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Salesforce.com Basics Part 1: Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities

I've done Saleforce.com consulting for many small businesses and the thing that I realized is that many small business have little to no process at all. Therefore when it comes time to implement Salesforce.com, owners have a difficult time understanding the basic concepts and are reluctant to change.

I found with the larger companies I worked with, explaining Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities was a breeze. This is because larger companies have an established sales process and these terms are not new to employees.

So I've decided to write a couple of tutorials to help new users understand the very core components of Salesforce.com. Advanced users may find this boooooooring but that's OK this post isn't for you.

OK! New folks let's start off by talking about Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities.

Accounts:
Accounts in Salesforce.com represent all of the organizations or companies that are you DO BUSINESS with. Note that these are not just your customers but business parters and maybe even competitors. Accounts hold information about a company or an organization and nothing else. For example it would contain information about the employee count, annual revenue, stock ticker and anything else you need to know about the organization. If WalMart was one of your customers you'd create an Account called WalMart. Then other users would click on Accounts tab to find the WalMart Account and open it for more information. If you wanted to find out how to contact Sam Walton, that record would be stored in a different place.


Contacts:
And that leads us to Contacts. In Salesforce.com you also have Contacts. A Contact record contains information for each individual you do business with (like Sam Walton). A Contact Record stores information like phone number, email address and birthday. An important concept to understand is that a Contact MUST be associated with an Account. You cannot create a Contact without specifying which Account it belongs to. If you want to find out Sam Walton's contact information you'd find him in the Contacts tab. Alternatively you can also go to the WalMart Account record and scroll down. There (under the Contacts section) you will see all those Contacts that you have at WalMart.


Opportunities:
Finally Opportunities are the potential sales deals that are either dead or alive. Every Opportunity belongs to an Account. So if you were working on a sales pitch or deal with your customer WalMart, you'd probably create an Opportunity to track that. In the Opportunity you'd track everything about that deal. You'd track everything from what stage you are in the sales process to how much potential revenue you think this deal will close. If you have an RFP for this deal, the Opportunity would be a good place to upload it. Again all Opportunities belong to an Account. If you want to see all the current and past sales deals with WalMart you'd click on the WalMart Account and scroll down to the Opportunities Section. Or, you can click on the Opportunities tab to browse through all the deals in your system.

Hope this clarifies some confusion. If there are any questions fire away. Next time we'll talk about Leads

Try Before You Buy

There are many people who have referenced Gartner's report that 2008 is going to be a big year for SaaS. I think we can safely say that on-demand software is proving to work for many organizations and we will continually see adoption rise year after year. However, there's always going to be the skeptics that point out the hurdles of implementing hosted software.

In reality there are hurdles whenever you implement any kind of software system, hosted or not. This is nothing new. And in my experience, projects often fail because the organization did not test drive the product before buying.

For almost all SaaS products out there, you can easily go online and sign up for a demo account in seconds. Ok fine, maybe you'll have to talk to an annoying Sales Rep first, but no company is going to stop you from trying out their product. The beauty is that you don't need to install anything. If you try it and don't like it, then you just walk away there's no need to uninstall or format any gear.

So go ahead. Take it for a spin. Slam on the brakes a couple of times and initate a turn at 60 km/h. Isn't that what we do with all demos? I mean, everyone test drives the car they're about to buy so why not try the software you're about to drop $10,000 on?

Don't blame the dealer if you found out you got a Dodge Dynasty when you thought you were buying a Ferrari.

