Gaurav Dhillon is the CEO of SnapLogic, makers of cloud and on-premise integration products. Gaurav is the former CEO of Informatica. Companies everywhere have jumped on the Salesforce.com bandwagon, reaping the benefits of this CRM solution. But why stop there?
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Even with all of Salesforce?s new social enterprise product launches and acquisitions (Assistly, Dimdim, and Radian6), its applications can?t support everything needed to run a well-oiled business. Most likely, you have important but underutilized customer or sales-related data living outside Salesforce ? in your financial or file sharing applications, or even in a partner?s systems. And you probably wish you could gather deeper business intelligence and analytics than what?s delivered through Salesforce?s standard reports.
Many companies are getting more out of Salesforce by connecting it with useful applications that may or may not be supported in the Salesforce AppExchange. Read on for the top five business app categories that fill Salesforce?s gaps, and can further enhance the work of your enterprise sales team.
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1. Financial Systems
Gone are the days of running an invoice over to accounting. Business processes like these are now automated, but not usually in Salesforce. Companies that connect their QuickBooks, SAP or FinancialForce systems directly to Salesforce will get a more complete view of each customer and product line. Once your sales team can track when customers have paid invoices or when products have shipped, they can more effectively service their accounts.
2. Vertical Applications
No matter what industry you?re in, you?ve probably come across some valuable niche apps that meet the more unique needs of your business environment. In the media industry for example, advertising tracking, optimization and fulfillment systems like Operative are mission critical. For example, Pandora was able to save tons of billing and sales support time by pushing more advertising details from Operative into Salesforce, such as actual sales delivery, third-party delivery data, processed vs. unprocessed ad details, products, discounts, proposed vs. actual clicks and actual invoice data.
If you're a doing a lot of sales online, you may want to sync your ecommerce sales system with Salesforce. Or, you may have other important software specific to running your association, manufacturing operations, insurance business, etc., which you could also integrate for increased productivity.
3. File Sharing and Storage
Many companies are asking their suppliers and partners to collaborate on joint business processes, like invoice or contract tracking. While these processes are most efficient when they?re synced with your Salesforce application, there are limitations to sharing and storing files in Salesforce.com. For instance, your partners and organization members probably don?t have Salesforce accounts. Your extended sales teams can realize greatly improved collaboration by connecting Salesforce.com to outside file sharing and storage applications, like Box.net or DocuSign.
4. Data Quality and Enrichment
Salesforce?s handy features won?t be useful at all if your company?s data is wrong or outdated. Therefore, leverage a data quality and enrichment solution to make sure your customer data is not only accurate, but enhanced beyond what people can easily track on their own. Tools like Data.com or Trillium can help you easily cleanse and enrich customer account data. You can even add things like geocodes or Dun & Bradstreet data for each company to make sure customers are assigned to the appropriate account services teams.
5. Business Intelligence
Since Salesforce?s reporting options are somewhat limited, every company can benefit from connecting it to a fully-featured business intelligence solution like Birst. By integrating Salesforce with a business intelligence solution that also analyzes key data from any finance, operations, marketing, social media, supply chain or other business application, you can unlock new opportunities for insight. For example, a business intelligence tool could help you look beyond sales data in isolation by merging social and web data from Twitter, Facebook and Google Analytics with your operational systems. That way, you?ll be able to visualize social media sentiment against actual sales data from Salesforce.com.
Of course, there are many other excellent examples of applications that complement Salesforce and help enterprise sales teams work in new and interesting ways. The key to finding these opportunities is to start by developing a clear picture of all the data assets that exist across your company and its partners, suppliers and the web at large. When you examine everything you have to work with, you?ll find ways to make each tool in your application portfolio more useful with comprehensive, trusted and timely data.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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