Tough Questions to ask Your SaaS Vendor

Smart Company – An Australian online business magazine ran an interesting story today about the proliferation of software-as-a-service vendors and the attraction of this model for SME’s.

Whilst this isn’t news, Michael’s story delved into the important issues surrounding the need to ensure your SaaS vendor has the right infrastructure, expertise, and security in place to protect your business data.

Ask questions and review the provider’s written policies. Your questions should cover the:

• Type of facilities and security arrangements in place – reputation and history are important.
• Infrastructure and virus protection used.
• Backup procedures and storage – think business continuity planning.
• Privacy policies.
• Level of data encryption to protect website transactions.
• Hardware and power redundancy.
• Qualifications of operations staff.
• Hours and procedures of site monitoring.

I think Michael only addressed half the issue. In reality customers need to also examine what contracts and legal terms are in place to govern data ownership. As we’ve seen in the US this year, when SaaS vendors go bust it gets very ugly very quickly for customers.

So whilst your data might be secure what are you going to do if the service is shut off by the Administrators?

Customers need to be asking questions including:

1. Do you have clear ownership of your data AND the right to demand your data from the vendor or whomever is in control of the vendor if the service is shut down for a period of more than X hours?
2. What recourse do you have to get your data in a timely manner?
3. Is the vendor obliged to warn you in advance of a likely shut down of the service?

Now let’s take that a step further.

Data is one thing, but what about the customisations you have built into the SaaS solution? The sales reports, the sales process, the email templates, your marketing campaigns, your business dashboards, knowledge base, quote templates, and document library – do you see the broader issue? Yep, the data’s secure but we’re screwed as we can’t get it and nor can we get our customisations.

So whilst it’s important to ensure the vendor has a proper data centre and knows what they are doing you need to ask a lot more questions and be prepared to put the vendor under a pretty harsh spotlight. Your ability to operate your business depends on it. The worst case scenario is you pay a premium to get your data back and are then faced with having to implement a new CRM system – more implementation cost, more training cost, more unproductive hours.

These types of issues are why we chose to partner with SugarCRM as the core CRM platform that we recommend for our customers. No other vendor in the CRM space provides customers with the options and peace of mind as SugarCRM.

Here’s why two key reasons why I make that statement:

1. SugarCRM can be deployed on your own infrastructure, Sugar’s Cloud, or a hosting partner of your choice
2. If you choose a hosting provider it’s a very simple process for them to extract the system structure and send this to you so that you also have a back up of the CRM system – in addition to the system data.

This is peace of mind. This is SugarCRM putting control in your hands.

CRM Vendors Continue to Confuse the Social Media Space

I continue to spend time working on our strategy and product offering around social media for the B2B world. Having evolved our business from the CRM space, we keep a close eye on what some of the big dicks are doing and I continue to be profoundly disappointed at what I’m seeing. And whilst it dismays me that I have to mention SFDC twice in the one month, it is necessary as yet again, the propaganda from SFDC has hit the airwaves without anyone being critical of what it all means.

Firstly, this initiative is not ground breaking. I commented on this recently in another blog post and stand by those comments and this additional post.

The article in question goes to great lengths to promote the failings of the social media monitoring tools (even mentioning the thought leaders like Radian6 and Techrigy) creating in my opinion a Benioff-esque tone of “they’re not a CRM so clearly they can’t be any good” as well as promoting a “jump in with jack boots” approach to interacting with the community

Example #1

After all, monitoring a conversation is one thing, but responding to it is another entirely — the domain of CRM, something Salesforce knows better than almost anyone else.

Monitoring or listening is one of the most fundamental activities of any company wanting to harness the power of the groundswell (with due credit to Li and Bernoff).

SFDC’s strategy seems to not so much put them on a collision course with the community monitoring start ups but puts you the customer on a collision course with your own community. I can’t help but feel SFDC are rushing into this space with grand plans about how you can use their platform to “respond” to social media activity yet they haven’t given a second of time to understanding the strategy that MUST reside behind the use of web 2.0 tools.

These “monitoring tools” deliver far more value than they are given credit for. Tools like Radian6 and Techrigy have a rich set of features that if used properly will allow a company to quickly and easily tap into the true feeling of the community. And it’s not just the “I’m interesting” bit that you should be tracking. Why not use these tools to keep an ear to what the community is saying about your strategic customers. Can you imagine going to one of your major customers with a solution to a problem that you unearthed via Radian6 when they probably don’t even know the problem exists? How can you use this information to deliver innovation to a major customer? I’m sorry but SFDC isn’t going to do that for you…

Example #2

But monitoring thousands of conversations across Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and blog comments is only part of the challenge. You still have to respond to them.

Absolute rubbish. If anyone goes into this thinking they need to respond to every piece of social noise about their company or products then they will fail quickly (and spectacularly).

This is what you’ll be doing if you follow what the author and SFDC are suggesting:

Due credit to Marta Zagan

Let me repeat something else Marta Zagan suggests – “The goal is not to control the conversation”.

In simple terms, the goal of using social network analytics is to watch, listen, and share some information with your community.

Don’t ever think you can skip the listen bit. And without tools like Radian6 or Techrigy you won’t be listening properly. Brian Solis (Social Media Manifesto) commented – “It’s about conversations, and the best communicators start as the best listeners”. Think about that for a minute. Isn’t this suggesting we step back and listen, then contribute? Not jump in boots and all with a human-being charged with responding and controlling?

Don’t go jumping in thinking you can communicate. You will need humans involved, but more importantly you need to have everyone understanding what the strategy is and what effort and commitment is required. Because this social media stuff isn’t easy. Get your VP of Sales in and let them see the data, let the Exec’s see what people are saying, in fact, make it a priority to have non-sales and marketing people looking at some of this information so that you can gain insights into the information.

