End of year goodies
End of year brings out some interesting goodies from various workshops competing with Santa for big kids’ attention. Some of it is pretty good stuff. Here’s a sampling of the best end of year product announcements from the cloud community designed to put you in the post holiday, already-back-at-work spirit.
Xactly Inspire
Xactly, the sales compensation experts in the cloud, announced Xactly Inspire the other day. It’s the kind of tool that managers will love because it gives them both insight into what’s happening in the sales funnel while providing advice about how to use it. For a very long time, sales managers could have one but not necessarily the other so this announcement should please the sales manager who has everything except quota.
This cloud-based coaching and on-boarding solution enables managers to monitor and predict sales activity based on the data flying around in the SFA and compensations systems. So what, you might say, we could always do that in sales meetings, what’s the big deal? Ummm, it’s the meeting part that I think is most interesting.
We’re always talking about ways to boost sales rep productivity but it rarely dawns on us that one less meeting could do a lot to put reps in the field and maintain their managers’ sanity and blood pressure. This is essentially an analytics application designed to derive meaning from the chaos that is sales—something that could actually accelerate the sales process. So, I’d give this innovation 5 out of 5 reindeer in my magical mythical year-end scoring system.
NetSuite OneWorld
Yes, we’re not going in alphabetical order this time. I do this to discourage entrepreneurs from naming their companies AAAAsoftware and the like, an idea that comes directly from the analog world of the yellow pages and bail bondsmen.
Anyhow, NetSuite has for many years aimed at providing a back office suite in the cloud that enables any size of enterprise to manage a global empire completely in the cloud from any terrestrial location. That’s a tall order considering business models, ecommerce strategies, currencies, languages, accounting rules, and global opportunities.
NetSuite has just put a marker down on a slew of new and improved products with names like Multi-subsidiary management, Multi-location inventory management, Multi-book accounting, global item and vendor records and more. I don’t understand some of this but it looks like the people who need to, indeed do.
NetSuite is on the threshold of being a billion dollar company and this functionality should do a lot to propel it to that club. If you’re counting, that would be 2 billion-dollar companies for Larry. Not too shabby. NetSuite has been a solid 4 out of 5 reindeer company for a long time but this introduction deserves an extra Rudolph so it’s 5 out of 5 for me here.
Salesforce
Several years ago Salesforce passed a tipping point, which makes it virtually impossible for it to not introduce products, so big has its footprint in platform technology become. It also doesn’t hurt that Salesforce buys compatible companies with leadership teams and technologies that bolt together into its vision.
One of its latest wrinkles is to offer an array of solutions for both the enterprise and the SMB markets, the better to maintain its pricing at the higher end, I think. This week, Salesforce introduced Opportunity Management for its SMB service and support offering, Desk.com. The idea is on solid footing. In small companies especially, employees wear multiple hats, the situation is more fluid and people take on the responsibilities that excite them, at least in my experience.
Opportunity Management for Desk.com relieves service people from the bureaucratic overhead of telling customers that they can’t take an order but that they can connect you with the sales desk which will only place you on a brief hold with—pick your least favorite music, it’s always there.
Seriously, though, the lines have been blurring for a long time between sales and service and this introduction simply follows the trend of enabling SMBs to be more responsive to commonsense customer needs. Another solid 5 out of 5 Reindeer performance for the company.
Selfie-mirror
Speaking of commonsense, the Selfie-mirror provides a bit of comic relief just when you might need it. Not in line with the holidays, my first impression of the mirror was straight out of the Brothers Grimm—“mirror, mirror on the wall…” that should be enough to give you the concept though you can get more here in a short video. Is this finally the future of the telephone beyond your pocket?
The futurist in me saw huge possibilities. The mirror has an HD camera, hi-fi sound, and Internet integration built in. Some of its uses include recording and transmitting anything you record in the mirror, which would make video blogging or social media participation a snap. The mirror also has home security benefits that enable the user to monitor anything happening in front of it at any time.
