Everything is related. Seriously, ask Kevin Bacon. Everything is related and in the business world, this amounts to one guiding principle:



The more processes and components of your business that you can tie together, the more coherent and efficient your business will be.



Here’s a recent Bluewolf story that serves as a great example of putting this philosophy to use:



WHO: Our client sells real estate management software to other businesses. They also provide consulting and training/certification courses for their software so businesses can send administrators or representatives to become system experts.



CHALLENGE: Our client is using Salesforce to track Opportunities (sales) run reports, etc. Like so many other companies, they also have a public website where they wanted their customers to be able to browse a catalog of offerings (classes, in this scenario) and make purchases.



The deeper challenge at hand begs the question: how can our client make these two systems and processes work together so they don’t have two processes running parallel to each other with twice the effort put forth and can avoid having two separate houses for sales data?



SOLUTION: One of our sharpest developers built a solution that marries Salesforce with our clients’ external website such that both tools can be used, information can be kept in one place for reporting and other purposes, and minimal maintenance is needed to make changes in the future.



Step One: Make product catalog information from our clients’ internal repository available to their customers.

Our developer first built and embedded several Salesforce Sites (separate webpages consisting of Salesforce functionality) into our client’s public website—each displaying different product catalogs from our client’s Salesforce instance with a sleeker public-facing design. They also had the foresight to build her solution in a manner that does not require code changes when product offerings change—our client would simply log into salesforce.com and change their products through standard configuration and those changes will automatically translate to their public website.

Step Two: Bring customers’ purchase information back into our client’s repository.

When our client’s customers make a purchase (i.e. – enroll employees in software training classes) the information captured in our developer’s Salesforce Site eCommerce solution is automatically populated into a new Opportunity in our client’s salesforce.com instance. The transaction is seamless, both parties’ needs are met, and our client has full visibility of their sales metrics and enrollments by reporting from a single repository.

It’s been our experience that when all of the pieces of business-to-consumer transactions are connected, the process runs smoother, customer retention is less of an issue, and companies can spend more time on strategically growing their business.



Can you think of any parts of your internal business operations that don’t speak to each other or connect? How would your day-to-day change if they did? Share your thoughts/scenarios in the comments section.