Selligy

The next enterprise software category will not end in “M”

The death of M

Most of the enterprise application markets to date have a three-letter acronym that ends in M – for management.

HCM – human capital management
SCM – supply-chain management
CRM – customer relationship management
EFM (or just FM) – enterprise financial management

There’s a good reason all these apps end in M: Who uses (and buys) these applications?

Managers.

All of these applications solve difficult problems for managers – from getting the revenue forecast right, to getting the taxes right on every paycheck every week, to tracking hundreds of millions of physical items through the manufacturing process. And watching every penny so the quarterly reports are accurate (or else a manager could, literally, go to jail).

But several new technologies are now creating an opportunity for a new category of enterprise applications focused on the problems faced by actual line employees – not managers.

Yesware is a new application that allows salespeople to become more effective at using email, perhaps the most important tool they have. It helps the salesperson manage email templates and measure which emails are the most effective.

Clearslide has taken off by providing salespeople with better tools for giving – and, again, measuring the effectiveness – of their presentations.

Selligy – our product – is a mobile application focused on helping salespeople prepare for, arrive on time at, dial into, and measure the results of their flow of customer meetings.

What makes these applications different from the classic management applications?

The user is the buyer – and gets immediate value. These apps provide value by solving the problems of the individual employee – rather than the management of the entire enterprise. The rise of App Stores — from the iOS App Store to the Chrome Store to Salesforce.com’s AppExchange — allows individual users to be the buyer — and thus makes it possible to write applications primarily focused on end-user value.

Enabling the quantified enterprise life. These apps integrate directly into the end user’s tools. This gives the end user fantastic new levels of data – on par with personal fitness app data. Rather than track how far you’ve run, these apps track how effective your day-to-day tasks are. All of this helps the end user be better at his or her job.

Something for the boss as well. This new activity data will also be a goldmine to managers as well. It will act as a new feedback system about how they, too, can help the line employee do a better job.

Plays well with others. One of the marks of the traditional applications is that they “own the space,” generally replacing their predecessors. Having a single, central system is critical to providing managers with a unified dashboard. But these new tools deliver value directly to the end user, integrating well with (not necessarily replacing) existing systems.

So, these applications concentrate on making enterprise users more effective, rather than making the enterprise as a whole more manageable.

Of course, while they have a terrible reputation for usability, enterprise application companies do care about usability and end users. But, ultimately, when you sell a management application to managers, the management features become mandatory and the usability features become optional.

We’re excited at Selligy to be able to turn this on its head: for Selligy, delighting the end user is mandatory, everything else is optional. If you’re interested in what this looks like, check out our product video.

What will this new category of enterprise application be called? I’ll write more about this in future posts. But here are some possibilities:

- Enterprise Effectiveness Applications
- Personal Enterprise Apps
- Employee Effectiveness Apps
- Personal Enterprise Effectiveness Apps

What I do know is that – whatever the name is – it doesn’t end in M. The managers have their applications now. It’s time for technology to help the rest of the enterprise.

Chris van Löben Sels

Making the customer king

Inc.’s John Brandon has a great interview with Eric Ries with start up advice. Like many other experienced tech folks, he emphasizes getting the product to customers quickly, so you can figure out what is wrong quickly, so you can fix it quickly.

But unlike many other commentaries, Eric puts it this way: “whatever you do make the customer king.” Given all the talk in our industry about disruptive technology, visionary prescience, and next-big-thing-ism, it’s great to see someone as buzzword compliant (Eric apparently coined ‘pivot’!) put the customer at the center.

Making the customer king is actually what we think creates the disruptive opportunity for Selligy. Up until now, sales tools were sold to sales managers and sold the (very hard) problems that sales managers have.

But now, with AppStores and smartphones, we can build sell sales software directly to salespeople. So we can build sales software that solves the (also very hard) problems that actual salespeople have. Our goal is to give salespeople software that, for the first time, will make them feel like they’re the king.

Because it’s good to be the king.

Chris van Löben Sels

How can you tell if someone has deep enterprise experience? By how they respect sales.

This post was inspired by Anthony Iannarino’s posts about taking back the word sales.

If you know real enterprise sales guys, you know they’re not Joe Isuzu…

How can you tell if someone has deep enterprise experience? By how they talk about — and respect — enterprise sales.

We love listening Aaron Levie making fun of enterprise sales. His slides are hilarious. Joke enterprise sales guy, joke cheesy expression, joke cheesy hair, charismatic and, well, cheesy at the same time.

We agree – enterprise selling is in the process of being transformed – and that’s a good thing.

And yes, we love to laugh about what salesguys get up to (heck, so do salesguys), we even have a home for our sales humor (Busted Quota). But we respect them and their craft. Because we know how awesome awesome salespeople can be.

