As you may or may not have heard by now (I'm on hold waiting for the call as I write this) RightNow, one of the Big 3 in CRM on-demand, purchased Salesnet officially today. This is a good thing for many reasons. First and foremost, Salesnet provides the depth and complexity that RightNow's sales "service" lacked and this will be an immense boost to the RightNow portfolio of "classic" CRM application services. Second, it takes Salesnet, the 4th of the Big 3 off the charts and that's good for Salesnet. It was time to go.
Just so you know, its 4:58pm EST, 2 minutes before the formal call to discuss this further. I'll write the rest of this after that call is over, in case I learn something new or if I don't. I still have some things to say but I'm gonna hang in for a few minutes. So please wait a sec......If you want, read the official release. Take a minute....They're reading the Safe Harbor Statement
I'm Baaaaaack - Smart for RightNow
Okay, here's my final take on this. Good move by RightNow, equally good by Salesnet, though for different reasons. Greg Gianforte, CEO of RightNow led the analyst conference, which was covered much more heavily (as far as I can tell) by analysts from investment banks like Credit Suisse, CitiCorp, First Boston, and Friedman, Billings and Ramsey than by the Gartners or the Forresters of the world - tells you something though I'm not sure what. Greg saw this acquisition as a purchase in their plan (Build, Buy or Partner) for their Knowledge at the Point of Action (I'm using the caps the way he spoke of it) which seemed to be focused around his idea of RightNow and the customer experience.
According to Greg, KATPOA (guess) is based on the idea that a bad customer experience comes because of a lack of knowledge at some point in the business. So by acquiring Salesnet for a bargain $9 million (that is a basement bargain, given the once-promise of Salesnet), they get deep domain expertise in complex selling - true; hundreds of customers with a per seat average of 65 - probably true; and 26 employees with 12 offshore contractors - true too, though I'm pretty sure that Salesnet had a bunch more than 26 employees - at least they did in 2005 when I was last at their offices; and finally, this accelerates RightNow's production schedule by a full year for some of the sales functionality - true if he says so. So this really is a good deal - a very smart deal for RightNow.
Also Smart For Salesnet - But For Entirely Different Reasons
I've known Salesnet for years. I met them in 1999 and have been familiar with many of their original leaders and hung out with them including Mike Doyle, their CEO until 2005. They were good people. Donna Parent, their Marketing Manager for many years is still one of my favorite people in the world.
They had a great approach to their customers - they used business analysts who would work with the individual sales departments at companies and those departments that the sales process impacted to identify how the company used their sales processes to make things work. These were not consultants. They didn't discuss how to improve your processes. They simply worked to identify them with you the customer so that they could personalize your Salesnet implementation to your actual processes. They took time and it had dividends. But, truthfully, after awhile they kind of lost their way in the view of the marketplace and all they seemed to do was to spend their time assaulting salesforce.com with some pretty vicious and direct attacks - to the point of actually putting it on their homepage. Despite the best advice of many of us to cool their jets. (see my entry of several months ago), they paid no attention and simply attacked, attacked, and attacked. Yet they had excellent products with more functional sales depth than any other on demand vendor out there. AND they had been releasing some very cool OEM and vertical versions of their product. But you wouldn't know it from them. Frankly, it was a blessing that they were sold to RightNow for their own sake. Kind of "stop me before I kill again. " Greg Gianforte, a truly decent sort, will not do the same kind of attacking but will work on positioning the asset for what it is - one of the best functionally for complex sales anywhere - a great addition to the portfolio. In fact, on the conference call, Greg said that the Salesnet chief competitor, salesforce.com, is not in the same market as RightNow and is not their chief competitor. So that they won't be following the same nutso strategy that Salesnet did to damage themselves. They went from a company with tons of promise back in 1999 to an exceptionally smart, cheap acquisition by RightNow - which worked out for both of them. And I'm glad it did.
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