisco.  It was a big event, one of the largest if not largest technology conferences in the industry.  Marc Benioff was in top form as he evangelized the benefits of cloud computing and how it has helped leading companies cut costs and capture opportunities.  Better yet, Marc deferred to his customers - letting them deliver the message.

The focus of the conference clearly was on social.  Great social tools like Facebook and Twitter have been revolutionizing the consumer market - why not create similar technologies to revolutionize the enterprise.  With improvements to Chatter, the acquisition of Radian6 and the announcement of Data.com, salesforce.com is looking for innovative ways for companies to interact with its customers/partners and for the companies' employees to collaborate better with each other.

Many innovative companies in just about every industry have already taken advantage of these capabilities - looking for ways to continue to engage and impress its target market.

Case Study: Helping Those Who Help Others

MondayCall Solutions recently published a new case study for the Alameda Alliance for Health. The Alliance provides health care coverage to over 125,000 children and adults in Alameda, CA. The Alliance has a team that conducts community outreach and enrolls Medicare/Medi-Cal “dual eligibles” into their Medicare Advantage Special Needs Plan for seniors and people with disabilities. One of their challenges is to systematically and scalably find individuals in the community who are qualified dual eligibles.

MondayCall Solutions helped the Alameda Alliance:

• Redesign Salesforce to better map to their processes
• Restructured data to simplify collection and focus on only needed information
• Jumpstart their business development team on correct Salesforce usage
• Provide visibility into metrics that drive their operations

The result:

• Significantly improved tracking of every individual in their process
• Cleaner data that can be used to drive more accurate reporting
• Improved adoption of Salesforce. Improved responsiveness to the community

For more details, please see the new case study. 

We'll be at Dreamforce 2011

Whether you are a customer, potential customer, partner, job seeker or just want to stop by to say 'hello', we look forward to seeing you at Dreamforce 2011.

We're in booth #23 in the exhibitor section.  Make a hard right when you enter the exhibition hall.

If you'd like a discount/coupon code/voucher to Dreamforce 2011, please contact us at sales@mondaycall.com.

Getting Sales People to Adopt Salesforce.com

Sorry, there is no easy answer here. One of the bigger challenges to a successful CRM implementation is getting adoption from the sales team. One of the key advantages of Salesforce is the ability to track sales activities so that you can institute and track scalable sales processes, get better visibility into your pipeline and grow your sales in an organized and predictable way. For many sales people, good use of salesforce.com is a productivity enhancer rather than a time sink.

Is Resistance Futile?
However, many sales people would also disagree -- or more accurately, they understand fully the benefit of instituting CRM but they resist participation, sometimes vehemently. They often cite the following reasons:

• This is just a tool for management to micro-manage
• I'm busy closing deals, not filling out forms
• I get paid the big bucks and data entry is beneath me
• I can't get convenient access as I'm constantly on the road
• Documenting slows me down and doesn't help me get to my number

No matter what management says, no matter how much a sales person knows that it's good for them in the long run -- changing the behavior of people is hard.  And in an aggressive sales organization where making the number means everything, taking time out to do something you aren't directly compensated for is tough.  And why work on something with a  long term benefit if quota isn't reached in the short term?

Salespeople have a reputation for being resistant to this type of change -- particularly change they doesn't impact their bottom line -- immediately.  Nothing really gets around this point.  There has to be an incentive or a consequence to create any change. In other words, there needs to be a carrot and a stick approach.


Motley Crew
The reports from Salesforce are only going to be as good as the data going in, so 100% participation is required. Each sales person has different motivations and styles and so a multi-faceted approach is required to change everyone's behavior. Some sales people are super-organized team players. They get that they will have better visibility into their accounts and increase their ability to juggle a multitude of opportunities. They get that their more organized and methodical approach will result in better relationships with the customer and a higher win rate. They get that this is a tool that helps them "be on top of things" and helps them hit their number.  They also know that with a stronger, better managed sales organization behind it, that everyone, including him or herself will benefit.

Others take a more seat-of-the-pants style to closing deals. They don't see the value and frankly speaking, must be forced into using Salesforce. They need management to run the sales and forecasting meeting directly from Salesforce reports (if it's not in Salesforce it doesn't exist). They need to be embarrassed in front of their peers that they haven't followed up with a lead in several weeks. They need to be low on the leaderboard report because their forecast isn't accurate. They need to be nagged and baby sat and given artificial "incentive" metrics like having a quota for calls/emails each day.  Others need to be tested and certified as part of their MBO.  It's never perfect though.  If you are exceeding your quota, it often becomes your "get out of jail free" card.

