Incentive Automation in a Native Salesforce Architecture

Hello, welcome to the webinar. My name is Dan Roach. I'm the head of demand generation here at Fielo. Today's event is titled "Incentive Automation in a Native Salesforce Architecture." Our moderator is Tim Harman, principal analyst with Nuvocie, a leading industry analyst firm with a focus on channel development, And his guest today is Husseni Rasiwala-Yali, Head of Alliances and Business Development at Fielo. I hope you enjoy the discussion today. And with that, let me give control over to Tim Harmon.

Thanks, Dan. And Husseni, hi, it's good to be with you again. I got the opportunity last month to put your CMO on the hot seat, or at least the warm seat. Where we talked about trends in the manufacturing industry. I know that this month you'd like to talk a bit about the FIAL platform from an architectural perspective. And so normally the webinar spotlight is on me, but this time I'm going to turn the tables and I'm going to pose some telling questions to Husseni Rasiwala-Yaliwala, given that FIAL is willing to share their is learning from its many, many customers. So, hi Husseni, to start, can you give a little context, tell the audience a little bit about Fielo?

Sure, Tim. And, no, thanks for the invitation, thanks for hosting. So looking forward to this. So, you know, what is, you know, tell you a bit about our company and what is Fielo. So Fielo is a loyalty incentive automation cloud. It's a platform that allows customers of all kinds, different geographies, different industries, and brands are using Fiala to power B2B channel partner incentive programs, as well as consumer loyalty programs. And what's also exciting is that Fiala can do multi-relationship incentives. So oftentimes we also do for a lot of global brands B2B2C programs. I mean, the idea is that Fiala is a horizontal play. We can incentivize all kinds of data, all kinds of incentives, actions and behaviors with our agile cloud-based platform. We've had a lot of traction where our native Salesforce Cloud, and so what we've seen in the marketplace is we've worked with a lot of global brands across many geographies, but also many industries. So when we're talking about the B2B channel partner incentive stream, you know, CPG, manufacturing, high-tech, anytime you have a channel-centric company that you need to automate channel engagement, channel interaction, channel revenue, Velo can be used, as well as consumer loyalty along with online and in-store retail.

Hey, that's a, that's a pretty impressive customer list from a global perspective, so kudos to you and Velo, Husseni. Let me start out by asking you kind of a duh question given that this webinar is all about native Salesforce architecture, but I just want to confirm, PLO is a native Salesforce application, right?

Yes, absolutely. Yeah, PLO is 100% native to Salesforce's force.com platform. So we essentially live inside the platform of Salesforce, force.com. We plug into your existing Salesforce environment as a Salesforce customer, and we take advantage of all the properties and capabilities that that offers.

Can you give, give me some examples of those properties, those Salesforce Platform Services that you leverage?

Sure. I think one of the most important for a lot of our customers, um, we'll start with security. And as you might imagine, the Salesforce Platform is secure head to toe. You know, for those that don't know, you can go to trust.salesforce.com and actually see the compliance certifications and the uptime of Salesforce's cloud. And FIO lives inside that same cloud. So as an application, at the application level, We take advantage of that infrastructure and that security in terms of authentication, encryption, object-level security, field-level security. And for infrastructure, Salesforce security spans firewalls, SSL security, and database security.

Yeah, I know that Salesforce has long been lauded for its security. Absolutely critical in today's age environment. It's interesting that you start with security because it's compared to your approach being a native platform application to Salesforce. The alternative approach to Salesforce compatibility is as a composite architecture application, which is fancy words for an application that is externally integrated to Salesforce via APIs. And although API integration has its merits, security is commonly cited as the number one problem with that approach.

That's absolutely right. You know, you know, as soon as you get API-integrated applications involved in an architecture and a blueprint, you know, you begin pulling data through different requests and different security and different systems, you start getting issues. You know, data breach methods are becoming more sophisticated. Poor API integration serves as a sheer gift for hackers. So, and sometimes, you know, developers do not provide enough boundaries to limit security problems and causes loopholes and backdoors. You know, for example, mobile applications typically use standard HTTP basic authentication, which is not the best option, right? Another example, for encryption to work properly, you need SSL certifications, right? And they need to be validated. But hackers can exploit weak validations with phony certificates. Not all API integrations leverage certification authorities or use key pinning as an extra layer of protection. So, you know, really the bottom line here is that API security is hard. And, you know, if weak and shortcut APIs are there, you have a destruction of loss of data, theft, leaks, which can lose— of course, you know, can lead, of course, to loss in revenue. Productivity and reputation for the business.

