Seeking clear-eyed thinkers (with a love of CRM). Photograph by Johan J.Ingles-Le Nobel.

Work With The Best People

Why work for Innoveer Solutions? Simple: Because of who else will be on your team. We employ the best CRM professionals, backed by Innoveer’s pragmatic and forward-thinking company culture. When it comes to working environment, team dynamics, and customer satisfaction, we’re second to none.

Earn Customer Plaudits

Our customers regularly tell us that for project quality and execution, business results, as well as the personality and culture of Innoveer’s people, our teams are the best. Period.

Innoveer’s success — on a number of fronts — stems from our singular focus on CRM. Customers engage us to work on the most interesting projects. Our success also has to do with Innoveer’s pragmatic philosophy. We don’t see CRM as requiring a Big Bang strategy. Rather, companies must make step-by-step improvements.

That clarity of purpose, backed by our CRM expertise, help explain why we’ve won so many awards for our work over the years, including the People’s Choice award for CRM and CRM magazine’s “One to Watch.”

Tackle Top Projects

Awards aside, what really makes a job worth pursuing? Innoveer offers competitive compensation and benefits in all of our locations — that’s a given. But Innoveer’s employees enjoy much more than that.

Indeed, in an informal “why do you work here?” survey, Innoveer employees also emphasized our:

• Camaraderie
• Open door policy
• Producing positive results for clients and the company
• Having fun
• Working hard
• Constantly being challenged by something new
• “No jerks” policy
• Project variety
• Leading-edge CRM work
• High levels of client satisfaction

In other words, here’s what makes for a great job: People. Challenging work. Intellectual equals. Professional growth. Engagement. How you’re treated. Getting the tools and support you need to succeed. Having fun.

‘No Jerks’ Policy

On the fun front, we’ve all had experiences working with people who were rude, unpleasant, or unprofessional. And you know what? Life is too short to bother with that kind of approach.

Accordingly, Innoveer maintains a “no jerks” working environment. In particular, our hiring process ensures that your team is nice, energetic, considerate, team-focused, and actually fun to spend time with. Why settle for anything less?

Pragmatic, Forward-Thinking Culture

Forget diktats issued by absentee management figures. Innoveer’s success is predicated on our pragmatic, forward-thinking culture. We’re always looking for opportunities to keep our employees engaged, keep them ahead of the CRM curve, and especially to enhance their careers.

Here’s how that works in practice: We involve everyone in the company strategy, and in expanding and improving our business. We build systems and processes to help employees more easily accomplish their jobs. We provide employees with cutting-edge professional development. And we celebrate our successes.

Learn More

To apply for a job at Innoveer, or for more information, visit Innoveer Careers.

To hear why employees enjoy working at Innoveer, view our “Why Work For Innoveer” video.

For great customer service, go on strike. Photograph by www.flashbacks.com.

Plan A: Ensure Customer Service Reps Go On Strike

Want to have a great call center? Every three years or so, send it on strike.

Here’s my thinking: When Group Health Insurance (GHI) — now Emblem Health — was in deep discussions with Innoveer over how to improve the insurer’s four New York state call centers, the staff went on strike.

The scene outside GHI’s Manhattan headquarters — located across from Penn Station and near Madison Garden — was dramatic. Imagine a long tractor-trailer parked on the street, blaring salsa music from morning to night, and a crane dangling a giant rat in front of executives’ office windows.

But inside GHI, a revolution, albeit of the quieter variety, was also underway. That’s because during the strike, GHI decided to rotate the management team through the call center to handle the phones themselves. So management got assigned shifts to resolve customer issues, and used the company’s then-CRM system to deal with all customer inquiries, including requests for claim status updates, dispute resolution and so on.

Say Hello To Senior Executives in the Call Center

Thanks to this hands-on experience, management learned:

• Which processes needed improving
• How the customer service group interacted with — and used CRM to support — claims processing
• The flow of information, or lack thereof, from the sales group to the call center, including sharing and managing leads
• About various systems-level and configuration issues, which made it difficult for agents to quickly resolve customer inquires

By the time the strike ended, GHI executives knew that they had a customer service problem on their hands, and that they needed to set a different tone. As a result, the strike was a customer service watershed event for GHI, and led directly to a number of great enhancements.

