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	<title>Apprivo Bizblog &#187; Administration</title>
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		<title>Ready, set, implement!</title>
		<link>http://bizblog.apprivo.com/2009/11/17/apprivo-quick-start/</link>
		<comments>http://bizblog.apprivo.com/2009/11/17/apprivo-quick-start/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Administration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CRM]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Customer Portal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PRM]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Partner Portal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Partner Relationship Management]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salesforce]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salesforce.com]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[BPR]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Business Process Review]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Configuration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Customer Handoff]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[implement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Quick Start]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ROI]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Testing]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://bizblog.apprivo.com/?p=216</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Have you ever given yourself 30 days to finish something? How about burning off those last five pounds before swimsuit season? Polishing off that screenplay that’s been in your bottom desk drawer since 1995?  Breaking the Guinness World Record for most consecutive pogo stick jumps?
How about properly and efficiently implementing Salesforce CRM, Salesforce PRM, or [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Have you ever given yourself 30 days to finish something? How about burning off those last five pounds before swimsuit season? Polishing off that screenplay that’s been in your bottom desk drawer since 1995?  Breaking the Guinness World Record for most consecutive pogo stick jumps?</p>
<p>How about properly and efficiently implementing Salesforce CRM, Salesforce PRM, or Salesforce Service and Support across your entire business?</p>
<p>Apprivo Quick Starts let you do just that, getting your business up and running in less than 30 days.</p>
<p>But we don’t just turn it on and leave you hanging. We handle everything, from an initial review of your business to final testing and handoff. Our fixed-price implementations leverage Apprivo best practices, allowing you to benefit from the real-world lessons we’ve learned and enabling us to get Salesforce up and running in 30 days.</p>
<p>Each Quick Start follows our proven implementation methodology:</p>
<p><strong>Phase 1: <span style="color: #00364e;">Business Process Review</span><span style="font-weight: normal; "> </span></strong></p>
<p>First, we’ll conduct a business process review (BPR) session with your designated business stakeholders. Market dynamics and the intended strategic value of your Salesforce implementation are discussed and current and future business processes are reviewed. We’ll use that data to generate to a formal agreement of requirements and priorities. Be sure to bring a pen or No. 2 pencil.</p>
<p><strong>Phase 2: <span style="color: #00364e;">Design</span></strong></p>
<p>Next, Apprivo will document the BPR findings and recommend a set of best practices to meet your unique business requirements. The outcome of this phase is the solution design workbook, a design document that captures the page layouts, required fields, custom fields, pick-list values, and profiles required for your Salesforce implementation. A talking pop-up version of the workbook is available at an additional fee.</p>
<p><strong>Phase 3: <span style="color: #00364e;">Configuration</span></strong></p>
<p>Thirdmostly, which isn’t a word but should be, Apprivo will use the approved solution design workbook to configure the implementation. During this phase, we’ll perform two to three review sessions to verify that the configuration approach is following the approved design.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Phase 4: <span style="color: #00364e;">Testing &amp; Customer Handoff</span></strong></p>
<p>Finally, Apprivo will perform end-to-end tests from each user constituent perspective. We’ll also conduct one internal training session with your business users, and one technical handoff with your Salesforce administrator. You can film these sessions and edit them into a training montage complete with Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” in the background if you so desire.</p>
<p>You’re probably ready for me to tell you how much all this costs. Well, that depends on your circumstances. But I assure you, no matter the size and scope of your implementation, Quick Starts are worth every penny. Implementing Salesforce in less than 30 days means a fast ROI for your business and the elimination of the costs and headaches of attempting implementation yourself.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p>Quick Starts are offered for a fixed price based on the number of licensed users. Changes in scope for additional services are subject to additional fees and require approved change orders.</p>
<p>The implementation must be completed within 30 days of the project kick off meeting. Therefore, you must provide Apprivo with ready access to key business stakeholders and adhere to the agreed upon project timeline. Additionally, all Salesforce licenses must be purchased prior to kick off.</p>
