Siebel 8.1: Top 8 Reasons to Upgrade

Time to upgrade your old version of Siebel?

Current Siebel users, especially if they’re on version 7.5 or 7.8, often ask us if they should upgrade to the latest version of Siebel.

To be sure, Siebel 8.1 (technically, now 8.1.2) offers numerous enhancements, including an easier-to-use task interface, templates, revamped search and at long last, real two-way synchronization between Siebel and Outlook. Organizations that need this functionality, or which are supporting quite complex business processes, may have a strong case for upgrading.

To learn more, I asked Stefan van den Broek, who’s part of Innoveer’s Siebel practice, to detail the advantages of upgrading. Here’s his list of the top 8 reasons to upgrade to Siebel 8.1:

1. Task Based UI: To help users accomplish tasks, previous versions of Siebel offered SmartScripts and iHelp, but neither were particularly intuitive or helpful. Task Based UI (user interface), however, provides a hands-on experience that guides users through each required screen. Furthermore, these screens are relatively easy to build, can offer pre-populated fields, and branch in different directions, depending on answers. As a result, this feature is particularly well-suited for complex or infrequently used sales or customer service business processes, to reduce training requirements and learning curves.
2. Templates: Pre-populate almost any entity — including accounts and activities — in Siebel and save it as a template, so users can easily launch them later. With customer service, for example, create service request entities for specific situations, to be used by a particular user or shared between all users, to save time and reduce error rates.
3. Lead entity (aka lead management): Previously, opportunities in Siebel were part of the main sales cycle — sales moved an opportunity from quote to order — and campaigns were only part of the marketing function. What was missing was a bridge between marketing and sales. The new lead entity fills that gap. Now, upload leads from external sources and let users create leads. Siebel also facilitates true lead management and qualification, meaning that a sales user can accept a lead, or reject it, which kicks it back to a lead pool managed by marketing. All in all, this is extremely useful.
4. CRM Desktop: Siebel gains a true interface to Microsoft Outlook, replacing previous, limited attempts to integrate Siebel directly with the Outlook client, or the overly complex and time-consuming Siebel Server Sync Exchange (SSSE). CRM Desktop provides true, two-way synchronization of entities that exist both in Outlook and Siebel — contacts, to-dos, and calendar items. But you can also view and create any Siebel entities in Outlook, and make them follow identical account and opportunity rules. For example, create a Siebel account in Outlook, or create and view Siebel opportunities in Outlook. Furthermore, the underlying configuration and setup is relatively easy. Finally, this meets the needs of our Siebel customers requesting “real” Outlook synchronization.
5. Search: Takes a big leap forward in Siebel 8.1, which gains brand-new search functionality, backed by a dedicated indexing database. As a result, searching is much faster. For the first time, search queries need not be case-sensitive, and you can search all Siebel entities at once, as well as external sources, such as a separate products database, or a SharePoint database. Finally, the search results get a Google-style makeover, including a hyperlink to the data, as well as a preview.
6. Territory management: Formerly known as Assignment Manager, territory management got a big upgrade with Siebel 8.0, and with 8.1 it’s been further tweaked with better functionality and capabilities for refining territories and assigning them to salespeople. For example, you can run territory management in a trial mode to show business users what the results of using different territory configurations would be.
7. Performance upgrades: On the technical side of Siebel 8.1, overall performance — including search — has improved substantially. Under the hood, this involved numerous technical changes that make the application run faster. At the same time, Oracle also made a number of enhancements to speed up productivity when using the Siebel Tools.
8. UI and functional enhancements: With Siebel 8.0, Oracle cleaned up the UI, making it look a bit nicer, and added new applications — dubbed Widgets — that run outside Siebel. One example is Mobile Sales Assistant, which makes specific Siebel functionality available via a desktop widget. With 8.0, Oracle also added a new business rules engine, which moves validation and business rules from the Siebel business layer to the administration layer. As a result, you can write business rules using more of a business language, which makes for easier and quicker configuration and rollout of business rules.

The Business Case for Upgrading to Siebel 8.1

When organizations ask Innoveer whether they should upgrade to the latest version of Siebel, we ask them: What business goals do you need to accomplish? What functionality are you missing today? What are your current CRM and Siebel pain points?

Based on their responses, we overlay what Siebel 8.1 would offer, then make a recommendation accordingly. While many of Innoveer’s customers now use Siebel 8 or 8.1, a majority use Siebel 7.5 or 7.8, and a handful still rely on Siebel 6, which debuted in 2000. In general, the older the Siebel application, the more reasons you have to upgrade.

