Feature: secrets of selling SaaS

Leigh Kelson was one of the first on the scene when SalesForce. com reached Australia in 2004. The entrepreneur, advertising salesman and marketer had left behind a successful TV promotion venture in Perth and Queensland to set up a marketing consultancy and had come across an industry in need of help.

Kelson found that car dealers weren’t able to do any marketing because they didn’t have reliable data on their customers. He was introduced to the cloud CRM when SalesForce.com was rolling out its partner program and immediately saw the potential. “It’s delivered by the internet, there are no servers, there’s no IT, the business owns the technology and it was all leads, opportunities, campaigns – the vernacular was all there. I become a partner immediately,” he says.

Kelson was less interested in IT for its own sake than the advantages of marketing automation. Customers were telling him that their advertising didn’t work any more, and that in the new world of permission- based marketing they needed to collect email addresses but didn’t have the means to do it with.

“I saw that we could map out the processes for an email campaign and nurture those customers. To do that you need some sophisticated systems with workflows and manage the contact information. SalesForce.com has all that functionality built into it.”

The marketing space became congested with competition so Kelson asked himself what other things could the company build and which business processes could it automate that were larger than the marketing realm.

Fast forward seven years and PRM has grown to a total of 26 staff and a new identity as a software developer on Salesforce. com’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) Force.com. 

The company consists of eight senior business analysts based in Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth. “They all have a broad experience in being able to build and analyse requirements for business processes,” Kelson says. The rest of the staff are technical services developers working exclusively on the Force.com platform.

Kelson estimates 60 percent of work is developing applications on Force.com and 40 percent is more traditional salesforce automation projects on SalesForce.com.

“Certainly we’re doing more and more Force.com work,” he says.

PRM has made applications for customers to promote on the Force.com application store App Exchange such as Total Check. Total Check was built for Sensis and validates contacts in SalesForce.com by finding their details in the White Pages and Australia Post databases.

Sensis offers Total Check on Force.com free, charging a tiered fee for the number of records validated.

“That’s the sort of stuff that we love building,” Kelson says. One of the first organisations to use Total Check was the Cancer Council of Victoria, which signed up data collected through its helpline. “We’re not out there selling [the application], we got paid to build the app,” Kelson says. “It’s a way [Sensis] can get into the SalesForce.com customer base to sell their web services”.

Recently PRM has concentrated on the mining sector, which Kelson says is “drowning in spreadsheets” and is a ripe market for cloud applications to automate business processes.

To that end PRM has just launched Micloud.com, a Force.com risk- management application that co-ordinates logistics and mobilisation of workforces on large-scale construction sites.

An example was the huge train being built by Rio Tinto as part of the $40 billion Gorgon LNG project being built off the coast of Western Australia. “They [Rio Tinto] are mobilising 10,000 trade skilled workers,” Kelson explains. “Those people need to be compliant, they need to have their skills verified, have their medical (examination) and go to induction training”.