by Mike Walsh | May 30, 2019 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
Modern business practices mean you need to have some level of tech proficiency. Especially as a decision maker in a competitive industry, you need to be able to stay on top of the latest trends and technologies so you can keep ahead of your competitors.
If you have Salesforce, then you are already one step ahead of everyone else, because you have the most powerful and flexible CRM out there. But if you want to get the most out of Salesforce, you need to understand just what it offers. So let’s take a quick look at a more technical topic, namely: what is the difference between an API, framework, and middleware?
All of these important components of a modern business solution, and understanding what exactly they are and how they interact will help you make better decisions about what you need for your company.
API
An API is short for Application Programmer Interface. API simply refers to the method programmers use to interface with software, and only works via software to software. API’s are open-ended and can be built to do just about anything. For example, when you buy a movie ticket online, your card info is being sent via API.
For business purposes, API’s are a great way to send data, particularly sensitive data if you encrypt it, to another business, client or partner. Developers can craft the API for just about any business use and when you connect it to the Salesforce API’s, you can send and populate data directly into your CRM.
Framework
A framework is a tool or set of tools designed to solve a specific purpose or set of purposes. Frameworks use the above mentioned API’s to connect with other software, apps or separate systems.
A framework can also be thought of as a partially finished solution to a problem. The base foundation is there, and you build upon that to solve your specific needs. Salesforce itself can be used as either an out of the box solution or a framework, depending on your business needs.
Middleware
Middleware is also software that uses API’s, however, middleware is designed specifically to help isolated or separate systems interact. Mulesoft is a middleware solution recently purchased by Salesforce, whose powerful and unique code allows very complex programs to connect almost seamlessly.
A standard system, (frameworks included) is built with many layers stacked on top of each other, just as the OS, hardware, libraries, etc. Middleware works by taking slices of these layers, vertically! When done right, it provides a full or partial solution to any area within the application and can provide a much more robust connection between systems than a single or even a grouping of API’s.
So hopefully you now have a little bit better understanding the foundations that your business solution is built on!
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-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team
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CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Apr 19, 2019 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
For anyone who has looked around our site, or shopped for any software solution (ex. Salesforce) in recent years, this post is for you. The question of whether or not to post prices has come up a ton in this industry, with varying viewpoints on the benefits and drawbacks.
By and large, most software and SaaS companies keep their pricing sheets gated, and only available at the discretion of a sales rep. While this can certainly be frustrating for potential buyers, especially when all you really want to learn at that moment is the price and not to talk to someone about value and benefits, there are a number of reasons leading to this practice.
In this article, we will look at some of these reasons, and using our own first-hand knowledge, hopefully shed a little more light on why it can be for the benefit of both the selling company and the client to not have prices posted outright.
The relationship of software quality to price isn’t always 1 to 1
- More expensive isn’t always the best solution for your company. Maybe you don’t need the top of the line option – or when you get partway into a demo, you realize it has tons of features you don’t need and don’t want to pay for.
- Conversely – just because something is affordable to purchase up front, doesn’t necessarily mean it will work as well as advertised.
- Buying software isn’t like buying everyday items, like food or clothes, where it is pretty easy to estimate how much quality you get for your price. With software, it really does take thorough vetting of a product to determine if it will really meet your needs – and you can easily discount the right decision too early if it seems either “too cheap” or “too pricey” from the outset
Posted prices can scare away buyers who would actually save money in the long run
- Poor software, that costs less up front, might require more investment long term just to maintain. A few years later when you have grown too big for the product, you have to buy a more expensive version anyway – effectively spending more over that time span than if you had gone with a more expensive option to begin with.
- How much you should spend on a software solution is a complex calculation, and involves much more than what your budget is, and how much does X product cost. You need to factor in things like, how much money am I losing by not having a better product, and if my processes were X% more efficient, how much more money could I be making? When you start doing advanced calculations, often times higher priced software options turn out to be the better option because they pay for themselves quickly, and after that its all profit.
