reveries - tool news - eric hoffert

Software tools for sales and marketing traditionally have been very challenging to integrate into day-to-day work activities.

Applications would often require large downloads of complex desktop applications, or lengthy and onerous training cycles. Deployment timeframes were long; in some cases so long that software would be obsolete by the time it became operational. Costs were prohibitive and large upfront fees were commonplace before any value was proven to purchasers or end-users.

Customization or changes to software would require veritable armies of programmers and developers with frequent miscommunications about what users really needed. As a result, system usage rates were low; high-level management would insist on usage while line of business users would do everything possible to avoid it.

Enterprise software providers would dictate to users what to do, how to do it, and when to use their tools. It was as if the users were serving the providers rather than the other way around. But this approach was like driving a round peg into a square hole. A fundamental set of mismatches could not be reconciled. Following these trends, adoption has not been widespread for sales and marketing software tools.

To make matters worse, sales people are notoriously impatient. They want to sell and to focus on selling. Likewise marketers are creative souls and strategic thinkers -- rigorous workflows and processes don't fit in. Marketers, too, like speed and simplicity. But software requires sales and marketing teams to document what they are doing and to capture the knowledge that builds the business.

An inherent challenge must be addressed: How do you make it easy and compelling to leverage tools to support your work and to collaborate across a network with your extended sales and marketing team? In addition to the traits that are unique to salespeople and marketers, sales and marketing teams often don't speak the same language. Yet, they could operate far more efficiently if they had a platform upon which to collaborate. But the software worlds for sales (typically CRM -- Customer Relationship Management) and marketing (EMM -- Enterprise Marketing Management) have been islands unto themselves.

Fortunately, a revolution (and a big one at that) is now upon us. Software tools for sales and marketing teams have become more accessible, affordable, faster, and easier-to-use than ever before. Most important, a major new set of trends is transforming the entire marketplace so that sales and marketing software is now "at your service," striving to serve you as the user, to anticipate, react to, and meet your needs to get work done like never before. And adoption is rising rapidly -- hundreds of thousands of users have already moved to the on-demand model. The key enablers for this major transformation include:

On-Demand Software Services: Software can be reliably delivered now as a service, over the Internet, just like a utility that provides electricity, heat, or water to consumers. On-demand service is always there -- ubiquitous, widely accessible, and resilient. With delivery via a web browser, software services can run in a lightweight and easy-to-use package that is quick to access from any computer. Performance is radically faster than you might expect, and user interfaces are fun, intuitive, and friendly. On-demand services can include a variety of security mechanisms including data encryption, user roles, authentication, authorization, and permissions on access to keep data safe at all points of usage.

Rich Collaboration: Salespeople and marketers are people-centric; they spend a lot of their time interacting with prospects, customers, and partners. So, newer software systems are responding to this need -- becoming more people-centered and linking up users with other users, or sharing expertise in knowledge networks. Collaborative tools allow people to share insights, experiences, opinions, perspectives, strategies, plans; to alert if other users are online (via presence awareness), to interact in real-time with instant messaging or web conferencing.

Consumer-Friendly Features and User Interface: Consumer services like Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Netflix and others have caught on like wildfire with adoption in the tens of millions of users. These services value the opinion of users from the ground up, allowing anyone to cast their vote or editorialize a perspective. Five-star ratings from a likeminded community go a long way to build trust when deciding what tool, content, or product has the greatest value. Similarly, web logging (also known as blogging) has transformed and democratized the ability for any user to post a perspective and share it rapidly with ease -- no web authoring required.

Web Services Construction Tools: New standards on the Internet for data exchange and object access such as XML and SOAP enable automated bridges to be built across disparate applications. A new layer of tools has been built allowing users to drag and drop components to build a powerful software dashboard. Rich user interfaces can be constructed via web services on-the-fly, where no server software is even required. All delivery is at a client side communicating with web services distributed across the Internet.

Flexible End-User Customization: New tools provide unprecedented levels of customization that would have been unthinkable with enterprise software. End-users can easily change sales and marketing taxonomies, relevant links, message centers, logos, documents, and navigation structures with ease. And this is just the first wave. Users next will be able to configure their application components, colors, layouts, to develop highly tailored environments for extended sales and marketing teams, partners, suppliers, and customers.

Bridging the Worlds of CRM and EMM: CRM historically has been the province of the sales team, primarily focused on capturing prospect and customer interactions to support building and closing business. Similarly, EMM has been the world of the marketer -- creating a platform for the marketer to work on strategy, planning, execution, assessment and looping back again for enhanced results. These worlds have been quite distinct with virtually no interconnects. But this is now starting to change – in a recent study by Reveries Magazine and the Association of National Advertisers, 61 percent of respondents stated that sales and marketing integration was their most critical organizational issue. Software tools are acknowledging this issue and are starting to bridge the worlds of sales and marketing software, bringing collaboration and information sharing to new levels of capability. Watch this space for more announcements.

Dramatically Affordable: Major and radical transformations have taken place for the foundation components of software-as-a-service in open source software, telecommunication services, storage, bandwidth, and computing power. In many cases, costs are one or even two orders of magnitude less than they were just five years ago. This allows construction of a business proposition for a profitable business that would have been unthinkable very recently. These elements allow a new wave of software service to disrupt the existing economy in a dramatic fashion. What used to be a multi-million dollar upfront investment is now available for anywhere between $25 and $125 per user, per month.

Democratic Access: As an integral aspect of the on-demand model, software services are shared across hundreds, thousands, tens-of-thousands, or hundred-of-thousands-of-users. Individual users can subscribe to a software service just like small workgroups or teams, or entire enterprises. Every user interacts with the same version of the software and software is upgraded instantly for everyone at the same time. Such a backbone is called a "multi-tenant architecture", not unlike an apartment building filled with diverse groups of residents. The new world of on-demand brings enterprise level capabilities to the small- and medium-sized business market, going beyond the Global 5000, to include the potentially 200 million small and medium sized businesses worldwide with a profound ability to transform the types of tools available to all. This is a serious revolution for democratic computing access that is unlike anything we have seen before.

The foundation of traditional enterprise software tyranny and standard practices is weakening; as a compelling alternative the user-centric revolution for on-demand services is accelerating. Expect more significant disruption and change that will result in a more powerful, cost-effective, and enjoyable experience for end-users. Interested readers should be sure to follow up and to have a look at new on-demand tools for CRM (salesforce.com), rich web services authoring tools (dreamfactory.com), and people- centric business networking (www.linkedin.com).

This is just the beginning; stay tuned and surf the wave of the new revolution in software at your service.

Eric Hoffert is CEO of ShareMethods, providers of tools to power communications and collaboration between sales and marketing. Click here to sign up for a test drive of ShareMethods for 5 users. He has delivered collaborative enterprise software for Fortune 500 clients, and launched digital media products at AT&T, Apple Computer, Inc., and new ventures. Previously, he was Chairman of the Board and CTO of Magnifi, a digital asset management software provider with clients such as Coca-Cola, Disney, Boeing, Citibank, and others. At Apple Computer, he played a key role in the development of QuickTime software and holds patents for QuickTime video technology now on more than 175 million computers. Eric has been widely quoted in the press and his work covered in the media (Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Financial Times, CIO, InfoWorld, PCWeek, etc.); he holds eleven patents, has lectured widely around the world, and received the Computerworld Honors and Apple CEO Technical Awards.