Plan B: Design Great Customer Service From the Start

Accordingly, our position is that the ideal way to improve customer service is to send your call center on strike every few years.

Not feasible? As a backup, here at Innoveer we’ve defined the best practices for services leadership. Properly approached, this will help you understand and gather the same types of first-hand information that GHI collected and then applied to create a world-class customer service program.

Best Practices for CRM Customer Service Leadership

Great customer service arguably starts with what we’ve dubbed customer service leadership, which has four components:

• Service tier structure: Establish levels of service and access based on customer segment or stratification. For GHI, this meant deciding whether to route customers to different call centers based on whether they wanted a Medicare versus a PPO product.
• Service channels: What’s your plan for dealing with different sectors or products? Some organizations use a triage approach and transfer callers around. GHI, however, opted to create a single phone number that everyone uses, then a customer speaks with one agent, who tries to resolve all of their issues at once. Done correctly, this approach doesn’t cost the least, but it does provide the highest customer satisfaction levels.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Does service play well with sales and marketing? For one of Innoveer’s clients, which manufacturers consumer electronics, the lion’s share of people that contact the call center have the same problem: they’re missing a required component, such as a cable. So the manufacturer set up a complementary sales process. Now, a service agent can sell them what they need, which increases both revenue and customer satisfaction levels.
• Agent development & coaching: This might sound basic, but it’s essential. Development and coaching includes delivering service competency training, monitoring service delivery quality levels, and providing feedback to improve service delivery performance. Always assess, react and improve.

Ensure Customer Service Leads to Happier Customers

Customer service leadership is only one requirement for creating a world-class customer service program. But set your leadership sights correctly, and you can ensure that when it comes to great customer service, you’re not left trailing the competition.

Learn More

Service leadership is only one of the capabilities at which organizations must excel if they want to master customer service. The other essentials — detailed in separate blog posts — include case management, experience management, service operations and service measurement.

See Innoveer’s Customer Service CRM Excellence Framework to learn more about the 5 essential components of any great service program.

Also read our case study about how GHI decreased its call center cost per contact and ensured more accurate customer service.

Missing the link between service and sales? Photograph by Broma.

Do you want your service team to sell, cross-sell and up-sell existing customers? Many organizations say that yes, this is a primary CRM program objective. But this goal is notoriously difficult to achieve.

For starters, that’s because customer service professionals aren’t salespeople. Yes, service agents may have great rapport and interactions with customers. But taking that next step — “Mr. Jones, can I interest you in the complementary, whiz-bang new widget?” — simply doesn’t come naturally to most service personnel. Jokes about type A personalities aside, even most mothers would probably agree that great salespeople seem to hail from a different gene pool.

Lead, Or Follow

But recently, I met with a high-technology manufacturing company — let’s call it HTCo — that found a better way to mix service and sales, by having field service reps generate leads for the sales teams, rather than trying to sell new offerings themselves.

For background, at HTCo, the field service reps already service equipment at a customer’s site. They use SAP on the back end to track customer assets, and employ the SAP scheduling module to crunch through outstanding service requests, regular maintenance as well as emergencies, then dispatch the right mix of field service teams to the right customers, with each team typically visiting multiple sites on any given day.

Servicing Leads

Why use field sales to generate leads? Because they’re already inside the building. In fact, they know better than the customer what’s running onsite, what they need and maybe even what they’d like better. Furthermore, because HTCo provides “multi-vendor servicing,” it’s a natural next step for HTCo to support and fix all of the customer’s other products — including from the HTCo competition — as well as related equipment, including routers and switches.

Accordingly, when a field service rep is close to finishing a service job, before closing the customer case, he or she receives a prompt: Please inventory equipment that HTCo doesn’t maintain at the customer site.

Let the Leads Create Themselves

This inventory is gold. From it, HTCo can immediately generate sales leads tied to specific products that the customer already uses.  In addition, sales can pitch the customer on replacing what’s onsite with far superior offerings manufactured by HTCo. Specifically, leads get generated in HTCo’s Salesforce.com instance. At that point, all of the other-gene-pool sales types can go to work and close the sale.