- Finally, companies shopping for software are often buying something they have never purchased before. As a consequence, they may not have a particularly concrete idea of what the solution should look like, let alone how much it should cost. In these situations, sticker shock can push businesses onto the wrong product.
The price isn’t fixed!
- What’s the real price? “Well, it depends”. If you have heard this before and want to pull your hair out, know that the feeling is shared by many, but that doesn’t make it less true.
- For many SaaS and software companies, their products are not one size fits all, or even available as Out of the Box packages. They are designed to be customized and tweaked. Yes, this is a built-in cost, but it also means that you get a solution that is tailored to your business.
- Then, of course, there is always the fact that Sales just might change the price, depending on the situation. Trying to make their quarterly goals, you just might get a discount if you sign right away. Or maybe additional options and features are thrown in to sweeten the deal. Simply put, posted pricing gives Salespeople less wiggle room to get the deal done.
Too transparent pricing leads to competitors undercutting you
- Isn’t this a good thing? Competition leading to the best possible product, for the lowest possible price? … Not always
- When a product is all about man-hours, and expertise, competition undercutting prices can dehumanize the people who built the software. This could potentially have a huge ripple effect in the company if they are forced to cut the price of their products, leading to decreased profits, resource turnover and a whole host of other issues.
- This can also put excessive pressure on the software builders to make the product “cost-effective” – leading to corners being cut. And do you really want all of your hard earned business data being housed on a system that is less than thoroughly vetted?
On the other side, there are a number of arguments for more transparent pricing that are equally valid, ex. Pricing pages can quickly weed out unqualified buyers, or they increase trust. While these are both true, they can also lead to some of the negative effects discussed above.
No matter how you slice it, there is no clear cut best answer for whether or not software companies should post their prices. There are benefits to both sides of the coin, and in the end, it’s up to each individual company, knowing their target markets, their business model and their history to determine what will yield the best results for both themselves and their customers.
-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team
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Need some custom consulting or development to enhance the Salesforce you already have?
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CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Apr 12, 2019 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
A question that every company who uses Salesforce asks, at some point in their growth is, “should we hire a Salesforce admin?”
While this is a pretty important question to ask, unfortunately, there is no cut and dry answer. It’s different for every company, based on their individual needs. However, with that being said, let’s take a look at some of the values of bringing on a Salesforce admin, and when to do so.
Why you would need dedicated admin support
So let’s start with why you would even need an admin in the first place. Salesforce Admins do more than just set up users in the system. A good admin is essentially the workflow builder, data buster and all around problem solver that keeps your company’s processes and data on track.
Often times, a small company will either have done a makeshift job installing and configuring Salesforce, or otherwise used a consultant to set everything up correctly at the beginning. Either way, over time, the system grows and needs to be maintained or tweaked here and there.
For mid-size to large companies, where having dedicated admin support is mandatory – these are the people that your in-house staff will come to whenever they need the system to accommodate some request or change, for example, sending congratulations emails to the new client when a deal is closed.
What type of Admin
When it comes to in-house admins, it is fairly straightforward. Many times, for small to mid companies, there won’t be a full time, dedicated Salesforce admin, but someone who has the basic skills, and does it part-time / as needed. In-house admins have the advantage of generally being faster to deliver results, they already know the system, and if you have enough work for them to do, they end up being more cost effective.
Of course, not every company has enough workload to justify keeping a full-time admin in house. If you want to outsource, there are plenty of options, from lone wolf Salesforce experts to implementation consultants to Salesforce admin companies. For the solo contractors, they can be a cost-effective option, however, it may be hard to verify their qualifications, and they may not always be able to respond right away.
There are many Salesforce partners and implementation consultants, who primarily install, configure and develop Salesforce solutions. They will have in-depth technical knowledge, especially if they installed your system, and so will know exactly how to make the changes you need. This does also come at the cost of the normal consultancy rate.
Finally, you can utilize Salesforce admin services, from companies who are dedicated to that sort of thing. These groups may have a couple to dozens of trained admins available at any given moment to handle your needs. Their advantage is response time. However, like the individual contractor, you need to do your research to ensure they really know Salesforce. Their rates generally vary as well.