Yes, so as a native Salesforce application, then Velo does not have to deal with that constant monitoring and enhancing that's involved with external API integration in order to maintain security integrity.

That's right. You know, Salesforce is constantly applying the most rigorous security techniques and services. You know, they expand into a lot of different industries where data is extremely sensitive. We talk about things like new compliance like GDPR, Salesforce is at the forefront. And so Fielo as a salesforce.com application, you know, we have that same leveraged trusted platform that our customers have the peace of mind of using, and the data never leaves Salesforce's platform when using Fielo.

So I'm sure that a lot of the folks that you talk to are certainly security sensitive. They are the ones that I talked to today, certainly are.

Are.

It's one of the first questions. So that's great that you can take advantage of your native Salesforce architecture to be able to deliver that peace of mind. Let's move on. I do know a bit about the Salesforce platform, and the second point I'd like you to address is, you know, this concept of declarative versus programmatic functionality. Declarative being if you want to do any sort of customizations, you can do it via clicks versus the program— programmatic approach where you do it through coding.

Perfect. No, excellent point. So yes, you know, native Salesforce applications like Fiala can take advantage of declarative features, i.e., clicks, right, to make customizations, customizations and create business logic like approvals, versus have versus having to do some custom code and customization for everything. And declarative clicks approach is faster, right? It's more visual, and Salesforce is known for this great interface, this agility of their platform. And this all can be done by administrators and users of the field application. You know, Salesforce is famous for saying clicks, not code, and we leverage that philosophy in our interface native to Salesforce platform.

Which I imagine cuts down on the cost and time tremendously in terms of any sort of customizations that customer might want to affect. You know, it's my— yeah, it's my understanding too, Husseni, that native Salesforce applications like VLO can leverage and manage the same data sharing and access control tools that the Salesforce platform provides to administrators.

Yes, you know, this is absolutely very important. You know, just like other applications, And, you know, Fielo involves lots of users, lots of different types of users. So, you know, Fielo's incentive automation cloud certainly does require a range of access control, from incentive program designers to finance staff to the channel partners. You know, you have a lot of people involved in a Fielo-powered program, even CEOs and salespeople. So with that diversity in number of users, you want to be able to easily answer the question, right? What can, who can do what, and who can get what. And with being a native Salesforce application, like Sales Cloud, like Service Cloud, Fielo Cloud takes advantage of Salesforce's data sharing and access control features.

Yeah, that's got to be, uh, it's wonderful. I know that when it comes to incentive programs, you know, the marketing and, and channel professionals that I work with on designing their channel programs, one of the first questions they always ask is, you know, who should we target this program to? So the fact that you can again take advantage of this, you know, who is it for access controls that are native to the Salesforce platform is going to, to make a lot of your customers pretty happy, I would imagine.

You know, add a quick point, Tim. You know, given that, you know, some of our customers are already using Salesforce, clearly, then they all have the common interface and user experience. Of being able to configure that experience with the same tools.

Yeah, that, that which can be a big deal in terms of not only how much a system is utilized, right, because it's a common interface, they're used to the Salesforce user interface, and so VLO has, you know, it sits in the same environment, the same interface. So utilization is going to go up, but I have to imagine that it results in cost reductions in the form of no need for new training for a new application and the elimination of duplicate efforts, duplicative efforts, sorry. So you're not having to apply security in both places, both applications, because you sit inside the Salesforce application. And the other, my other kind of takeaway is that you don't have to do field mapping between applications because you're accessing Salesforce database objects directly instead of doing some sort of API mapping. So, um, is that it? Why are you looking at me with such a pained expression? Oh, oh, I almost forgot the grand finale, what you've been chomping at the bit to get to. Okay folks, so Husseni Rasiwala-Yaliwala pre-briefed me a bit on the notion that any Salesforce object can be a behavior that is incentivizable by Fielo, and they're pretty excited about it, so I thought I would give Husseni a platform to tell you about it. Now, I know from talking with lots of channel professionals over the course of the past several years that you are increasingly looking to incentivize your channel partners not just for the result, for the sale, so That's kind of been the classical historical approach. Let's put an incentive program in place. The more they sell, the more rewards they can earn, or discount points, or what have you. But the shift now that I see from a lot of savvy marketing and channel professionals is that they are incentivizing the behaviors that they believe contribute to and lead to the result. Is this something new in PLO?