In fact, in a six-month trial in the Netherlands, HTCo generated 3,000 leads using this approach, and it’s now rolling out the process across Europe.

Say Please

To help entice service teams to provide leads, the HTCo leadership provides feedback to the field service teams on the status of the leads that they generated. Field engineers also receive a reward for generating a lead — a gift certificate of a modest amount. But what really motivates them is recognition. Creating a feedback loop from the sales team — “Hey, that was a great lead, we just closed a deal, thank you” — does wonders for motivation.

Build a Big Bad Lead Machine

Everyone knows that generating leads is great. But if you want the sales team to use the leads, then you need a lead management process, including lead scoring, nurturing leads, and qualifying leads.

To help smooth out that process, going forward, HTCo plans to provide lead feedback to its field service engineers using Salesforce.com’s new Facebook-like Chatter. In addition, HTCo is weighing tablet PCs — probably not iPads — for field service reps. Not only would tablets provide just-in-time videos and documents to help field service personnel accomplish their tasks more easily and quickly, but an integrated barcode reader would help them more easily inventory all equipment onsite.

For the organization’s field service professionals, this would make generating leads that much easier — since they’d no longer have to enter them manually — and arguably further increase the number and quality of leads they share. Especially because they’re not having to play salespeople. Rather, they’re just helping nudge sales in the right direction.

Learn More

Innoveer offers a brief workshop — over one, two or three days — to help companies identify the cost, time and business benefits associated with achieving new and more mature (which is to say, more effective) CRM capabilities. During the workshop, Innoveer examines the five core elements of an organization’s field sales program, identifies the optimal enhancements, and produces specific, technology-agnostic recommendations for building next year’s plans and budgets, with detailed estimates of the required project time and costs to improve specific elements of your CRM program. Including lead management.

The universe may have started from an intensely hot fireball, but your Salesforce.com deployment doesn't need to. Photograph by csaavedra.

What’s the key to a successful global deployment of Salesforce.com? The good news is that it has very little to do with servers, databases or IT infrastructure.

Based on Innoveer‘s extensive experience in deploying Salesforce and CRM to some of the world’s biggest enterprises, we’ve found 5 key areas to focus on, if you want to ensure project success. Some of these areas involve straight-up recommendations, and some are questions that need careful weighing.

Here are the 5 key areas, in order of importance:

1. Avoid the Salesforce.com Planning Trap

Salesforce is a great tool and sales professionals generally like using it. However, as one of our customers said: “It’s not an iPod.” Meaning,  you can’t just send it out to the field and expect your employees to use it “as is.”

The solution here isn’t to plan a lot, but a little. Indeed, using a short, focused planning exercise to create an overall vision of where your CRM program is going helps avoid painting yourself into a corner later (because that’s not a fun place to be). So, although we advocate pursuing quick wins and quick deployments, remember to define the destination you’re trying to reach.

2. Maturity Matters

When dealing with different countries and different business units, don’t assume that they share the same level of process maturity. Groups and regions that have high process maturity should get advanced functionality, such as lead management, account planning and territory segmentation. Meanwhile, less advanced groups should get more basic functionality, such as opportunity and account management. The quickest way to kill CRM user adoption is to mix this up.

While you’re sorting out process maturity across geographies, do watch for groups that have similar approaches that might merge together well. Don’t think you’ll automatically require a full process realignment exercise. Rather, keep in mind that cajoling people onto the same processes will make your organization more effective, and your Salesforce deployment easier, since one size rarely fits all. For example, a large pharmaceutical customer of ours grouped their countries into three levels of process maturity: high, medium and low. We’re designing different plans and deployment strategies for each segment, to create a smoother implementation overall.

3. Leave the Big Bang to Physicists

For goodness sake, don’t try to deploy Salesforce to 130 countries across 5 business units all at once. Rather, the most successful global deployments start with groups that have the highest estimated rates of user adoption, get them to adopt it, then use these “wins” to evangelize the project and create an ongoing clamor for CRM or SFA across the organization. Taking anything other than this approach, in fact, can cause your project to fail catastrophically. Indeed, we’ve recently been advising a Canary Wharf-based bank that decided to go the other route, and it’s clear that it will take the firm years to recover.

