CRM Archives - The Latest on Accounting Tech for SMEs

Fuji Xerox Scanners, Printers Connect Direct to Salesforce.com

February 3, 2014 by Aimy Chen

Fuji Xerox has released an application for certain scanners and printers that saved documents directly to cloud-based business software Salesforce.com.

The Connect to: app was designed for small and medium sized businesses and aimed to transfer paper based information and documents from Fuji Xerox multi-function devices to Salesforce.com.

The user scanned paper documents and saved it directly to Salesforce.com with the app using the touchscreen on compatible Fuji Xerox ApeosPort devices.

“The Fuji Xerox Connect to: is easily achieved directly from the intuitive user interface of a compatible Fuji Xerox multifunction device, giving our customers more time to focus on their core business,” said Antony Bauer, solution marketing manager for Customer Solution Sales at Fuji Xerox Australia.

Benefits included reducing manual steps in uploading documents to the Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) program, automating processes and improving access to documents among colleagues and with customers.

The Connect to: app was available for download through the Fuji Xerox website with a 14-day free trial. Connect to: was compatible with the Enterprise, Unlimited and Developer editions of Salesforce, and was suitable for use with all Fuji Xerox ApeosPort-IV and ApeosPort-V multifunction devices.

Why You Shouldn’t Rely on Email

June 20, 2013 by Sholto Macpherson

Emails have replaced the phone as arguably the most indispensable of business tools. We live by the contents of our inbox.

But email has become a victim of its own success. Office workers frequently struggle with the daily volume of emails to the point where getting to “inbox zero” is an achievement worth tweeting about.

But when an employee reaches the point where clearing his digital communications tray becomes a task in itself, then email becomes a sap to productivity rather than a gain.

The smartest businesses are looking at ways to shift away from the multi-purpose email inbox as the primary tool of communication.
Here are some new strategies to restrict email overload.

1. Stop CC’ing your colleagues

If there’s a sure-fire way to blow out inboxes in a business it’s the dreaded CC (carbon copy) button. Not sure if that new guy three seats away should be part of the email chain? What the hell, add their name to the CC bar. Better safe than sorry.

Thankfully there’s an instant way to permanently kill off the CC email – instant messaging. Instant messaging or chat applications flip the relationship on its head. Colleagues can choose to follow a chat stream about a project, a location or office or a customer.

No need to sit and think who you should include on the message. The decision is left with the consumer of the information, which is better for all involved.

Digital First regular Andy Pattinson says the number of emails in his inbox dropped by 60 percent after moving to chat platform Chatter, part of Salesforce.com. In fact Andy makes a strong argument for banning internal emails.

Chat programs are destined to become regular business tools. See Microsoft’s decision to buy Yammer, which it will no doubt integrate with Skype (also owned by Microsoft) and Lync.

2. Tracking emails for happier customers

Another great reason to move away from the standard email has nothing to do with bulging inboxes. One of the most common problems with emails is that your colleagues can’t see who has emailed you (without peeking, that is). This is fine for most correspondence except when there’s a matter that needs someone else’s attention when you’re not around.

Digital First contributor MC Carter detailed the failings of email when it comes to customer service. Each employee’s inbox acts like a silo that no-one can access easily even though it contains valuable information the business requires to operate.

MC’s tip is to use helpdesk software to track your customers’ inquiries and to make sure they are answered by the first employee available. There’s a new generation of helpdesk software designed for professional services companies rather than IT support guys.

It’s easier to use and it means customer emails receive the priority they deserve and don’t get buried under lunchtime orders.

3. Upgrade to a CRM

One way to deal with email overload is to separate communication into different activities, projects and customers. When you are working on one task you only see relevant emails instead of every meeting request and CC from the past 24 hours.

You can try to do this with email folders but it’s very disjointed and runs into the same information sharing issues mentioned above.

The next step up is to move to a customer relationship management program, or CRM.

CRMs are designed to co-ordinate messages from various platforms – email, but also Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on – so that a business can track conversations with customers and move them through the sales pipeline from lead to sale.

But CRMs have a much broader purpose. You can create projects such as a campaign launch or an office move and assign tasks to employees. Some have their own instant messaging systems included for internal communications.

Low-cost CRMs include Base Camp and Affinity Live and increase in power and complexity with Salesforce.com and SugarCRM.

Email as a technology will be with us for a very long time. Move communications to appropriate channels and you can once again become master of your inbox.

What other productivity tools do you use as you don’t solely rely on email?

Conga Composer: Appexchange App of the Month

February 25, 2013 by Andy Pattinson

Following January’s Appexchange app of the month, February’s app is Conga Composer from AppExtremes. In my experience this is a must-have extension for most Salesforce.com customers.

Every organisation has a handful of documents that must be recreated over and over again for customers, suppliers, partners and employees. Common examples include non-disclosure agreements, sales quotes or statements of work. This is often a tedious process of making a copy of the last document of that type, keying in the new information and double checking before you send it out to ensure no mistakes were made.

