Opportunity Portfolio Management (OPM) is the sales training course using the methods and ideas that are mostly (but not entirely) described in my first book, Sales Automation Done Right. Most of the analytical stuff from OPM is encapsulated in a range of mature SalesWays software products bearing the Sales Cycle Manager name.

Sales Automation Done Right has a chapter on new technologies that are having a huge impact on selling. The point that I tried to make here was that good sales methodology developed with technology in mind would fit all the diverse new technology tools that are springing up so quickly. Two important ones are mobile computing and subscription CRM. We’ll talk about mobile in a future entry, but right now, I’m pleased to say that Sales Cycle Manager is now available for Salesforce.com on their AppExchange platform.

On page 248 of SADR, I show the Sales Advisor Dashboard embedded in Salesforce.com. I must admit that we did this in 2003, before Salesforce.com had fully developed their AppExchange technology. We saw the potential here and literally hacked our stuff in. That experiment proved that the methodology fitted well within the Salesforce.com CRM framework.

But now AppExchange is here, and is a wonderful way for third party developers to make their material available to Salesforce.com users. The technology is solid, has the backing of Salesforce, and the marketing message to show what’s available—this should be a win-win situation for both Salesforce and their partner community.

I did an audio-visual presentation on the new AppExchange product, which you may be interested in seeing here.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 10th, 2006 at 3:09 pm and is filed under SalesWays, CRM, Sales Automation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.