In short, you know who the early adopters are. Start with them, make them very successful, and move on to the next group. Then repeat, repeat and repeat.

4. You Can Never Be Too Thin (or Too Rich)

We’re big believers in delivering the thinnest functionality possible for each release, with the caveat that it must still provide value to the field. For example, one of our customers, a global office-supply firm, started by deploying just three core Salesforce.com capabilities — contacts, accounts and opportunities — to its 1,000+ field sales reps. Once they collectively got comfortable using these elements of Salesforce.com, the company started pushing leads to the reps and automating the forecasting process.

The moral is that taking CRM one step at a time isn’t just safe, it’s smart. Because when it comes to CRM, less is more.

5. Giving is Better than Receiving

Beer, or SFA? In fact, a recent, informal poll of sales reps indicated that they would prefer the beer. This isn’t a surprise, but there are three Salesforce.com capabilities might play close runner-ups to a frosty brew: Chatter, mobile access to Salesforce.com, and Jigsaw. Giving the field any or all of these features will show them that you’re focused on helping them, rather than just keeping a closer eye on their activities. And if done properly, catering to salespeople — really, with tools that help them do their jobs better — shouldn’t add much to your deployment time line, and may boost the bottom line.

Balance the Act

Do the above suggestions seem conflicting? Deliver thin functionality, but be sure to deploy Chatter. Fully satisfy one business unit, but also watch out for the levels of process maturity across the organization. What gives? The answer is that as with any type of enterprise system deployment, some project requirements will exert an oppositional force on each other. To be successful, then, your global Salesforce.com project must strike the right balance between numerous requirements.

Of course, many industry analysts have made their living in recent years by talking about SFA failure rates. But with a little bit of planning, your Salesforce.com project doesn’t need to be the black hole of your career. In fact, it might be a bright new beginning.

Still choosing which sessions at Open World to Attend? Photo by icecreamqueen99

There are over 90,000 sessions, meetings and cocktail parties happening next week at Oracle Open World.  If you’re like me, you’re heading out there to gather information on making CRM more successful and speak to a person or two who has faced some of the same challenges.

Here are my personal recommendations:

1. Establishing KPIs to Maximize CRM Success (Monday, September 20, 12:30 | Moscone West L3, Rm 3001) - Innoveer customer Nigel Hodges of Experian will be on a pannel exploring the keys to successful Oracle CRM On Demand programs, focusing on how program structure and measurement drive business effectiveness.
2. Business Case, Best Practices, and Challenges of Hybrid Deployment of CRM Sales (Tuesday, September 21, 15:30 | Moscone West L3, Rm 3006) once again, Nigel Hodges will be part of a panel discussing using a combination of Oracle’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management (Siebel CRM) and Oracle CRM On Demand to roll out their sales force automation solution.
3. Implementing Oracle CRM On Demand Globally: Challenges and Lessons Learned (Tuesday, September 21, 17:00 | Moscone West L3, Rm 3001) will be  presented by Innoveer customer Jeroen Kurvers of Compass Group.
4. Mobilize Oracle Systems for Your Employees and Your Customers (Thursday, September 23, 13:30 | Moscone South, Rm 236) presented by Innoveer partner Todd Christy, CTO and Founder of Pyxis Mobile. This session introduces thought leadership on mobile strategy for the corporate enterprise and provides a practical demonstration of how to build native applications that mobilize Oracle and other enterprise-grade back-end systems.
5. Welcome to Cloud 2: The Next Generation of Enterprise Collaboration (Wednesday, September 22, 10:00 | Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, *Novellus Theater) presented by Innoveer partner Marc Benioff CEO of Salesforce.com.  In this presentation you will hear salesforce.com’s vision for Cloud 2, a new generation of enterprise applications built for collaboration and inspired by consumer applications such as Facebook and Twitter.  Chatter will feature prominently in this discussion.

Thirsty?

At this year’s Oracle OpenWorld, Innoveer is sponsoring a cocktail party for our customers, prospects, partners and friends (and probably some random people who will just wonder in and pretend to know something about CRM.) Details can be found here.

