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On next Thursday, June 25th, GeauxPoint will release its newest white paper, “The Beginner’s Guide to CRM: An Honest Look at the Pros and Cons of Customer Relationship Management”

In addition to simply introducing the topic of CRM to the un-initiated, the guide will explore both the good aspects to CRM as well as the bad. This is unusual, since most Web content for CRMs is mostly about making sales. GeauxPoint’s paper, however, seeks to make audiences think twice.

“Too many clients were coming to us after they’d failed with their CRM,” says John Nettles, GeauxPoint consultant. “We’re happy to help, but we’d wished they’d have succeeded the first time. It would have saved the a lot of headache and tons of money.”

The white paper paper will help sales managers and business owners to fully understand, evaluate, and get started with CRM. It will explain what CRM does, evaluate CRM platforms, and provide a series of tools to help the reader decide if CRM is a good fit for them.

If readers do determine that they want to move forward with CRM, there a tools to help them get started. One such tool is a chart comparing multiple popular CRM platforms.

Another purpose of the white paper is to let audiences know that if they become stuck, there is always someone they can call.

“We don’t hard sell our services,” says Nettles. “When someone calls us, if the answer is simple, we help them right then and there, no strings attached. If the answer is complex, we offer higher services as well as pointing them in the right direction if they want to help themselves.“

The paper will be in the latest of a series of GeauxPoint publications. The consultancy hopes to continue to publish guides whenever it spots a widespread business problem the company can help solve.

If you’d like to speak about CRM, contact us directly.

As salesforce.com for nonprofits increases in popularity, many organizations are making the same avoidable mistakes with the platform.

We’ve identified 5 salesforce.com pitfalls for nonprofits to look out for. This list comes from experience in working with dozens of non-profit clients.

When performing nonprofit implementation and administration for Salesforce.com, look out for the following traps:

Pitfall #1: Thinking Salesforce is a Purely Technical Endeavor

In reality, Salesforce implementation is about 80 percent business planning, 20 percent technical work. While the technical work is important, it’s easy to get lost in the “how to” and lose focus of the “why.”

For this reason, if you choose to hire a consultant to help you implement Salesforce, you should be sure to find one that understands the trinity of business planning, Salesforce.com, and technology. Too often, GeauxPoint is contracted to fix the mess of “technology consultant” that said “sure, why not” when asked if they can help implement Salesforce.

Pitfall #2: Over-relying on Vendor Support

Often times, Salesforce users add apps to their platform for certain functionalities, such as mail-merges or household management. However, these clients often underestimate the complexity of what they are trying to accomplish, and become dependent on the sometimes reluctant support of third-party app vendors.

For many non-profits, configuring apps will often require some involvement on the vendor side. Their support teams often have to tweak things on the backend or provide essential info directly to clients.

However, vendors are feeling the burn from needy non-profit clients, and some are even turning away non-profit business. This can leave the client in a bad spot.

The reason vendors are turning off to non-profits is that it costs too much to support them. When the vendors realize that a client is trying to do something that is way more complex than what their budget can support, the vendors will choose to walk away client rather than adopt a lifelong series of problems.

Pitfall #3: Not Accounting for “Total Cost of Ownership”

Salesforce only grants ten free licenses. You can get more at a discount, however.

When budgeting for any project, it’s important to look at the big picture. In Salesforce’s case, some commonly overlooked expenses training, implementation, and  process development. This is not to say that total cost of Salesforce is super expensive; the non-profit licensing model makes it very affordable. But you should know what to account for.

Note that this is especially true for open-sourced alternatives to Salesforce, where costs are commonly underestimated. For these solutions, the difficulty is higher for both the implementation and administration, which is especially expensive in the long-run.

Pitfall #4: Loading the Instance With Apps

There are some really great apps available for Salesforce, but it’s a best practice to do as much as you can with the native Salesforce instance. You can do more than you think with the pure instance, and those apps are a lot harder to remove than they are to install.

Further, third-party apps can create data issues. Many apps require you to move data to the app-holder’s database, where ownership lines get hazy. Further, being developing your business processes around an app means that if that app producer goes out of business, you may have to re-develop your entire salesforce strategy.

Pitfall #5: Not Reviewing Salesforce Best Practices

Many organizations that fail with Saleforce do so because they try to use the platform for something that it was not designed to do, or in the way that it was designed to do it.

Before planning even starts, it helps to understand Salesforce and how it works. This can be accomplished by thorough review of Salesforce best practices. This will ensure that your business goals align with the capabilities of the system.

Salesforce is a registered trademark of salesforce.com and is used here with permission.

Any questions about Salesforce for your non-profit? Drop a line below or contact us directly.

GeauxPoint is experiencing an influx of clients who need help opening call centers. We believe that this is indicative of opportunity for existing health and human services call centers at large.