What’s impressive about this, to me, is merging multiple advanced capabilities into a single product unimaginable just a few moments ago. It is a great example of niche creation and of supply creating its own demand. Selfie Mirror gets 6 out of 5 reindeer for innovation. Don’t ask me how you get 6 out of 5, it’s part of the magic of the season. Enjoy yours!
To personalize or to be authentic
You might ask what the difference is between personalization and authenticity in CRM and the answer is subtle. For a long time I have felt—and said—that we over emphasize personalization when what customers really want is authenticity. But examples are hard to find, especially in our current culture where personalization is strongly emphasized and authenticity draws quizzical looks. Perhaps you are feeling that way right now.
Nonetheless, earlier this month in its August 10 and 17 double vacation issue The New Yorker served up a perfect example. For reasons that I don’t understand but am eternally grateful for, this magazine has, for many years, been an unofficial source of great material for the social CRM age. Malcolm Gladwell (author of many articles and books like Outliers and The Tipping Point) is an editor there as is James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds.
The article that impressed me comes almost literally out of left field. In “Learning to Speak Lingerie” Peter Hessler takes us on a trip to visit with Chinese lingerie entrepreneurs establishing a beachhead for their wares in upper Egypt. The Chinese are learning Arabic and have no familiarity with Islam or any other religion. They sell lingerie to women (accompanied by men and in one case a significant fraction of a woman’s whole family) who are dressed in traditional headscarves or more.
Despite the handicaps of language and culture, the Chinese are making inroads into the market and at one point in the article, I think you can see the handicaps working to advantage so that Chinese men are more effective at selling lingerie to Egyptian women than Egyptian men are.
Consider this: Through a translator, an Egyptian woman speaking to the reporter said, “I can’t describe how they [Chinese merchants] do it. But they can look at the item [of lingerie] and give it to the woman [i.e. a customer] and that’s it.”
That’s interesting but what comes next is key: “An Egyptian man would look at the item, and then look at the woman, and then he might make a joke or laugh about it.”
Wow! It feels creepy just reading that last sentence. Talk about personalization gone bad. The Chinese don’t have that problem in part because they’re still learning the language but also because they are focused on being authentic and in this case it means providing just enough service to help with selection and not trying to get into the mind space of the customer. Hessler documents this when he continues to quote the Egyptian woman, “When you buy something, you feel the thoughts of the person selling it. And with the Chinese their brains don’t go thinking about women’s bodies.”
This struck me as highly rational and to the point of good CRM. We make a big effort to personalize customer encounters and truth be told some of our efforts are really good and deserving of praise. But as in the example above, one person’s personalization can easily lead to another person’s feeling an insult with a resultant no sale.
That’s why my position is to favor authenticity whenever possible. It’s never perfectly clear when a customer will feel the love or something else so the question must be, why take the chance?
My suggestion to would-be personalizers is to first understand the moment of truth that your customer is actually in—it might not be what you think. Then work within the moment of truth to ensure that you are providing the authentic moment that customers want. You can’t do this unless you turn your data gathering and analytics toward metrics that tell you concretely how you’re doing. A man selling lingerie might be in particular danger of not understanding the customer’s moment of truth and personalizing it with an off-base comment (or offer) will only exacerbate an awkward moment.
Most products and services don’t serve intimate and private needs but they still come with moments of truth and customers still look for authenticity within them. I still believe that personalization is a decision on the part of the customer not the vendor. It often happens well past the halfway point of an encounter when the customer decides that, yes this fits my need in this moment of truth. That decision is often subliminal, but it certainly happens.
The Mouseless Era
Like driving on the interstate, you can cross boundaries without noticing but after a while you just know you aren’t in Kansas any more. I had one of those moments the other day talking about mobile technology. It occurred to me that calling what we do on devices “mobile computing” was just wrong, at least linguistically, but also I think conceptually and that’s important.
