Intuit and Salesforce Offer Joint Product for Small Businesses

Intuit and Salesforce Offer Joint Product for Small Businesses

Small businesses have a new tool for tying customer  relationships into their financial management. Intuit, maker of the ubiquitous QuickBooks used by many small businesses, has teamed up with leading CRM -solutions provider Salesforce to release Salesforce for QuickBooks.
The new product is part of a lineup of recently released new QuickBook-related offerings from Intuit. The new Salesforce for QuickBooks, designed for current QuickBooks owners, is intended to better organize a small business 's operations, by connecting front- and back-office functions and by allowing sales, lead tracking, and accounting information to be seen as interrelated data .

Integrating Salesforce and QuickBooks

The company said that the new product enables "the No. 1 CRM" to be plugged into "the No. 1 small-business accounting software." QuickBooks item pricing and availability, sales histories, and credit limits can be viewed together with Salesforce leads, opportunities and customer details.

For customers who already have QuickBooks and Salesforce products and services, a related offering -- Salesforce Integration for QuickBooks -- enables an integration  of data between the two.

Dan Wernikoff, senior vice president and general manager of the company's Financial Management Solutions division, said in a statement that the Salesforce-Quickbooks combined product is intended to provide "a powerful, expanded view of business information that will help users turn leads into customers."

One of the ways the companies intend to help business owners save time is through the ability for data to be entered once, in one place, and then become available across the QuickBooks and Salesforce

Oracle OpenWorld 2011 Showcases CRM

Oracle OpenWorld 2011 Showcases CRM
Oracle will once again host  an Oracle CRM  Pavilion at its annual OpenWorld conference. The Pavilion will highlight what Oracle is calling a "select group" of independent software vendors (ISVs) and system integrators (SIs) focused on customer  relationship management (CRM) system integration .
Oracle said it is only choosing the cream of the crop for its CRM Pavilion at OpenWorld, which runs Oct. 2-6 at Moscone Center in San Francisco. The Pavilion will showcase companies that have demonstrated proven customer success, traction with Oracle's sales organization, and synergy with Oracle CRM's product direction.

These companies will be on hand to demonstrate their solutions, discuss integration concepts, and show customers how to leverage Oracle CRM integration capabilities to make the most of their CRM deployments.

Meet the CRM ISVs

Anthony Lye, senior VP of CRM at Oracle, explained that the CRM Pavilion at OpenWorld is a great way for Oracle CRM customers to see what its partner solutions can bring to the table. "Working closely with these partners has led to many customer successes and product innovations that solve very complex requirements."

Oracle works with its partners to collaborate on product integrations that leverage domain  expertise to create deep integrations that are ready to meet customer needs.

A few of the vendors that will be on hand at the CRM Pavilion include Buzzient, an enterprise -class social media analytics firm, Dun & Bradstreet, Fellow Consulting, which develops customizable mobile  and offline solutions, Clicktools, Augme Technologies, and BigMachines.

Oracle's CRM Pavilion will also host system integrators who have worked with key CRM ISVs to deploy combined solutions, including IBizSoft and Wipro.

Making Social-Media Connections

Zeus Kerravala, vice president at Yankee Group, says the CRM Pavilion is one more proof point that demonstrates how large the ecosystem around CRM has become.

"CRM is not just contact management anymore. Social media is becoming a bigger and bigger part of this," Kerravala said. "CRM has really become, for a lot of companies, the central point of intelligence  for customer-management relations."

As OpenWorld gets under way, Kerravala said he will be looking for any new products and services around automation of the various data  silos associated with CRM. That's where he sees challenges.

"We have lots of information silos as far as CRM goes. The question is what do you do with that information? How do you mine the intelligence to learn something useful, particularly around social media? There's lots of social-media information," Kerravala said. "The difficulty is understanding what do to with it."

New details may also emerge around Oracle's acquisition of InQuira. Oracle recently announced that it could now provide customers with a complete CRM and knowledge-management offering that empowers integrated self-service support, online customer forums and agent-assisted CRM.

RM is not without its challenges. For CRM to be truly effective, an organization must convince its staff that change is good and that CRM will benefit them. Then it must analyze its business processes to decide which need to be reengineered and how best to go about it. Next is to decide what kind of customer information is relevant and how it will be used. Finally, a team of carefully selected executives must choose the right technology to automate what it is that needs to be automated. This process, depending upon the size of the company and the breadth of data, can take anywhere from a few weeks to a year or more. And although some firms are using Web-based CRM technologies for only hundreds of dollars per month per user, large companies may spends millions to purchase, install, and customize the technology required to support its CRM initiative.