Yesterday, the leading industry analyst firm Forrester Research, Inc., released The Forrester Wave™: CRM Suites for Customer Service Solutions, Q3 2012 report. 

If you’re like me, the word wave conjures up vision of a cool stadium crowd trick, but in actuality it’s a comprehensive report on the vendor landscape of a particular technology market segment. This report is meant to help companies make decisions about their technology investments - in this case CRM for customer service.  As for how it’s created, I picture a couple of analysts putting their heads together to choose a few vendors to highlight, and then jot down their thoughts a few weeks before the report is due.  Easy, right?

Not quite.  I had the opportunity to speak with our Senior Manager of Market Strategy, Carolina Grimm, to understand what Salesforce’s role is in the creation of the report.  It turns out the report is the product of more than eight months of collaboration between Salesforce’s internal team and the folks at Forrester.  Additionally, it isn’t just our analyst relations team; there are numerous teams involved from Salesforce’s side: Sales, Product Marketing, Product Management, Public Relations, Campaigns/Marketing, Legal & Procurement, and Finance.  The linchpin holding all these internal teams’ efforts together? Salesforce’s social collaboration app, Chatter.

Forrester first notified the participating vendors back in December 2011.  When Salesforce got the word, a private Chatter Group was immediately created to collaborate on the project.  The first document to be shared among the group members was the spreadsheet created by Forrester with 550 line items. There we had to address everything from company overview information to highly technical questions for our product management team. Each of these 550 items were assigned to specific individuals to complete.  Over the next eight months, the various teams posted files, spreadsheets, updated timelines, deadlines, questions, and suggestions in this group.  This way, each team could see what everybody else was working on and eliminate the one-to-one communication issues created by email. 

A vivid example of this collaboration is the effort behind the required presentation to Forrester, which involves a slide deck and product demo.  Rather than emailing slides back and forth via email, the various team members posted all the slides and content directly to Chatter.  Gone are the questions, “what’s the most updated version?” and “can you send me that deck?”  Chatter has the ability to transform a seemingly enormous project management task into an organized, attainable endeavor.

While the report was officially published this week, the work isn’t over yet!  A press release must be written. Our Legal & Procurement team must acquire purchasing rights so Salesforce can send a copy to customers and post it to our website.  Additionally, our marketing team is working hard to create targeted campaigns around the report; this includes branded landing pages, email templates, and banner ads. 

I haven’t even touched on the amount of work involved on Forrester’s side.  They have the responsibility of running through this process with seventeen vendors! If I'm doing my math correctly, that's 9,350 line items to filter through.  Moreover, throughout the entire eight month process, Forrester is in constant communication with the vendors in the way of briefings, presentations, fact checking, and so on.  Like our team, they’re undoubtedly working on tight deadlines with many moving pieces.  Before we know it, we’ll be preparing for the next report - but we’ll be ready: next year’s team can access the same Chatter Group to guide them through the process.  Piece of cake, right?

For a copy of the report, please click here.