Evaluating SalesForce
For the past few months I have been seriously thinking about the manner in which all the people that may be involved in this project will communicate. And of particular concern how they will communicate to the oil and gas investor / producer that will be using the software and community of independent service providers.
As I may have mentioned, the collaborative environment provided by "Google Apps for our Domain" is the best solution in the marketplace today. It hasn't all the features that other applications have, but Google has been able to prove that everything is always in development. And therefore it will eventually get much better then the competitions. I have been using their service for this project for about a year. And the interface elements of Google's design are such that they are intuitive and clear. Much like the Apple interface.
A few months ago Google announced their "Apps" product was available and integrated into SalesForce.com a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program. I thought I would try the product on the free trial basis.
When it comes to management of customers and marketing, the oil and gas industry has no idea what these terms mean. After 30 years in oil and gas I can say, that as a producer, I have never seen a customer. So when we take a state of the art application such as SalesForce.com is in the CRM marketplace. I did a bit of scratching to figure it out.
It recently came to me how the application is integrated into People, Ideas & Objects. We need to create full time "Account Manager" positions that service the client producer with their needs. These individuals will need to be very familiar with how oil and gas operates and can see the substantial differences in the application being mirrored within the client producers firm. Attaining that mirroring should be the Account Manager's key objective. They will have the SalesForce.com application as their key resource in determining the needs, and marshaling the resources of the community of independent service providers. Providing the services and our software to the producer. That way the community can be coordinated in their approach to the producer firm. I don't want producers being inundated by the same query more then once. That is inefficient and costs the producer unnecessarily.
How this gets achieved is through the application and the Account Managers organizing the resources for the firm. SalesForce.com provides a comprehensive solution that is well built and capable of approaching the demands that we will eventually be expecting of it.
Naturally this imputes that the Users, Developers, Investor Sponsors and Project Managers that are active in the development of this software will also need a license to SalesForce.com. Or, alternatively can access the system through a Partner and other Portals. Their they can deal with the Account Manager, the development team, other users and producers as needed and be fully up to date as to the status of the software application and its integration within the producer firm.
A couple of things that I thought were interesting and of value was a way in which the producer (Through the Account Manager.) and users could post a suggestion and the rest of the community votes on the feature. If we had the ability to prioritize our developments in such a simple manner, it would help to maintain that our focus remains in the marketplace. The second interesting feature was the idea and solution features.
Therefore the need to have the services of Google Apps for our Domain ($50.00 / user) to deal with the "Office" type of applications, email, calendar, and most importantly the wiki. And have SalesForce.com ($1,500.00 / user) provide the glue that holds this community together throughout the regions we may find ourselves operating in.
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