Solution for End-to-End Lead-to-Cash Workflow
As part of our Pick of the Week series, we requested an online demonstration of what sounded to be too easy, and were privy to a demo of Dell’s DCBA (Dell Cloud Business Applications) to see the lead to cash process from building customer awareness to sales contract. We were impressed at how far the industry, and Dell, has come in the last few years at solving the practical challenges around marketing and sales integration. Dell is providing enterprise-level CRM capabilities to SMBs that might have run into seven figures (and a year-long implementation) only 10 years ago. And going even further by tying all this front-office activity together with accounting to synchronize invoicing and billing into the process, insuring that sales staff can be paid without spending 12 hours a week updating their CRM records, and Finance does not have to chase down account managers for collections and accounts receivable updates on the 29th of every month.
Small and Mid-Market Companies Choose Online CRM as the Shortest Path to Revenue
The killer Enterprise Application to emerge at the end of the Client/Server era was CRM, which spawned a huge ecosystem of sales process, configuration and customization experts. The next step was online CRM solutions led by Salesforce.com, a true multi-tenant architecture and Cloud ecosystem in and of itself. The ample supply of CRM expertise, along with the market needs to generate revenue as quickly as possible resulted in a wave of online CRM start ups and then pure-play Marketing Automation vendors that were eager to plug into the accelerating number of customers opting for a services model.
Falling Through the Cracks
Even with the best CRM software and a lot of customization, even for those who spent the most on these systems, and especially large organizations, getting to a state of accurate and current information has always been a challenge. The perpetrators tend to be too many steps in the process, unclear roles and responsibilities, limitations in the software that force workarounds, ineffective hand-off of customer relationships, different levels of process and software maturity, and many others. Much of this was caused by contention for capital budgets, the complexity and expense of internal systems integration and never being able to get ahead of the technology curve, resulting in a large percentage of CRM implementations failing outright. Properly selected and integrated Cloud-based Applications like this one from Dell have already gone a long way to eliminate many of these challenges by offering a shared customer database approach from the very beginning.
Following the image above, it is quickly apparent that the demand and supply cycles are covered by this approach: Lead to Opportunity, to Proposal, to Customer Support, which is good for the customer. The internal operational cycle is also enabled from Marketing to Sales to Invoicing and Billing, to Customer Service, which makes life a lot easier for everyone involved.
The demonstration was recorded and we have included relevant excerpts that follow the process. Dell offers Pardot, a leading Marketing Automation Solution for marketing which connects automatically to Salesforce.com by synchronizing User-IDs from each component, in less than a minute. Sales Funnel, Alerts, Dashboard, Forecast are coordinated out-of-the-box, and rules are customizable between the applications.
Next comes Conga, which merges customer information, selected products and services, proposal template and cover letter into a print-ready quotation that shares all data with the appropriate customer and pipeline records.
EchoSign, an e-Signature solution from Adobe follows, allowing the customer to authorize the order securely and purchase immediately, which is always a good thing in Sales.
The next part of the solution solves the ever-present issue of ensuring the Sales and Accounting Systems contain and report the same information. This is accomplished using the process integration presented below:
Dell SMB Lead to Cash Process Automation 1 from Techaisle on Vimeo.
As shown in the image, the same information that is incrementally collected throughout the marketing and sales process is used to auto-populate the agreement, invoice and collections data within the accounting package, for our demo, this was done using QuickBooks Online, one of several pre-configured packaged integrations that do not require manual intervention except for company-specific policies and table structures.
Again, seeing it is more impressive than reading about it:
Dell SMB Lead to Cash Process Automation 2 from Techaisle on Vimeo.
What was the name of your company again?
The benefits of sharing information between Marketing, Sales and Accounting are equally or more important with Customer Service, which is the lifeblood of all companies’ online reputation these days. Taking the data one step further into customer service affords the advantage of having the full customer history at your fingertips while fielding support calls – which provides a higher level of satisfaction and smarter service capabilities.
Dell SMB Lead to Cash Process Automation 3 from Techaisle on Vimeo.
Why this is Important
This is important because it goes back to some basic principles that improve information system management, including:
Move Data, don’t type it more than once. Whether using drop downs to input categories and exact descriptions or whole sections of records or groups of records, moving data will result in fewer errors than typing it into the system. In addition to the accuracy this offers, it eliminates a lot of the drudgery associated with maintaining CRM systems and allows sales people to get back to selling.
