If there’s any area of my personal organization tasks – that web apps haven’t gotten right yet, it’s the contact manager.

As a busy consultant, i need to be able to quickly add contacts, and pull them up from anywhere, on any computer. An online contact manager that works smoothly would be a great solution for me and many others.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a perfect solution for most people yet. While email, calendar and to-do software is getting better all the time, contact managers are like the ugly cousin that no one pays attention to. Perhaps part of the reason is that people are hesitant to store all of this personal information online — and still, we are perfectly willing to put all of our private emails and contacts in a service such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail.

Then – there is all the other companies – who jump onboard the CRM process, with their new and flashy CRM System (Microsoft, Siebel, Sales Forge or something completely out there).

They may not have a strategy and ambition with their investment – but they surely have CRM. !!!

This process can kill an organization – having CRM without am ambition / plan and a way to identify the success and gain we can achieve – by actually planning our CRM approach. That is why I something ask people, how much is enough (Online Contact Bok, or the Full Sales Forge Solution.

My best advice is quite simple. Identify your goal – and your desire, and ask yourself, will I really gain any value of the CRM process. Can you do the same – in a without doing the same thing like everyone extra.
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Having spent a few years in the trenches of incentive marketing and the related services; I would like to offer a short explanation of what the topic is about – as well as what kind of value it does provide. This chapter is a description of 3 different scenarios.

Incentive marketing is usually the definition a marketing service / effort made by an organisation who wishes to provide the person or company making a decision of a purchase with an extra ordinary value to decide on their product – instead of the competitor.

It can be used as a hidden discount; it can be used as an opportunity to provide extra ordinary services, and finally also to secure that the individual are being granted a value for his/her loyalty.

We have throughout the years seen several scenarios where this effort has been used to secure the deal – and I would like to provide you with a sample scenario of what have been done; as well trying to place my comments of how used and what kind of value this has made.

IT-Hardware supplier bundle UNIX Services with Education.

An American IT supplier (IBM did at a certain time) bundle their offerings of RS6000 based Servers, with free education for the organisations employees.
The challenge, Microsoft Windows Servers was making the first impressions of the market and several of IBM’s customers made the decision of replacing these services, with the cheaper and more “simple managed solutions”.
Did it make a difference, I hardly think so – but it was a way to show that value in knowledge could be bundled with hardware sales.

Today, we are looking at several hardware suppliers bundling software (Windows with the Computer) as well as Free Applications when buying hardware (Navigation Software/Hardware bundle) and many similar solutions. I have even seen several US-Based offerings of Cable Services with Free Computers and Network Access for a longer subscription period.

Rebate and Bonus Programs

Who hasn’t had a bonus card from a Coffee Shop, Burger King, Meals and bookstores (as well as many others). We have been lured into the belif that the fact that we have been “valued customers” did provide us with a certain value – but the customers have realised that they haven’t been granted a better price, and everyone else have made the same decision – thereby making it not big deal.
Was it worth it – Well, first of all – it made the customers loyal – until the same solution was offered by the competitor and thereby making our Rebate program less valuable.
Usually, we had to introduce a new program soon after, again with the competitor following the same path and so the story goes.
Basically; although been cheap to implement – they haven’t really made an impression in the clients brand recognition, when the customer are moving in between several loyalty cards; we have achieved anything and not changed their purchase patterns.

I fail to see any but one industry who has secured and enhanced the usage of loyalty cards within the years; the Airline Industry.
As an industry they have understood that their frequent flyers had the opportunity to gain “personal value = frequent flier miles” on the companies expense, as well as catering and extend the value by offering several levels (Bronze, Silver and Gold Memberships) – again making the “club” more exclusive.
The value of the card has also been extended with adding in Credit Card, Club Membership as well as Hotel Chains, Car Rental and many other services.

Incentive to decision makers.

