Yesterday, I had enjoyable conversations with a customer working with salesforce.com and AppExchange and Simon Wheeldon who heads up AppExchange in Europe Uh? Why do that.
Professional accountants I speak with are anxious to find ways of better managing their relationships with clients and winning new business. Putting aside the need for a business model that allows your firm to ‘sell,’ my natural response is to point them in the direction of blogs as a medium for communication and interaction. But there comes a point where gathering and using formal, structured information is both useful and appropriate. Especially if you have a telemarketing operation (which a blog cannot trump) or if you have a partner dedicated to winning new clients. There are are other opportunities as well.
SF.com brings something very different to the client relationship management (CRM) party. Sure – it’s got contact management, there’s a mobile module, pipeline management and all that good stuff. But there are several ways in which SF.com is a viable alternative to say an Act! or SalesLogix:
- It’s a service (SaaS) so you pay as you go for the number of users you wish to have and for as long as you need.
- You can jump in at the point that’s appropriate to your needs. Check out the ‘editions’ page to get a feel of what this means
- There’s a 30-day free trial to the Team Edition (entry level really) so you have a chance to see if it is right for you without forking over an upfront fee.
- But where SF.com stands out is in its AppExchange. Here you’ll find around 250 add-on applications to extend the way you use CRM.
For instance, there’s a connector module called AccountDynamics that splices SF.com to QuickBooks. How cool is that? This is a great example of how you can mix the online and on-premise worlds. I’m not so anal as to assume software is an either/or choice so if you’ve got clients who use QB, then providing them with advice about bolting these applications together could be useful in taking their business forward. Think in these terms – marrying mobile sales people and in-house accounting provides genuine business value.
In discussing AppExchange with Simon Wheeldon, it transpires that many companies use the API (the gateway to the guts of SF.com) to develop in-house solutions that don’t become part of the publicly available services. Simon says around 45% of the SF.com traffic goes through the API. That’s significant. Typical applications will be those cruddy spreadsheet or small database applications that are used in sales and marketing but which are not connected to other systems in any meaningful way. This allows companies to consolidate their apps and get a better measure of control over the whole process. A significant benefit. But what about customers?
I spoke with Paul Court who heads operations at Globix – a managed services provider with UK centres based in London. Their customers are typically FTSE250 midcap companies. To Paul, SF.com plus AppExchange is a no brainer because it avoids the costly effort required to develop applications that are non-core but still in that ‘must have’ category. Paul is a straight talking person who knows how to communicate benefits from a business perspective and can give you the technical low down. I recommend contacting him if this is of interest to you. Louisa Benckendorff at Nelson Bostock (020 7792 7435) can facilitate that along with arranging calls directly with the SF.com and AppExchange team.
If you’re an existing apps vendor then SF.com will bend over backwards to help you. The price you get from customers is 100% of what you choose to charge. There is no revenue share. So from both yours and customer perspectives, end user cost is entirely transparent. You will need to go through a validation process and SF.com is picky about quality. But that’s all to the good.
Finally, if you’re concerned about the long term cost of running a collection of SaaS style products then consider this:
- Globix would not exist let alone be in growth mode if its services were uncompetitive compared with on-premise alternatives
- SF.com has a conversion rate from free trials of around 7% – way higher than I’d expect
- Sandhill has an excellent analysis of how SaaS in general makes sense.
Technorati Tags: AppExchange, client relationships, client_marketing, salesforce.com
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Dennis,
Great stuff. I think this will present good fodder for our conversation tomorrow. Two questions come to mind, though.
1) While there is no cost to the OEM/AppExchange partner (no revenue share), customers do need to be SF.com customers, too. So if someone wants to use an AppExchange accounting app, they need to pony up the $85 for a SF.com seat at a minimum, right?
2) Have you looked at the complexity of the APIs? It seems relatively easy, but I'm trying to paint a mental picture on what it's like to become a NetWeaver partner versus what it takes to become an AppExchange vendor.
Looking forward to tomorrow,
J
Jason,
To download and install apps from the AppExchange one must be a SF.com (ie CRM) customer. However, with the advent of the OEM product, some partners (5 to date, and Remend as an example) will offer similar products both as an AppExchange add-on to the CRM and as a stand alone product on the OEM platform.
We should talk about the revenue differences to the partners of these options tomorrow.
-mark