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Archive for April, 2009
Ribbit Hits the Cloudforce Tour
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 | located in Events, Salesforce | No Comments »
Ribbit continues on the Salesforce Cloudforce Tour and will be in Chicago this Monday (May 4th) and in Minneapolis on Wednesday (May 6th). If you happen to find yourself at one of these events and looking for ways to help your sales team become more productive - stop by the Ribbit booth and say hi to Greg (he’s the one on the left) who can show you all the goodness Ribbit for Salesforce has to offer. I know he’d like to meet you, and I am sure you will find it was good to meet him too.
View Ribbit Cloudforce Tour in a larger map
To see where we have been on the Cloudforce tour so far, do that magical thing called ‘clicking’ on one of these links below:
- London: April 7th
- Houston: April 1st
- Boston: March 26th
- Santa Clara: March 18, 2009
SME Trends: Mobility, Transparency, Open Computing
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 | located in SME Trends | No Comments »
Russell Mickler penned an article recently covering the Top Three Technology Trends Impacting the SMB/SME in 2009 and I thought these three trends hit the mark for what our customers have been sharing with us:
1. Mobility. Unchained from the desktop, consumers are in the field using powerful, high-resolution wireless devices at broadband speeds everywhere. Instead of using a computer strictly in the home or office, today’s computing experience is “immersive” and real-time.
2. Transparency. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that more regulation and accountability will be an outcome of 2008’s financial melt-down. The need for greater transparency is coming. So, how is your firm positioned to provide immediate transparency to your customers today? In the upcoming year, how can you use technology to make it easier to do business with your company, and to automate business transactions while providing useful business intelligence and auditing tools to interested 2nd and 3rd parties?
3. Open Computing. Unlike any other time in the history of microcomputing, the consumer has a wider range of software and application choices, and many of these products can be acquired at little or no cost. Email, contact management, document management, productivity applications, project management solutions, operating systems, advanced graphical editing tools… all of these applications whose licensing costs - historically - presented a barrier to entry for the SMB can be acquired today for free.
I think a SMB/SME could focus on just one of these trends and see positive impact on their business - on productivity, financially, even competitively. Adopting all three and it puts you in a whole different ball game.
We will be covering each one of these topics more over the next month and interested in your thoughts. Have you implemented any of these in your business? If so, which one(s)? What has your experiences been? What would you do differently (if anything)? What are you planning to do going forward?
Russell Mickler penned an article recently covering the Top Three Technology Trends Impacting the SMB/SME in 2009 and I thought these three trends hit the mark for what our customers have been sharing with us:
1. Mobility. Unchained from the desktop, consumers are in the field using powerful, high-resolution wireless devices at broadband speeds everywhere. Instead of using a computer strictly in the home or office, today’s computing experience is “immersive” and real-time.
2. Transparency. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that more regulation and accountability will be an outcome of 2008’s financial melt-down. The need for greater transparency is coming. So, how is your firm positioned to provide immediate transparency to your customers today? In the upcoming year, how can you use technology to make it easier to do business with your company, and to automate business transactions while providing useful business intelligence and auditing tools to interested 2nd and 3rd parties?
3. Open Computing. Unlike any other time in the history of microcomputing, the consumer has a wider range of software and application choices, and many of these products can be acquired at little or no cost. Email, contact management, document management, productivity applications, project management solutions, operating systems, advanced graphical editing tools… all of these applications whose licensing costs - historically - presented a barrier to entry for the SMB can be acquired today for free.
I think a SMB/SME could focus on just one of these trends and see positive impact on their business - on productivity, financially, even competitively. Adopting all three and it puts you in a whole different ball game.
We will be covering each one of these topics more over the next month and interested in your thoughts. Have you implemented any of these in your business? If so, which one(s)? What has your experiences been? What would you do differently (if anything)? What are you planning to do going forward?
Benioff likes us. He really, really likes us.
Monday, April 20th, 2009 | located in Salesforce | No Comments »
At the April 7th Cloudforce London event, Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, Salesforce.com - here on stage with Bill Murphy, MD, BT Business - let everyone in the room know (and now everyone on You Tube) that he is a fan of Ribbit.
The comment comes in at 3:07 where Benioff gushes that ‘Ribbit for Salesforce is the most exciting app he’s seen in the AppExchange‘.
Nice. Nothing like getting a little love from the big guy himself. Thanks Marc.
SME Trends for 2009, Part I
Monday, April 20th, 2009 | located in Productivity, SME Trends | No Comments »
BT Tradespace recently released a survey that revealed a growing trend among small and medium businesses based in the United Kingdom.
- One in ten people (8%) are putting in 100 hours a week or over - the equivalent of 14 hours of work a day.
- Most business owners participating in the survey (21%) work 50-60 hours a week.
