CIO
...The business-critical nature of some Salesforce.com deployments also contributes to the need for partnering. A SaaS deployment may simply focus on the application, with little or no need for professional services. However, Salesforce.com deployments don't always exist in isolation. They are often embedded in broader projects to revamp sales or customer service in a department or across an organization.
K12, a company that provides online K-12 education, fits that model. The organization decided to replace its legacy customer system as part of an effort to provide a more personal and relevant customer experience, according to Dianne Conley, vice president of marketing systems at K12. The company selected Salesforce.com over Oracle as its software provider; Salesforce.com recommended Appirio, a San Francisco-based services provider specializing in the cloud, as an implementation partner.
K12 planned to hire a partner for the project, whether the nod went to Salesforce.com or Oracle. "It wasn't even something we thought twice about for an undertaking on the scale we were doing," Conley says...
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Appirio in the News
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Kindred Healthcare Empowers Sales Reps With iPads And Salesforce.com
Forbes
Sales executive Barry Somervell has a passion for arming his team with tools that yield productivity; he believes in the power of technology to transform the selling process. Barry was asked to come into Kindred Healthcare, a $5 billion supplier of post-acute-care services, to energize and modernize its nursing center division's sales process to bring patients into its 224 skilled nursing and transitional care centers. Barry quickly saw that the tools that the "clinical liaisons" carried were lacking. This group of sales professionals, from a clinical or nursing background, needed better ways to collaborate with colleagues and with hospital medical staff to offer the right services to patients about to be discharged and in need of rehabilitation services. You can see Barry and his team in this video.
The problems were subtle but persistent. Even when powered by salesforce.com, Windows Slate computers didn't cut it -- the poor connectivity and awkwardness of the device interfered with good engagement with hospital staff and patients and their families. The sales resources were largely paper-based and inconsistently applied. The results of a meeting were often lost in a morass of documentation done online in the evenings from home, resulting in lost sales, missed opportunities to share and learn, and a data vacuum that prevented management from knowing what was wrong and how to fix it.
The team was determined to find a solution and decided to find the best technology to drive collaborative engagement with the discharge planners responsible for getting patients onto the next phase of their recovery and rehabilitation, engage directly with patients and their families through video and rich media, and make each sales interaction a resource to be mined for insight and improvement.
But which tools would make this group of sales reps successful? That's what the sales and marketing collaboration council wanted to know in their monthly planning meeting. This steering committee, 15 people strong, is headed by the president and staffed by sales, marketing, field operations, and IT.
The answer, created by cloud integrator Appirio, was to use a smart combination of iPads for engagement; salesforce.com for content access, contacts, and sales process and analysis; Cisco WebEx for training; email for collaboration; and MobileIron for tablet security and app management.
Appirio worked with Barry and his core sales operations team for managing the salesforce.com environment and doing the analytics, with the IT department for device management, with the marketing team for content creation and porting, and with the regional sales directors to drive adoption, use, and collaboration....
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Sales executive Barry Somervell has a passion for arming his team with tools that yield productivity; he believes in the power of technology to transform the selling process. Barry was asked to come into Kindred Healthcare, a $5 billion supplier of post-acute-care services, to energize and modernize its nursing center division's sales process to bring patients into its 224 skilled nursing and transitional care centers. Barry quickly saw that the tools that the "clinical liaisons" carried were lacking. This group of sales professionals, from a clinical or nursing background, needed better ways to collaborate with colleagues and with hospital medical staff to offer the right services to patients about to be discharged and in need of rehabilitation services. You can see Barry and his team in this video.
The problems were subtle but persistent. Even when powered by salesforce.com, Windows Slate computers didn't cut it -- the poor connectivity and awkwardness of the device interfered with good engagement with hospital staff and patients and their families. The sales resources were largely paper-based and inconsistently applied. The results of a meeting were often lost in a morass of documentation done online in the evenings from home, resulting in lost sales, missed opportunities to share and learn, and a data vacuum that prevented management from knowing what was wrong and how to fix it.
The team was determined to find a solution and decided to find the best technology to drive collaborative engagement with the discharge planners responsible for getting patients onto the next phase of their recovery and rehabilitation, engage directly with patients and their families through video and rich media, and make each sales interaction a resource to be mined for insight and improvement.
But which tools would make this group of sales reps successful? That's what the sales and marketing collaboration council wanted to know in their monthly planning meeting. This steering committee, 15 people strong, is headed by the president and staffed by sales, marketing, field operations, and IT.
The answer, created by cloud integrator Appirio, was to use a smart combination of iPads for engagement; salesforce.com for content access, contacts, and sales process and analysis; Cisco WebEx for training; email for collaboration; and MobileIron for tablet security and app management.
Appirio worked with Barry and his core sales operations team for managing the salesforce.com environment and doing the analytics, with the IT department for device management, with the marketing team for content creation and porting, and with the regional sales directors to drive adoption, use, and collaboration....
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