Many of you may or may not know but Foretuit is a brand new AppExchange partner, barely 5 months since our first security review and posting to the AppExchange, and less than 11 months since we were first introduced to Salesforce’s ISV team (kudos to Andres, Nicole, Leyla and Ron).  The old adage is never more true — you are the company you keep.  And, in the case of the Mobile AppExchange announcement, we were asked to participate first, and second, we welcomed the opportunity to be among a small subset (less than 5%) of the 750 appExchange partners currently in the ecosystem.

[Editor's Note: Repost from Selling Power Magazine.]

Want to win? Then make it your mission to lose quicker. It’s hard not to agree that sales, by its very nature, is a highly human-centric endeavor. All good salespeople know intuitively when a deal is going to happen, and conversely, when it isn’t. Yet that internalized knowledge rarely, if ever, becomes institutionalized, meaning it never gets into the system of record or CRM application. This creates a huge barrier to improving sales performance.

The data speaks for itself: looking at a knowledge base of deals assembled from a variety of companies and industries and totaling more than 10,000 opportunities, the numbers are striking. Winning deals on average took only 75 days to close, while losing deals took 175 days to close out ― 100 days longer. During those additional 100 days, management, sales ops, finance, and all sorts of other ancillary groups in the enterprise spent time/cycles on evaluating what, in essence, the sales rep knew all along. The time has come to fess up.

It can no longer be acceptable to maintain an opportunity in a pipe beyond its sell-by date. Moreover, accurately predicting sales opportunities is way too important to leave to a rep’s gut or hunch, as the outcome directly affects the entire corporation. Much of a company’s asset allocation, budgets, and resources are set based on their sales reps’ predictions. Unfortunately, current predictions from sales are more like wishful thinking than science. Or worse, like hide and seek. The reason is simple: humans process this data intuitively and don’t have the time nor inclination to open the kimono and show the proverbial powers-that-be an honest assessment of a deal’s potential outcome.

Mr. Clean® is a registered trademark of Procter & Gamble.

This culture of bravado makes cleaning a sales pipe nearly impossible. Yet what can only be described as losing fodder must be cleaned out of the pipe if an organization ever hopes to leverage its investment in the sales process. Thus, the trick to winning is to find a way to allow for a clear quantitative assessment of the pipe and clean it so that your best people across your organization are available to spend precious resources, time, and cycles on the deals with the highest likelihood of winning. Yes, you need to become Mr. Clean.

The key is bringing modern science and technologies together using big data and analytics to better predict sales outcomes far in advance of expected close dates. The goal is to create an intelligent, predictive approach to business-to-business sales by 1) determining patterns based on actual company and buyer business behavior, and 2) analyzing that information in order to increase communication between colleagues and more closely link management to sales teams with the goal of closing deals faster and more efficiently, without arduous manual effort.

Since many studies show that salespeople are spending less and less time selling, the absolute essential ingredient to success here is to ensure that any effort does not add manual steps to the sales-reporting process ― more key strokes, clicks, needless processes, or internal meetings will only result in less productivity, not more. And since the essence of the social enterprise is, well, social, then something needs to change to allow salespeople to spend more time with the right customers while capturing the very essence of a productive deal cycle ― one that yields a positive outcome.

Thus, the trick to better resource optimization is to automate the process of updating activities without entering information and give management complete visibility into the sales process without relying on a weekly interrogation. All of this empowers a sales organization to fail much faster ― and win much more.

Visual Pipeline

As you may know – beyond Foretuit’s keen ability to predict whether opportunities will be won, lost, or slip – one of the things people really like about it is the rich interactive visualizations, like Foretuit’s Visual Pipeline view.

So, when we looked at how to make Foretuit run within salesforce.com, we had some tough choices to make about how to do it.  So, we surveyed the market to see how other vendors do it.  And, frankly, we came across unimpressed for the most part.