CRM will have a role to play in how you engage with your communities, but it can’t be the driving force behind this. You must have everyone understanding how you as a company will harness these tools to deliver a dialogue and engagement. And you must also confront the problem of whether you even want this data in the CRM in the first place.

And just so you know, there are some CRM vendors doing some far more interesting work in this space than SFDC. RightNow is really ahead of the curve when it comes to customer experience management and SugarCRM are miles ahead in terms of how they are harnessing the power of open source with these great new web 2.0 tools.

Gorilla in their midst – hardly…

Your comments are welcome as always

Salesforce.com – behind the times but applauded by the analysts

Tech Target reports today that Salesforce.com is moving customer service into the cloud and allowing integration with communities, discussion groups, forums etc. Whilst the analysts are (yet again) falling victim to the relentless PR machine that is Salesforce.com what this release actually says is two things.

Firstly, they are way behind the times when it comes to innovation in customer service. What SFDC has announced here was actually pioneered by RightNow Technologies and Lithium around 3 years ago. RightNow Service was integrated into the Lithium community platform providing a complete customer experience solution that focuses the overall customer care experience. So why is it news that it’s taken SFDC 3 years to catch up?

Secondly, they still don’t get this whole social media/web 2.0 space. Their approach so far has been to latch themselves onto other people’s ideas and let hubris take over. I particularly liked the comment from SSPA VP Ragsdale – “They’ve done a good job of latching the Salesforce brand with the FaceBook brand”. Many SFDC customers must be truly confused as to what all this means.

Innovation in customer service (or customer experience management as it is rightfully called) is being done elsewhere. Here’s a good example – Greg Gianforte – not spewing out noise or grandstanding, but actually getting out into the field and talking to real customers, listening to real business issues and bringing this back into his organisation.

Ragsdale rightly comments that as many organisations are new to social networking and many of the web 2.0 ideas and need help understanding how to leverage these ideas and technology components – something we’ve been championing at Smart Selling for a while now.

The Wiki is Not Always the Best Solution

One of my many Google Alerts arrived this evening and a particular entry caught my eye. Despite the fact the first part of the blog post was really good, it went on to propose a resolution to a sales reporting problem that has sent me into a quiet rage.

As much as I support and promote the use of Wiki’s in organisations, suggestions like those contained in this post make me angry as it’s an example of technology being used outside its traditional scope to fix a problem that has been caused by technology being misapplied, and then reinforced by a major dose of general corporate incompetence.

Whilst Stewart’s idea has merit, in essence, he’s suggesting the customer accept a band-aid solution rather than confronting the real issues and working towards a long term, sustainable, best practice outcome. And this is before I even start on the sad fact that this type of ‘work around’ has to be proposed for a terribly archaic reporting structure.

The information presented in the post outlines (at least) two fundamental business issues – and I’m not convinced that a Wiki is an acceptable solution on its own (though I will propose that a well resourced Wiki will help engage and deliver corporate change).

Problem #1

I get the feeling they are using a CRM solution and that it clearly hasn’t be configured to suit the needs of the organisation. Call me a sceptic but I’d say they are probably using Salesforce.com and engaged Salesforce.com PS team to configure the solution – so they have a beautifully configured CRM that does nothing to help them sell more effectively. Based on our experience of sales automation projects I’d suggest the VP of Sales was rail roaded by the Salesforce.com sales reps via their typical colour, light, and movement sales presentation and probably never thought to consult the people for whom the system relies on – the field sales person.

Resolution? Stop listening to your CRM vendor and actually listen to your sales team. Look at your sales processes and start understanding your sales data. A Wiki is not going to do this for you but can become a central knowledge repository for specific sales, process, and how-to guides

Problem #2

Stewart’s proposal that a sales reporting Wiki might eventually allow the VP of Sales to analyse data ‘perhaps twice a week’ is fundamentally flawed. In fact it’s wrong.

Resolution? Get serious about your CRM use and how you report sales information. Implement a solution like Cloud9 Analytics. Cloud9 would provide this VP of Sales with the opportunity to take immediate action to improve sales performance and drive revenues.And by immediate I mean she could focus on the forecast breakers, the major customer deals and have any significant events delivered to her via a dashboard or directly to her BlackBerry.

Problem #3

Either the VP of Sales is in way over her head or she’s been given a charter to be mediocre. The role of a VP of Sales is to be a Sales Leader, not the resident reports monkey. The role of the VP of Sales is to reduce revenue risk, increase team productivity and facilitate collaboration. At a minimum the company needs to invest in a sales coaching tool like Private Sales Coach. This would allow the sales reps to take greater ownership of the progress of their opportunities and allow the VP of Sales more time to spend being a sales coach and sales leader.

A wiki will help this company but not as a sales reporting tool. If the company wants to mature into a true Sales 2.0 organisation then they need to do more than just put a wiki in place.

Sales Leadership Conference

I’ve just arrived in Chicago for the Selling Power Sales Leadership Conference. I came up from Australia back in March for their Las Vegas event and found it so relevant and informative that I’ve made the effort to come back for this event.

The agenda looks really interesting and I’m pleased it’s got a strong focus on leadership and culture. I spend a lot of time on these two topics as I find they are always at the heart of the issues and challenges that we are engaged to deal with for our customers. I’ve noticed that Sales 2.0 seems to have really taken hold in the US, but is still virtually unknown in Australia or APAC for that matter.

This event kicks off two weeks in North America for me. I’m hitting Atlanta, Boston, and San Mateo also – speaking to a range of vendors and potential partners. A number of these are really exciting and represent the opportunity to work with some really smart, innovative people.

Hopefully I’ll have some downtime to catch up with my buddies in Boston, maybe catch a Patriots game and get re-acquainted with my good fried Sam Adams.