Corporate Blog

Self Service vs Solution Selling By: Travis Huch on Mar 20, 2008

As a former Enterprise Software sales guy, I came through the ranks with the Solution Selling and Target Account Selling approach that what we were selling was not a product, but a solution to a problem. The prevailing attitude was “Don’t sell the product – find out the problem and tailor the product in a way that solves the problem”. In other words, if you just told the customer what the product did, you might lose to someone that has an inferior product, but who better articulated how his or her product solved the prospects problem.

Fast forward to today. Now it’s possible to install on-demand applications into an on-demand CRM platform without even speaking to a sales rep or a systems engineer. We have people do it every day. Welcome to the new world of self-service on-demand applications! Does Solution Selling totally go out the window? I don’t think so.

I love when our customers and prospects call us after having educated themselves on the basics of our products. I love it even more when they’ve installed one of our products and used it inside their own Salesforce.com account. At that point we end up having a much higher level conversation about how we can combine the functionality of our products with their unique workflow and business process to create a solution that will uniquely yield value to their organization.

I know that there are those of you that still don’t want to talk to a sales person. Your email address is mickey@mouse.com. But don’t worry. We don’t bite, and in fact we may even be able to impart some value in how you can combine the power of platforms like Force.com with our products in ways that will bring you competitive advantage, or at least save you from a few hours a week inside Excel. Give us a call!

The Importance of Habitual Destinations in a Platform By: Eric Rubin on Nov 28, 2007

In some ways we are all like Norm on Cheers. We are creatures of habit drawn to community. Once we have found our preferred destinations, it’s hard to pull us off our bar stools. This seems to be more pronounced in our corporate lives where the herd dynamic further slows the movement that drives change.

In the world of platforms, these “habitual destinations” play a key role- and are potentially the game changer for the next generation of platforms. They are the anchor tenants that seed the creation of the new platform.

For example in the consumer world of platforms, think of MySpace, Facebook and eBay. Their anchor tenants have generated a user community in the 100’s of millions that habitually frequent these destinations. This then becomes the ante to court an ecosystem of partners to develop value added capabilities to service the new marketplaces they create. You can see a virtuous cycle emerge; end users spend a greater percentage of their time doing more in the same destination- which in turn creates additional barriers to entry and switching costs to the benefit of the platform provider.

In the professional markets think Salesforce.com and WebEx. Each has an enormous following of professionals that habitually frequent their destinations. Each is also leveraging their anchor tenants as a gravitational force to attract third parties to contribute to the ecosystem. Again, from the end user perspective, you get more productivity from a single destination. And again there is an advantage in critical mass to discourage competition in that it creates higher barriers to entry and higher switching costs. Moreover, in the professional world, integration between solutions is important, and this is an inherent aspect to these platforms.

Each of these examples also highlights the other half of the habitual destination equation- community (or in business terms, collaboration). This is the disruptive part of the equation that threatens the entrenched players. The Window’s desktop is arguably the most dominant destination for any user, but it was designed to be an island (the p stands for personal…) and collaboration is the Achilles heel that threatens the Windows franchise as the defacto destination. In other words users are spending less time on the desktop and more time on collaborative (read web) destinations.

To summarize, the trend in next generation platforms is that they are anchored by a habitual destination, and built from the ground up on the foundation of community.

BI Platforms- Solving the Paradox of Functionality vs Usability By: Eric Rubin on Dec 5, 2007

Is it possible to have a “one size fits all” BI application that appeals to both power users and executive users? It has historically been a catch 22 leaving the executive user in the dark. On one end of the spectrum you have to generalize the application to solve for any problem, and on the other end of the spectrum you need to solve unique problems for individuals. Distilling it down to its purest form, power users (analysts, domain experts, ops people) require robust tools but business users require straight forward applications.

The common approach is to try to dumb down the tool for the business user. But this has never worked- tools adoption within business users has always been low and that isn’t likely to change.

A new approach, with a paradigm shift, is needed – delivering BI as a platform, not just a tool. The elements required of this platform are three-fold
1) A robust set of tools to address the needs of sophisticated power users solving general problems.
2) A frictionless publishing platform for building and improving the unique domain specific apps that these experts produce. Of equal importance, these apps need to be published to “habitual” destinations where end users can consume these applications effortlessly without a behavioral change
3) Built-in “one click” customization in the delivered apps to enable full interactivity for the end-user – with zero programming.

Put simply, the solution is to provide a platform that allows power users to be s/w publishers. The end result is that business users get their unique requirements for BI delivered in a way they can consume it – as a professional application – not as a tool, and not as a report.

The difference between an app and a report is also an important distinction when gauging the value of BI for decision making. Reports are flat, serial and output only. They discourage exploration in all directions. Applications offer a dialogue – they’re fully interactive, they allow for simultaneous and threaded exploration, and they support input as well as output.