When do you want to bring on a full-time admin?
There is no right or wrong ratio, but many companies start finding they need one full-time admin, somewhere between 30 and 40 users.
If you are a small to mid-size company and growing, you may want to get ahead and plan for the future. Keeping your long term grown plans in mind is always a best practice when hiring anyway.
Whichever way you choose to go, in-house, outsourced or hodge-podge, Salesforce Admin work will inevitably need to get done. Hopefully, this has given you a little bit more insight on the why you need to think about it, who to consider, and when it is necessary to bring in a Salesforce admin.
-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team
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Need some custom consulting or development to enhance the Salesforce you already have?
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CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Mar 21, 2019 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
Pardot B2B Marketing for Salesforce is an extremely powerful tool. You can link thousands of prospects and leads to your CRM and engage with them in all sorts of ways. However, with great power comes great… confusion? Specifically, how do you know which automation tool to use for each situation?
Pardot features a couple of primary tools to use for your segmentation and automation: completion actions, segmentation rules, dynamic lists, and automation rules. In this article, we are going to be looking at two of these, dynamic lists and automation rules. When combined, these two tools form the backbone of your automated marketing efforts.
What is the difference between dynamic lists and automation rules?
Are you saying, well duh, one is a list and the other is a rule? You aren’t wrong, but the thing is, dynamic lists are defined by rules, and automation rules can be used to create lists. So the lines aren’t as clear as they may seem.
In short, a dynamic list is a list of prospects that automatically updates itself, both adding and removing members, based upon the rules you specify. Automation rules can certainly be used to add prospects to a static list, but they can also be used for many other options, such as assigning prospects to a particular sales rep/team.
Both dynamic lists and automation rules run continuously, matching and working with any prospect who matches their criteria.
The short answer is, you should use a dynamic list when you are creating a list that will likely be changing regularly. Such as members who have yet to watch a video, or who have an upcoming renewal date. By using a dynamic list, not only will your prospects be added the moment they qualify, but they will be removed when they no longer are needed.
With automation rules, the best practice is when you have a rule, that will run continuously and be based on multiple criteria.
Use Cases
Dynamic List
ABC Coolers is looking to send a reminder email to each of their customers who have a subscription renewal coming up. This could be done via either a dynamic list or automation rule, however, the dynamic lists are the best practice, since we will be looking to create a list that is continuously changing. While the automation could be written to give similar results, the dynamic lists will yield better transparency, tracking and reporting options. As well as being cleaner in the system.
To do this, we would create a program in the Engagement Studio, specifying the email to be sent, a start and end point. Then we simply specify our new dynamic list as the recipient. Thus, whenever someone is added to that list, the engagement program fires, sending of the email. What’s more, the program to be set so that members can enter an unlimited amount of times so that every time a renewal is pending, your list will update and send those critical emails.
Automation Rules
For automation rules, better uses will be when a list is not needed. ABC Coolers is again looking to automate their process. This time, they want to achieve a couple of results:
- When prospects view a landing page but don’t take completely the form, they want a follow-up email to be sent.
- To do this, they would use a completion action attached to that landing page to designate if the form was completed. Then, the automation rule is simply “send an email if the page was viewed AND the tag does not equal completed”.
- When prospects haven’t been active in a while, ABC wants to slowly reduce their Pardot Score, so that only active leads will be pushed toward sales
- This automation rule would be based on any field that tracks how many X days since the prospect has been active, and then reduces the score.
- For every greater power, multiple rules could be built, with incremental dates, such as 15 days with no action, 30 days with no action, 60 days with no action, and at each of these markers, the score is reduced. Oh, and just to make sure the score doesn’t go too low, you can also specify that it only applies to prospects with a score above zero!
So, hopefully, this quick dive into the use cases for Automation Rules and Dynamic Lists has given you a couple more ideas into how you can use Pardot to better manage your B2B marketing efforts.
