A Philadelphia firm finds success by structuring its services and seizing opportunities
A Philadelphia firm finds success by structuring its services and seizing opportunities
As CEO of a thriving IT consulting firm, Andy Atkins looks over his shoulder at his counterparts struggling in the client-server space, grateful that he staked his future to the cloud. Atkins and his team are closing in on their three hundredth client company, and even in this tight economy are adding five to ten new ones each month.
Atkins launched CRM manager in 2005, a time when cloud computing was just getting off the ground. Since then, Atkins has learned plenty about building a consulting firm in the cloud. “What a lot of SI’s still don’t understand is that cloud computing presents a fundamentally different business model than client-server,” Atkins says. “You don’t just go in, implement the software, and wait for the next release to come out so you can do it all over again. Cloud computing apps are not stagnant, but constantly evolving. That means the implementation process is ongoing. And these days, you’re not just dealing with one revenue stream. In addition to salesforce.com, we are also using other cloud computing solution partners like Google, working with software vendors who are developing programs for salesforce.com’s AppExchange, and even developing our own apps for that market.” Atkins describes CRM manager’s sales cycle as a virtuous circle, in which consultants take advantage of being at a client’s site to find new opportunities, sell additional salesforce.com licenses, and provide more solutions.
Salesforce.com Alliance Manager Charles Chung calls CRM manager a “true extension of our own sales team: they are constantly uncovering new opportunities for us. Their retainer program really drives user adoption and ensures the success of customers. And when that happens, customers themselves become true believers. As the log-in metric goes up, customers are more likely to add more licenses—which is a net gain for everyone.”
Atkins also stresses the importance of a consulting firm using the technology it preaches. “We try to be our own best example. Virtually everything we do is in the cloud. We don’t own a single server. We don’t have to hire an army of IT guys to manage the infrastructure. We use salesforce.com to manage our own business, and QuickBooks Online to handle our financials. The only conventional application we still use is Excel, and even here, we’re looking to convert to Google Doc’s spreadsheet function. All of this helps communicate to our customers that we aren’t just promoting the cloud—we’re living in it.”
Learn-as-you-go
When he founded CRM manager, Atkins had reached an intersection in his career. He had already launched and sold one company, ExecuTrain, a software training firm, and he was now looking for a new idea to grow. That came during a consulting engagement when his client asked him to implement a CRM system. Atkins had no hands-on experience but was hearing the buzz about a company with a strikingly new approach, not just to CRM but to software in general. “Salesforce.com was pretty young back then, but their online model made good economic sense and the trial was free, so I went online. And you know what? It worked.” Taking a learn-as-you-go approach, Atkins guided his client in consolidating data spread over a rat’s nest of spreadsheets into salesforce.com. The company became an early salesforce.com customer, and, some months later, CRM manager was born.
An early turning point for CRM manager came when Atkins developed a structured implementation process, which includes the CRM manager Plan and translates a client’s business needs into salesforce.com customization, integration, and deployment. Atkins got some good advice crafting the basic elements from a prospect, a vice president of sales at a global financial services company, who persuaded him that companies embracing salesforce.com would require the ongoing involvement of a consulting partner. In turn, that partner should have the skills and commitment to fully understand a company’s business processes before beginning the customization work.
The CRM manager Plan put the firm on solid financial ground. Clients make an annual commitment ranging from five to 20 hours a month, paying a higher hourly rate for time that goes over. “The plan has become the basic building block for our business, and it’s a win-win,” says Atkins. “For the customer, it provides ongoing consulting and support at a discounted price. For us, the plan represents a consistent, predictable revenue stream that gives our consultants ongoing work.”
As the firm got rolling, the staff grew. Atkins persuaded Tom Behlau, a friendly competitor who had launched two successful systems integration companies, to become a managing partner with CRM manager. The firm’s first client was that VP from the global financial services company. Its second was a major commercial real estate developer in Philadelphia, whose director of sales and marketing, Sam Malandra, eventually joined the firm. Mimi Wilder, a Princeton and MIT-educated engineer, became the firm’s first consultant. Now she’s VP of client services.
Opportunities at every juncture
CRM manager is flexible in the role it assumes for its clients, either acting as a de facto salesforce.com administrator or complementing internal resources. “Smaller companies tend to see us as a virtual in-house administrator—paying us our flat monthly rate, with some overage as needed,” says Malandra. “Other companies may actually have two or more administrators who use us strategically, such as saving time by having us identify top candidate applications on the AppExchange.”
An example of the latter is Corporation Service Company, which provides business services to nearly half of the Fortune 500 companies. After CRM manager rolled out salesforce.com to some 200 CSC representatives, CSC signed up for their 10-hour CRM manager plan. Incremental projects have included the deployment of email marketing functionality and a quoting system that uses Conga Merge (AppExtremes, Inc.) from the AppExchange.
Malandra stresses the importance of identifying a client’s business processes before doing the development work. “Cloud computing is so accessible that too many companies just grab the application and start customizing fields, and then wonder why it’s still not working right three to six months down the road. Forty percent of our customers last year had already implemented salesforce.com, but realized they hadn’t gotten it to its full potential. To make sure there is follow though, we make a point of assigning ongoing support to one of the consultants who did the initial implementation. That way, they can capitalize on what they’ve learned in the weeks they’ve spent on-site. At every juncture, we’re always asking: how can we make the system better? What can we improve?”
As the universe of cloud computing applications grows, the opportunities for CRM manager are expanding, as well. The firm has begun helping customers take advantage of salesforce.com’s integration with Google Apps and is now working with a wider palette of salesforce.com features, including Salesforce Ideas and the self-service community portal. CRM manager also is leveraging the Force.com cloud platform to translate a customer’s unique business needs into creative business solutions. For example, the firm utilized the Force.com code and pages to create a graphical dashboard for Appletree Answering Services, which walks users through each of the steps required to move a customer through their implementation process. The dashboard enables employees to easily track which steps have been completed and which ones remain for a given customer or individual at any point in time.
CRM manager is also building an ecosystem of SaaS applications from the salesforce.com AppExchange, selecting apps it can recommend and resell, as well as identifying vendors who could be strategic partners. And the firm is developing its first set of tools for converting leads to opportunities, which they plan to post to the AppExchange. “We don’t see ourselves as becoming a product company, per se,” says Atkins. “Rather, we see the AppExchange as a way to capitalize on project work that seems applicable beyond a small group of clients. When you create something that is cool, it cries out for a wider audience.”
“Going forward, there’s a long and growing list of opportunities that are wide open for us. That’s not so true with traditional client-server consultants. A lot of them are suffering right now because those growth paths aren’t there. My partner Tom Behlau still has many connections to that world, and what we hear isn’t good. As for us, we figure that if we can do well in this economy, we can make it anywhere. And we think that salesforce.com itself is following the same pattern.”
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