Well, haven’t we all heard about these offerings? Choose my product (Cable access to your office) and we will give you a Free X-Box (or whatever tool), I have seen companies who sell IT-Equipment – offering Fridges and Air cons to volume based purchase agreements in Asia.

Does this kind of service work; surely – you can always rely on human greed. Is it ethical – well; sort of / could be / perhaps….  It depends on how it’s been introduced.

Honestly have seen few companies who has used this Incentive form as a lifting pole for the sales – and introduction of new equipment (Lets not mention the excursions and seminars made by the medical industry within the 80’s and early 90’s for the doctors and pharmaceutical decision makers).
Certain companies have taken the effort to be open about the opportunity; but also provide their client with an opportunity to gain personal or company incentive value – to secure future loyalty in purchasing. I have even seen a Danish Organization in Asia go through a sign up procedure for participants – who was that strict in having the Companies CEO to sign up on the admission to this kind of programme.
They just didn’t want anyone later to point fingers and say that the decision was made by an individual who had an opportunity to make personal gaining on securing this deal going through.

Read my next chapters – about the value of incentive marketing.

Having followed the recent development of both Darren Lennard is a managing director in the London offices of European-based investment bank and Dresdner Kleinwort Wassersteinuse of WIKI’s . He became something of a creative-class everyman a month ago when, after a long and onerous day at the office, he plucked his hyperactive BlackBerry from his silk-lined pocket and proceeded to smash it on the gleaming granite countertop of his London home.

As if an explanation is necessary. The analytically gifted investment banker had morphed into a zombie-faced thumb man, wheeling through his engorged in-box as his last activity before going to bed and his first upon waking. The time squandered on his electronic mistress made his brain reel. Of the 250 e-mails he received each day, he says “85% were totally not important to my job.” Think that ratio of e-waste sounds depressing? It gets worse. Legitimate e-mail will drop to 8% this year, down from 12% last year, according to Redwood City (Calif.) e-mail filtering outfit Postini Inc.

BLOW-OFF FACTOR
What makes Lennard’s e-mail outburst unique is that it was embraced by his superiors. J.P. Rangaswami, Dresdner’s global chief information officer, is among a growing group of experts dedicated to slaying the unwieldy electronic blob. The cc: button? “Cover your asses,” says Rangaswami, sounding less like a suit than a tattooed text punk. “…And bcc:, that’s, like, almost evil. People can hide and have these sneaky little private conversations. Ludicrous!”

Indeed, the onetime productivity wonder has turned into a maddening time waster. Despite the brawniest corporate filters, more than 60% of what swarms into corporate in-boxes is spam. Since so much of what’s received involves scams about millions languishing in nonexistent bank accounts, interoffice status contests, and people plopping unwanted meetings onto Outlook calendars, the e-mail blow-off factor is rising. That’s imperiling the medium’s former dependability. In the long run, perhaps the biggest death knell for e-mail is the anthropological shift occurring among tomorrow’s captains of industry, the text-messaging Netgens (16-to-24-year-olds), for whom e-mail is so “ovr,” “dn,” “w/e (over, done, whatever).”

No surprise, then, that on Rangaswami’s orders, e-mail at Dresdner is beginning to fade as the collaboration tool of choice. Instead, workers there, as well as at places like Walt Disney, Eastman Kodak, Yahoo!, and even the U.S. military, are ditching e-mail in favor of other software tools that function as real-time virtual workspaces. Among them: private workplace wikis (searchable, archivable sites that allow a dedicated group of people to comment on and edit one another’s work in real time); blogs (chronicles of thoughts and interests); Instant Messenger (which enables users to see who is online and thus chat with them immediately rather than send an e-mail and wait for a response); RSS (really simple syndication, which lets people subscribe to the information they need); and more elaborate forms of groupware such as Microsoft Corp.’s SharePoint, which allows workers to create Web sites for teams’ use on projects.