Is mail still relevant to you? Photograph by smilya7679.

The Postman Never Rings Twice

The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook and Twitter are replacing email as the “king of communication.” The US Postal Service is projecting that the volume of First Class Mail will decline 37% in 2010, and things are so dire at the UK’s Royal Mail that the British government is looking to sell off the institution that traces its roots to 1516.

Does this means that we should just eliminate the address fields of our CRM systems? Actually, it doesn’t. Even with the rise of social media, direct marketing spending will increase by over $1B in 2010, to reach more than $45B.

Since describing our vision for how organizations can achieve marketing success in 2010, this blog has touched on many topics like customer segmentation and campaign execution. But one simple fact of life is that unless you have the correct addresses in your CRM system, the best-laid plans won’t work.

Enter Experian QAS

To gain more insight on this issue, I spoke with Innoveer Principal Consultant Luke Emberton. Luke has been working with our customer Experian QAS over the past year, helping it to provide a version of its award-winning address verification product to users of Oracle’s CRM On Demand and Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud 2.

According to Luke and our friends at Experian QAS, the biggest best practice for ensuring that a contact or account has a correct address is verifying that the address is entered correctly the first time. “How often do sales people go back and fix the address for their accounts?” Luke asked me hypothetically.

When using QAS for CRM On Demand or QAS for Salesforce.com, finding the correct address is interactive. As a sales person is entering the address, QAS can make suggestions and even fill in the remaining fields to speed up the data entry.  Luke reports that QAS validates addresses for the US, UK and 26 other countries.

The benefits of such an approach should be as obvious as Priority Mail:

• Lower costs: More accurate address data decreases marketing costs by having fewer returned mail pieces
• Better segmentation: Customer segmentation should improve — at least in certain circumstances — because some offerings need to be targeted at certain geographies
• Happier customers: The customer experience will improve because product shipments will be sent to the proper address
• User adoption: Sales reps and others who need to enter address data into their CRM system will be pleased that the system helps speed up this otherwise laborious process

So if you want a surefire way to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing, sales and service operations, start with addresses.

Learn More

Heading to Oracle OpenWorld 2010? Experian QAS will be there, showcasing QAS for CRM On Demand. In addition, we’d like to know: Which cocktails are most likely to increase CRM success?

Beyond addresses, also know the five requirements for creating more effective marketing programs: marketing strategy, lead management,campaign management, event management and marketing measurement.

Who places model employees first? Photograph by Ludovic Bertron.

From Personnel to Personal

How do you legitimately sell a product you don’t have? Staffing companies, executive search firms and headhunters face this challenge every day, as they sell less of a product, and more of a promise.

Accordingly, unlike more product-focused companies, staffing firms must master a much greater variety of people-related skills: matchmaking savvy, expertise at managing long-term relationships with clients on both sides of the fence, building trust, and maintaining an excellent “institutional memory” about who they’ve placed and where, since today’s placed worker may become tomorrow’s staffing services client.

But staffing is also a high-volume business. Being first to market counts, since a top-notch candidate, delivered first into the interview process, often gains a head start over similarly skilled competitors who arrive later. Accordingly, staffing firms must support numerous sales activities, and use CRM to both track and support their relationships with clients.

As with any industry, however, simply implementing a CRM system — or decreeing that salespeople must use it — is not enough. Rather, staffing firms must ensure that the CRM system meets the needs of its salespeople, and then entice them to use it. To do that, they will have to master a variety of CRM-related challenges, including throughput support, data management, relationship management and having the latest information on potential recruits.