As an example of the paradigm shift, let’s explore a mini app built on the Carousel BI platform – Sales Forecast Cockpit. A power user – in this case a sales operations person – creates the application using a simple drag, drop, and connect model from a palette of business components. This specific app provides views of your opportunities by closed, commit, and raw pipeline. Carousel’s built-in right-click customization allows users to change views by rep, by product, by status, or by any of the criteria that an opportunity object allows. The app is fully interactive, supporting input as well as display. For example, you can drill down on the detail of an opportunity and change its status from pipe to commit. The estimated time to build this type of mini-app is 1-2 hours. Sales ops then publishes the app – in this case to a tab in salesforce.com – for the consumers of the app (sales managers). Sales managers have immediate and frictionless access to the product with no behavioral change as salesforce.com is a habitual destination. They can drill down to see detailed information by clicking on a chart, change the slice of data they’re seeing with a single click, and even perform minor enhancements to the product in the field (or iterate back to sales ops to complete the cycle.)

In short, the platform approach addresses the needs of both the power user and the executive masses without compromising either end of the spectrum.

The Metrics-Driven part of "Sales 2.0" By: Travis Huch on Oct 31, 2007

DreamFactory had the opportunity to participate in the Sales 2.0 conference held yesterday at the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco. Considering it was the inaugural event, I was surprised at the strong attendance and some of the great companies that were represented. Geoffrey Moore kicked off the event with a great discussion where he laid out the basic enterprise / solution sale model compared with the traditional mass market brand and demand driven sales model. Although he briefly disparaged the traditional enterprise rep (it wasn’t that long ago that I was one of those, but fortunately I have thick skin) I found myself agreeing with his assertion that the middle of these two models was basically a no-mans land. He then went on to lay out how the Sales 2.0 model enables companies to sell profitably in this zone by leveraging web technology to touch many more customers than possible with the old enterprise sales model. This is something we’ve been practicing for a while here at DreamFactory, so this wasn’t news. What was new and very encouraging to me is that he said the only way to really achieve success using the Web 2.0 sales model was to become a metrics-driven sales organization.

Stu Schmidt from Webex then went on to describe the metrics and methodology for what Webex calls “web touch” selling in great detail. His presentation included several graphic depictions of the Webex pipeline that help Stu and others figure out the pipeline health and velocity of deals moving through the pipeline. I was ecstatic! We have a visual component in our Carousel analytics product that actually draws a graphic depiction of your funnel in salesforce, calculates your velocity at each stage, and enables you to drill down to see individual deals that are moving or are stuck. Most people react with bewilderment or boredom when we show this graph. When we show it to people like Stu who care about these metrics, they usually flip out and become a customer within an hour or two!

Our mission with Carousel is to make it much easier for sales organizations to become metrics driven, and to manage the leading indicators that provide the statistical confidence that the month, quarter or year are on track. Carousel has enabled it here in our sales organization in a very big way, but I feel the need to stand up and shout it in an audience like we had yesterday. I told Eric I’m having t-shirts printed up that say “Ask me about sales pipeline velocity” for the next show!

Cloud Based Platforms- What’s All the Excitement About? By: Eric Rubin on Nov 27, 2007

At the beginning of 2006, Salesforce.com introduced a visionary concept that is changing the way corporations buy applications. They merged a cloud based business platform with consumer oriented marketplace concepts, resulting in the AppExchange. Less than two years later and they have over 700 partners participating in the ecosystem.

It turns out that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Nearly every significant technology company has introduced a similar combination- Cisco/WebEx Connect, Microsoft Live/Online/Dynamics, Amazon S3, Oracle On-Demand, Sugar Exchange, SAP A1S, Google Gears and recently NetSuite SuiteBundler.

What’s behind this trend?

From one perspective, there is an open field opportunity to be the next dominant platform provider for business software, and the battle lines are being drawn.

But from my perspective this is much more than a turf battle. It turns out that the efficiencies offered by cloud based platforms benefit all of the parties in the equation - the platform provider, partner community and the end-customer.

From the platform’s viewpoint, these new apps extend their footprint in the enterprise, raising switching costs and thereby reducing churn. They can also monetize their excess bandwidth in new ways, both to their installed base with platform licenses as well as with the partner ecosystem via marketing services.

To the partner, the platform can dramatically reduce time to value, lower customer acquisition costs, and turn large fixed upfront costs into much smaller variable costs.

The end customer gets to better leverage their investment in the anchor tenant (in the case of AppExchange, the anchor tenant is salesforce.com).

Probably the most powerful aspect of these platforms, however, is that they enable a third option for IT- best in class applications developed by third parties that are Native to the platform. In the past IT had to choose between one or the other- “jack of all trades” suite providers that were tightly integrated or best of breed applications with poor interoperability. Now customers can have their cake and eat it to- best of breed native apps that share a common data and services’ bus- and are fully interoperable "out of the box".

As the first company to build applications from the ground up on these new platforms, we are experiencing the movement first-hand. At an ever increasing rate the mantra we are hearing from the ecosystem buyers is "we want native apps".

What's New With DreamFactory at Dreamforce 2007 By: Eric Rubin on Sep 13, 2007

We have been very busy at DreamFactory since the launch of AppExchange in ’06. We have grown from one application (DreamTeam) to a suite of 7 category leading applications in our “Essentials suite”. During this period we have experienced a tremendous uptake in customer adoption and have well over 1,000 companies using one or more of our applications.

