CRM - January 2009 - (Page 24)

GOOGLE AND CRM Kaplan draws a comparison: “Three to four years ago when I asked CIOs about the use of [instant messaging], which was a consumer phenomenon, they said no way would they allow that kind of stuff in corporate environments.” Kaplan matches that example up with recent “consumerization” movements toward social networking and cloud computing. While some organizations seem willing to open enterprise doors to Facebook, Amazon Web Services, and Google, others are slow to capitalize on the benefits—still worried about security and married to traditional computing. Some vendors have endorsed integration with Google AdWords and Google Apps; others are competing with Google, positioning themselves as a more-secure option. Within CRM, Salesforce.com has perhaps the tightest Google Apps integration, the result of a relationship dating back to 2003. The cloud superpowers announced the SalesforceCRM for Google Apps product in early 2008, and at a subsequent December event called Cloudforce, revealed that 5,000 customers have started using the combined offering. The previous integration of Google AdWords and Salesforce.com has helped, as well, but the significance now extends far beyond search, according to the keynote delivered by Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s cofounder, chairman, and chief executive officer. “Cloud computing brings us all together because it’s a model that adapts regardless of the size of implementation or the size of the company,” Benioff said. “We’re not an island—we realize there are other clouds emerging.” (That may be an understatement: The very same day, opensource CRM provider SugarCRM released an updated edition that trumpeted new access to cloud-based third-party data.) But Google remains the biggest cloud in the sky. “There were 300,000 leads going from Google into Salesforce.com a month,” spells out Chuck Ganapathi, Salesforce.com’s vice president of product marketing.“That’s a tremendous amount 24 of volume of marketing that is going on from Google…that will at some point get converted into customers.” It’s the “at some point” that’s causing some grief. In February 2007, software and platform provider Etelos was one of the first to board the Google bandwagon, with Etelos CRM for Google Apps—essentially a CRM tool available on the iGoogle landing page. When monetization became an issue, Etelos refocused its vision, spending more on developing its platform. “There are definitely some constraints you get when you start running many versions of an application within someone else’s framework,” says Danny Kolke, “Every couple of weeks or so, [Google Apps] tends to go down. It’s a nerve-wracking 45 minutes.” the company’s founder and chief executive officer. “There are some issues there with trying to provide an optimal experience inside someone else’s interface.” Kolke says that developers originally saw lucrative potential in the Google Apps platform, but it hasn’t panned out. “Most of the users are iGoogle users and iGoogle is free,” he says. “They’re looking for an app that’s free so they can do light lifting, and aren’t interested in using heavy CRM.” For many months, he says, Etelos was known as the “CRM for Google” company, and getting partners to look beyond that nickname has been a struggle. The industry may be reluctant to admit that some users are looking for “light CRM,” but it’s unavoidable. Small businesses, especially ones accustomed to running some level of CRM out of Micro- soft Excel or Outlook, find Google Apps appealing. First, it’s hard to compete on price when something’s free. Second, Google Apps provide collaboration capabilities not found in Outlook and Excel. Hunt Services, a small organization in Phoenix that serves as the go-between for physicians and pharmaceutical research, has used Google Apps for close to a year. Amanda Drake, Hunt’s director, says that not having to pay a fee was the main appeal—saving on overhead is a solid benefit for her small-but-growing company. But the centralization and collaboration efforts are the real payoff: Drake says that she used to spend hours in Outlook emailing Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets to coworkers, but those days are past. Google Calendar is now the hub of Hunt’s business—it’s where employees schedule events, set alerts and tasks, and store notes about different clients. All client contact information, in fact, used to be walled off on the main computer—not everyone had access, but now they do. Having tried the Holy Trinity of Google Apps—spreadsheets, calendar, and documents—Drake got additional functionality by clicking the “What’s New” link at the top of one of the Apps pages: That’s how she found Google Sites—a Web-page creation application that’s now critical to Hunt’s relationship with clients. “Every time I post an opportunity onto those sites, when I sign in, it’s in the form of a document—some kind of paperwork that the physician will have to sign. I post it directly to the site, share that with the doctors, and they click that link. They don’t have anything to figure out.” Drake says that sharing forms online reduces paper and mailing costs—and saves time, too. Above all, Drake says, the collaboration capabilities delivered by Google Apps have revolutionized Hunt’s workflow: Essentially, people can work from anywhere as long as they’re signed into Google. Hunt has not yet transferred its email over to Gmail—dealing with the legacy system has been too much of a monster, www.destinationCRM.com CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | JANUARY 2009 http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - January 2009

CRM - January 2009 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point The Shots Heard ’Round the World 30,000-Foot Views Of the Cloud Stuffing the Ballot Box— With Complaints The Marketing Line for ’09 CRM on Twitter Technology Helps Insurance Weather the Storm Required Reading The Google-ization of CRM The Feedback Funnel Email: What’s Inside? Shake Your Moneymakers Lead Sweet Lead Incentives at the Speed of Lightpath Sales Contentment for Content Management A Worthwhile Excursion Into Call Recording Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - January 2009

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