They tended to fall into one of two camps:

• Thin wrappers – these vendors take their existing UI and just dump it within the salesforce UI in what’s called an iframe. Unfortunately, the problems with the iframe approach are many.  Firstly, it’s not really integrated.  Basically, other than being embedded in the page, there is no relationship between this UI and the salesforce.com UI (so you can’t mix-and-match data or components).  It’s basically like having a separate browser tab. Secondly, it doesn’t act like a web user experience.  You end up seeing things like scrollbars within sub-frames; if you resize the browser the content don’t resize to fit; etc.  An additional problem for us is that we wanted to integrate really tightly with Chatter, and this approach wouldn’t let us do it well.

• Native Interfaces – On the other hand there are vendors that have built their UI’s natively in force.com.  Force.com is a great platform for building web interfaces quickly, with lots of different components and capabilities.  So, there are some great products out there.  The downside was that most of these vendors didn’t achieve the same level of interactivity or visual richness we were shooting for.  So, initially, we weren’t sure how possible it would be to create an immersive experience on Force.com

In the end, we decided to take a risky, but potentially fruitful path: Rebuild our interfaces as native interfaces in Visualforce, but augment this with HTML5 and JavaScript to keep the visual richness and interactivity that our users love.  The good news is that we learned that Force.com makes it really easy to do this – you can mix and match Visualforce components with native HTML5 and JavaScript pretty well seamlessly.

Frankly, our final result ended up exceeding our expectations.  We got the tight chatter integration, and kept all the visual richness and interactivity. We’ll be launching it at Dreamforce ’11 at the end of August.

While you’re waiting for Dreamforce, check out a video demo of Foretuit in Salesforce.

When people connect in a social sense, they are “friends.”  There’s no more simple construct as they are literally peers — friends, neighbors, relatives.

On the flip side, when people connect in a business sense, they are “colleagues.”  People that work together and have a defined role.   Their role defines their social standing in an organization.  They are worker, manager, sales person, marketer, pricer, boss — you get it.

More important, each colleague has a need to collaborate to perform a specified task at a particular time during a particular process. This is hugely important.  Why?  Well, understand the role and purpose, you can understand the business.

This is the very nature of collaborative structures and it lies at the heart of our approach. When applied to a specific context — like sales, you begin to understand our method. Foretuit leverages these collaborative structures to identify patterns of unstructured activities within the chaos of daily business life.

For sales, it creates a real-time model for deal flow, and maps that deal with other deals to create a knowledge base of deal sequencing – like a sales genome.  Understand the genome on an individual, group, organization, industry or global level, and you have achieved the holy grail to determine deal maturity, and the confidence to know the likely outcome, positive or negative.  In fact, our alpha results have been extraordinary and indicate a high likelihood of correctly predicting outcomes at a very early stage.   Thus, we are on the verge of greatly reducing friction in the sales process thereby eliminating the subjective nature of deal proctology.

Think about the impact.  Today, most experts, board members, executive management believe the sales process is entirely ineffective and totally inefficient.  The amount of resources (think capital) required to operate the sales process is burdened by significant over investment in lead generation, pipeline coverage and operational oversight.  Yet with all that investment, deals don’t just slip at the end of the quarter — they vaporize as if they never existed in the first place.

Thus, the environment is dysfunctional at best as it breeds distrust and lives on regular interrogation. The investments required to generate 10x lead flow and 3x pipeline coverage are huge, and the outcomes hit or miss.  Organizations spend over $18 billion per year on CRM applications alone.

A small relative improvement in deal cycle management could yield significant upstream and downstream benefits.  Not just from better allocation of management and operations time, but in improved upfront targeting and resource allocation.  Plus, if you live in a product organization, think about the benefits to downstream production and alignment with supply.

Sales resource is expensive and precious.  With improved foresight, comes better allocation of sales resource.  And with the amount of time compression at the end of any quarter, there is a critical need to understand how best to utilize scarce resource.  Most customers skew their purchase cycle to the closing weeks of any quarter.  With the proper foresight, management would know where and when to focus and, perhaps more importantly, where not to.  More importantly, this benefits the sales rep as sales quota obtainment would be higher and thus compensation and job satisfaction much greater.

Thus it’s in everybody’s interest to improve deal lifecycle management.  Today’s tools and applications tend to enable the current dysfunction but do little to change the game.  Our approach is certain to change that — and that’s a quick overview on how Foretuit does what it does.