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Cloud Extend for Salesforce
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 25 August 2011, 22:04 IST
BOSTON: Boosting sales team productivity, Cloud Extend for Salesforce will debut next week at Dreamforce '11, putting sales and marketing professionals in control of designing and deploying sales guides and processes. With this announcement, Active Endpoints, Inc., the process automation company, champions the business user with an application that automates sales processes, yet is drop dead simple to learn and use, requiring no technical skills whatsoever - a point confirmed by the company's customer and partner organizations.
"Salesforce can sometimes be intimidating to even the most seasoned sales and marketing professionals," said Mark Taber, CEO of Active Endpoints. "By enabling consumers to add process to Salesforce, Cloud Extend could easily be the single most important feature to drive adoption and the expected return on investment. Getting consistency on first call handling, automated sales call follow-up and automated reviews of deals in a pipeline are just a few examples."
Customer Validation for Cloud Extend for Salesforce
PSA Insurance & Financial Services is just one of the companies building momentum for Cloud Extend for Salesforce. A provider of insurance, employee benefits, retirement plans and wealth management services, PSA will simplify its Salesforce implementation by providing sales managers, marketing and operations with highly intuitive, graphical sales guide applications, and in turn, provide its sales reps with structured, high value sales guides. Among other things, PSA is looking to Cloud Extend to help sales reps capture expiration dates of its customers' non-PSA lines of business. Knowing these expiration dates is vital because it identifies pivotal times to follow up and cross-sell additional PSA policies and services. Sales reps often forget to ask for the expiration date or forget to set a reminder to follow up at the right time.
"Cloud Extend will dramatically improve the ease of use for our sales reps by leading them down the garden path of the most effective sales processes and ensuring that we capture the information we need to best serve clients," said Andrew Bartels, director of IT at PSA. "Initially, we thought Cloud Extend would be the icing on the cake of our Salesforce implementation. We now know it will be a critical component to maximizing our investment in Salesforce."
Going forward, PSA will use Cloud Extend sales guides to replicate successful sales patterns and enforce data consistency associated with expiration dates. Specifically, a pre-defined sales guide for first call or follow-up call will automatically:
* record expiration dates
* put a reminder task in Salesforce that includes call-back day and time
* prompt the rep to identify information to send to the prospect, such as a brochure about PSA's employee benefits offerings
* invite prospects to PSA's proprietary events
* send HTML emails using pre-defined templates
* share information about the sales call with a PSA manager via Salesforce Chatter social networking technology
PSA expects a dramatic economic impact as a result of improving its cross-selling process with Cloud Extend. For example, improving a sales rep's productivity by 10 percent with annual insurance renewals of $1,000,000 would represent an additional $100,000 annually, in perpetuity. Scaling this across 30 or more reps would represent several million dollars in increased annual revenue to the company, in perpetuity.
Justin Hoffman, PSA marketing director said, "Cloud Extend sales guides don't take the decisions away from the user. The user still makes the decisions, but guides and their use in task creation (amongst other capabilities) ensure that things aren't forgotten. Our reps are reminded at the right time to re-engage the prospect, and the guides make it very easy for them to quickly choose the best method for their specific need. This has a huge impact on our ability to increase our close ratio."
Use Cases in the Enterprise
The accelerating pace of new product introductions, growing number of competitive threats and changing role of the buyer are overwhelming sales and support staff who rely on traditional, IT-bound sales processes (or worse, ones relying on manual playbooks or memorized processes). Such processes evolve slowly and erratically and often interfere with sales professionals who "just want to sell."
Cloud Extend supports the entire lead-to-close sales lifecycle, from qualifying leads to closing initial deals, identifying cross-selling opportunities and beyond. Compelling use cases include:
* Ensuring consistency in delivering company introductions, product introductions, and summary value propositions.
* Ensuring execution of sales call follow-up activities such as those practiced by PSA (above) and other activities, including assigning tasks to other sales team or marketing personnel for follow up.
* Automating the pipeline review process with a sales guide that lets sales reps self-evaluate the accuracy of an opportunity's "sales stage" and "next steps" and automatically updates these fields based on the completion of the guide.
Feature highlights of Cloud Extend for Salesforce include:
* Native integration with Salesforce
* Drop dead simple creation and modification of custom interactive sales guides
* One click to publish and share sales guides with the entire sales team
* Sample guides for lead nurturing, sales qualification and call scripting to get users up and running in minutes
* Scales with the business via Active Endpoints' high performance, multi-tenant platform
* Social and mobile support for iPad, iPhone, Android and Chatter
For systems integrators and consultants specializing in Salesforce implementations and optimization, Cloud Extend for Salesforce will help jump-start joint customers with their Salesforce adoption - in new implementations as well as those that are established but underutilized. Some Cloud Extend partners share their views and first impressions:
Tech Mahindra, part of the $12.5 billion Mahindra group, is a global systems integrator and business transformation consulting services firm exclusively focused on the communications industry and is a strategic partner of Active Endpoints. Manish Vyas, senior vice president, Tech Mahindra Americas, said, "Tech Mahindra is excited to enable its customers to add process automation to their Salesforce implementation, enhancing their sales and support efficiency and therefore increasing the value from their Salesforce investment. We believe Cloud Extend for Salesforce to be the next generation of sales force integrated workflow solution in the cloud and has tremendous potential going forward."
Vikas Gupta, vice president-cloud computing competency, said, "Tech Mahindra has long been committed to building a cloud portfolio for its clients and to helping them excel by advising, enabling and managing the ecosystem of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Our partnership with Active Endpoints and Cloud Extend for Salesforce has a strategic position within our cloud computing roadmap. We will leverage this strategic partnership to achieve the status as the IT preferred provider in the telecommunications industry and cloud computing systems integration."
Bluewolf is a leading agile business consulting firm and top-tier salesforce.com partner. "The salesforce.com ecosystem is leading cloud innovation," said Corinne Sklar, vice president of marketing. "Increasing sales productivity is a key performance indicator for our clients, and solutions that support automation like Cloud Extend keep reps selling, not administering technology.
Baker Communications is one of the fastest growing performance improvement companies in the world. "Many of our clients struggle with adoption issues of their Salesforce installations," said Christie Bissias, chief technology officer at Baker Communications. "For a CRM to truly be a sales enablement system, the system must capture the correct and required data for the users to follow the correct processes. Many CRMs are primarily only used as sales accounting systems because they are rich but complex applications, and it is not a salesperson's strength to capture all of the correct data and follow specific processes. It is to sell. The step-by-step processes Cloud Extend for Salesforce can enable and automate have the potential to ignite our clients' adoption of Salesforce and maximize their ROI."