Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Dear Marge

This is a bit of a “How long is a piece of string” question; there are so many variables which have not been addressed. I will however endeavour to give you something of an answer without taking all day, time which I guess that neither us has.

Firstly, my direct, hands-on experience is with Maximizer, ACT! Goldmine and SalesLogix as well as Access and MS SQL, so I am familiar with where you are coming from. Experience of SFDC is from head to head comparisons in tendering and that of our sister organisation which gets the ASP bite of the cherry! We also have SymVolli / SalesVision which is either an ASP or on-site package slanted at forecasting, estimating and quotations, but can also integrate with or replace a CRM package.

Just a word from experience: I’ve never come across a system yet, ASP or on-site software that didn’t cost an organisation more to implement than it took to buy or rent. I tend to look for a return on investment and ROI is more dependent on the efficiencies gained, time saved and increased productivity and effectiveness than anything to do with the maker of the software or whether it resides on your server or someone else’s.

In order to get out meaningful figures for comparison, you need to define the number of implemented uses, the number of records you use and the number and nature of processes you want the system to be responsible for, both now and in the future.
Before a deployment of either type of system you need to have your list of things which it must do and the list of things you want it to do. Next comes the wish list of things you would like it to do, if you can afford the time to work out how or the cost of getting it done.

From my experience, this exercise takes more time than the installation and configuration of a system to the user’s needs. The tendency is to fiddle with a CRM / Sales Office Automation system after installation which is always time consuming as it involves unravelling bad decisions..

Your starting point with a software installation is inevitably the time taken to install client and possibly server software. For 5 users of ACT, Goldmine or Maximizer, look at about 4 hours to 8 hours depending on the decrepitude of your systems.

For SFDC, as long as everyone has Internet Explorer and a decent ISP, then the installation time is nil. Getting 5 connections at an adequate speed to the ASP server should be straightforward, but on low bandwidth ISP connections, I have seen exchange server and other ISP reliant applications kill the connectivity to an ASP server.

The next step in both systems is configuration. This is often done on a pick and mix basis from the features of the software you’ve chosen, which has features running around looking for a relevant application. It is much better to define your processes and then get SFDC or whoever to tell you if it will:

Do it out of the box
Do it with configuration
Do it with integration or programming via an API

With most software systems and SFDC the configuration is for the database as a whole and if you have establish how you will do it, a day should see the application set up to the general user requirements if it is out-of-the-box and configured. API development depends on whether or not you are using third party software and how much programming is needed – there’s no way top generalise.

Data transfer is a pain. If you have a relational database, you will need to cope with many tables – for instance for each location, you might have one company but you deal with 10 contacts. Access handles this by using relational table – any other way would leave the database filled with blank columns in the data for unused contact fiends and some companies, inevitable would have 20 contacts which would require additional records. A limitation of ACT and GoldMine is that the view is contact centric and if you want to liaise with say 4 contacts in a company, you will need 4 records.

I would budget a 4 hours per 1000 records if they need standardising to the correct field, 2hours per 1000 if the data is sound and 8 hours per thousand if the data needs manipulation. We use a spreadsheet to order and decontaminate data tables!

Before loading to any application, it is a good idea if you:

Ensure all data is in the correct field

Ensure that the data contains no commas or quote marks of any other variable separator

If you are using a, import wizard, ensure that the data is not corrupted at index level

You talk of orders and quotes – that implies that it is desirable to hold an analysable order history. This is another relational application. You really want to stick orders against the contact rather than against the company. How you do this in SFDC is usually via a third party add-on.

Quotes against a contact in a company can only be generated automatically if you have a template and a parts list in the database. That’s complex and can easily take upwards of 5 days for about 200 items and prices. The prices should be dynamic and link from the accounts system.

Lastly opportunities or the sales pipeline needs to be configured. SFDC, ACT, Maximizer and so on are not very good at this. Every sales opportunity should be given a close date, a $$ value and a percentage probability of closing the deal. The last item is almost always guesswork! If you do this correctly, the quotations should come from the same figures and parts list that drives the opportunity management system. This is one of the most time consuming parts of the operation. Getting an opportunity system or sales forecast to bear a resemblance to reality requires you to analyse what constitutes a hot sale and to quantize all the steps. Sales forecasting is a science, but the way the sales steps relate to each other is subjective. With a good system you can at least be consistent and have the same mistake across all your figures. I’ve seen more board room punch-ups between the CEO, FD and SD over this than anything else!

To Follow, summary of timings

Steve Alker

Summary of timings

Depending on how you do it, say 1 to 5 days work, most of which is working out what steps are an how they relate to the end. This information ideally needs to be reviewed over the duration of the sales cycle to show inconsistencies and silly things, such as a sales which has been predicted at 75% chance of closing in six months time and is still at 75% probability of close three weeks before the order due date. Probabilities of close, close dates and order values rarely remain the same for long if a opportunity is being managed well.

If I was taking a stab at your system for Maximizer, I’d budget for quite a few days worth of work as the quotation and opportunity parts are very configuration intensive. SFDC is little different in these areas except that data interchange, manipulation, merging to documents and storage are done to a remote server, possibly with local software accessing office based or workstation based API’s. I think about 10 to 15 days work should do it. SFDC would take about 9 to 14 days. The real economy of SFDC seems to be with medium size systems and dispersed sales teams or sales offices – no one has to beaver away loading workstation software – an advantage which is promptly lost if you deploy 3rd party applications on workstations or office servers.

To these timings you have to add staff training about 1 day for basic and 3 days for admin level. You can’t easily train more than 5 people at a time - lecturing 30 just doesn’t work.

DIY jobs usually take about 3-5 times as long and need to be corrected from errors once the client has realised that they have a job to get on with, rather than becoming a part time CRM consultant. I’ve seen more sales and marketing managers get the boot for devoting too much time to learning the intricacies of as SRM system rather than paying a trained consultant or CRM practitioner to do the job in a quarter of the time.

Were we to do that lot in SymVolli / SalesVision, I’d guess about 7 – 10 days. SymVolli does not need much training as it is configured around your processes and Outlook – Our weirdest system is for about 3 users where it runs their entire quotation system and as a spin off, gives accurate sales forecasts and a workable ASP CRM system. It took weeks to establish their requirements an build a fully populated quotation system and about 40 minutes to show them how to use it!

Best wishes


Steve Alker

We have implemented Salesforce.com and we are a small business. It works great and required very little IT consulting.

The only technical thing we did was made it so leads from our Web site come through on salesforce and things like that.

Much of the other stuff with salesforce does not really require an IT background, you just read the documentation, maybe go through some of their training material, and just use it. Using salesforce you inevitably run into something you want to do so you look it up in the docs and figure it out. It is online but it is not unlike using software on your own PC or something.