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Green Irony News

Green Irony Expands Into Tampa

We are excited to announce that we have expanded into the Tampa, Florida market. The office’s core focus is on Salesforce consulting and development with a heavy focus on the financial services vertical.

“Our Tampa practice further complements our existing go to market strategy both in the Southwest Florida region and in financial services,” said Aaron Shook, Founder and CEO of Green Irony. “We’re excited about the possibilities of adding a wealth of talent in banking, insurance, and wealth management and being better equipped to serve our customers in Florida with a local consulting presence.”

Green Irony Tampa resides in a tech-centric innovation hub, co-located with Salesforce R&D. The Tampa team has rolled out over 45 end-to-end Salesforce implementations for financial services customers.

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Green Irony News

Green Irony Partners with Sageworks

We’re pleased to announce that we have partnered with Sageworks (https://www.sageworks.com) to deliver a Salesforce.com™ integration for Sageworks’ best-in-class banking platform. This integration will allow banks and credit unions to be better prepared to meet the needs of today’s customers, providing a 360-degree view of each customer’s asset and risk profile. This integration enables users to make better informed decisions at the front end of deals, streamline internal loan and deposit processes, and surface new revenue opportunities from existing customers.

“This integration for the first time connects Salesforce users with Sageworks users,” says Jay Blandford, President at Sageworks. “We are thrilled to be able to provide Salesforce users quick access to the customer lifecycle data, automation and portfolio analytics that are uniquely available from Sageworks. Partnering with Green Irony to develop this integration for our clients was a no-brainer.”

As in other industries, the value that financial institutions get out of Salesforce is heavily influenced by the quality of the implementation and how well it fits the business’s needs. This new integration from Sageworks provides quick-and-easy access to Sageworks Loan, Deposit, Collateral and Lien data, and all without leaving the Salesforce platform. Business users at financial institutions can easily push loan applications to underwriting to be worked on by loan approval teams in the Sageworks software. From Salesforce, they can continually monitor the progress of loan deals, all in real-time, through both the Classic and Lightning Experiences. Find out more at www.sageworks.com/banking/sageworks-salesforce-integration/.
This solution aligns strongly with Green Irony’s core mission of unlocking the value of the Salesforce platform and giving customers the tools they need to run large portions of their businesses on the Salesforce platform. We are very excited about the possibilities that lie ahead for our banking customers.
Looking to take your banking processes to the next level with Salesforce and Sageworks? Contact us today.

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Digital Transformation Platform Migration & Modernization

Salesforce Is Not a CRM

Say What?

Salesforce is not a CRM.

This fact may be somewhat surprising to you. After all, it has “Sales” in the title and in many circles is thought of as the clear-cut number one option in the space. If the Gartner CRM report were a race, Salesforce would be Usain Bolt running the 100-meter dash at an 8th-grade track meet. So how in the world is it not a CRM?

Well, What We Mean Is…

Allow us to clarify. Salesforce is not just a CRM. Clearly, it is the undisputed leader of the pack in the world of customer relationship management software, but thinking of it as only a system for managing leads and sales pipelines is a huge mistake. Under the guise of creating a (world-class) CRM product, the company has been able to create much, much more.

The approach that Salesforce took as a software development company has many parallels to Amazon, intentional or not. Amazon’s storefront required a great deal of behind-the-scenes services to operate at the scale necessary for being the world’s biggest marketplace.

The company continually invested in these services, and, as a result, became one of the market leaders in cloud technology platforms. AWS now holds a 45% market share in the Infrastructure as a Service market, more than Microsoft, Google, and IBM combined, all a very convenient byproduct of the need to power a very needy e-commerce business.

Salesforce’s story is similar. Their vision was to create a cloud-based CRM, but they didn’t merely create software to drive sales processes; they created a platform. Think of the CRM as an app running on top of the Salesforce platform, similar to how Apple’s iPhone has a Messages app for texting that runs on top of its iOS platform. In order to develop a CRM like Sales Cloud, Salesforce also needed a world-class SaaS platform with enough flexibility to allow the complex configurations that each unique CRM implementation requires. Just like Amazon, as a result of building their core deliverable with great technical foresight, they created a powerful platform capable of doing much more.

The Force platform is robust yet flexible, capable of running any app imaginable. And since the CRM was the first on the platform and the platform was designed to easily allow data access to other apps running within the same organization, each and every one of these new apps that are created have access to data that is the lifeblood of every organization: its customer data.

The possibilities for apps on this platform are nearly limitless. Here is a list of useful business functionality that impressed us, but this list really only scratches the surface of the potential of the platform:

  • Plugging into automated marketing solutions like Pardot for full marketing-to-sales visibility and automation
  • Creating a custom application that sends text messages to customers with order delivery status updates, all in real-time
  • Automating the generation of commonly used documents like proposals, purchase orders, and invoices with tools like Drawloop, saving countless person-hours per month
  • Rolling in accounting or automating professional services project management workflows with FinancialForce
  • Allowing field technicians like towing dispatch units and their managers to stay in sync with up-to-the-minute coordination on the status of their jobs and intelligently coordinating teams of technicians to work in the most efficient way possible

You get the idea. The possibilities are limited only by the number of business problems you encounter and your imagination. As a group of technologists who have all spent their careers in technology, this platform is beyond impressive. The amount of time spent integrating data with traditional platforms is immense in scale.

Creating a series of purpose-built apps on the same platform with easy access to data allows technologists like us to concentrate on the real problems and accomplish the real goal: adding value to our customers.