DreamForce is the season where the DreamFactory app machine goes into overdrive, and we will be featuring significant enhancements to nearly every application in our suite, including:

1) A time and expense module integrated with DreamTeam
2) Advanced resource management for DreamTeam
3) A major rev of Carousel - introducing “plug and play’ mini apps that take I/O dashboards to new heights
4) Microsoft Office interoperability with FormFactory

We are also pleased to announce a new product in the suite - DoX for ad hoc document collaboration.

DreamFactory embodies a new pace of innovation which extends into every aspect of our business. A powerful and virtuous cycle is emerging that empowers the customer in ways that are not possible with traditional s/w delivery. It’s simple and powerful - customer adoption drives CDI (customer driven innovation) which drives our delivery of continuously improving products. In essence, we view our mission as unlocking our customer’s domain expertise and transforming this into best in class business applications. Think of it as “have it your way” applied to the most critical applications.

We will be demonstrating all of these capabilities and more at DreamForce so please stop by Booth #229 to catch up with us.

DreamFactory Speaking Panels at Dreamforce 2007 By: Bill Appleton on Sep 13, 2007

Hi everyone,

Dreamforce 2007 this year is just around the corner from Sunday Sept 16-19. DreamFactory will be in Booth #229. Come by and learn about our suite of applications for sales, marketing and services. We have great apps that are huge time savers for advanced business analytics, project management & team collaboration and release management to highlight a few of our applications.

Also, DreamFactory will be on 3 speaking panels this year and I'll be speaking on these 2 below:

Leveraging the Best of AppExchange and WebEx Connect

http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/tracks/tracks/a1y300000004C9ZAAU/

The combination of AppExchange and WebEx Connect, a collaborative composite application platform from WebEx (now a part of Cisco), will enable a new generation of on-demand business applications and services. Learn first hand from developers on both platforms the strengths of each and how they both should play a role in your development and distribution strategy.

2:30 PM (PDT)
Tue, Sep 18, '07

From Garage to Glory: Secret Tips & Techniques of Top AppExchange Developers

http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/tracks/tracks/a1y300000004C9YAAU/

Build an app in days. Market to customers on the AppExchange. Generate real revenues and grow your business. Learn from the top developers and entrepreneurs that have done all three as they share their stories and secrets on building an on-demand company on the AppExchange.

11:30 AM (PDT)
Wed, Sep 19, '07

Ken Neff, VP of Products & Services will be on another panel talking about the new meta-data push capability we added to Snapshot that will ultimately allow the ability to push customizations to production environments:

On-Demand Development Lifecycle & Tools

http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/tracks/tracks/a1y300000004C9WAAU/

Track: Developer: Apex & Beyond

2:30 PM (PDT)
Tue, Sep 18, '07

See you there!

Join DreamFactory on Work 2.0 Web Seminar with Phil Wainewright By: Eric Rubin on Jul 12, 2007

Hi,

Tomorrow I'll be featured as a guest presenter on Phil Wainewright's webex series called "Series Work 2.0: Conversations with Phil Wainewright." Phil is an Industry Analyst and well-known blogger on SaaS and On-demand Topics. I'll be talking about DreamTeam on WebEx Connect. Join the call if you're interested in getting a sneak peak of what we're buidling on the new WebEx Connect platform.

Details:

July 13th @ 11:30 AM PDT | 12:30 PM MDT | 1:30 PM CDT | 2:30 PM EDT

Join Web pundit Phil Wainewright for a series of unscripted conversations with business people to learn how they are transforming business processes using WebEx. Gain insight into the new collaborative social software and its use in today's working world.

The way we work has changed. Gone are the days of large, vertically integrated organizations where everyone involved in a project worked for the same company. Today we work with a globally distributed network of partners, colleagues and customers. Our competitive advantage comes from speed, flexibility and connections, not size, scale and seclusion.

As one of the first companies to develop applications on the WebEx Connect platform and a key AppExchange partner, DreamFactory has unique insight into designing applications for SaaS platforms. The DreamFactory suite of solutions for sales, marketing and project management are specifically designed to support the new collaborative work paradigm.

Register
http://www.webex.com/web-seminars/enroll_event/669124317

Welcome to the DreamFactory blog. By: Eric Rubin on Jul 12, 2007

We are entering an era of unprecedented change in the delivery of enterprise applications. SaaS providers are leading the charge with rapid innovations addressing the immediate needs of businesses. Moreover, they are delivering these capabilities with a new business model that is in direct alignment with the customer’s success. New SaaS platforms have emerged that threaten to unseat established providers by offering a shared “enterprise o/s”. These new platforms are enabling a new generation of ISV’s like DreamFactory that create applications that are both Best of Breed AND Native- sharing enterprise data and services- eliminating application silos or the need for intermediate integration services.

This blog will focus on the opportunities and challenges of this category of next generation ISV’s who build native products on enterprise SaaS platforms like Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, and WebEx Connect.

Our agenda is to share our perspectives in the hopes of stimulating a dialogue that in turn can help shape our direction moving forward.

So please stay tuned.