A slight inconvenience for an ad-hoc document becomes a royal pain when it’s regularly large volumes. Never mind the hassle of storing and retrieving those documents sometimes months or years later. Creating and managing these documents can be very time consuming.

As is the theme with these reviews, there is a much better way. Conga Composer sets up standard templates for common documents which are automatically filled by data from salesforce.com at the push of a button.

Here’s a video that shows how it works.

Once sent documents are stored with the contact’s details for simple search and retrieval, which also scans the documents’ contents. This dramatically improves visibility of documents you send out as a business.

Imagine one of the sales team being able to see the entire history of every quote that has been sent out to a customer, when they were sent and to whom. Document histories are also included in Salesforce.com reporting.

One often overlooked area is how apps are supported once installed. Conga support, provided by the AppExtremes team, is second to none.

I have found Conga to be a cost-effective way to make business processes more efficient. It’s well worth checking out.

Have you used Conga? Post your experiences in the comments below.

Next month: Echosign kills off the fax machine, the document courier and the scanner simultaneously!

Image credit: Conga Composer

AppExchange App of the Month: OrchestraCMS

January 29, 2013 by Andy Pattinson

This is the first of a monthly series highlighting some of the best applications available on the salesforce.com Appexchange. Salesforce.com pioneered the concept of business applications delivered via an online store, creating an entire ecosystem dedicated to extending the core functionality of salesforce.com, everything from marketing automation, electronic signatures, content management and over 1,700 other applications.

My first app of the month is OrchestraCMS (CMS stands for content management system and is the administration “backend” which manages what you see and can do on a website). There is no better way to start the new year than by re-assessing how effective your website is at finding customers for your business.

Is your website delivering what you want?
Does it engage your audience and drive leads into your sales pipeline?
Is it fresh and easy to maintain?
And how well is it integrated with your customer database (CRM)?

Once a year is just about often enough to take a step back and look at your website objectively. Website design can become tired quickly even if you are adding content regularly. So the next time you evaluate your web presence I highly recommend you take a look at OrchestraCMS as your content management system.

Whether you are a salesforce.com customer or not, there are significant benefits with OrchestraCMS being built entirely on the force.com platform, from not having to worry about hosting because your site is running on salesforce.com infrastructure to the inherent security benefits this brings.

But the biggest benefit is that OrchestraCMS integrates your CRM (i.e. salesforce.com) directly with your website. Viewers’ actions on your website can trigger processes in your CRM automatically without having to move data between the two systems. This means your partners can place orders with you directly in a branded portal, your customers can update their own details or add more information to a customer service case. Any type of form on the website – newsletter, contact, software demo, event registration or lead generation – is automatically entered into salesforce.com, reducing the need to manually rekey or copy over the data.

A list of features can be found here.

Specialist recruitment company Hydrogen chose OrchestraCMS to record how often visitors returned to its website and turn these statistics into marketing data for prospects in salesforce.com. Hydrogen’s non-technical staff could add content and make changes to the website using OrchestraCMS’s user-friendly interface. And the CMS used Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service to store a large collection of documents and videos used on the website and elsewhere.

Other customer success stories demonstrate how a website, intranet or portal working in step with your CRM and customer service application can be a powerful addition to your suite of systems.

Next month: Conga and generating single-click templates from salesforce.com.

Xero execs scoop million-dollar windfalls as investors pile in

December 2, 2012 by Sholto Macpherson

US venture capitalists buy $65 million in stock.

Xero’s latest round of fundraising added another $47 million to the company’s coffers and handed multi-million dollar windfalls to its three largest investors.

Xero board member and former MYOB founder Craig Winkler, Xero CEO Rod Drury and co-founder Hamish Edwards reduced their shareholdings by selling $12 million, $4 million and $1.5 million worth of shares respectively to two US venture capital funds.

The funds, one backed by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, increased their holding to a combined 16.8 percent by also buying 10 million shares from Xero at NZ$6 each.

As reported in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday, sharemarket investors reacted bullishly and pushed the shares to a new high of $NZ6.89 on Friday, with the shares trading later up NZ40¢ at $NZ6.84.

US investor Matrix Capital Management’s stake in Xero rose to 9.8 percent from 1.8 percent and Valar Ventures to 7 percent from 3.9 percent.

Winkler’s share in Xero dropped to 15.7 percent from 19.5 percent, Drury’s holding fell to 18.5 per cent from 21 per cent and Edwards was reduced to 4.9 percent from 5.7 percent.

“As founders, you don’t have many opportunities to take money off the table,” Mr Drury said of the sale to the SMH. “The US investors wanted to buy more. It is interesting to see this level of support from overseas investors at the same time as MYOB’s note issue is under way.”

MYOB announced last week a subordinated notes offer to raise $125 million.

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