Wrap Up

Ok, maybe the title was a little misleading and meant to grab your attention. Salesforce’s Sales Cloud is the clear-cut number one CRM in the market and the gap continues to widen. However, thinking of Salesforce’s offerings as purely confined to the arena of sales tools is capping its potential value to your business. It has much, much more to offer (just like MuleSoft), and there are easily attainable returns on investment for those willing to take the leap.

Want to Dive Deeper?

Since this post was published the Salesforce platform has continued to expand its capabilities, yet we continue to encounter this misconception day after day in the field.

So, we dove deeper into this topic and included non-CRM use cases that we’ve encountered. Read on: Salesforce is still not a CRM

 

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Green Irony News

Ribbon Cutting

Curtains Up

Writer’s block isn’t common for me. Throughout my career I’ve always enjoyed having the opportunity to write about technology, and, more importantly, the business value that technology solutions can drive. Staring at the blinking cursor in this Google Doc, however, I’m wondering where to start the blog entry that will set the tone for Green Irony right out of the gate and serve as a defacto mission statement for the organization. The blog could clearly go in many different directions, but after many round-trips around my home office pacing the room, I decided it should start at the beginning with the hows and whys.

The short version of how we got here is that we’re not your everyday technology consultants, and that’s exactly what led us here.

First, a Little History Detour…

“We can’t ever forget that the Internet now is just a staid utility. The exciting platforms are software applications that are very, very simple.” – Mark Cuban, Technology Entrepreneur

My team’s background is in enterprise software development. We are skilled in building software solutions from scratch; whether it’s a large, enterprise software product (like the ones sold by Salesforce themselves) or a custom piece of software that is tailor-made to the needs of a specific business, we are very comfortable building software from the ground up by starting with nothing and writing code to execute upon the vision. Java middleware that powers a high percentage of Fortune 500s? No problem. iOS and Android e-commerce storefronts and loyalty apps? Done it. Hardware appliances that distribute virtualized systems into a private cloud? Rolled out in 2008, before it was cool.

These deliverables all gave our team experiences of immeasurable value. We learned how to solve highly complex technology problems and then how to translate this ability into solving business problems. These skilled teams of engineers were capable of solving any and all problems, but there was still an issue: large teams of great engineers solving complex problems takes time. Large teams of great engineers are well-compensated for their problem-solving abilities. Therefore, large teams of great engineers taking the time to solve problems from scratch is costly… costly enough that only the largest of businesses could afford to make these investments and solve these problems. But these problems exist across the board, so we needed to find a new way to solve them.

The People’s Technology Platform

“We need to make it easy for our customers to build that application, because our customers can’t build like Amazon.” – Adam Bosworth, EVP, Salesforce.com

The software approach mentioned in the previous section is similar to the one taken by large software companies like Amazon, IBM, and Salesforce when they develop their product offerings. These companies invest hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D for their software products, but most (if not all!) non-software companies do not have these types of budgets and need a different approach. After all, the value of software isn’t slinging a bunch of lines of code together to create the most technologically advanced solution possible (although I’m here to tell you that that is a lot of fun!). No, the value is in solving problems that make an impact for real people.

And that brings us to the why in “Why are we doing this?” Simply put, when we evaluated Salesforce, we saw the technology platform of the future. We saw a platform that would enable us to build solutions that could impact businesses of all shapes, sizes, and goals. It was flexible enough to fit almost every business need yet simple enough to allow for incredibly rapid deployment of business value. Development tasks that would have taken several weeks to build using the solutions of our past could be done in several days. We were blown away.

Like Adam Bosworth said above: your company is not Amazon, so it shouldn’t expect to build like Amazon. Using Salesforce, that no longer means you can’t drive rapid business value using technology. Just like Amazon.

And Now, a Word About Culture…

“The business of business is not business. The business of business is improving the state of the world” – Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com

As a relative outsider to Salesforce (I’d used the CRM in my previous role, but that’s about it) who has worked with countless different enterprise software companies, their cultural approach is a breath of fresh air. Like any company, Salesforce exists to make profits and drive value, but their approach is one that I find to be highly superior to the “shareholder earnings at all cost” methodology that I’ve seen deployed by many other large software companies.

Benioff’s concept is very simple: satisfy your stakeholders. Stakeholders are anyone who has an impact on your company’s performance. Employees, customers, partners, and a business’s local community are all key stakeholders in the business, and the theory is elegant in its simplicity: by satisfying and driving value to these stakeholders, a company’s performance will also excel. The record-setting pace of Salesforce’s revenue growth is a perfect illustration of this theory in action.

Marc Benioff is concerned with addressing the needs of his stakeholders, and as a result, his shareholders are also rewarded. We are also big believers in this approach. The culture of helping the customer, the community, and the employee is one that is very appealing to our team, and it’s a huge part of our identity.

That’s a Wrap

Let’s come back to where we started: the short answer for how we got here is that we’re not your everyday technology consultants. We have experience with a large breadth of different technology solutions and we’ve worked with the best-of-the-best to create custom software solutions that drive incredible business value. And because of this experience, we know just how powerful the Salesforce platform can be.

At Green Irony, we believe that everyone can benefit from the same types of technology solutions that Fortune 500 companies have been using for years. We also believe that Salesforce’s platform levels the playing field, allowing businesses of all sizes to take advantage of these innovations.
Ready to take your business to the next level with these digital solutions? Talk to us today.