Learn More

For best practices to pursue when upgrading Siebel, read our white paper (PDF), Optimizing your CRM Initiative with Siebel 8. In addition, to make Siebel 8.1 also play well with mobile devices, such as the BlackBerry and iPhone, look to Pyxis Mobile.

Finally, if you’re evaluating whether to upgrade Siebel or embrace the cloud, know that from a feature and functionality standpoint, for most organizations today, cloud CRM will offer most of the capabilities they require, including built-in maintenance, upgrades and a more modern interface, at an equivalent or better price to Siebel.

Make Smaller Businesses Bigger with Salesforce.com

Until recently, smaller businesses that wanted to partner with large businesses often faced a significant barrier to entry: their technology. Namely, large business partners often wouldn’t bother integrating with small businesses’ systems.

Today, however, the cloud is changing that. Even small organizations have the opportunity to partner with large enterprises, and in some cases, they’re already using the same software, such as Salesforce.com or Oracle CRM On Demand.

To find out more about the benefits, challenges and opportunities for smaller businesses to use the cloud to work with big business partners, I spoke with Jeff Brandes, vice president of business development and operations at EveryScape, an Innoveer client based in Waltham, Mass., that uses Salesforce.com.

EveryScape creates visual guides for local search, using interior panoramic imagery to allow users to “walk around” as though they were at a location in person, for places around the world, including Starwood, Omni and other large hotel chains, over 2,000 small businesses, and even the Cheers bar in Boston.

How does EveryScape reach new accounts?

Brandes: We have a small, direct sales team, but primarily we reach them through our business partners. We’ve partnered with StarCite — covering the hotel and meeting space — and also a number of directory providers that I’m not allowed to name publicly yet. Collectively, they have thousands of salespeople.

With your using Salesforce.com, what’s been the feedback from these business partners?

Our directory services partners are multi-billion-dollar companies, and we’re able to convince them that we’re not a tiny little vendor that can’t handle the scale of orders they’re going to deliver to us. And a critical test was their looking at our systems and seeing that we could scale from tens to thousands of orders with them in a matter of months.

How do you handle all of these orders?

We run our whole business on Salesforce.com, from order entry through post-sales support, no matter how an order reaches us. What that means is, whether we or a partner close a deal, the order gets into our Salesforce.com software through the Salesforce.com partner portal, automated feeds or our own people entering the information directly. We then track the pipeline, and when an order closes, we create a project.

How does Salesforce.com automate the underlying processes?

To build one of our visual guides, a photographer has to come out to the business. So first, Salesforce.com selects one of our photographers and sends an email: “We have an opportunity for you, do you want to accept or reject it?” When they accept, the system automatically provides required information and scheduling. The client also receives a series of emails saying, “Thank you for your order, the photographer will contact you.”

Once they schedule, it’s in the system and Salesforce.com updates them with a reminder, 48 hours beforehand. After the shoot, the photographer uploads the photos to our site, Salesforce.com stores links to the images, and the product goes into the production phase.

When the project is completed, Salesforce.com sends the client a link to their preview and the client can submit changes and edits through Salesforce.com Cases. Once it’s approved, that’s recorded in Salesforce.com, and the client receives the final, approved version. If the deal has come from a partner, the partner also gets notified with the appropriate identifiers, and they can post that tour on their website.

Was it difficult to build that level of automation into Salesforce.com?

Not really. We started three years ago, building a piece of the puzzle, then just kept adding to it.

What advice would you offer newcomers, based on your three years of cloud experience?

For a company that has limited IT resources, there’s no way we could have affordably built a system that scaled and had the redundancy of something like Salesforce.com, it would have cost just too much money. Remember too that the server is the least of the cost. Also factor in the day-today running costs, having a mirrored test environment, IT staff, plus backups.

How does Salesforce.com compare with using on-premise CRM?

Out of the box with Salesforce.com, what you get for your money and what you start with is just so much greater. I also build most of the reports myself.

Customizing Salesforce.com is also relatively simple, but more importantly, there’s a lot of work that other people have done that can be leveraged, some free and some moderately priced. For example, we use Informatica; Innoveer helped us with that. Also electronic signatures from a company called EchoSign.

For Salesforce.com add-ons, there’s no RFP; you just use AppExchange?

Exactly. And the other thing that can be noted is the beauty of SaaS. It’s a painless trial to see if these add-ons do what you need them to do.

