This week saw SalesForce launch version 9 of their popular online CRM product. The two things that interested me the most were the workflow visualiser and the free version of the SalesForce platform:
Workflow Visualiser & Process driven CRMs
In the CRM world there are three main types of CRM vendors; interactive, process driven and record centric CRMs:
| CRM Vendor Types |
Current Market Leaders |
| Interactive |
eGain Communications
KANA Software
RightNow Technologies
Talisma
LivePerson
KNOVA |
| Business Process Driven |
Sword Ciboodle |
| Record Centric |
Microsoft
Salesforce.com
Oracle Siebel
SAP
Oracle CRM on Demand
Entellium |
At the moment the market leader for process driven CRMs is Ciboodle (who I used to work for) and with the Workflow visualiser it really reminds me of Ciboodle and a more process-driven CRM. Ok, you’ve always been able to do workflow in salesforce but they are now allowing you to see visually what your workflow actions are doing and how they flow into each other and with complex workflow actions this is really good news. The only limitation being you can only see your workflow and have to go back to salesforce to continue to edit the workflow. Read more…
This month Tony Karrer’s blog asks the questions:
- Where is your time spent?
- How much time do you spend and how did you find time for all the relatively newer things like reading blogs, twitter, social networks, etc.?
- What are you doing less of today than you were 3-5 years ago?
- Do you have less of a life with all of these new things?
Where is your time spent?
With the amount of information available at the touch of a button I think the best way to answer this to say how I manage my time on an average day and how it now fits into it.
It takes me an hour door to door to get to work and I spend this time, on the way to work catching up with the latest and greatest information. This usually involves either listing to podcasts and/or catching up on my Google reader feeds on my phone. I’ve found google reader a great asset as I can mark interesting stories for my friends to read and they do the same, I also may send a tweat. When I get off the train it takes about 10 minutes before I’m at work so I use this time to check the days calendar and any outstanding emails from the previous day. I’m usually quite strict about emails and only read them 3 times a day, I find they can be quite distracting if your constantly getting pop-ups about new emails. That actually reminds me of an old boss, one day he came into work and tipped his entire in-tray into the bin and announced if it was urgent someone would tell him eventually.
Read more…