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Grants Available for QuickStart
***STOP PRESS***
If you are located in the East Midlands we may able to help you to obtain grant funding for your QuickStart under the Train to Gain program.
Our Quickstart program is a fixed-price remote or on-site service that helps customers configure the application to address their key business processes. 
Tangible Results and Faster ROI
Nothing is more frustrating than waiting months or years to see a return on a business investment—especially something as important to your business as customer relationship management (CRM). With the QuickStart professional services packages, the wait is over.
Based on customer research and thousands of successful Salesforce deployments, Salesforce has created the QuickStart family of services. These services will help
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you begin to achieve a return on your investment in less than five days with their award-winning, on-demand CRM solution. We are one of the few independent consultants certified by Salesforce.com to deliver these services.
Designed for customers with fewer than 100 users, QuickStart services capture your unique organizational requirements. Our business analysts map solutions that address your problems and accelerate business processes and productivity.
QuickStart Benefits
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- Dramatic improvements in a short period of time
- A road map to help you meet future business needs
- Higher end-user adoption and more efficient use of your CRM investment
- Knowledge transfer to help you implement or further optimize your solution on your own
- Metrics to help you manage your business
The QuickStart family of services includes:
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- QuickStart Assist: A remote or on-site service that helps new customers configure the application to address their key business processes
- QuickStart Optimize: A remote or on-site service that helps existing customers configure the application to address their key business processes
QuickStart Assist
QuickStart Assist is designed to help you deploy an ideal set of Salesforce functionality to your user community. The program is for new customers who need expert assistance with the initial setup of the application to support their critical business processes. While not designed to be a comprehensive implementation, the program allows customers to prioritize the consultant's time on the most valuable aspects of the CRM deployment.
QuickStart Optimize
QuickStart Optimize is designed to unlock unused functionality in your existing Salesforce deployment and increase user productivity. It is designed for existing customers who need enhancements to their current application setup or want to extend their use of Salesforce to new areas, such as customer service and support.
We use best practices to configure solutions for optimal performance-and do so in a set amount of time. You'll have the ability to prioritize your most important needs first, because this is not a comprehensive reimplementation.
Scrum and Salesforce
I have just read a blog post where someone talks about 90 days as really short implementation time in contratst with a typical 18 to 24 month implementation for a CRM system. Some implementations can be even shorter. So for users who are happy with the standard Salesforce.com B2B CRM model I have undertaken a 5 to 10 days implementation engagement including end user training.
So what has this to do with Scrum? Well firstly Salesforce.com itself uses Scrum to manage all its own product development and they have seen a 60% productivity improvement as a result.
The challenge that both approaches face is that project estimation is uncertain but in the first case you get a fixed price but a risk that not all the functionality will be implemented. In the second case you might get all the functionality but at the risk of cost overrun.
The benefit of using Scrum is that you can decide at the end of the fixed period whether the return that you would get from the missing functionality is worth the extra cost. The reason that Salesforce.com makes this possible is that unlike other types of software infrastructure (particularly on premise databases) you will have a working system. It may not do everything but it will function and you can then evaluate it against the real world requirements.
Its not just technology
A lot of the work that I do is helping people get started with Salesforce.com and we sometimes deliver this help as fixed time package of work. Now these work packages (QuickStarts) are pretty short engagements (3 to 5 days) and we ask the clients to do some pre-work so that they can get the maximum return on investment. This consists of some online training and completion of a questionnaire which outline their goals for the engagement.
- Lead from the top
- Get the requirements right
- Scope the business impact
- Invest in change management
- Plan for support
Gnu Force.com?
"One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control," he said. "It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."
At the root of this is his fear that once they have got you hooked they can make you pay through the nose but is this realistic? Even if you put your software on your software on your own web server you would be at the mercy of a proprietary chip maker and if you want to implement a high volume internet application you need to have access to an internet backbone which is again another dependency even if you could access it directly.
The fact is we are all dependent on proprietary computer infrastructure of some kind and we have to rely to some extent on the vendors not extorting us too much really out of self interest. They understand that in order to grow their business they need to sell us more and that its better to have willing customers than a blackmail victims.
That is not deny the contribution that the Free Software foundation and the Open Source movement has made, but I would argue that its main benefit has been in fostering innovation. Allowing via the LAMP stack for example a host of Internet based businesses to be created. Its difficult to believe that a proprietary vendor like Microsoft would have facilitated that development because its focus would have been on meeting the needs of its target corporate IT customers.
Currently there is no doubt in my mind that the Salesforce.com .Force platform offers the best cloud computing infrastructure and that more and more people will start to take advantage of the benefits of moving to the cloud. These are largely connected with not worrying about building infrastructure but on concentrating on the added value of the application. The best response from the Free Software adherents is not to stand on the sidelines wringing their hands or taking the occasional pot-shots about privacy but take it head on and develop an open source multi-tenant database with a Java like Data Manipulation Language (DML) that could provide a real alternative. There's your challenge Richard. Good Luck!
Salesforce in the Cloud
Salesforce.com has been a leader in cloud computing since its inception. Although launched as on demand CRM solution other SaaS applications have always been part of the vision. You only have to see the No Software logo to realise that.
Two years ago Salesforce launched the Force platform and more recently VisualForce to enable third party developers to deploy applications on the Salesforce.com cloud platform.At the recent Dreamforce conference more announcements , such as Sites, were made which demonstrate the Commitment of salesforce.com to this goal.
Other bigger players are now beginning to show their hand: Google has had its app engine around since 2007 and Amazon is pushing its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and most recently Microsoft announced Azure.
Who will win? Well without doubt Salesforce.com offers the best technical solution because its multi-tenant database scales so much more easily than the other solutions but its achiles heel is its reluctance to fully embrace a VAR model. With Amazon a vendor can buy the service embed his application and resell it and of course Microsoft have well established reseller channels.
Salesforce have taken the first steps along the VAR route by offering an embedded licence but this only applies to a single app. If a vendor wants to integrate other third party apps to provide a complete solution then the customer must buy a platform licence from Salesforce.
Its early days and this is very much an evolving situation. Its easy to see that Salesforce.com does not want to risk cannabalising its revenues streams and changing from a culture of centralised control to decentralised management is a challenge but if it wants to compete with the other vendors who are looking to park their tanks on the Salesforce cloud computing lawn, it will need to unleash its own attack dogs.
Welcome Forcists
I must admit this is not the first blog I have attempted. My original idea was to blog about general marketing issues but of the three posts that I made 2 were about Salesforce.com and then I stopped for a while because I couldn't really think of a direction to take. So as I spend most of my working day involved with Salesforce.com I have decided to focus on that and create a dedicated Salesforce.com blog. Ofcourse there are lot of other Salesforce.com blogs out there but I hope my slant on the subject will be a useful contribution. I will also flag up other bloggers that have interesting things to say about Salesforce.com. One question that has occurred to me: Is there a collective name for Salesforce.com users? What about Forcists? Perhaps not. Maybe we don't need one. After all there is no collective name for iPOD users. Or is there?