<p>There are a few things that Quick Starts don’t cover. They don’t handle data migration, installing new applications, language support other than English, and custom development including Apex and S-Controls.</p>
<p>To learn more, download the Quick Start data sheet or contact Apprivo now.</p>
<p><strong>To the point…</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Apprivo Quick Starts help your business implement Salesforce CRM, Salesforce PRM, or Salesforce Service and Support in less than 30 days</li>
<li>Apprivo handles every aspect of implementation, from initial analysis to final testing and handoff</li>
<li>Quick Starts are a wise business investment that accelerate your Salesforce ROI</li>
</ul>
<p>If you need advice regarding how to implement Salesforce Customer and Partner Portals for your organization, <a style="outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; color: #e59226; text-decoration: none; padding: 0px; margin: 0px;" href="http://www.apprivo.com/about_contact_us" target="_blank">contact Apprivo</a> for a free, no-obligation consultation.</p>
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		<item>
		<title>Portals: To build or to buy?</title>
		<link>http://bizblog.apprivo.com/2009/10/13/portals-to-build-or-to-buy/</link>
		<comments>http://bizblog.apprivo.com/2009/10/13/portals-to-build-or-to-buy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:10:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Administration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Customer Portal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PRM]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Partner Portal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Partner Relationship Management]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salesforce]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salesforce.com]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[force.com]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salesforce Custom Development]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salesforce Customer Portal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salesforce Partner Portal]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://bizblog.apprivo.com/?p=206</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Building customer and partner portals in-house is a lot like that model airplane project you started with Dad—it seemed like a good idea at the time, but was ultimately a lot more work and less fun than either of you expected.
A recent IDC study, which you can read in full here, found that participants experienced [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Building customer and partner portals in-house is a lot like that model airplane project you started with Dad—it seemed like a good idea at the time, but was ultimately a lot more work and less fun than either of you expected.</p>
<p>A recent IDC study, which you can <a href="http://bizblog.apprivo.com/pdf/idc_force_study_2009.pdf" target="_blank">read in full here</a>, found that participants experienced five key benefits when building custom enterprise applications on the Force.com platform, compared to traditional in-house development.<span id="more-206"></span></p>
<p><a href="http://bizblog.apprivo.com/pdf/idc_force_study_2009.pdf" target="_blank"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-103" style="border: 0pt none;" title="idc_force_study_2009" src="http://techblog.apprivo.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/idc_force_study_2009.jpg" alt="idc_force_study_2009" width="206" height="270" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Those benefits:<br />
</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Faster. Custom applications were developed and deployed in 76% less time and required 76% &#8211; 85% fewer developer hours.</li>
<li>Lower cost. Companies were able to reduce their three-year TCO by 54%, saving $560,000 per application.</li>
<li>Higher quality. Users of the custom applications built on the Force.com platform reduced annual downtime by 97% and spent 60% less time dealing with the service desk.</li>
<li>Better performance. The combination of the first three benefits contributed to better business performance and generated an additional $3.9 million in annual revenue for each firm.</li>
</ul>
<p>So using Force.com to build your portals is a pretty good idea—definitely better than trying to build using traditional in-house development platforms. But there’s an even better solution, one that offers top-notch performance and saves on IT costs in the long run.</p>
<p>Overall, purchasing Salesforce customer or partner portal licenses is a smarter, more cost-efficient decision than building a portal yourself.</p>
<p>I get asked about this at least twice a month. Why buy when I can build? Well, my 3+ years of experience in this area has helped me develop:</p>
<p><span style="color: #00364e;"><strong><span style="color: #335e71;">THE TOP TEN QUESTIONS TO ASK WHEN DECIDING TO BUILD OR BUY</span></strong></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;"><strong><span style="color: #335e71;">1. Do you have the IT Resources?</span></strong></span><br />
Do you have the IT team with the right skills? Even if you do, is that really how you want to spend your IT resources? What is the opportunity cost of them doing this? What gets pushed?</p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;"><strong><span style="color: #335e71;">2. Is this really a fair match?</span></strong></span><br />
Sure, your IT people are great, but is it really fair to expect them to build something comparable to what scores of experienced, dedicated developers at Salesforce have created over the past 10 years?</p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;"><strong><span style="color: #335e71;">3. How much flexibility will your application have?</span></strong></span><br />