The stereotype … versus the guy who built your business

If you’ve been in this business for more than five years, enterprise salespeople have paid your rent or your mortgage, paid for that next car, for your vacations.

Salespeople practice a complex craft – not unlike how designers discern what makes a great product, or engineering managers know how to guide a team.

Great salespeople discern deeply how the world of how people, information, emotion, organizations and decisions interact.

Each has an explicit process and style of working – and to the non-practitioner, great sales (like great design or great engineering leadership) looks like a combination of hard work and uncanny instincts for how to make things happen in the end.

Enough self-righteousness, the jokes are still funny

All that aside, it’s people in enterprise companies who invented enterprise sales jokes in the first place.
Calling salespeople “coin-operated” didn’t exactly start in the enterprise sales department at Instragram.

While we have learned that a salesperson’s credibility is often the asset that gets the deal done, we also suspect “salesperson’s credilibity” is also a pretty good punchline.

Besides, in my experience, more salespeople find sales jokes funny than most designers and engineers find jokes about them.

And, more importantly: Aaron is still right!

Aaron is right. Enterprise software does suck in many ways. (Yes, I’m including software I’ve helped build at PeopleSoft, Oracle, and Adobe). It solves gnarly problems to be sure, but often in pretty gnarly ways.

And so does the business model. And, of course, so do some salespeople.

We agree with Aaron that app stores allow us to sell directly to the user. By selling to the user, we get to (and have to) focus on the user’s problems — which are different problems than the user’s boss has. Usability, adoptability, and hour-to-hour value become the non-negotiable goal, not the nice-to-have. As Aaron says, this changes everything.

So, we expect our business will involve more consumer selling and inside sales and less traditional enterprise sales.

But not because enterprise salespeople suck.

We have too much enterprise experience to think that.

Chris van Löben Sels

Why the heck did Salesforce borrow $1 billion dollars?

Salesforce.com just announced a proposed private placement of $1 billion in senior convertible debt, with an option for an additional $150 million and a hedging transaction to offset dilution.

Why?

Well, I don’t know. And they won’t say. Generally, people borrow cash so they can buy something with it. And if you’re going to buy $1 billion of it, you don’t pre-announce you plans and drive up the price.

But here’s my take.

Just under two weeks ago, Marc Benioff led a session in New York announcing Salesforce’s direction as the Customer Company. The customer revolution, he said, will connect companies to their customers in radically new ways – he had nothing short of nine factors driving this revolution: Social, Touch, Local, Big Data, Identity, Community, Ecosystem, Cloud, and Trust. This revolution, he said, would lead to much more connected customers, partners, employees and products.

While we’ve seen ‘customers, partners, and employees’ in similar presentations since the late 1990s, adding products is new. Benioff talked about the ‘Internet of Things,’ where your camera, your fridge, your car all provide data that connect you back to the vendor.

He envisioned (in a positive light) a Minority Report like experience of walking into a Canon store and having the salesperson walk up and ask, “How’s that DSLR you bought in January working out for you?”

The presentation laid out a big vision. To build that vision, Salesforce is going to need more product. More product means more acquisitions. And apparently that means about a billion more in cash.

Like most good long-range vision statements, Benioff’s presentation packed a mix of new innovation and competitive positioning. On the innovation side, it’s brilliant to parley Salesforce’s cloud-based CRM data into the central platform for all mobile apps, social communities, and interconnected products. It essentially says, ‘when you get serious about any of these initiatives, come talk to us first.’

This leverages a natural strength of the platform into a powerful vendor lock-in. What customer wants to build a platform for dealing with very high scale product analytics from scratch, then integrate it into their Salesforce system, if they can just start with the Salesforce platform?

It’s also great positioning against a very serious Oracle threat. Oracle has put together an extremely powerful platform of customer-centric SaaS products. RightNow for customer service (a weak spot for Salesforce), Eloqua for marketing automation (another weak spot for Salesforce), Vitrue for social (probably the better buy at a much better price than Salesforce’s BuddyMedia buy), and ATG for eCommerce (a hole in the Salesforce platform).

Now it’s time for a bit of disclosure. I worked in product strategy at Adobe, where we rolled out a fairly similar vision to the Customer Experience vision of Oracle (they call it CX, launched in NYC last June, we called it Customer Experience Management). And the ‘Customer Company’ vision is an interesting twist on the same trend. Oh, and I also worked at Oracle after the PeopleSoft acquisition (well before Larry’s SaaS buying spree, though). And a ton of my colleagues at PeopleSoft are now at Salesforce (but I haven’t talked to any of them about this article). So I may be biased toward seeing the predictions we made about Customer Experience Management come true. </disclosure>

Unlike Salesforce, however, Oracle doesn’t have a central platform on which to build new apps. In fact, even getting all of the above solutions to use a single customer database to do their current jobs is a real stretch. So the Customer Company vision puts the focus on Salesforce’s strength and Oracle’s weakness.