-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team
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CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Jan 31, 2019 | Success Stories
AgileCap provides insurance agencies with a simple, quick source of funding, making timely business growth attainable. Banks traditionally require large, tangible business or personal assets to secure loans. AgileCap does it differently.
AgileCap considers the entire book of business to be an asset. A substantial asset that allows them to provide the funding needed to grow. This paradigm shift in how collateral is defined has allowed AgileCap to provide financing to all ranges and types of agencies over the past 15 years.
The Challenge
AgileCap had leveraged their unique business model into many years of successfully providing funding to insurance agencies nationwide, and substantial company growth. However, they had reached a bottleneck in their ability to scale.
After many years of growth, AgileCap was using many disconnected systems for accounting, data processing, storage and more. Because none of these programs could share data through smart integrations, the AgileCap team was forced to do a lot of duplicate data entry, which is, of course, time-consuming and error-prone. Some other specific challenges included:
- Lacking the desired variety and complexity of deal tracking tools
- The invoicing process could have been easier
- Desired overall increased visibility and transparency
- Reporting could have been faster and more comprehensive
Overall, their disconnected systems were slowing down their underwriting process, weren’t giving them the tracking or metrics they needed to deeply analyze their business and lacked smart workflows and automation to that would save them time.
The Solution
CloudMyBiz is a certified Salesforce Partner. We develop and implement custom Salesforce solutions, integrate systems, enable user adoption and give businesses the foundations to reduce costs, increase efficiency and maximize ROI. CloudMyBiz gives clients access to what
Salesforce does best: innovation. Salesforce is more than just a cloud or software tool, it can be the foundation for developing and growing a business in just about any way imaginable. Salesforce was not entirely new to Agile Cap. In fact, they had actually installed Salesforce previous, however, the basic layout was not user-friendly, and borderline overwhelming to figure out. Consequently, Agile Cap had stopped using Salesforce and returned to their other systems. What they didn’t realize, was that they needed a consultant and developer who understood their industry, and could tailor the system to their specific needs.
Eventually, AgileCap contacted the reps at Salesforce to get a consultant recommendation, and they were then referred to the Alternative Lending experts at CloudMyBiz. After in-depth discussions and a proper Business Process Review, we established that AgileCap’s specific needs included:
- A single, integrated system.
- Reduced human error so they could better scale.
- Enhanced reporting tools.
- Better visibility on where deals are in the process and better pipeline management.
- Improved ongoing monitoring of the loans.
- Streamlined communication internally and externally to create a better user experience for their clients.
The Result
To meet the needs of AgileCap, we implemented our FUNDINGO Loan Management solution, built on the Salesforce platform and designed specifically for the Alternative Lending industry. The FUNDINGO Underwriting and Loan Servicing Apps gave AgileCap the functionality, automation and data insights they were looking for.
Moving them onto a single platform also allowed CloudMyBiz to implement direct integrations with DocuSign, Experian, Conga, and Quickbooks, meaning that all data was now shared by the system, and could be instantly accessed from within Salesforce. This significantly reduced the time it took to process deals, as well as the frequency of data errors.
CloudMyBiz also built a brand new, custom Amortization Schedule module for AgileCap. This custom build-out has been essential to allowing AgileCap to continue growing. It allows for the invoices to be automatically created, sent out, and collected upon, with minimal oversight. What’s more, amortization schedules could now be easily created, updated and reported on. Finally, one of the biggest benefits was that it allowed for invoicing automation (including interest and principal amounts) as well as reporting projected cash flow and revenue for the portfolio.
AgileCap immediately realized that the new system was a vast improvement upon their previous solution. In fact, when they began testing the initial version, they discovered that they were going to be able to save up to 3 hours for each and every deal they processed. In a very time conscious industry, when potential clients are shopping between 10 different funders, and often expecting a turn around time of a day or two, those 3 hours were a huge win for AgileCap! The overall result: AgileCap removed the roadblocks in their way, streamlined their process and are now growing and funding deals faster than ever before!
Interested in learning more?
Have specific questions or want to talk to a FUNDINGO consulting expert?
Contact us at info@cloudmybiz.com
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
