Make Smaller Businesses Bigger with Salesforce.com

Posted on July 22nd, 2010 Adam Honig Comments 0

Until recently, smaller businesses that wanted to partner with large businesses often faced a significant barrier to entry: their technology. Namely, large business partners often wouldn’t bother integrating with small businesses’ systems.

Today, however, the cloud is changing that. Even small organizations have the opportunity to partner with large enterprises, and in some cases, they’re already using the same software, such as Salesforce.com or Oracle CRM On Demand.

To find out more about the benefits, challenges and opportunities for smaller businesses to use the cloud to work with big business partners, I spoke with Jeff Brandes, vice president of business development and operations at EveryScape, an Innoveer client based in Waltham, Mass., that uses Salesforce.com.

EveryScape creates visual guides for local search, using interior panoramic imagery to allow users to “walk around” as though they were at a location in person, for places around the world, including Starwood, Omni and other large hotel chains, over 2,000 small businesses, and even the Cheers bar in Boston.

How does EveryScape reach new accounts?

Brandes: We have a small, direct sales team, but primarily we reach them through our business partners. We’ve partnered with StarCite — covering the hotel and meeting space — and also a number of directory providers that I’m not allowed to name publicly yet. Collectively, they have thousands of salespeople.

With your using Salesforce.com, what’s been the feedback from these business partners?

Our directory services partners are multi-billion-dollar companies, and we’re able to convince them that we’re not a tiny little vendor that can’t handle the scale of orders they’re going to deliver to us. And a critical test was their looking at our systems and seeing that we could scale from tens to thousands of orders with them in a matter of months.

How do you handle all of these orders?

We run our whole business on Salesforce.com, from order entry through post-sales support, no matter how an order reaches us. What that means is, whether we or a partner close a deal, the order gets into our Salesforce.com software through the Salesforce.com partner portal, automated feeds or our own people entering the information directly. We then track the pipeline, and when an order closes, we create a project.

How does Salesforce.com automate the underlying processes?

To build one of our visual guides, a photographer has to come out to the business. So first, Salesforce.com selects one of our photographers and sends an email: “We have an opportunity for you, do you want to accept or reject it?” When they accept, the system automatically provides required information and scheduling. The client also receives a series of emails saying, “Thank you for your order, the photographer will contact you.”

Once they schedule, it’s in the system and Salesforce.com updates them with a reminder, 48 hours beforehand. After the shoot, the photographer uploads the photos to our site, Salesforce.com stores links to the images, and the product goes into the production phase.

When the project is completed, Salesforce.com sends the client a link to their preview and the client can submit changes and edits through Salesforce.com Cases. Once it’s approved, that’s recorded in Salesforce.com, and the client receives the final, approved version. If the deal has come from a partner, the partner also gets notified with the appropriate identifiers, and they can post that tour on their website.

Was it difficult to build that level of automation into Salesforce.com?

Not really. We started three years ago, building a piece of the puzzle, then just kept adding to it.

What advice would you offer newcomers, based on your three years of cloud experience?

For a company that has limited IT resources, there’s no way we could have affordably built a system that scaled and had the redundancy of something like Salesforce.com, it would have cost just too much money. Remember too that the server is the least of the cost. Also factor in the day-today running costs, having a mirrored test environment, IT staff, plus backups.

How does Salesforce.com compare with using on-premise CRM?

Out of the box with Salesforce.com, what you get for your money and what you start with is just so much greater. I also build most of the reports myself.

Customizing Salesforce.com is also relatively simple, but more importantly, there’s a lot of work that other people have done that can be leveraged, some free and some moderately priced. For example, we use Informatica; Innoveer helped us with that. Also electronic signatures from a company called EchoSign.

For Salesforce.com add-ons, there’s no RFP; you just use AppExchange?

Exactly. And the other thing that can be noted is the beauty of SaaS. It’s a painless trial to see if these add-ons do what you need them to do.

What happens if Salesforce.com goes down?

Reliability-wise, we’ve had barely any hiccups. Really, our biggest fear is not if Salesforce.com is going to be down, but if our connectivity is going to be down.

Are your partner pages hosted on Salesforce.com?

The partner portal is a customized view into Salesforce.com, where our partners can see what they need to see. We built that on our own using Drupal, and that talks back and forth to Salesforce.com.

We also track our photography partners — we call them Ambassadors — like we would a sales deal: When they apply, all of their credentials and links to their portfolio are in Salesforce.com. As they get trained and certified, they move to next step, to the point where they sign their contracts. And once they receive an assignment, they again get tracked just like a deal would.

Did you originally plan to keep everything in Salesforce.com?

Having had the opportunity to build a couple of CRM systems in a greenfield environment with not a lot of legacy applications, I’ve found that the longer you can keep it all in one system, the fewer integration problems or headaches you have.

Learn More

For more on choosing between on-premise and cloud CRM, see Upgrade Siebel, or Embrace the Cloud?

For more insights from Innoveer customers into using the cloud, see Genzyme’s Salesforce.com secrets.

Also learn how the cloud can help with customer service, and why integrating with the cloud is easier than with on-premise CRM.