Whether a sales person is on either end of the spectrum, an important facet to improving adoption is to lower the cost of "entry".   If it's easy, then resistance will be less. That can mean several things:

• Increase automation as much as possible. This can mean having quick and convenient pull-down and lookup fields, simplified workflows and more. This can mean an integration with several other applications in the workflow to make it as seamless as possible and to remove double entry of the same data.
• More points of accessibility, such as smart-phone and Outlook integration so that the steps required to enter and access data are minimized.  Some organizations give their sales team Ipads - a small investment compared to the data they receive from it.
• Use lots of alerts.  People find it easier to react to an alert than to proactively search for information.
• Accurate reports for each sales person so they know at every point where they stand during their quarter.
• Prototype your solution with a friendly audience.  Work out the kinks on a small subset of influential sales people before rolling it out to the larger team.  Use your prototype team as your evangelists 
• Training and easy-to-follow documentation so that they can get past most issues without needing someone to handhold them.  Making your training customized -- the more generic it is the more the sales people have to interpolate to their specific situation
• Set clear guidelines on what is expected.  Maybe you don't need to track every "called, no answer" detail nor put in every attendee of every meeting.  Consider the value of the information and the cost to put it in.

and much more. Optimizations are a quick way to lower the cost of using salesforce.com prior to rollout. These types of improvements, coupled with the "stick" approach, help most organizations achieve adoption. The road to value is never an easy path.  You need a plan to get there and to maintain it as the organization grows.  The payoff can be great once the process becomes institutionalized.

Change Management Styles

Every organization is its own biosphere, with unique individuals interacting in an environment that has evolved differently over time than even its direct competition. No wonder that procedures and practices are always different from company to company.

In interacting with many companies, we find that even the process of change management varies widely. The process by which information is obtained, decisions are made and implementations are conducted are shaped by the leadership, market forces and the people that are hired. One of the more common questions we see when managers want to effect change is whether it should be done as a large scale initiative or done in incremental steps. When done as a large scale initiative, the project can take a life of it own but can build significant momentum and force. It can be like a juggernaut that easily moves aside any resistance. The up front planning that is required for a large scale project provides a great discipline to work out the issues early. However, large scale initiatives can get crushed by their own weight. Expectations begin to get set very high, sometimes impossibly high and the only result in these cases is disappointment. The longer a project goes, the more chance there is for scope creep. The longer a project goes, the more chance that the requirements by which the project was built on have already changed. Poorly planned large scale initiatives are notorious for missing dates, going over budget and underdelivering.

Incremental approaches are much more iterative, where bite size pieces are defined and implemented. It's a great approach to de-risk a project and supply quick wins early and frequently. However, this approach is not without some risk. Without a clear long term vision, smaller scale projects can meander and can result in wasted effort. In addition, an organization can only absorb so much change on a frequent basis. If the process changes every 2 weeks, it may become difficult for people to do their jobs.

An analogy in the software development world is the waterfall versus agile development methodologies. In waterfall, there is strong upfront planning/definition and logical steps that progress towards a final, often large deliverable. Waterfall tends to work better in environments where requirements don't frequently change and where quality is of paramount concern. In Agile, smaller, mini-projects are defined that embrace an iterative approach to development. Agile works particularly well in environments where the requirements change frequently and technology risk is fairly high.

In the Salesforce.com world, most sales/marketing/support organizations live in a chaotic world where the competitive marketplace changes the landscape almost daily. Iterative approaches tend to work best in order to meet market demands quickly. When we work with a customer, we try our best to understand their business drivers so that a long term vision can be mapped. Having best practices knowledge in many industries help us drive towards a goal for their Salesforce.com implementation that can be used to guide the incremental projects that will get the customer there.

From there, several phases are defined so that there is a path to the goal. Phase I of course is planned in great detail than subsequent phases. It helps us and the customer get quick wins so that we can build momentum for even more success going forward. Having the roadmap handy though helps ensure that we avoid future roadblocks and helps us more effectively plan the subprojects that will have the most valuable impact in the change management process.

And after all, customers are paying for change.

Best Practices On Salesforce.com, From Salesforce.com

This is a quick, useful video that describes some of the high level keys to a successful CRM implementation. 

There are a many more things to consider that can sink an implementation ranging from technical, process and organizational issues.

However, the three things they identify are very important and worth highlighting.  Find out more at http://www.salesforce.com/learn for more best practices.

Go Native

One of MondayCall Solutions design principles is to go native wherever possible.  "Going native" means using native, out-of-the-box configuration whenever and wherever you can.  As long as you can meet the business requirements, the preferred method is to avoid writing custom code.

For those unfamiliar with building and managing systems, there are clearly pro's and con's to each approach.  Going custom often gets you exactly what you want.  After all, you are customizing it to your special needs.  As your business requirements change, you also can continue to customize the system to meet your specific requirements.  Going custom gives you ultimate control. Salesforce.com offers the Force.com platform and API's to give you that control.