What happens if Salesforce.com goes down?

Reliability-wise, we’ve had barely any hiccups. Really, our biggest fear is not if Salesforce.com is going to be down, but if our connectivity is going to be down.

Are your partner pages hosted on Salesforce.com?

The partner portal is a customized view into Salesforce.com, where our partners can see what they need to see. We built that on our own using Drupal, and that talks back and forth to Salesforce.com.

We also track our photography partners — we call them Ambassadors — like we would a sales deal: When they apply, all of their credentials and links to their portfolio are in Salesforce.com. As they get trained and certified, they move to next step, to the point where they sign their contracts. And once they receive an assignment, they again get tracked just like a deal would.

Did you originally plan to keep everything in Salesforce.com?

Having had the opportunity to build a couple of CRM systems in a greenfield environment with not a lot of legacy applications, I’ve found that the longer you can keep it all in one system, the fewer integration problems or headaches you have.

Learn More

For more on choosing between on-premise and cloud CRM, see Upgrade Siebel, or Embrace the Cloud?

For more insights from Innoveer customers into using the cloud, see Genzyme’s Salesforce.com secrets.

Also learn how the cloud can help with customer service, and why integrating with the cloud is easier than with on-premise CRM.

Donald Rumsfeld’s CRM Advice

Microsoft didn’t see the Internet coming, and now look what’s happened.

People think they know too much. But more often, we’re surprised not by the answer to a question, but by not even knowing the question existed in the first place.

Errol Morris has been provocatively exploring this issue in The New York Times. His inspiration: the famous observation by Donald Rumsfeld that the problem with military or political intelligence isn’t the known knowns (you can plan for those) or the known unknowns (someone knows the answer), but the unknown unknowns. In other words, you have to watch out for the things that you don’t even know that you don’t know.

CRM and Unknown Unknowns

In the CRM realm, we see this regularly. Recently, for example, I met with a prospective client that had invested $15 million over five years to build its new CRM system. The company was very focused on creating a 360-degree view of its customers, and provided sales reps with every conceivable account-related data point, across 45 different screens, with five tabs on each screen.

Unfortunately, whoever designed the system didn’t take into account that sales reps have to make about 50 telephone calls per day, and when they actually reach someone on the phone, have only about 15 seconds to make a connection and engage the customer or prospect. Having 45 screens doesn’t help. In fact, the system is useless.

Likewise, one of our high-technology clients spent lots of time generating marketing leads, which is a good thing. But the company neglected the handoff point, where the leads flow into the sales department. As a result, salespeople never used the leads, resulting in millions of wasted dollars.

Why We Fear the Unknown

According to Morris’s research, Rumsfeld’s observation — as well as the reaction to it — both have firm groundings in human psychology. Namely, we like matters to be black and white. Too much ambiguity makes people uncomfortable. Even hostile.

Perhaps that’s not surprising, since people tend to ignore what they don’t know they don’t know. As a result, we tend to chronically underestimate the downside or upside that these unknown unknowns pose.

The Internet, for example, has completely transformed society, arguably for the better. But some businesses were caught off guard by its arrival. Microsoft failed to embrace the Internet, tried to play catch-up, and failed. Since 2000, Microsoft’s stock price has decreased by 40%, while Google, the company that came to define the transformational power of the Internet has seen its stock price soar by 347%.

Find Out What You’re Missing

For both of the companies facing CRM challenges above, the problem was similar: not knowing the right questions to ask.

For example, talk to a VP of sales operations and ask what four or five components they think about for excelling at territory management, and maybe they’ll mention account planning or list management. But are they thinking about customer segmentation or cross-functional collaboration? In fact, to do well at territory management, you need to address each of those four underlying components.

To provide organizations with better perspective into the capabilities required to excel at CRM — for marketing, sales, or customer service — we built Innoveer’s CRM Excellence Framework. Our goal is to help organizations see what they do well, see what needs improving, and learn what they may be overlooking altogether.

Having this information helps ensure that you plan and build the right CRM program, as well as get the most bang for your buck. Indeed, if you need to build better territories — one of the five capabilities required for effective sales force management — and your organization already handles territory management quite well except for list management, then start there, because you’ll see the biggest improvement and bang for your buck.

So remember, when it comes to CRM planning, there are no stupid questions. Only the ones you didn’t know to ask.

Learn More

For more information on Innoveer’s CRM Excellence Framework, and planning CRM projects, see the capabilities required to excel at marketing, sales, and customer service.