Mobile has always meant a few things but mostly it implied some user at the periphery of a wireless network tied into a central server/database/hub. It was more of a master-slave relationship where the mobile user could use some but not all of the functionality available because it wouldn’t all fit on the small screen or small device. The implication was that the mobile app was a subset of the app that ran on desktops and laptops.
Gradually, mobile came to mean whatever you did on a mobile device with the understanding that devices were wireless and the apps you were using resided in a browser. It was cool stuff but over a short time, browsers have been pushed aside in favor of apps specific to a task. At some point, and I think it was when we went from web browser to app, we left Kansas and invented yet another kind of computing, which I am calling mouseless until something really sexy comes along.
A good example of mouseless computing can be found in the Salesforce Service for Apps announced this week. Powered by the Service Cloud, Service for Apps enables companies to embed customer service into apps running on mobile devices. The new designation does not come from where the apps run but what they facilitate and, to be clear, this mouseless computing is really about the ability to escape the confines of an office and a desk even if you never leave the building—perhaps especially if you never leave the building. An executive or manager with a device has the ability to run the business from the device, full stop.
There are five customer service channels or bits of functionality in the Salesforce Mobile SDK for Service for Apps that bridge computing, telephony, media, and social media and bring us to mouseless computing including: Chat; Tap to call; Knowledgebase; Case management; and a concierge service that the company continues to insist on linking with some form of disaster by associating the term SOS with it (Salesforce SOS for Apps).
A business can either build business-specific apps and embed Service for Apps into its larger CRM instances on mobile devices or it can add the Service for Apps SDK to existing business-specific mobile apps. How will this be used? Here’s what I think.
We call them apps but they are also the business ends—or customer ends—of specific processes designed to make life easier for customers. These embedded apps enable a vendor to let the customer decide when it might be necessary to step out of a more common service or support process and ask for specific assistance from a live agent or get content such as video.
Anyone worried that this technology will create a moral hazard by enabling customers to over-use live help should relax, no one (okay, no sane people) elects to get help for fun. Letting the customer decide when to jump out of an automated process is highly enabling, it tells customers that the vendor trusts them enough to let them make the decision.
It also lets the vendor off the hook for trying to come up with, and program for, every conceivable service situation. Instead, it lets the vendor say, here are our service processes, which cover most of the contingencies for this company and its products. If you need something else, please use one of these modalities to get action. This offers the real possibility that no one (okay, no sane person) will ever sully your reputation in social media or a sentiment site again simply because they were unceremoniously kicked out of a service process because no one on your side ever considered that a customer could do something unheard of in your service app.
I can see this technology used every day though not for rote processes. Its utility might be best underscored in a highly technical situation where the customer might be up to elbows in complexity and needs to access deep expertise in a context sensitive moment. I can see customers using the video chat functionality to show a service person some kind of abnormality or failure, for instance. The concierge service (SOS) may be the best example because the idea implies a high-end service for a limited number of situations.
At any rate, this constellation of functions and how they are delivered has caused me to think that we’re in new waters, thinking differently again about the vendor-customer relationship and how to solve for the customer. Did you know I wrote a book about that? It’s now available in digital form at Amazon. I have to admit though, I never considered the mouseless angle but there it is.
Microsoft Shrugs (Salesforce? nah!)
Well, how about them apples?
In a Reuters article out today, Microsoft said it wasn’t really pursuing Salesforce at this time citing the high cost—about $50 billion for the market cap and what must be calculated for a premium likely to be extracted from any would-be suitor.
As I have been saying, the time when Salesforce would have been a smart acquisition has long passed. When conditions were right for a purchase, the very shrewd people running software companies poo-pooed the whole idea of cloud computing and were not interested. Now, despite some credible efforts at building cloud infrastructures, these same companies have been disrupted.
The same Reuters article quotes Chief Executive Bill McDermott of SAP declining interest too, saying, “We have never bought something that was impaired and in decline.” Clearly implying that Salesforce’s cloud computing software was becoming commoditized—as if legacy on-premise software is still in its hay day.