Build Information Incrementally. Capturing the same data repeatedly will annoy customers and staff, records should be built up over time and sections of data moved to populate application modules as they are brought online. Dell’s solution does this through progressive web forms for customer records and by sharing data between marketing, sales, accounting and customer service.
Centralize Data. Trying to manage multiple customer databases is confusing, inefficient and causes a lot of frustration. Accuracy, Consistency, Reliability and Timeless are hallmarks of data quality and all suffer from running disparate databases of the same information. While data tends to take on a life of its’ own with volume and increased usage, starting with a design that shares information between systems will eliminate problems down the line and can actually give Small and Mid-Market businessesan advantage over Enterprise customers who have been wrestling with huge CRM database and internal IT for the past 15 years.
Keep it Simple, Get Going Fast. In a recent survey 77% of SMB complained that even there has been a lot of progress in the past few years, complexity managing IT has grown faster than the problems it is designed to eliminate. SMBs want to spend money on revenue generating activities and reducing costs, which means focus on the core business, not hiring people to manage IT adoption that cannot stay engaged full time on building the business. We were surprised at how easily this whole integrated solution came online, easy enough for a power user to manage and available to use in a matter of days, quicker for those who are familiar with CRM systems. The Dell solution comes with fixed fee, fixed scope implementation services for all of the applications they sell, making it easy for SMBs to get going quickly with a single vendor for support.
The Bottom Line
Dell’s DCBA solution was announced last September and has come a long way since introduction. In this example the demo provisioned a new account without need for any coding; userIDs tied Sales and Marketing together. Customers signed the necessary paperwork and and Invoicing data was moved automatically once the new account was opened in QuickBooks. For small and medium sized organizations, finding ways to make best use of their IT investments-- to streamline their sales processes, as in this example here, can be the path to increased sales and help them realize greater business success, and is certainly much easier and cost effective than it used to be.
Techaisle Analyst Insights
The arguments for cloud are clear, and well-aligned with the specific interests of small and mid-market businesses, and ITDMs and BDMs. However, despite what appears to be a 24x7 stream of cloud information available to everyone with an internet connection, cloud is not ubiquitous – meaning that there are objections that prevent cloud from being introduced in some SMB environments.
To better understand cloud objections, Techaisle’s SMB Cloud Computing Adoption survey asked respondents “What are the key inhibitors to embracing cloud – what factors might prevent you from adopting new cloud solutions, and/or accelerating the use of current cloud solutions?”
Responses show that the traditional cloud bugbears of security and control continue to furnish obstacles to increased cloud penetration/acceleration. As the figure illustrates, SMBs are most worried about security of applications and corporate data, and about control over data, users and applications.
Mid-market businesses also register a high rate of concern regarding the difficulty of integrating operational systems across hybrid traditional/cloud-based systems – and objection which, in Techaisle’s opinion, has real merit and will require attention (and solutions) from the cloud supplier community. This issue is of particular concern to firms with 100-249 employees – large enough to have diverse systems requiring integration, but not large enough to have deep IT resources capable of addressing the problem. We expect that this concern will spread both to larger firms as they move more workloads from on-premise to cloud or hybrid platforms, and to smaller firms as they adopt more SaaS systems (requiring cloud-to-cloud integration).
A drill down into inhibitors by employee size segment shows that the smallest organizations in both the small and mid-markets – the 1-9 employee micro-businesses, and the 100-249 medium businesses – have some unique issues. Micro-businesses worry about vendor lock-in – a reasonable concern, as these firms have neither the technical expertise nor the purchasing power to extricate themselves from supplier relationships if they experience difficulties. The 100-249 employee size groups, as detailed above, are worried about integration. Consistently, though, SMBs are concerned with questions of security and data/user/application control. Suppliers able to address these issues will benefit from expanded market opportunity.
Looking at this issue through the ITDM/BDM lens, we see that the principal objections – with one important exception – are defined by the roles that each group plays within their organizations. BDMs, as might be expected, are very concerned with control over business data (can we access and manage data in the cloud as well as we can on premise?), with connectivity (can we get to information and applications when we are on the road?), and with vendor lock-in (which can be seen as an extension of the data control issue). ITDMs, on the other hand, are more concerned with technical issues than their BDM peers: they are more likely to cite limitations in service access and integration issues as cloud impediments.