Though the likeliest scenario is that e-mail will remain the prime tool for notification and one-to-one communication, “a huge percentage of collaboration will occur outside of e-mail, with a continued rise in these other tools,” says Clay Shirky, associate teacher in the interactive telecommunications program at New York University. “There’s an enormous untapped value to be gotten by getting collaboration right.”

KILLER WIKIS
Although all these tools are gaining momentum, it’s easy-to-use and practically free wikis that proponents say offer the promise of collaboration beyond e-mail, even though big editing kinks remain and other quirks and security flaws are sure to surface. Internet research firm Gartner Group predicts that wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009. At Ann Arbor (Mich.)-based Soar Technology Inc., an artificial-intelligence company that works on projects for the Office of Naval Research, wikis enable the company to slash in half the time it takes to complete projects. Soar engineer Jacob Crossman says that’s because the wikis eliminate the usual flurry of back-and-forth attachments and resulting document-version confusion that’s rife in e-mail. At Dresdner, Rangaswami says that among the earliest and most aggressive adopters, e-mail volume on related projects is down 75%; meeting times have been whacked in half.

None of this is to imply, however, that e-mail is on its way to floppy disk-dom. It has certainly come under threat before. The Lotus Notes juggernaut of the early 1990s never displaced e-mail. Nor did attempts to build collaborative platforms during the boom. But this time may be different, Rangaswami and other experts say, because e-mail has hit a wall, creating an impenetrable scale of conversations people don’t need to be a part of and shipping around mounds of information they can’t possibly digest. What was intended as a point-to-point communication tool has been stretched into a broadcast medium.

That’s what Darren Lennard is beginning to grasp at Dresdner. Instead of chatting via e-mail, Lennard now uses the bank’s own version of Instant Messenger. Projects are also more efficient. Recently, Lennard wanted an analysis of how to double profits on a particular trade. Instead of shooting copies of the same document to several people via an e-mail attachment, only to have to keep track of, merge, and archive all the fixes back into a central version, he threw the problem up on a wiki page where everyone could brainstorm, comment, and edit in real time. In the space of two days, entire e-mail conversations evaporated and Lennard had analytics that would have otherwise taken two weeks. Next year’s budget practically wrote itself on the wiki page.

Something very Wisdom of Crowds was happening. It was as if everyone could Google everyone else’s brain. “The first thing they teach you at Harvard or Yale business school is that it’s important to have efficient, open disclosure,” says Lennard. “It’s just that, as a team, we didn’t have the tools to practice these amazing concepts until now.”

This kind of open-source, bottom-up workplace is exactly what Rangaswami envisions. So far, companies have invested 95% of their spending in business processes, according to Social Life of Information author and former Xerox Corp. Palo Alto Research Center director John Seely Brown. A scant 5% has gone toward supporting ways to mine a corporation’s human capital. That’s why fans say the beyond-e-mail workplace will become a key competitive advantage. In the global race for innovation, it’s not as much about leveraging what’s inside your factories’ machines as what’s in your employees’ heads.

According to Gartner, the world’s leading provider of research and analysis about the technology industry, “CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is not a technology or a software package — it is a strategy. To implement the strategy, organizations use tools and technologies, usually offered by vendors in the form of CRM software packages … using the tools and technologies offered by the vendors to solve specific business problems related to interactions with customers.”

Too often, CRM deployments help businesses manage the sales cycle more effectively, but the software isn’t utilized throughout the organization, so you’re only getting a partial value from the software and you’re not maximizing the customer’s experience with your organization. For instance, when a customer calls a service center, an agent may only have the customer’s sales history and information on shipping issues but not have access to customer questions submitted via e-mail. This means your customer must explain her problem or question — again — to the live agent. True customer relationship management goes far beyond sales, marketing, and support management. But many small and medium businesses tend to view CRM solutions as technology for technology’s sake, even though CRM experts caution small and medium businesses, as well as the enterprise organizations, against this attitude.

