Government turning to cloud-based SaaS solutions

Cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (or “SaaS”) solutions are rapidly becoming the de facto standard for many businesses – especially in marketing and communications departments. But according to a study by Microsoft, one-third of small and medium organizations still aren’t using SaaS at all – some not feeling secure about having their data in the cloud. However, SaaS may be getting a credibility boost from the U.S. government, which has begun looking to the cloud for its IT needs.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recently announced that the agency plans to rework the way it does business with its software vendors, saying its old way of contracting for proprietary software was inhibiting its flexibility and making it harder for the agency to keep up with the big data accumulated by high-tech U.S. military drones. Intelligence agents use the drone data to spot trends and provide warnings to the President of the United States and other decision makers, but the agency needs to be able to review the data quickly to aid users within mission timelines. That’s where SaaS comes in. SaaS delivers complete applications from a third-party data center over the Internet – which will give the agency more flexibility, be easier to deploy, and will result in cost savings since the agency will be using the service on a pay-as-you-go basis.

CRM company Salesforce.com, which is well known for its sales, customer service, and collaboration software, is one vendor working with the government to develop products that will allow it to adopt SaaS. Vivek Kundra, formerly the U.S. Chief Information Officer and now the Executive Vice President of Emerging Markets at Salesforce, says the company plans to help the government use SaaS to “adapt to the ‘social revolution that is taking place in the public sector.’”

Likewise, for “SMBs that want to maintain their size, but want to become more profitable, seek cost-effective, efficient solutions that match their needs for predictability and low overhead cost. Cloud services can serve both sets of criteria,” according to the Microsoft report. SaaS enables organizations – both government and private – to scale IT resources more easily while reducing costs, and focusing resources on core operations. With growing adoption in government SaaS security is getting the kind of credibility boost that may help accelerate its adoption among smaller businesses as well.

As part of the recently released Salesforce Service Cloud 2, “Salesforce for Twitter” is included for all new and existing Salesforce customers. Not only can you use the tool to monitor hashtags, keywords, and/or Twitter accounts — but these incoming Twitter messages can be integrated into the existing CRM system as business leads.

What this means is that you can then easily identify, track, and communicate directly with these leads to provide answers to their questions in your area of expertise, and keep abreast of problems that your product or service can solve. You can then track Twitter just as you do your other marketing avenues, thereby measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your Twitter interactions.

Twitter has, for many, been somewhat difficult to measure in terms of marketing value, compared to your other marketing avenues. For Twitter marketers – those running Salesforce.com anyway – this feature promises to be a huge step forward toward managing leads from Twitter marketing along side those from other marketing efforts.

The Web-to-Lead form creates a seamless integration between your website’s contact form and Salesforce Lead records. You replace your website’s existing contact form (if you already have one) with the Salesforce Web-to-Lead form, and when a prospective client enters their information into your contact form, a new Lead is automatically created in Salesforce. No more manual data entry on your part!

Once the new lead is created, you can set up “auto-response” rules so the prospect receives a personalized message from you and/or you can receive a notification e-mail informing you that a new Lead has been created. That way you can follow up with leads more quickly – while they’re still hot.

The Web-to-Lead form is extremely customizable – it can be formatted to look like any other part of your website.

This feature has saved our clients a tremendous amount of time, and has been an important step forward for all of them in streamlining their web lead sales processes. With web-to-lead, you no longer have to gather the prospect’s information entered in your contact form or input it manually into Salesforce. Not only does it eliminate that initial data entry on your part, it also reduces the likelihood of error (ie: you typing the wrong email address) when doing so.

Your initial response can be handled for you automatically as well – with the automated response e-mail feature. When a new lead is created, the Salesforce system can automatically email them back with whatever message you want. With this automated process, the chance of a lead falling through the cracks is decreased significantly. It’s just on you or your assigned agent to follow up appropriately.

* Most editions of Salesforce are able to utilize the Web-to-Lead form, and depending on the amount of customization needed, it can be up and running within a few hours. If you are unsure of where to start, or if the thought of working with HTML code makes your brain hurt, we can help you out.