The one area where the pattern does not correspond to expectations is in security, where BDMs express higher levels of concern than ITDMs. Given that ITDMs are responsible for most aspects of cloud security, we would have anticipated more security-related concern from ITDMs, if not necessarily lower rates of security-related worry on the part of the BDM respondents.
VMware just announced two new and updated cloud offerings for the SMBs - VMware Go Pro and VMware vCenter Protect Essentials Plus. VMware Go Pro is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product designed to make it easy for SMBs to manage, monitor, and secure both physical and virtual machines through a single console. VMware vCenter Protects Essentials Plus is an on-premise IT management system including asset discovery, configuration, power management, antivirus and endpoint security designed for use in both physical and virtual environments.
VMware Go Pro
While VMware Go Pro was introduced in January 2011, the latest release has some new important capabilities such as - “IT Advisor,” which scans and assesses an SMB’s physical and virtual infrastructure and then provides recommendations, guidance, alerts and actions to help the small and mid-market businesses optimize their environments, streamline management processes, improve security and expand their virtualized infrastructure. Each time the IT Advisor scans the environment, it provides new alerts to quickly identify and solve problems. The latest release also includes updated asset and patch management capabilities that allow users to create and label groups of machines and then schedule patch scans and deployment for these groups.
VMware Go Pro with a starting price of $12 per managed system/per year will become available for download in Q4 2011. However, it will take some time for the product to be widely available through VMware’s global partner network of nearly 25,000 channels.
VMware vCenter Protect Essentials Plus
New features within VMware vCenter Protect Essentials Plus include – new scripting capabilities to drive increased efficiency by allowing SMBs to manage and execute scripts across machine groups or the entire network. It will also allow users to execute Remote Desktop Protocol from the vCenter Protect Essentials Plus “Machine View,” allowing IT admins’ remote access to a target machine. While not a typical scenario for a small business, nevertheless, vCenter Protect Essentials Plus console will also allow multiple administrators to simultaneously perform different tasks at the same time in IT-intensive mid-sized organizations that offer hosting and other cloud-based services including social media services.
Similar to VMware Go Pro, VMware vCenter Protect Essentials Plus will be offered through VMware’s global network of channel partners in Q4 2011. It is expected to be available as an annual subscription at $57 per server/per year and $36 per workstation/per year.
Techaisle Take
As per Techaisle’s research, Worldwide SMB Virtualization spend is expected to be US$952 million in 2011. However, the spending is heavily driven by medium businesses (100-999 employees), in fact, 95 percent will come from this segment. US represents nearly three-fourths of that spend. Thus far, most virtualization vendors like VMware have focused their efforts on the mid-market businesses that have in-house IT staff and large IT infrastructure. On the other hand small businesses can also benefit from virtualization if vendors actively market their offerings to service providers that can provide aggregated offerings for smaller businesses. But with its new offerings available in 28 languages, VMware is making a bold attempt at broadening its SMB customer base on a worldwide basis.
The messaging used by Mark Shavlik, Vice president and General Manager, SMB Management Solutions, VMware seems quite right as he addressed virtualization as solving a business issue and not a technology product. He said, “We continue to innovate to bring SMBs advanced solutions tailored to their needs so that they can increase efficiency and reduce costs regardless of the size or sophistication of their IT organization”.
VMware has being doing well because it has established itself as the default Virtualization vendor for large enterprises. However, with its new initiatives, it is increasing its focus on its messaging specifically for SMBs. This would allow global SMBs to enjoy the benefits of virtualization and improve their asset utilization and reduce management costs while at the same time increasing business flexibility and security.
The cacophony surrounding virtualization has led to confusing generalizations. VMware would do well to guide SMBs better in this regard. While the virtualization market has developed, systems management tool vendors have continued to enhance capabilities of their products as well. It would be useful for VMware and its channels to provide better case studies and ROIs to SMBs underscoring when it would or would not be useful to deploy virtualization.