In fact, according to the December 2005 DestinationCRM article, “11 Ways to Ensure CRM Success,” “If executives learned anything from the Y2K tech wreck, it should be that technology is not a good driver of a CRM strategy, but reorganizing business process efficiencies and bolstering revenue are. Find out how your company’s customer touch points can maximize those ideas, then give customers applications that work with them.”

In other words, set your strategy first — yours might be something such as “How can my company improve customer commitment and loyalty (leading to greater profitability)?” Then use your technology as a means to an end.

With the right technology — both hardware and software — you can consolidate, access, and store customer data, and even segment it into categories that make sense for your company. For example, say a certain group of customers purchases the same or similar products and services. You can utilize your CRM system to make this information available to the marketing department, which in turn can create a marketing strategy or sales promotion geared to that specific group of customers. Segmenting your customers this way can enhance your company’s revenue in the long run.

By putting customer-centric capabilities and technologies in place, you gain a significant competitive advantage because you can provide both customers and business partners a better relationship experience, including better service and more timely information. In addition, Gartner also reports that CRM software for small and medium businesses drives better bottom-line and top-line financial results through reduced sales and service costs, greater sales productivity, and improved levels of customer satisfaction and increased customer retention.

After you’ve developed your strategy for a customer-centric environment, consider the following points as you look for a CRM system to meet your unique business needs:

* Do you want an in-house or outsourced CRM system? Deploying a CRM solution onsite at your company gives you the ability to fully customize the application for the specific needs of your company and customers. You also store all the customer information on your own servers, so you are ensured of data safety and access. However, hosted CRM packages are gaining in popularity and may make sense to meet simple CRM needs for those small businesses that have had little CRM experience.

* What is the expected time frame for measurable ROI? In the early ’90s, when CRM was first gaining popularity, publications were rife with CRM horror stories — multi-year deployments that almost never worked correctly, or installations that were supposed to take only weeks and wound up taking months or years. Luckily, the industry has come a long way since then, but you should still talk to several of your software vendor’s customers and ask them to describe the benefits they’ve received since implementing the CRM system — and ask how quickly those benefits came.

* Will your new CRM system integrate easily with existing customer information? Any new technology should allow data from existing CRM systems and business applications to be easily accessed or transferred into a new environment. If your CRM system isn’t integrated with your operations applications — including inventory and finance applications — it doesn’t matter that your sales force can take orders while in the field, because they won’t have accurate inventory information.

But most importantly, remember that CRM is a strategy, not a technology. Figure out where you can get greatest return by improving customer-facing processes, then find the CRM solution that best supports your goals and best fits your organization and budget. Then when you look back at your CRM solution in a year, you’ll be thinking not about the technology but of the rewards in terms of new business, more revenue, and greater customer loyalty.

In 1980, Bill Gates had a brilliant idea: make a fortune providing the operating system platform for the first PCs and let others build applications on top of it. In 2006, Marc Benioff has the same idea.

On Tuesday, salesforce.com officially launched AppExchange, an online marketplace for applications certified to run as add-ons to salesforce.com’s hosted customer relationship management and sales force automation applications.

(Just don’t call it software, please. Since the company’s launch in 1999, it’s proclaimed “the end of software.” Salesforce.com says it provides applications on demand.)

While salesforce.com CEO Benioff often disses competitors such as Microsoft and SAP by name, an odd thing happened during the festivities announcing the opening of AppExchange: The company began comparing itself to Microsoft.

Introducing AppExchange, Benioff said, “We’ll take a killer app on the Internet — salesforce.com — and transform it into a platform, just as our predecessors did in the PC marketplace.”

Like Microsoft, salesforce.com hopes that by allowing independent software developers to build on top of its basic software, it can keep customers happy.

Lew Tucker, a salesforce.com vice president in charge of the AppExchange, told journalists at its event that the goal of the software marketplace was to increase basic subscriptions to salesforce.com. He said, “It’s almost like if you go back 10 or 15 years to Microsoft and Windows. You bought Windows, and then you bought applications to run on top of it.”