So, what are they going to do with the $1 billion? Here are some ideas:

Expand the platform with big data, mobile app, and Internet-of-Things technologies. There are too many possibilities here to catalog, since these would probably be technology acquisitions, ahead of customer demand, rather than expanding the customer base. But if you wanted to do a handful of these, plus a medium-sized buy or two, you might want a billion to do it.

Expand the digital marketing offering and attack Oracle-Eloqua. If Salesforce’s mission is to connect companies with customers, they need a leading solution in the communication applications of email and multi-channel marketing. Marketo was the most obvious candidate, but they are heading to an IPO. Responsys (NASDAQ:MKTG) is another; it may be more affordable. ExactTarget is another possibility. And there’s a plethora of smaller multi-channel campaign management possibilities, from Neolane, to Silverpop, to many others.

Attack Oracle-RightNow with a next-gen customer service offering. Much of the connected product applications will connect to the customer support apps, not the sales apps. Salesforce might think that they can’t leave RightNow uncontested. ZenDesk is a possibility. So is RingCentral.

Attack Oracle-RightNow with a social communities offering. One possibility that overlaps both customer service and connected-to-customer is social support communities. While Jive (NASDAQ:JIVE) does this, they also do a lot of other things and weren’t built on SaaS first. Lithium is the likely target here. (yet more disclosures, Rob Tarkoff, Lithium’s CEO, is a former boss and mentor; and we didn’t talk about this article).

What’s not on this list? I don’t think that Salesforce needs to buttress its core Sales Cloud offering. There’s a ton of innovation in new tools for helping salespeople sell. And, thanks to the growing number of app stores (iOS, Android, Chrome, etc.), these startups can now sell direct to the salesperson.

Why doesn’t Salesforce need to move in this area? Because all of these start-ups have, or will, integrate with Salesforce (which is easy) and not Oracle (which is very hard, given the number of products) or SAP (which requires on-site software installed by IT in most cases).

So that leaves companies like Yesware, Clearslide, Crushpath, and Selligy to build great tools for salespeople – putting Salesforce even more into the lead as the customer platform. Linda Crawford’s SalesCloud presentation had a ton of content about the Customer-Connected Sales team, but left plenty of room for the Salesforce ecosystem.

(Final disclosure! My current job is at Selligy, where we’re doing just that: building a great application on top of Salesforce to help salespeople sell.)

Given Oracle’s massive buying campaign, Salesforce needs to outflank its new rival, not re-trench into its core. These are my guesses as the probable moves.

Then again, what couldn’t you do with a billion?

Chris van Löben Sels

Indispensable Mobile Sales Apps – The Road Warrior List

At Selligy, we’re road warriors building an app for road warriors … so we spend a lot of time looking at what works to help salespeople sell, from calculating when to leave based on traffic conditions in a strange city to taking better notes to finding that hotel room you didn’t think you needed …

Let us know what you think should be added! Or droppped!

Selligy	(Yes, it’s a shameless plug — but you knew it was coming, so let’s just do it right now!) Selligy helps salespeople with an iPhone and Salesforce.com get to their meetings on time and prepared.  It uses real-time traffic to tell you when to leave to your next meeting — and will even text your customers if you’re late. It intelligently finds missing meeting location data and you’ll see social media photos of contacts in Salesforce. Click here to get Selligy now!
Expensify	The tagline says it all — expense reports that don’t suck. Any road warrior faces the headache of turning expenses into reimbursements … Expensify helps! They’re our heroes because they are trying to make enterprise apps better by introducing the discipline of selling directly to the user — just as we’re doing for salespeople.
Yesware	Selligy and Expensify help with meetings and calls, Yesware helps with email — the third critical tool in any salesperson’s quiver. Yesware is a gmail plugin that helps you track email templates and see whether your customers are opening your emails. A critical tool!
Evernote	At the end of the ten-meeting road trip, what happened in meeting number six? Evernote tries to help make it easier to both make and read your notes from the road.
Cardmunch	It may be 2:00 am in your home time zone, but Cardmunch is easy enough that you can still take snapshots of the cards you got during the day … and have them as contacts in the morning. The mix of automated technology and human checking is, all in all, quite decent.
HotelTonight	Snow storm? Sudden customer emergency? Where am I going to stay? For those of us without a 24-hour travel agent, Hotel Tonight helps you find that last-minute bargain. The unexpected stay in a five-star hotel (while coming in under budget) is much better than the unexpected stay in a (literal) roach motel.
Starbucks!	Because coffee is for closers. And closers on the road need to find the nearest Starbucks, a.k.a. the mobile office.

What are your favorite tools? What tool doesn’t exist that you think should? Let us know!

Chris van Löben Sels, Marketing