CRM Challenges Staffing Firms

As they embrace CRM, staffing firms face these five CRM-related challenges:

• User adoption: In any commodity-oriented businesses — staffing firms included — call volume counts, a lot. Accordingly, managers often prioritize monitoring, measuring and mandating that salespeople use the CRM system. Too often, however, they fail to also empower their salespeople, leading to poor CRM system adoption or even failed projects.
• Throughput: Staffing is a high-transaction, high-volume business, offering a somewhat commoditized product. So when salespeople — often making 60 calls a day or more — get a potential client on the phone, the CRM system must put the information they need at their fingertips, or else they’re going to lose the sale.
• Complicated relationships: The person you place in a job today may in the future become a client of your staffing services. Accordingly, the CRM system, backed by appropriate sales activities, must helps firms log the people they can potentially place, track client accounts, as well as monitor the status and health of the long-term relationships and activities associated with both.
• MDM: Trying to recruit someone? For master data management (MDM) purposes, most CRM systems key on people’s email address. But if you’re trying to lure someone away from their current employer, then contacting them via their work email address may not be appreciated. Accordingly, firms that excel at tracking contact information are integrating their CRM system with social networking tools such as LinkedIn and Jigsaw, to have the latest information on potential recruits.
• Social networks: Less a challenge and more of an opportunity, social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook can give recruiters nearly real-time information on people’s comings and goings, the better to recruit talent that suddenly becomes available. Crucially, CRM can help manage this process, track current efforts, and quantify which recruitment strategies — including the use of social networking sites — best boost a staffing firm’s bottom line.

Put Information At Salespeople’s Fingertips

Addressing the above issues can help staffing firms capture more market share. But for firms to excel, their CRM systems must serve the needs of not only managers, but also salespeople.

For example, I recently met with a staffing services firm with salespeople who each make 60 calls a day or more. But the company wasn’t closing deals, owing to its CRM system having so many screens, each with numerous tabs, that when salespeople got a live prospect on the phone, they couldn’t find the information they needed to close the deal.

The lesson here is that CRM must put the information your salespeople need at their fingertips. Forget building a 360-degree view of customers. What your salespeople really need is the how do I close a sale in 20 seconds? view.

In other words, to succeed at selling staffing services, first sell the CRM program to your own salespeople. They’ll take it from there.

All eyes on London. Photograph by Mostaque Chowdhury.

Have you already implemented Salesforce.com? Wondering what to do next?

If you’re attending Cloudforce 2010 London — now scheduled not for September 7th, but Wednesday, September 8th, due to the planned London Underground strikes — come find Innoveer at booth G19 and discuss how to take Salesforce.com to the next level.

In particular, we can discuss which enhancements — from a sales, marketing or service perspective — will enable your organization to maximize its Salesforce.com results.

Mention this blog and you’ll have first dibs on our office-friendly mini-dartboards. We’ve also laid in a healthy supply of Sonic Rocks magnets.

Influencing isn't the same as selling. Photograph by Clever Cupcakes.

What keeps pharmaceutical executives awake at night?

Pharmaceutical executives in the Americas cite their industry’s changing business model (for 35% of them), pipeline growth (24%), as well as the impact of impending regulatory reform (16%) and generic competition (16%). Those results come from a recent survey of 211 pharmaceutical executives conducted by Cegedim Dendrite and analyzed by GreyHome Marketing and Research Consulting.

Interestingly, the survey also found that when it comes to selecting CRM software to help increase sales in a rapidly changing environment, experience—versus price, customer service or technological flexibility—trumps all other factors.

To learn more about the sales, regulatory and customer-facing challenges facing life sciences organizations, as well as the need for more flexible CRM systems to support rapidly changing business models, I spoke with Lindsay Duncan, vice president of technology & development strategy at Cegedim Dendrite. The company, which develops Mobile Intelligence CRM software, controls 35% of the global  pharmaceutical CRM software market.

How different is CRM, by necessity, for life sciences companies, since their sales reps don’t technically sell, at least not directly?

Duncan: Yes, you’re influencing. Influencing doctors to prescribe your product. Influencing key opinion leaders so they’ll influence doctors to prescribe your product. And trying to get your product into formularies in managed care organizations or hospitals, so doctors can actually prescribe your product. As a result, the required workflow is quite different from a traditional, business-to-business type of CRM solution.

One reason Cegedim Dendrite specializes in life sciences CRM is because the company was formed in 1969 from a life sciences data services company. It’s difficult to be a horizontal CRM player and still maintain a really good life sciences focus, because the commercial model is so different from a retail model. That’s why we’ve haven’t diversified into other markets, but instead always focused on life sciences.

What life sciences CRM trends are you seeing?