But Kendall Collins, vice president of product management for the company, denied that it’s building a Microsoft-style ecosystem of proprietary applications that only work together.

“We do allow applications to make a call to salesforce,” he told internetnews.com. “Our API is bi-directional, so you can pass information into and out of salesforce.”

For example, Steve Lucas, vice president for data integration for Business Objects, said that his company’s Crystal Reports product can pull in salesforce.com data. “If you’re a Crystal Reports user, you now have the ability to call salesforce.com and use it as another data source.” (Business Objects also created a separate Crystal Reports application to run on AppExchange.)

Analysts loved the idea.

Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of Nucleus Research, said, “They’re expanding what they’ve done with CRM to provide people with more functionality. There’s a lot to CRM and business process applications. This is a great way to provide users with an on-demand platform to access them.”

She said AppExchange would give ISVs a new distribution channel, while giving salesforce.com subscribers more reason to stick around. “What they want is for their basic system to be much more sticky than just the basic CRM application,” she said, “much like Microsoft has done with Office.”

Wettemann added that salesforce.com customers are free to go. They can easily move their data to another service.

Sheryl Kingstone, a Yankee Group analyst, said she wouldn’t endorse salesforce.com as a platform-only play. “Number one priority should be an application and not a platform,” she said. But she thought AppExchange was very important to the company as a way to help ISVs empower customers. “What’s more important is the ability for their customers to make unique business process and custom changes to their own applications or [to build any application they want themselves.] So, it’s a platform play, but it’s all about empowering the application itself.”

Said Bruce Guptill, managing director of Saugatuck Research, “Having an entity like Salesforce.com act as an aggregator/software/services provider is key to making SaaS really work for most user firms.” He said that enterprises typically have hundreds of applications from dozens of vendors. “Managing just the combination of licenses, usage, rates/costs, and services levels can add tremendously to the IT management burden of any user firm. Add in support and maintenance, and there’s a potential nightmare.”

Guptill said that if Salesforce.com can simplify the management, it would make software-as-a-service (SaaS) more economically attractive.

He said the future of enterprise computing is a hybrid environment in which software is accessed in a variety of ways, including over the Internet. “Salesforce.com has moved another step ahead in the direction that all ISVs will eventually be headed,” he said.

Whether or not it works in the short term, Guptill said, is still to be determined. Benioff admitted that launching the AppExchange, originally announced in September 2005, was much harder than anticipated.

Said Guptill, “A SaaS business model is tremendously different and potentially much more complex than the traditional model — for both users and vendors.”

Using technology to integrate processes and information offers small and medium companies a way to cost effectively streamline operations and gain a comprehensive overview of the business.

The smaller your business, the less you can afford inefficiency or waste. Intuitively, it might seem easier for a smaller business to achieve efficient processes and for management to have a comprehensive view of operations. Surely it’s easier for inefficiency to flourish in the depths of sprawling corporate giants, right? But the fact is that efficiency is often a larger challenge for a smaller business for several reasons. Processes are often informal and knowledge of them is stored primarily in people’s heads.

Information may be scattered across computers and among employees, and owners and managers often have to function in “player/coach” roles that leave them little time to spend gathering information and constructing a timely and accurate picture of operations that can aid in informed decision-making.

Integration of processes and information through a technical infrastructure offers small and medium-sized businesses a fairly fast and cost-effective way to meet these challenges. There is business software available to meet a number of integration needs, from customer relationship management (CRM) and sales force automation (SFA) applications that help you leverage customer information throughout your business to enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications that help you keep tighter control on inventory, production and cash flow. Whatever application is most appropriate to your business, the goal is consistent: to achieve consistent, efficient processes and a unified, accurate, timely view of operations. Automating processes helps ensure consistency and reduce errors, saves training time, and mitigates risk during employee absences or through turnover. Integrating business data provides you with an accurate, timely view of operations that aids decision-making and helps you achieve better control over business results.

