Salesforce.com Integration Options

Sales leads – new revenues for you!

It probably does not come as a surprise to those who are misfortunate enough to follow my tweets, that we, at edocr.com have embarked on a major programme to deliver real measurable value to an existing asset you have, but probably was never trully aware of its full potential until now. Yes! we are speaking about the documents (pdfs) you produce daily, weekly, monthly and/or annually to communicate with prospects, customers, suppliers, shareholders, government, authorities, and anyone else that you need to communicate with, without dilvulging confidential information.

Among these documents are the traditional sales and marketing collateral, but there are other documents produced for operational and regulatory or any other purpose that could equally be applied in the right environment to generate interest that will lead to new prospects for your products and services.

Ask yourself these few questions:

  1. Do you see sales and marketing collateral, as well as operational and regulatory and similar documents as a cost? What if this could be reversed? Documents becoming a profit centre instead of a cost centre contributor?
  2. Do you know how many documents you have produced over the last 5 years for external consumption? Do you know how many of these are available in your web folders, but no one can trully find them through navigating your website. You might be startled with the true figure!
  3. Any ideas about the cost of above? Any ideas of how much revenues you generated as a result of your spend in documents? You may have never wondered about ROI, but shouldn’t that be an interesting figure to talk about?

Without diverting too much from the topic, we at edocr.com are on a mission to turn your costly documents (I am not referring to print costs, but the costs involved in producing them, mainly human resources) into revenues for your company.

As part of this, we have embarked on a major development programme to provide you sales leads from your existing document inventory. At present, we are preparing edocr.com so that we can provide you a tool kit to extract data out of edocr.com with user consent where required.

Integration Options

We believe our role should end with collecting sales leads and then handing over those leads to organisations which can add significant value further upstream. This is where Salesforce.com and its ecosystem, App Exchange comes into play.

Given that Salesforce.com is not the easiest product to integrate with, mainly due to their pricing strategy, we believe we have three options available for consideration:

  1. Traditional web-to-lead forms
  2. API, especially as edocr.com is based on OAuth and salesforce.com now has OAuth capability
  3. App Exchange

Your Contribution

We must accept we are not experts of salesforce.com, but have the resources to implement the integration once we know damn well which one would work for us. I see two options:

  1. Integration with salesforce.com using our resources
  2. An app which will receive the leads from us, but left open for others to integrate to suit their needs, perhaps incorporating further value addition from salesforce.com partners

This is an exploratory article, asking your help in formalising the right option for us. We believe that there will be significant up sell opportunities for all who will get behind us in this venture. We are truly excited to be working with salesforce.com (especially you, Mr. Barker) and its ecosystem, who are well oiled on generating revenues.

The Wrong Pricing – Missed Opportunities

As edocr.com continues to grow, it has become essential for us to adopt the right tools that will make our lives operationally little bit easier. Now is the time for us to leave spreadsheets and move on to products that will bring structure to a very chaotic environment. Two tools will be key to this strategy of operational simplification.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

We have adopted Contact Manager from Salesforce.com, which is affordable and versatile enough for our needs. And we know that as edocr.com grows, we have a path for increasing the CRM functionality to match with our future needs. In addition, we see salesforce.com as a strategic partner, so it makes sense for us to also be using their products, vice versa.

Accounts

Having used Winweb for a brief period, we are now trialling Xero, a SaaS product from one of our growing customer base. I love the simplicity and the design and yet to fully test it. My gut feel says this is the right product for us. And these days, I put lot of trust in to my gut feel.

Alignment

Ideally, we love our own database of users and customers to be in sync with CRM and accounts products we have adopted. So integration and free availability of APIs are fundamental to achieve this. I have been a keen advocate to see Xero and Salesforce.com establish the ability to data exchange.

It was good to hear from Tony Rule of Xero yesterday that they have infact gone live with the integration

Pricing Dilemma

Let’s take a brief look at the costs involved for one seat license across both products for one year.

  • Salesforce.com contact manager = £36 (we have subscribed for 2 seats)
  • Xero = £144 to £228 – the more expensive option is suitable for edocr.com

Here is the problem. For me to benefit from having synchronisation of customer data across saleforce.com and Xero, I would need to upgrade my account to either:

  • Salesforce.com enterprise (£1,020) or unlimited edition (£2,040) (where API is part of the licence) or
  • Salesforce.com professional edition (£540 plus more) (where API is not part of the licence but you can add it at extra cost).

Conclusion

The combine cost of subscribing to Xero and Salesforce.com now needs to go up from an affordable £264 to over £1000 to achieve integration. This is clearly not an acceptable situation for us. I love to comment more on this aspect, but as I have a half written post on pricing strategies, I think I should better leave it till then, other than to say, at this stage, we would have to operate without synchronisation. Just to add salt to the wound, products like JavelinCRM and Xero can achieve true synchronisation without any additional spend!