VMware has three major advantages: its portfolio of products, ecosystem to implement and support, VMware's environments and brand recognition. It is time to start capitalizing on these advantages to target the SMB market segment. Microsoft and Citrix are not far behind.
Tavishi Agrawal
Techaisle
Since the emergence of the Internet in early 90s, experts have been predicting the use of software applications over the Internet, whereby users did not need to install any applications software and servers on their own premises. Instead, they could simply connect to the Internet and access their applications and data from their service providers, much like the telephone, where all the telephony networks and infrastructure are installed at the telephone company’s operating centers and users only need to buy a phone to use all the telephone-related services they need.
The concept was particularly appealing for small and medium businesses (SMBs) that did not have adequate financial and technical resources or the scale of operations required to install the required IT infrastructure in-house. Indeed, up until recently, many SMBs found themselves at a disadvantage in competing with large companies, which implemented the new (and often resource-intensive) complex applications to improve their productivity, develop new products and services better and faster, and provide superior customer service.
In recent years, however, the playing field has begun to be leveled with the emergence of cloud computing, whereby the servers, applications and networking equipment are installed at an external hosting company and users can use the applications they need using any device they want (e.g. desktops, notebooks, tablets, smartphones) without incurring any large capital expenditures upfront, paying for the use of applications on an as-needed basis. One of the most famous examples of such cloud computing is the CRM application offered by Salesforce.com, the single largest pure play cloud computing vendor in the world. While large companies spent tens, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to install, maintain and periodically upgrade their CRM applications from large vendors like Oracle and SAP to serve their customers, SMBs can now acquire similar capabilities by paying a few dollars a month per user.
Several changes have taken place in recent years and now the stars seem to be finally all aligned for a rapid and sustained growth of cloud-based solutions. Enter cloud computing accelerated by mobility and the work from anywhere and anytime culture.
The New Economy and Increased Demand from SMBs
The dramatic shock to the global economy in 2008 had a multifold effect on the decision making of businesses. With sharp drop in revenues and profits and decreased availability of credit, SMBs found themselves starved of the capital they required to invest for in-house IT infrastructures to meet their increasing IT needs to improve their employee productivity, develop new products and services and provide higher levels of customer service to compete in the globalized economy. With the global economy unlikely to recover anytime soon and resume its long-term growth of earlier years, SMBs have become quite averse to make large capital investments and prefer to pay on an as-needed basis. Cloud computing meets this need of the SMBs by converting capital expenditures into operating expenditures.
Increased Employee Mobility
A second factor that has increased the demand for cloud solutions is the increasing mobility among SMB employees and their need to be able to access their applications anytime from anywhere using any device (e.g. desktops, notebooks, tablets, and smartphones). Cloud solution providers have developed new capabilities in recent years that allow SMB employees to do precisely that. Applications and data can be accessed over fixed and wireless connections and they adapt the data views automatically depending upon the access devices being used by the mobile workers.
Technological Developments
Cloud computing is also being enabled by the fact that new applications are increasingly being developed with Internet delivery in mind rather than just adapting the older client-server technologies for the Internet. A key element of this new trend is the evolution of integration platforms that allow users to integrate the web-based and on-premise applications to work together and exchange data on an as-needed basis automatically. Over time, this will allow SMBs to have multiple applications that work seamlessly like a single system without SMBs having to be concerned about transferring the data accurately and quickly for use by different applications thereby reducing their needs for internal IT skills.
Cloud computing is also becoming more economical by the increasing use of virtualization, which allows use of fewer servers to serve the needs of multiple SMB customers. Virtualization also allows for greater security, backup & recovery and higher levels of IT availability, which have become increasingly important for SMBs with their increasing reliance on IT.
Development of the Cloud Computing Ecosystem
Finally, a more complete ecosystem is evolving, consisting of cloud solution developers (e.g. Salesforce.com, Netsuite, Taleo, Concur) , infrastructure providers (e.g. Dell, IBM, Cisco, HP, etc.), hosting companies (e.g. Equinix, Savvis, Rackspace) as well as local channel partners that collectively have the capability to develop and deliver cloud-based solutions to the large number of SMBs spread out all over their markets. Furthermore, collectively they have the financial & technical resources and credibility to convince SMBs to adopt the new technologies.
Tavishi Agrawal
Techaisle