Of course this is a double-edged sword.  Customized solutions often take longer to build because you have to build many of the pieces yourself.  In addition, customized solutions often take more overall maintenance effort, because changes to the requirements must necessitate changes in the customized solution.  This can get very expensive as the system becomes more complex.  I remember very distinctly one developer at a company who defended the "spaghetti" code that was written in their environment as "job security."

All is well and good until the requirements necessitate a major overhaul, or if the administrator of the system suddenly decides to take a job somewhere else.  Without a deep investment, custom solutions tend to become more brittle and untouchable over time.

Using native functionality means a faster time to market.  With Salesforce.com's SaaS platform, you will not only be able to maintain the system with greater ease but also be able to take advantage of the constant improvements made to the system.  Not all changes will be welcome but most will.  Salesforce.com after all is improving the platform based on customer feedback to stay competitive.

So wherever possible, go native.  When you can't, and there will be times when you can't, then really evaluate its priority and scope and see if it is a good business decision.  Still, the productivity, accuracy and information visibility you get from a well running sales, marketing and service infrastructure usually trumps the costs.  If you do need to go custom, then keep things as simple as possible, build the things that you need now and if it makes sense, wait for the day that Salesforce.com adds the functionality so you can migrate to a native set up.

A Word About Optimization

It would be nice if we could be experts at everything -- and I mean everything.

At work we use lots of tools to help us be more productive and to help us towards our business goals.  Most of us use cell phones, email, word, excel, intranets, applications like CRM/ERP, scanners, printers, tablets, etc.  And if you're in the growing camp of people who are working remotely, you have even more tools that you need to work with.  Tools are great because they make your life easy -- or at least they are supposed to.  But as anyone knows you end up playing system administrator on more days that you would like.  Knowing how to address technical and product issues is great for the minority of folks who have a knack for technology and the time to learn it but most people just want it to work and don't have the time.

Take your cell phone.  You really don't need to know all the technology behind how the cell phone works -- you just want it to work in the way you want it, when you want it.  Same with Excel.  It's great to know how to use it, but for most applications, you may not need to know how to program it using the API's.  That's not to say that there aren't uses for people who know how to write an iphone application or how to write complex scripts in Excel to process data.  While there are many ways to skin the cat, one could divide people who use tools in several ways.  There are the creators/configurators, the maintainers and the users.

• The users are the end-users who utilize the tool on a day-to-day basis.  They gain benefit by using the system.
• The maintainers are the people who administrators who make sure it is working in the way that the end users want it.  They may make sure it is always running and turn the knobs and dials to address changes to the system to reflect the changes to the environment or the opportunity to be captured
• The creators/configurators are the people who may do the set up and configuration of the tool.  They may also make the major changes to an already running system.  They typically have deeper expertise than a maintainer and understand best practices.  These are the folks you like to have in charge when you need to make a big change.

For consumer products, the first two are the same person.  Sometimes all three. Tools designed for consumers strive to be so simple to use that you don't need help. For tools used in business, particularly ones with a modicum of complexity, the three categories are often held by distinctly different people.  CRM tools like salesforce.com fall into this category.  End users are typically sales, marketing and support personnel.  Maintainers are usually a dedicated sales operations person or an IT engineer.  Creators/configurators may be consultants specializing in these technologies and have had the benefit of seeing many multiple implementations. 

As a business executive, you need to understand what you need.  In massive organizations, you may need to have a creator/configurator in-house just because of scale and volume.  Some organizations, with very simple needs may not need a creator/configurator at all.  Most organizations fall somewhere in between with either a part-time or full-time administrator with targeted assistance from consultants to help with proper set up or optimization of an already existing environment.

It's interesting to see how many companies struggle with the maintainer-only model.  They often hack  up a configuration that gets them going but find over time that the system they created is unscalable, burdensome for new employees and inflexible to handle the changing needs of the organization.  Not only does it cause suboptimal procedures, it also makes it much harder to unwind what was done from a process standpoint.  Not to mention the all important data.  Once organizations reoptimize their environment, there is often a data migration process that must ensue.  Sometimes it can be painful.  Still others never get off the ground, with end-users rebelling because the system just doesn't make sense to them.

Every place there is an addressable pain or opportunity, there is a market.  Consultants offer "Quickstarts" to help people get on the right foot immediately.  They are a great bang for the buck because you start with the right practices and procedures from day one.  "Optimizations" are often "restarts", where things have drifted enough that the system needs to be reconfigured.  Optimizations are common and are also a big bang for the buck.