While the idea of integration is simply, when you consider implementation, the choice of applications (and acronyms) can be confusing. The path you choose should be determined by your business model and objectives. Typical integration choices include:

* Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the first step to integration for many businesses. CRM software integrates customer information in one database so that sales and customer service, management, and, in some cases, customers themselves can access information. CRM can help service representatives respond more quickly to customer needs or giving them immediate status on pending orders, help sales and marketing people by showing what other products a customer has purchased, and help management track purchasing trends and which customers are the best in terms of sales and service.

* Sales Force Automation (SFA) automates and integrates customer information and the sales process to help make the sales force be more effective and lower costs of sales. SFA may overlap with or be an add-on to a CRM system.

* Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software is used, by manufacturing and retail companies to manage areas such as product planning, inventory management and purchasing, production, customer service, and order tracking. ERP integrates operational data, tasks and processes to streamline operations and enable better real-time decision-making.

* Business intelligence (BI) applications integrate data to give an overall view of operations for better, more informed decision-making at the management/strategic level. BI applications generally include features that allow managers to project profit scenarios with different sets of assumptions, to see which will best maximize cash flow, profits, etc.

* Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) vendors offer software that helps tie together different databases and applications with a common interface or workflow. When you buy these products, the price often includes professional services to implement the software with your systems.

For many businesses, integration is an effective way to leverage information, streamline processes, and lower costs. Whatever your needs, there are available off-the-shelf software packages that are designed for your type of business. Integration also typically requires a corporate network, some kind of relational database and a business server on which to centralize data. Integration gives you big-picture visibility into and control over your business, and it is simpler than you might think.

Don’t you hate it when your new CRM application crashes your system?

Enterprises using Salesforce.com’s hosted applications will soon be able to crash-test their deployments without fear by using Sandbox, an optional service expected this quarter.

Customers can use Sandbox to test new applications installed from AppExchange, evaluate new customizations or features before rolling them out to users, build a development environment for integration testing, or create a safe training environment for employees.

“We’re seeing customers beginning to deploy Salesforce.com across the entire enterprise, not just for CRM,” said Phil Robinson, Salesforce.com’s vice president of global marketing. “Customers are customizing and extending Salesforce.com, so they can build other applications that sit alongside it, and also installing applications out of AppExchange.”

The San Francisco-based hosted applications provider launched AppExchange in September, with the aim of making it easier for third-party developers and customers to find each other. The directory now features 85 pre-built applications.

Robinson said customers will be able to turn on Sandbox with a single click, choosing to either replicate the entire Salesforce.com deployment or the configuration of applications sans data.

Sandbox will include the ability to create a complete copy of the organization’s production database in a completely separate sandbox environment that can be used for configuration-change testing, integration testing, or new user training.

Customers will be able to delete and refresh sandboxes as needed to keep them in sync with any changes or updates made to the production environment. Companies will be able to have all their corporate data and configurations modeled in the sandbox environment, or deploy a configuration-only version that will not include any production data.

“In a traditional client/server or mainframe application, people would have a parallel system for development and testing, but at great cost and complexity,” Robinson said.

Robinson said his company has invested significantly in its data-center facilities in order to support Sandbox; the company sees the effort as part of its strategy to move from being a CRM provider to also becoming a platform for all kinds of on-demand computing.

Sandbox will be available as an additional option for Enterprise Edition customers for $25 per month per user; the configuration-only version, without data, will be $18 per month per user.

The company expects to deliver the testing environment as part of its “Winter ‘06,” which is currently scheduled for later in the company’s fourth quarter.

Salesforce.com isn’t the only hosted applications provider to offer a test bed.

A spokesman for RightNow Technologies, a competitor that offers both on-premise and on-demand CRM applications, noted that his company has provided customers with a test environment for their software upgrades and customizations for the last five years for free.