Xenogenix

Force.com is the the underlying Software as a Service platform on which the incredible success of Salesforce.com has been achieved.

Customers love it because:

• They can be up and running in hours
• The on demand model eliminates the IT cost and resource absorption of  installing and running systems
• Its highly customisable so the system fits your business rather than the other way around
• An unbeatably low cost of entry and unparalleled time to value
• It's trusted by some of the most demanding customers in the world

The Problems Force.com solves

People know they probably need a better executed CRM strategy, but they often have trouble in putting their finger on why? and what for?  It gets harder when theres a wider group of stakeholders.

One way to solve this is to create a set of simple problem statements which are voiced by leaders of each function.

Here are some that you might relate to...

CEO/ MD

1. I need the information that tells me when to intervene, what’s going to happen, not what’s happened in the last period
2. I can’t tell if our forecasts are credible
3. Its hard to really know if my sales director/ manager is getting the best performance from his people
4. When customers call me I feel I should know more about them and how we are doing at the touch of a button
5. My teams don’t talk to each other enough about our customers to prevent complaints and problems
6. How much dead wood is my sales director carrying?
7. Our projects take too long to start adding value
8. Marketing campaign costs are impossible to justify
9. I think there’s lots of potential for our systems and processes to make our people more efficient and satisfy more customers

Marketing

1. We don’t measure which campaigns are working best
2. We can’t track which leads or sales come from which campaigns
3. Sales get given leads that haven’t been qualified 
4. Sales people can hide behind a fog of misinformation
5. Sales people don’t use our leads properly

Sales

1. Marketing don't produce the right sort of leads
2. I can’t see what activities my sales people are doing 
3. Sales people are not accountable and don’t take responsibility
4. I don’t have confidence in the pipeline
5. When sales people leave they take all the customer information with them
6. When sales people swap accounts, it is impossible to do an adequate hand over
7. It takes too long to get new sales people up to speed

Customer Service

1. Customer service representatives can’t see what activity has happened within an account 
2. There is no central database of customer information
3. I can’t measure how long it takes to resolve customer issues
4. People can’t easily share information about solutions to customer issues so we keep reinventing the wheel

Finance

1. I cant easily justify cost cutting/ containment in sales and marketing
2. My team spend too much time second guessing revenue forecasts, compiling sales and marketing management reporting information that we can use
3. We can avoid headcount, space and cost liabilities by using a managed service.

IT

1. Every department/country/region goes off and implements their own solution. Difficult to keep to standards
2. Our legacy application became unmanageable. It's slow, it lacks features, it's so heavily customised we can't recognise it anymore.
3. Enhancement projects take forever. Design, development, testing and deployment are almost always over-budget and late.
4. Our legacy applications are not documented. System help / online help are out of date.
5. We don't have a robust back-up, recovery and system maintenance schemes in place. 
6. Everyone asks I.T to do the reporting because data is across multiple systems/lots of Excel files and nobody else can work it out.