One customer said it well.  "I don't need to be an expert at salesforce.com, but I do want to reap the benefits of using salesforce.com."  He has his day job which is to leverage his company's core competencies to sell his company's product.  He astutely knows that salesforce.com expertise is not a core competency of his company.  That being said, he's all for gaining the full benefit of using salesforce.com.

WIth Power Comes Great Responsibility

Companies simply have to do more with less these days.  Resources have been cut to the bone and spending approvals on items as small as a few thousand dollars are required all the way up to the CFO.  When a project is evaluated the first question is always, how can we do this more cheaply and with less risk.  Can we do this in-house?  Why don't we use Joe, have him add some more hours during his day to take this on so we don't have to show an additional expense and/or go through a budget approval process.

In some cases this is the wise move.  Cash is hard to come by and getting outside assistance may be a luxury.  However, in most cases you get suboptimal results which in today's economy has become the new norm.  Suboptimal results though scaled out to your salesforce or customer service operation though get magnified and increase costs significantly.  Worse yet, you increase the risk of the whole project being a failure.  And what organization is more important these days than your sales, marketing and customer operations teams?  Lack of usage, improper usage, decreased morale, inefficiencies and mistakes result in lost dollars.  This is not the area to compromise too much on.

I say this because we see lots of companies in need of what we call a "tune up".  They tried to set up salesforce.com in a way they thought was right but in the end caused them problems.  This is the conundrum with powerful, feature-full products -- there are 15 ways to skin a cat with Salesforce.com but probably only a few right ways to do it.  One customer struggled for nearly a whole year before calling in the cavalry.  Think of the wasted time and effort during that lost year and what could have been -- not to mention the added cost of migrating all the old information to the new set up.  "Restarts" can be costly and you can lose credibility.

Still, you have smart people.  They could figure out anything given time, resources and energy.  Do they have that luxury?  And, can you sustain it ongoing as well.  Your core competence should be your business levers that drive your success and salesforce.com administration and set up is probably not one of your desired core competences.

So get off to the right start.  Setting up the right data structures, configuring the tool in the correct way and establishing a simple and scalable process is essential to a painless future (or at least less pain).  More importantly, it'll mean more dollars for you in the medium to long run.

Dreamforce 2010

The Dreamforce 2010 by all accounts was a smashing success.  With exciting announcements like Database.com, Salesforce.com continues to establish its leadership in the cloud apps space.  The value-added stack continues to grow, enabling small, mid-sized and large scale companies benefit strongly from the cloud. The role of IT within mid to large organizations is shifting.  The disruptive benefit for small companies is the ability to have leading edge infrastructure without the time and expense.  Another big trend at Dreamforce was mobile.  The mashing up of back end technologies and front end consumption computers and devices is exciting for any customer, particularly those with employees on the move.

MondayCall Solutions had a great time meeting the community.  The theme was collaboration and there was plenty of collaboration with Salesforce.com employees, technology partners, fellow implementation partners and of course, customers.  The place was wall to wall with suits, casual developer garb and expo booth company uniforms.

Some of our friends that had a presence (booths and/or speaking ops) at the conference included:  Boomi, Luminosity Group, Silverpop, CRMFusion and more.  It was a big cloudfest that resulted in excitement, opportunity and best of all, results.

It's going to be hard to top Bill Clinton, Stevie Wonder but looking forward to Dreamforce 2011.

Project Methodology

At MondayCall Solutions, our methodology is meant to deliver value, predictability and transparency to our consulting projects.  Our methodology is highly flexible, matched to the needs of every individual customer.  We leverage our best practices experience but customize, customize, customize to maximize the benefit to the customer.

While every project is unique we have a basic structure to our engagements.  Many of the heading names are familiar as classic project management steps but we describe the variations that we focus on.

Needs assessment	Good planning means good execution.  We understand your business drivers and work with you to prioritize the right requirements to meet your business goals.  What's going to move your business KPI's?  We leverage our best practices experience to properly scope the project so that you have a clear roadmap on what should and can be done.
Discovery	We assess your current environment and create an execution project plan.  This reduces risk and leads to good scalable design.
Design	We architect the best-in-class solution that will meet your business goals while being scalable and easy to maintain
Development	Our experienced consulting team creates a solution based on the specification.  We use iterative development so that you can see progress early.
Testing	We thoroughly test each solution and document its usage and maintenance procedures.  Consultant and most importantly, user acceptance testing is key
Rollout	It doesn't stop when the code is finished. We provide a full range of training, mentoring and support assistance to help roll the solution out to a large user base
Ongoing Support and Administration	We provide flexible support services so that you always have access to an expert to help you not only rollout but sustain the value ongoing.

All throughout the project, we build multiple milestones throughout the project so you can see progress early and all of our engagements have management oversight to ensure a high quality deliverable.  Our goal is not technology delivery, but solution delivery.