What cheek. McDermott can only wish his company was as impaired and declining as rapidly as Salesforce. What exactly does impaired mean anyhow? Is it a new GAAP standard?
Related posts here, here, here, and here.
A Salesforce Bid Is Possible (but smart?)
One billion dollars. Buying Salesforce would take about 60 of these piles.
The latest Bloomberg reporting on the possible acquisition of Salesforce has more meat on the bones but still no evidence beyond reports of conversations. But it is completely within the realm of possibility that Salesforce could be bought. The meat on the bones comes from some anonymous sources with first hand knowledge of discussions that Salesforce might have had over the last month or two with a variety of mostly unnamed suitors.
Microsoft has emerged as the possible suitor and the story seems credible. But keep in mind there does not appear to be an offer on the table. Add to this the inevitable logic that markets consolidate and a mature market has room for two contenders. If Microsoft were to buy Salesforce it would set up the dichotomy or duopoly of Oracle vs. Microsoft/Salesforce in the CRM market.
It wouldn’t happen immediately but other full suite CRM vendors like Sugar CRM and SAP could possibly wither on the vine. IBM might buy Sugar to make a go at competing with the duopoly and SAP would still be a formidable ERP player though it has been late to the cloud and one wonders if it could keep up.
At the same time, ancillary vendors like Marketo would either have to evaluate being acquired or being frozen out since both Oracle and Salesforce have their own marketing capabilities. That’s just the beginning. In a two-brand market—think Coke and Pepsi, or think about DB2 and Oracle—the customer relationship becomes more retail oriented.
The danger I see, and I have written about this before, is that in a two horse race, innovation takes a back seat. Each vendor can figure out its unique differentiators and tend to its own flock, staying away from expensive competitive wars. This is the dangerous part of the scenario since Salesforce, far more than any other vendor in the market has been the innovative engine of the industry. In recent years, Salesforce has kept up a regular cadence of innovating a disruption and the market has taken the next two years playing catch up only to find that Salesforce’s cadence has disrupted things again. There is no telling if this cadence could be kept up if Salesforce became part of Microsoft or any other vendor for that matter.
You can heap all the accolades you want on Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, and he deserves some for his insistence on making Microsoft more relevant across a broad swath of his company’s product lines. But making Salesforce a part of Microsoft—or any other large vendor—would insert Salesforce into a competitive landscape for resources already carved out by innovative projects inside Microsoft. Also, the Senior team at Salesforce including co-founders Marc Benioff (CEO) and Parker Harris (CTO) could not be expected to stay on for very long and it is their innovative genius that has produced today’s Salesforce, a company full of Blue Ocean thinking and projects reminiscent of Microsoft in the 1990’s.
For that reason, I think Salesforce, a roughly $5 billion company, barely able to register for the Fortune 500, is too big to be acquired. Taking Salesforce out would have a deleterious effect on innovation, and thus competition, in the industry. It risks creating a duopoly. Perhaps one of the reasons for the rumors of Salesforce retaining bankers for advice about its future is for the specialized legal expertise that might be needed if the Department of Justice or even the European Union decided to weigh in on anti-trust grounds.
There is a lot to consider in all this. It’s not just about two companies considering a merger and trying to set a price or raise the cash. It’s about the future of the whole industry.
After about 1930 the only cars imported to the U.S. were luxury models and sports cars, the country’s manufacturing prowess along with the devastation of the Second World War provided a more or less protected market in North America. During that time automotive innovation barely budged. Many of the innovations we think of as commonplace today came from outside vendors trying to innovate around U.S. patents. Things like the dual overhead cam engine, disk brakes, and front wheel drive were forced on the Big Three automakers from Japanese manufacturers in the 1980’s.
Consolidating the CRM market into a duopoly now would have a similar effect that could stifle innovation and launch a status quo era in software. But we’re just getting started here and that’s why a deal to acquire Salesforce doesn’t make sense to me.
