Solvis Consulting, LLC

Foro Mundial de Negocios - Monterrey - May 13th

Our friends at El Tecnológico de Monterrey are organizing the Foro Mundial de Negocios (May 13th).The event will have speakers like Jack Welch, Fons Trompenaars & David Sable. We are offering to our Solvis' customers and prospects a special price for the event. Click here for more information and to register.

Design Discussion: Marketing Automation

By Earl LaChance

As Marketing Automation implementations have matured over the last few years, we've begun to see the impact of their initial designs. Much like the customizations that have crippled enterprise applications like SAP, PeopleSoft, and Siebel throughout the 90's and early 2000's, flawed designs are impacting campaign management systems.

One overall consideration is that every component of a campaign should reside in it's proper application. Some key design elements that one should consider when implementing a campaign management solution:

• Keep the calculations and logic where they belong; ensure that the models and calculations are built external to the campaign management application. An example of this is to maintain models and their associated algorithms within a Data Mining application. The results of these models should be some of the first inputs when creating a campaign (or an offer stream within a large campaign)
• There should be a well thought-out information map, that translates the cryptic data that resides in the Data Warehouse or the Data Mart into business terms that the common marketing user can understand and relate to. An example of this would be the ubiquitous "0" or "1" for negative/positive... these types of flags should be converted to an obvious value for a marketing user such as "Client" vs. "Prospect".
• Keep the business logic where it belongs: the actual campaign management application. This application, usually graphical in nature, is where the Marketing Analyst can apply their business rules to determine the client or prospect list to be contacted for said campaign. Complex calculations and customer segmentation should have already been performed before the marketing user creates the actual campaign. This eases adoption for the business and enforces the use of the correct application for the proper purpose.

Of course, there are many other elements to a solid Marketing Automation/Campaign Management software design - the aforementioned are a few key elements that should be considered in order to maintain flexibility for future marketing requirements.

Salesforce.com Partner Conference Mexico City

By Earl LaChance

Salesforce.com has shown again why they are one of the leaders in the SaaS (Software as a service) CRM space. In an effort to work with partners in building success and to share the new functionality of their latest release, Alex Wolin, George Hume, and Matt Browning went on a "Road Show" to 4 countries in Latin America to work with local partners.

The first day of the Mexico City workshop we focused on Salesforce.com fundamentals sales training (although we all believe that we have this skill mastered, fine tuning is always welcome and often needed!). Matt's review of Salesforce.com's main selling points and role-playing excercises were well received and of great value. In fact, Daniela Olmedo, a Solvis Consultant, and I applied some of this information the week immediately after during a client visit.

On the second day, we were able to learn and discuss the new functionality recently delivered, including  Force.com platform:
"Force.com is the world’s first Platform as a Service (PaaS), enabling developers to create and deliver any kind of business application, entirely on-demand and without software. It’s a breakthrough new concept that is making companies radically more successful by letting them translate their ideas into deployed applications in record time." from Salesforce.com website.

We are very interested to see this concept being leveraged to deliver a true SaaS platform and architecture, as opposed to the current primary use of SaaS, that of a single-purpose application.

Kudos for Salesforce.com, specifically to Alex, George and Matt for their time and effort in working closely with their partners for mutual success.