Thanks SaaS-sy year ahead

A question of demand

So how big is Saas in terms of revenue and business potential? Is it even worth pursuing?
Sam Law at The Damaged Pixel Blog mentioned this story from The Economist: http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10431816

Here's a summary of what it says:

• Investors keep throwing money at SaaS companies, such as NetSuite, which saw a 37% rise in its IPO price on the first day of trading. This seems to be a hot market indeed.
• Skeptics always said that data privacy and reliability would never make this business model feasible; however, NetSuite, Salesforce.com and a myriad of others are proving them wrong.
• As an example Salesforce.com, the market leader, serves more than 38,000 firms and recently signed up its millionth paying user. According to Gartner, the market for web-based applications reached $5.1 billion in 2007 and will grow to $11.5 billion by 2011—by which time it will account for over one-quarter of software sold to companies.
• However it is still not very clear where the profits are to be made. NetSuite offers a variety of on demand applications, while Salesforce.com is the leader in on-demand CRM. Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP have also jumped on the bandwagon.
• Nevertheless, profits are minimal. NetSuite has never posted a profit, while Salesforce is barely profitable and has an astonishing price-to-earnings ratio of 660!
  
• Other worries that arise are also how each on demand company will compete and stay alive. Salesforce.com is offering a platform for on demand applications called Force.com, but as CEO Marc Benioff points out: thousands of applications have already been written for the platform, but it is too early to say whether the idea will work.

Here's the fancy graph that shows the $billions that this industry is capable of producing:
So Gartner says that the on demand industry will grow from $5billion currently to around $12billion. Each sector seems to be predicted at growing at about the same rate. Collaboration seems to be the most wanted sector, followed by CRM.

Good read!

Pros and Cons of Software as a Service

This is about a post from another blog, I found it very interesting and well-balanced actually. Hard to find those these days. Maybe our blog isn't too balanced itself (we love SaaS, don't we!?).
It details (in not too many words) the pros and cons of software as a service (software on demand).
Here's the link:
http://dpixel.wordpress.com/2007/12/17/the-pros-and-cons-of-saas/
from the The Damaged Pixel Blog by Sam Law.

I agree with these pros and cons, although I think that the cons aren't as bad as they seem. But as the post points out it does depend on the company you pick to store your valuable data. I guess I say this because I am thinking of salesforce.com and that they are a pretty stable company that will secure your data.

Step number 1

Well, step number one would be to maybe consider buying the book:
Salesforce.com for Dummies.

Ok, it's more of an optional step number one, but the book is great to start you off and is an easy read.

Buy it/review it at Amazon

or set up an account on salesforce.com and get it for free

All You Kids Out There ...

This is my "Hello World" of blog entries, so I'd thought it would be fitting to explain: Why Warrior's Corner?

I've lived in Toronto my whole life and so watching Hockey Night in Canada almost became a ritual in my family. Without fail, every Saturday at 7:30 the Toronto Maple Leafs would be playing on CBC and during the first intermission there would be this segment called "Coach's Corner" with Don Cherry.

To sum it up, if Canada and Hockey had sex ... Don Cherry would be their baby. He's a straight shooter type of guy and probably the most outspoken Canadian. I always enjoyed watching his segment because he never sugar coated anything. If a player sucked, there would be no excuses, he would always call him out. And he's probably best known for the advice he gives to kids watching his segment. Sounds something like this:

"All you kids out there, don't be yapping to the referee. If there's one thing refs hate ... it would be players who complain and whine like little babies ... DON'T DO IT! (* fist pound on the table *) "

So how does this relate to what we're doing? Well, We've followed many blogs over the past 2 years. Frankly we're tired of reading about how some blogger with a Political Science degree thinks that textmypet.com is going to be the next Google. In my mind, I believe that there is a lot of garbage written by people who just don't get software. In fact, the Web 2.0 hype has gotten out of hand and every day a new wazooozie.com comes and goes.

We wanted to start writing about the real game-changers: people and companies who are actually changing the industry. We're not here to give kudos to the person who flipped textmypet.com for $100,000 and now thinks of himself as a "Serial Entrepreneur". Like Don, we want to lay it out on the table without the sugar coating and cherry on top. Some people may like it, but some might not. We're not here to masterfully script pleasurable posts just to drive AdSense revenue.

Take a little hit of Don Cherry:





Click Here for Don Cherry's Greatest Moments