Many new healthcare-related call centers are springing up because of a reform-related payment structure known as “capitation.” Under a capitated payment system, insurers give healthcare providers lump sums to care for entire populations. For example, one million dollars might be allocated to care for the elderly, mentally ill, crippled, etc.

Also, under capitation, the healthcare providers keep what they don’t spend. This encourages efficiency. Under the old system, providers were commonly reimbursed for whatever clients spent.

CAPITATION. Under a capitated payment systems, healthcare providers are allocated funds for entire populations at once — such as the elderly, mentally ill, etc. The providers keep what they don’t spend, which leads to the creation of efficient “care” centers.

One way that healthcare providers are becoming thriftier under capitation is by setting up call/contact centers, most often referred to as care centers by the providers.

There are several reasons why the care centers are cutting costs. One is that the centers provide cost-effective alternatives for patients to receive information. For instance, under the old model, patients might unnecessarily go to the ER just for information. With care centers in place, the patients have an accessible and cost-effective alternative.

Another way that care centers are more efficient is through technology-empowered communication. For example, automated reminders are proving to be effective at reducing expensive and wasteful appointment no-shows.

A third way that care centers are increasing efficiency is by created a better-informed client base. The call centers help patients understand what their obligations are and how they can prepare for hospital exams and events.

Capitation Opportunity

So where is the opportunity for existing call-centers?

There is no good reason for healthcare providers to waste millions setting up and operating call centers when others can do it better and cheaper.

Currently, the providers are creating care-centers in vacuums, essentially re-inventing the wheel for each unit. Once the care centers are implemented, the providers are left to figure out what makes a care center tick. When left alone, items like quality control, scheduling, management, and reporting are figured out largely by trial and error. Often times, the care centers operate under woefully inefficient processes for lack of knowledge of an alternative.

If the providers won’t give up control of their care center completely, existing call centers can at least help them set up the facilities. Lately, GeauxPoint has been perfecting a model to develop these centers. A major component for the model is taking the business objectives of the providers and retrofitting these with existing best practices of health and human service call centers. Also, the methodology includes components for training (management and specialists), quality control, staffing, and recruiting.

Conclusion

Existing call centers that are seeking new revenue-generating opportunities should be on the lookout for new care centers. For a more aggressive approach, the established call centers can propose their own care-center programs to healthcare providers who have recently come under capitated funding structures.

If existing call centers work quickly to fill this space, the result could be long-term revenue generating relationships. However, if the healthcare providers fill this need for themselves, the opportunity could be gone for good.

Expect more content on this subject to come.

Have any questions or comments about capitation and capitated payments? Drop a comment below.

SCHEDULE A FREE 30-MINUTE CONSULTATION WITH GEAUXPOINT TODAY.

Salesforce® is the most valuable investment that many businesses will make this year.

A large percentage of the companies that adopt a Salesforce instance will choose to implement it without outside help. However, many of these businesses will fail for reasons beyond their control.

The #1 Reason Why Businesses Fail at Salesforce Implementation and How to Avoid it

We’ll let you in on a little secret: most GeauxPoint Salesforce work is in re-implementations. This means that the client unsuccessfully attempted to set up Salesforce themselves, and then later realized that maybe they need a little help.

Implementing a Salesforce instance without outside help is certainly possible and there’s tons of content out there to help DIY’ers. Still, missteps are frequent and costly.

The Most Common Failure Scenario: 3 Critical Mistakes to Avoid

About 70 percent of clients that approach GeauxPoint for Salesforce assistance have attempted and failed at a Salesforce self-installation. This equates to thousands of hours and dollars lost. In many cases, failed implementation can harm data systems, which then require laborious and expensive “unwinding.”

Why do so many business fail at implementation? Usually, they make the following three critical mistakes for Salesforce implementation:

	Critical Mistake #1: Procuring the Wrong Products or Licenses Usually, clients make first contact with software products like Salesforce-based solutions through marketing, such as on the Web or through a vendor at a conference. It’s not clear to them at this point what their options are. They only understand the potential benefits presented by the marketer. As a result, the client purchases licenses, overlays, and third-party apps that aren’t appropriate.
	Critical Mistake #2: Jumping Into Implementation Right after obtaining licensing, clients jump right into what seems the next logical step: implementation. The client may read and review some of the many guides available, but often times they improvise through most of the process.
	Critical Mistake #3: Retroactively Planning At this point, obstacles begin to emerge, and it’s often too late to fix them. Clients slowly become aware of fundamental problems in their implementation strategy. They then deploy a series of Band-Aid fixes and outside applications that only make matters worse

After these three mistakes, clients are usually faced with a choice: either abandon their Salesforce investment or perform a re-implementation with an expert.

STILL UNSURE? CLICK TO SEE GEAUXPOINT’S GUARANTEED SALESFORCE IMPLEMENTATION SOLUTION.