Yes, indeed, and this is huge for us and huge for the marketplace. We know that, you know, we know what is the desired end result in these programs. It's sales and revenue, and channel professionals typically employ incentive programs involving sales goals in order to produce productivity. And yes, sales should always be incentivized, but consider the range of behaviors, right? That contribute to better channel revenue. For example, putting together and submitting a sales forecast, requesting and providing quotes, performing marketing demand gen activities, taking training to enable your channel to become more knowledgeable. You know, all of these behaviors have a lot to do with getting those end results of better sales and revenue. You know, and all these behaviors are or can be contained within the Salesforce object. In the Salesforce database, which again is where Fialo sits natively. So we can access and transact on all that data directly. So what this means, of course, that Fialo can incentivize any behavior, any outcome, any time. You know, incentivizing both the result and its contributing behaviors pays big dividends. It is what we believe to be the multi-behavior strategy for a lot of our customers and how they're successful nowadays. So we know of one company, for example, that did a comprehensive test, an A/B comparison of their incentive programs. You know, they incentivized one group with just the sales behavior, the end results, and then another group with sales goals and those contributing behaviors. And the second group outperformed the first by almost 10%. So it makes a difference.

I have to say, I do find that to be impressive. I was I started talking and writing about behavioral incentivization, incentivizing behaviors in addition to results, a couple years ago, and it's heartening that a tech vendor has stepped up to the plate now to actually automate that from this perspective. So, it almost makes me want to jump over and start over as a channel professional and go into designing some new programs because I think there's a lot that can be done on this, this subject. So let me see if I got all your points, Husseni Rasiwala-Yaliwala. By being a native Salesforce application, you provide a common user experience for Salesforce customers, number one, specifically in the form of security capabilities you talked about, extensively. Declarative customization, the fact that you can use clicks, not code, to customize an application. And user access control, being able to address that capability where you want to put a new incentive program into the field, but you don't want it necessarily for all of your customers or all of your channel partners. So you can use the Salesforce access control tools to define the segment that you want to target that to. The second point I got from what you talked about was that you're not now— you are now able to incentivize not just the orders object in the Salesforce database, that orders object being the end result, but any Salesforce object, essentially extending your incentive program span to include behaviors that contribute to sales.

Absolutely, that's it.

Okay, good. So, um, the, um, I wonder if you want to share, Husseni, uh, anything about what, uh, the audience can expect from Fielo in the next, uh, couple of months.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, new things down the pipe for us as a company and in our outreach. Is some great playbooks. You know, we like to think of PLO being used across 3 different lines, 3 different streams of marketing, sales, and channel programs. So we're offering to the market and to prospects and partners these playbooks on different use cases of how PLO can sequence through different goals of your company. Likewise, our website is being revamped with a lot of this information to be there, so look out for that.

Alright, well, thanks, Husseni. I think that's good information, good information, and congratulations to you and your team for this new platform capabilities that you've encompassed. So, and thank you, Phil, for inviting me to be the questioner in this case, and I will now turn it back to Dan for final wrap-up.

Alright, guys. Thank you, Tim. Thank you, Husseni. It was a great discussion. Hopefully everybody found that very informative. I just wanted to take a second to remind everybody in the audience, if you submitted a question, we will be right— we will write back to you directly and get that question answered. And if you have any questions that you have not gotten a chance to submit yet, you can email them directly to me at marketing@fialo.com, and I'll make sure that you get a personal answer from Husseni or Tim or somebody else if it's more relevant. I also wanted to take a chance to— take the chance to let you know about some changes like Husseni mentioned. If you want to find out more information about this topic or other incentive and loyalty subjects, you can now go to fiala.com and check out the new resources section that we added to this website that houses our growing library of webcasts and papers and industry information. Thank you for joining us today and look out for an invitation to our next webinar coming soon. Thank you, everybody.