Well, I’m blushing.
In my 20 years in the high tech world, I’ve never heard an enterprise application described as “super sexy.”
For this, I have to thank James Ward, a Technical Evangelist at Adobe who saw Right90 Trust Analytics™ app at Dreamforce and thought it was one of the best, see his Adobe Flex blog for the recording of the app here. James, thanks for bragging rights I never thought I’d be able to claim!
Once I got beyond the fun of it all, I thought about how the adoption of enterprise applications is greatly influenced by the user experience. Over and over, the biggest inhibitor to the success of a enterprise application deployment has been user adoption. Think of the phrase “shelf-ware” that described business’ purchase of enterprise apps that just sat on the shelf and were never deployed.
If users don’t adopt the application, no data gets entered, no analysis can take place, and no insights that can benefit the business are derived. It’s a simple hierarchy that drives a business’ success. CEOs can mandate the use of an application, but that use will still be spotty unless the users like the application and get more benefit from using it than not.
When I reflect on who our audience is for our applications, I’m very proud to have our app called “super sexy”. The users of our applications—sales reps and sales management primarily—are some of the toughest folks to please. (We all know they love their CRM systems and log in every morning like they do with their email.) If we can increase user adoption by providing them with an application that is a pleasure to use and delivers great value through the insights that are presented, I know that our customers will be successful. Sales forecasting has been a tough problem to solve for large companies, and I hope that applications like ours will inspire them to move out of the “do nothing abyss” and move forward to finally fix the chronic sales forecasting problem.
My thanks to James Ward for giving us some extra exposure; my thanks to our CTO, Dean Skelton, who is the brains behind this application; and finally to Elaine Cleary, our Customer Success Manager who so ably and beautifully demo’d our new application. In addition to our applications, Elaine is one of the reasons that our customers have achieved success, she helps to guide their use and adoption of our applications. She also provides a weekly spotlight blog that can be accessed here.
Ask some people in your company: “On a scale of 1–10, how much do you trust the sales forecast?”