Will your development efforts build in flexibility to allow for any/all of the following?</p>
<ul>
<li>Granular user profiles?</li>
<li>Robust security model (object and field level security)?</li>
<li>Role hierarchy to drive record visibility?</li>
<li>Workflow?</li>
<li>Approval processes?</li>
</ul>
<p><span style="color: #003366;"><strong><span style="color: #335e71;"><br />
4. Do you have the hardware and software to scale?</span></strong></span><br />
Realistically, where will you host this solution? Will it be 99.99% available?</p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;"><strong><span style="color: #335e71;">5. Can you measure what you manage?</span></strong></span><br />
When you&#8217;re done with the basic plumbing to make your application operational, will you have the budget and the time to build a flexible reporting and dashboard engine to report on your business?</p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;"><strong><span style="color: #335e71;">6. Are you really saving money?</span></strong></span><br />
Factor in the price of IT, software, and hardware. Are you still saving money?</p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;"><strong><span style="color: #335e71;">7. Are you really saving time?</span></strong></span><br />
Can you afford to wait 6-12 months for your IT department to build a portal? What are your competitors doing?</p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;"><strong><span style="color: #335e71;">8. Can your application grow with your business?</span></strong></span><br />
Your business will change. How quickly can you add new features to your custom solution? Salesforce has hundreds of plug-and-play applications.</p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;"><strong><span style="color: #335e71;">9. Will you have a single customer view?</span></strong></span><br />
If you are already using Salesforce to manage customer accounts, contacts, opportunities and other customer-related data—think about it—does it really make sense to have another system?</p>
<p><span style="color: #003366;"><strong><span style="color: #335e71;">10. Can you make it all fit together?</span></strong></span><br />
Do you need to integrate with external systems (orders, ERP, etc)? Salesforce provides out-of-the-box integration capabilities versus point-to-point integration, which is the likely route for home-developed applications.</p>
<p><strong>To the point…</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Utilizing assets on Force.com is proven to be a better solution than building customer enterprise application compared to traditional in-house development</li>
<li>In this economy, you need every edge you can get—so make sure you carefully evaluate the build vs. buy decision before you make it</li>
<li>There are numerous reasons why purchasing Salesforce portal licenses can be a better business decision than attempting to build portals in-house</li>
</ul>
<p>If you need advice regarding how to implement Salesforce Customer and Partner Portals for your organization, <a href="http://www.apprivo.com/about_contact_us" target="_blank">contact Apprivo</a> for a free, no-obligation consultation.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Is it time for a Salesforce Tune-Up?</title>
		<link>http://bizblog.apprivo.com/2009/09/17/is-it-time-for-a-salesforce-tune-up/</link>
		<comments>http://bizblog.apprivo.com/2009/09/17/is-it-time-for-a-salesforce-tune-up/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:42:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Administration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[channel management]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[channel sales]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[partner relationship]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://bizblog.apprivo.com/?p=200</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[One of my favorite scenes from Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road is when Dude Lester’s car breaks down. Dude angrily confronts the woman who sold him the car, demanding an explanation. She checks the engine and sees that it’s completely dry—not a drop of oil. “Oil?” says Dude. “You never told me I had to put [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>One of my favorite scenes from Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road is when Dude Lester’s car breaks down. Dude angrily confronts the woman who sold him the car, demanding an explanation. She checks the engine and sees that it’s completely dry—not a drop of oil. “Oil?” says Dude. “You never told me I had to put oil in it!”</p>
<p>Even the finest machinery (or in our case, software,) won’t work at an optimum level without an occasional tune-up. If it’s been awhile since your business implemented Salesforce, or if your business has grown or changed significantly since implementation, then it might be time to “check the oil.”</p>
<p>That’s why Apprivo offers Salesforce Tune-Up, a fixed-price optimization package. Our experts work with you to evaluate and tune your existing implementation to ensure Salesforce is in sync with your current business environment.</p>
<p>Apprivo has developed a diagnostic checklist to assess the impact of change on your Salesforce implementation and provide optimization recommendations based on our real-world experience, not theoretical possibilities. In less than two weeks, your Salesforce implementation will be tuned for your business and running at peak performance.</p>
