An interview about Publishing Accelerator with Sanjeev Dash, Head of Strategy at Ribbonfish
In this article, I speak to Sanjeev Dash, fount of all knowledge for our Publishing Accelerator at Ribbonfish. Read on to learn more!
What is the Publishing Accelerator?
The Publishing Accelerator is a quick start package for publishers that you can be used to accelerate your Salesforce implementation and get all sorts of publisher-specific customizations and extras.
Where does Salesforce come into it?
Salesforce is a cloud-based software company that, amongst other things, provides Customer Relationship Management (CRM) focused on Sales, Analytics and other services. It is also a low-code based platform that lets you easily change, configure and build on the system. If you do not have Salesforce at the point of purchase, we are Salesforce partners and we can liaise with Salesforce on your behalf to get you setup with the appropriate licenses.
Who needs the Publishing Accelerator?
The Publishing Accelerator is primarily for academic publishers, or any publisher that publishes journals or academic books. It has been set up with various custom fields and objects to allow academic publishers to easily record things like opportunities that are very specific to their use case (e.g. Subscription products) or bibliographic data (e.g. ISBN, Title, Format) and associated it with Courses.
The Publishing Accelerator has all the basic bibliographic data that you need, so we can also provide this to other publishers too as a starting point. For example, trade publishers and educational publishers.
How long does it take to get the Publishing Accelerator set up?
It normally takes about 4 – 6 weeks to get up and running with the Publishing Accelerator.
We have added in all the fields and features that would exist for publishers in academia, and we work with the client to remove the fields and features that they do not need.
This reduces the time for implementation and ensures you get quick value from your implementation.
If you are not an academic publisher, the implementation time will be longer.
What does the ‘setup’ or implementation of the Publishing Accelerator look like?
We usually provide a demo of the core Publishing Accelerator with all the features. We then go through a series of workshops to narrow down the fields and features that are needed for your specific business.
After the workshops, we will go away and configure your system and then present it back to you in the form of a review with your business users.
Based on your requirements, we can also assist with data migration and setting up the roles and permission for your users.
We also provide hands on training in the form of train the trainer as well as documentation and videos that you can use for your internal training.
Besides the Accelerator, what else should I be doing with my Salesforce Instance?
Once the product pricing and bibliographic data has been added to Salesforce, there are a number of other features and products that can be used on top of this data.
For example, Salesforce has a Marketing Cloud product. Marketing Cloud can be useful for journal publishers in terms of running campaigns for authors. For example, you could run campaigns direct to customers.
In addition, Ribbonfish offers a whole host of other modules and features that allow you to leverage the data that is already available.
For example, we have Publicity by Ribbonfish, Ads-Up and the Author and Academic Portals.
These types of products further extend the functionality and features you can use, and extends your system to more departments and users and consolidates your data into one system.
What happens if I don’t use your Accelerator and I just use the standard Salesforce CRM?
You could use standard Salesforce CRM, however, it does not come tailored with publishers’ requirements.
This means it will take much longer to get the basics that you need into the system and it will mean you will need to spend extensive time learning the Salesforce product.
In addition, it will take you time to gather requirements and construct a workflow that will allow you to use Salesforce as a CRM for publishers.
With the Publishing Accelerator, we have done all of the hard work already, so you don’t have to.
Thanks to Sanjeev for sharing his insights with us!
If you want to learn more about our Publishing Accelerator, you can contact us right now via contactus@ribbonfish.co.uk.