From December 10, 2020, JAFCO began offering the Salesforce Implementation Support Program for seed-early startups.
In order to promote initial settings at the time of introduction and smooth operation within the company, we collaborate with marketing agency toBe Marketing Co., Ltd., which specializes in Salesforce introduction and utilization support services. The implementation will be handled by Aitex Co., Ltd., which is in charge of JAFCO's core system development.

We spoke with Yutaro Saka of JAFCO Group Co., Ltd., Tatsuichi Watanabe of toBe Marketing Co., Ltd., and Taketomo Nii of Aitex Co., Ltd. about the background to this business alliance, awareness of issues, and what we want to achieve in the future.

JAFCO Group Co., Ltd. Yutaro Saka (left), toBe Marketing Co., Ltd. Tatsuichi Watanabe (middle), Aitex Co., Ltd. Taketomo Nii (right)

IPO Smooth forecast and actual management for. Salesforce Started support for introduction and utilization

-Please tell us the background behind this initiative.

Saka: When I was seconded to an investment destination, I became keenly aware of the difficulty of KPI management and wondered if it would be possible to standardize operations.

When aiming for an IPO, the most important thing is budget management. You need to manage your budget and performance to see if your company's performance is close to your business goals, and find out where the problem lies if there is a gap between your budget and performance numbers. Is the number of negotiations small, the order rate is low, or is the product price setting inappropriate? Visualization of sales status is necessary to review the numbers precisely. Therefore, when a company makes a certain amount of sales, numerical analysis by a sales management system becomes important.

At the investment destination that was actually seconded, a lot of time and power was devoted to the related departments and the extremely complicated work of redefining the numbers managed by Excel and migrating to the system. Up until now, as a capitalist, I had been looking at the numbers that came up from the investee companies, but by being seconded and experiencing on-site work, I learned how difficult it is to get the numbers. The actual experience of "If you have a mold from the beginning, you don't have to have such a hard time" led to the provision of this program.

Nii　​ ​Salesforce is highly customizable for each company, and it is a very effective tool if you can master it. However, if the initial settings and the definition of numbers are not properly advanced, the numbers that management wants to know and the numbers set by the person in charge of the field may be different, and the forecast analysis may not work well.

In order to utilize Salesforce, it is important to unify the data notation in about 20 hours for the initial setting, and to clear where and what number the sales staff in the field should enter and confirm. It's very encouraging to have support, as few seed-early companies have experience deploying Salesforce.

Watanabe　​ ​toBe Marketing has provided Salesforce implementation consulting to more than 348 companies, but all of them have the same challenges. This time, JAFCO will take the lead instead of making molds by us as the introduction vendor, and we can show that "this is the way VCs and investors are looking for forecast and actual management for IPO." From a VC perspective, you can unify general-purpose rulers.

Running costs can be reduced if the initial setup time is shortened by the support. Having seen the hardships of many start-up companies, I felt the significance of this introduction support program and decided to support it.

-Please tell us about the specific services of this initiative.

Saka We will introduce packages created by JAFCO, toBe Marketing, and Aitex to JAFCO's investee companies.

Over the past six months, we have organized the dashboards that startup management wants to see, such as numerical items required for business management, and created packages that can be used immediately after the introduction of Salesforce. The content of this support is to provide the initial introduction support free of charge so that smooth in-house operation can proceed.

Nii: I've already conducted trials at several companies and realized that it's difficult to get into operation just by providing packages. I feel that it is important for the player to teach me how to use it while running alongside me, and I am generously supporting the initial introduction.

Specifically, for the introduction, the data managed by Excel will be migrated to Salesforce, but at that time, data cleansing is required. Cleansing is the unification of company name notation (unification of corporation and corporation), detailed data organization such as whether or not there is a half-width space between company names. Once that's done and you've got the data into Salesforce, you'll be able to manage your sales status within Salesforce to match your operational blueprints. Pre-operation starts after setting items so that the number of appointments for business negotiations can be managed in detail. We will reflect any improvements in operation and start full-scale operation.

Smooth operation can be realized by supporting such detailed data organization and setting work up to the operation.

Watanabe: The purpose is to make full use of Salesforce in-house and to promote number management for IPO. I think that initial implementation support is essential so that the numbers entered by the field match the numbers that management wants.

-Please tell us about future developments and what you want to achieve.

Saka: At the moment, we are assuming that it will be used by companies in the seed-early period, but I think there are still many parts that can be modeled. In the future, we would like to further evolve the contents of the package for strengthening internal control in response to listing preparations and cooperation with invoice software. We would like to support startup entrepreneurs so that they can concentrate more on their business.

Watanabe: I would like to increase the number of packaging patterns. It would be nice if we could start with smoother introduction support and develop into multi-cloud by linking with external applications.

Nii There are many things Salesforce can do to prepare for an IPO. Now that DX is advancing, management figures cannot be processed like Excel, and it is necessary to be able to express them on the cloud without being personalized by anyone. We will continue to improve the service even after the full-scale introduction so that people will feel "I'm glad I introduced this program" when I IPO.