We’re seeing a lot of activity in what used to be called emerging markets, where the cost of CRM and outfitting people with laptops or mobile devices can be a big problem.

In some markets, not all, we also see companies moving away from a local, offline solution, to more of an online solution. In Europe, we see that transition happening fairly quickly.

Finally, we’re also seeing companies roll out more mobile devices—whereas they may have just used smartphones before, especially in the United States—to handle the signature capture required by regulations for distributing product samples, and also for electronic detailing of products.

What’s happening with electronic detailing?

There are two trends. The first is compliance, and using a mobile device to replace paper-based detailing. Typically, a rep went out, showed material, and wrote that down. But now, many companies have gone to electronic material—via PowerPoint slides or multimedia presentations—and the device can capture which information the doctor saw and even conduct a survey, then feed that data back to the sales and marketing teams.

The second area is in medical devices, where some commercial teams actually work with doctors in how to use a certain devices or applications. So that’s partly training, and partly marketing.

How do you handle SaaS, since sales reps won’t always have guaranteed Internet access?

As life sciences is our focus, we have a hybrid solution. So for reps, their mobile application looks like the online application, and when they are online, they have full features.

But if they’re in an area that doesn’t have connectivity, then it defaults to more basic features, which still include call reporting, doctor lookups, multimedia, and capturing signatures—all of the customer-facing features. But any options that aren’t available offline, such as call-planning tools, just get grayed out in the user interface.

Does providing mobile CRM to sales reps improve their adoption levels?

Mobile devices certainly help, because representatives don’t want to be carrying big devices in the field. But the traditional limitation is, because of screen size, there’s less you can do. For engaging doctors, face to face, for example, it’s not as good.

So the smaller form factors—for signature capture and multimedia, especially in the United States—haven’t been so popular. But with the iPad, which we support, and similar devices, we think they’ll become more popular, with their great screens and good battery life.

Cegedim Dendrite offers a hybrid CRM environment; why is that?

We can take our SaaS architecture—our multi-tenant architecture—and if a customer requires, for regulatory or other reasons, run it multi-tenant in the cloud. Or, clients can run it in their own data center. With our larger, global deals, we actually see a lot of clients wanting to roll out dedicated installations to different locations. But smaller clients are often more interested in having a totally shared, SaaS-based architecture.

Learn More

To help make any CRM program more successful, review our “top 10” marketing, sales andservice CRM strategies to see how your program compares to best practices and industry benchmarks.

CRM driving you to drink? Try a Sparkling Sangria. Photograph by Betty Crocker Recipes.

At this year’s Oracle OpenWorld, Innoveer is sponsoring a cocktail party for our customers, prospects, partners and friends (and probably some random people who will just wonder in and pretend to know something about CRM.) Details below.

A fun time will be had by all — plus there will be some good networking.  This got me thinking about the cocktails that I would offer to clients who are facing some of the key challenges for CRM success.  Here’s my list:

1. For those who are considering adding a mobile solution to their CRM system, we’re recommending a Sidecar.
2. If you’re a customer service professional worried about the tendency of your customers to “jump the queue” and use Twitter to get expedited service, we recommend the Sneaky Pete.
3. We wrote that having a well defined strategy for your direct marketing team doesn’t make you an “evil genius“, so we’re recommending a Zombie for marketing professionals who still need to build their plan.
4. Adoption of SFA remains a challenge, so if that’s thwarting your success, we are going to offer you a Boilermaker.  The shot is for you and the beer will be for your sales users.  After all, getting SFA used is about balancing their needs with the company’s.
5. Lastly, for those in the crowd who still think that a 360 degree view of your customers will solve all of your problems, we’re ready to serve you a Kamikaze.

Please join us Tuesday September 21st between 5:30pm and 8:30pm at Roe, “San Francisco’s premier boutique nightclub and lounge destination” for drinks, hors d’oeuvres, and lively CRM discussions.  Roe is located at 651 Howard St, San Francisco, CA 94105.

You can RSVP for this event either on Facebook or LinkedIn so we know how many Sidecars, Zombies and Sneaky Petes to have at the bar.  If you’d like a Sparkling Sangria, we can probably get you one of those as well, or add your own suggestions for CRM cocktails in the comments.