Mick Hegarty, head of BT Tradespace, nails it when he said companies such as BT (and I’ll include Ribbit here) need to enable SMEs “to do things quicker, more efficiently and more flexibly”.
I know this trend is not unique to the United Kingdom, and it doesn’t just affect SMEs, but businesses of all sizes. Everyone is expected to do more with less (time), so the key will be to focus on increasing productivity by expanding our use of technology in as many places as we can - both in our professional and personal lives.
If using certain technologies could save you 2.5 hours a week, what would you do with that time?
Ribbit Webinar: Maximize Your Sales Teams Productivity
Thursday, April 16th, 2009 | located in Events, Productivity, Salesforce | 1 Comment »
On May 14th, Ribbit will host a free webinar with THINKstrategies Founder and SaaS/cloud computing guru, Jeff Kaplan, and Ribbit customer, Will Stacy from Santander Consumer USA (Drive Financial), to share their experiences on how Ribbit for Salesforce can maximize sales efficiency.
There will be a live demo of Ribbit for Salesforce and a Q&A session following. We are also happy to take your questions beforehand, so feel free to leave a comment here or email sia [at] ribbit [dot] com and we will do our best to get that into the queue beforehand.
Jeff and Will are sure to bring out some nuggets of wisdom here, so be sure to register now.
Use Ribbit to make calls from 36,000 feet.
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 | located in Productivity, Salesforce | No Comments »
I’m writing this post from 36,000 feet above the earth on a Virgin America flight from San Francisco to New York. Very comfortable seats with TV, radio, video games and Internet Access. Oh wait - NOPE. I picked a flight that hasn’t been turned on yet! Argh!
In sales, I find myself on planes quite a bit. I have an iPhone and a Macbook, but neither are connected to the outside world up here. I wonder what’s going on. There is no radio, no satellite TV and no Internet connection.
For the last 9 or 10 years, I have brought a laptop with me on flights. For the first 3 or so years, I would watch a DVD and maybe edit a PowerPoint deck. After that, I would download a show to iTunes and watch a few episodes and maybe edit a PowerPoint deck.
Well, its 2009 and things have changed.
Most of the major airlines are now offering wireless Internet on their cross country flights!! It just turns out that this one doesn’t. Missed the boat big time on this one!
However, this is great news as I want to know what’s going on when I travel and sometimes, being offline for 4-5 hours is near impossible. I want to jump on Facebook and update my status. I want to read if anyone has Twittered about Ribbit. I want to send/receive my latest email (both business and personal) AND, I have a few calls to make. Yes, that’s right, calls.
Ribbit could help me do that if I was connected.
I would like to call my mom and sister to see if we can have a family dinner tonight. I would like to call my tennis buddy to see if we can play this afternoon. I would like to call my friend Chad and say goodbye before he moves to Denver.
Ribbit (and in my case, Ribbit for Salesforce) allows me to make and take all my mobile calls right in the browser. If I was connected, I could turn on my Motorola bluetooth thingymajig and call all the people I just mentioned right through salesforce.com!
Now, think of this in the context of the business world!! You have vendors, partners, prospects, customers and boss’ all trying to reach you. How much more business could you close if you could answer every call and take an order?
The possiblities are endless.
Ribbit for Salesforce launches in the UK
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 | located in Salesforce | No Comments »
Thought there was no better way to launch our new Business Mobility blog than with the announcement Ribbit for Salesforce is available exclusively from BT Business to all new and existing UK Salesforce CRM users through a free trial now, and will be commercially available later this year.
Ribbit for Salesforce is delivered as a cloud computing service and can be implemented quickly without infrastructure or management overhead costs of traditional on premise applications. Businesses can store and organize voicemail as email in Salesforce CRM, categorizing leads, contacts and in progress deals. All voice messages are also delivered as SMS or email so that users can respond or forward to others in their organization without having to dial into voicemail.
“There’s a big problem for SMEs that they haven’t been able to address around the mobility and productivity of their mobile workforces, primarily because it’s difficult for them to take an existing application and mobilize it,” says Chris Lindsay, general manager, BT Business applications. “In the current climate, productivity is key to how businesses can survive. Survival is the key word this year.” Some 20% of SMEs are looking to take mobile technology into their workforce, full scale productivity suites and applications.”
With Ribbit for Salesforce, BT is providing its customers with a huge competitive edge in today’s highly dynamic environment. Helping to improve business processes, the application will help firms make the most of every customer opportunity during the recession and put them in a strong position to thrive when it ends.
Ribbit for Salesforce launched in the US in April 2008 and was recently named as the Best Mobile App in 2008 by Salesforce customers.
The UK availability of Ribbit for Salesforce was announced during the Cloudforce London event on April 7th.
Ribbit has attended other Cloudforce events, most recently:
- London: April 7, 2009
- Houston: April 1, 2009
- Boston: March 26, 2009
- Santa Clara: March 18, 2009