<p>We can help make sure your dashboards are still relevant and are delivering the metrics you need to proactively run your business. We can ensure that your profiles and security settings are up-to-date and that you aren’t sharing the wrong information with the wrong people. And we can make sure your third-party applications are functioning properly within Salesforce.</p>
<p>If you’re not up to speed on the new features that have been released every quarter and the new products that have been launched every year, you may be missing out on solutions that could benefit your business. So we’ll go in and make sure you’re using the latest and greatest and that your Salesforce environment is optimized to your business.</p>
<p>Salesforce Tune-Up is offered for a fixed price based on the number of licensed users. Changes in scope for additional services are subject to additional fees and require approved change orders.</p>
<p>There are a few things that Salesforce Tune-Up doesn’t cover. It doesn’t handle data migration, installing new applications, language support other than English, and custom development including Apex and S-Controls.</p>
<p>To the point…</p>
<ul>
<li>If it’s been awhile since you implemented Salesforce or your business has grown or changed, it might be time for a tune-up</li>
<li>Through the Salesforce Tune-Up program, Apprivo will perform a diagnostic checklist and provide optimization recommendations</li>
<li>We can also ensure that you’re up-to-date with the latest Salesforce innovations</li>
</ul>
<p>Apprivo Salesforce Tune-Up is available immediately, for pricing information <a href="http://www.apprivo.com/about/contact_us.html">contact Apprivo</a> today.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Your gut is good. Apprivo Special Pricing is better.</title>
		<link>http://bizblog.apprivo.com/2009/08/11/your-gut-is-good-apprivo-special-pricing-is-better/</link>
		<comments>http://bizblog.apprivo.com/2009/08/11/your-gut-is-good-apprivo-special-pricing-is-better/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:00:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Administration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CRM]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lead Management]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Leads]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PRM]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Partner Relationship Management]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salesforce]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salesforce.com]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://bizblog.apprivo.com/?p=111</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Think fast! One of your sales reps or channel partners sends you a special pricing request at the eleventh hour. There’s no time to do any research into how this will impact your business, and this is a must-win deal. Time to go with your gut, right?
Well—don’t get me wrong. It isn’t that I doubt [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Think fast! One of your sales reps or channel partners sends you a special pricing request at the eleventh hour. There’s no time to do any research into how this will impact your business, and this is a must-win deal. Time to go with your gut, right?</p>
<p>Well—don’t get me wrong. It isn’t that I doubt the abilities of your gut. In fact, I’m confident that your gut has made a lot of great decisions in the past. But there is a more reliable—not to mention defensible—solution that you might want to try.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.apprivo.com/products_apprivo_special_pricing" target="_blank">Apprivo Special Pricing</a> provides the transparency you need to make informed pricing decisions, whether selling direct or indirect. So you’ll never have to worry  about losing money on a gut-instinct pricing decision ever again.</p>
<p>Using Apprivo Special Pricing is easy. Simply enter the line-item discounts you need to win the business, and Apprivo automatically calculates the impact on your distributor and your company’s net and gross margin. Customized approval routing ensures the person with right level of authority receives the request.</p>
<p>This innovation accelerates the decision-making process by permitting you to instantly analyze the impact of non-standard pricing across the entire value chain to determine whether the business is worth winning. Apprivo even simplifies the reconciliation process by calculating and tracking expected channel claims, alleviating verification headaches for you and your partners.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.apprivo.com/video_products_in_action?dl=3" target="_blank">Watch a demo now</a> to learn more about Apprivo Portal Publisher.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.apprivo.com/video_products_in_action?dl=3" target="_blank"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-326" title="ApprivoSpecialPricing" src="http://bizblog.apprivo.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/ApprivoSpecialPricing.jpg" border="0" alt="ApprivoSpecialPricing" width="300" height="194" /></a></p>
<p><strong>To the point…</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.apprivo.com/products_apprivo_special_pricing" target="_blank">Apprivo Special Pricing:</a></p>
<p>-	Helps you make informed pricing decisions with full transparency<br />
-	Analyzes impact of non-standard pricing across the entire value chain<br />
-	Accelerates approvals with automated SPR routing<br />
-	Reduces rebate headaches by simplifying reconciliation</p>
<p><span id=":1n9">Apprivo Special Pricing</span><span id=":1n9"> is available immediately. For pricing and purchasing details, <a href="http://www.apprivo.com/about_contact_us" target="_blank">contact Apprivo</a> today.</span></p>
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