Salesforce.com Melds Marketing and Sales Management

Four Steps to Implement Mobile CRM the Right Way

The modern sales representative is looking to IT to gain more control and influence over customers. To that end, many sales reps regularly rely on customer relationship management (CRM) software to keep track of customer interactions. Now, Salesforce.com wants to give those sales reps more granular control over how their organization actually markets products and services to those customers.

Salesforce.com today launched Salesforce1 Sales Reach, a set of applications that allows sales representatives to launch their own “micro” campaigns, track and nurture sales leads, track how customers are reacting to a particular piece of collateral material, and even create their own online communities among customers.

Based on Salesforce Communities and the Pardot marketing automation software that Salesforce.com gained when it acquired ExactTarget last year, Mark Woollen, senior vice president of product marketing for Sales Cloud at Salesforce.com, says that as the line between sales and marketing gets blurrier, the average sales representative wants to have more control over how the organization they represent engages with customers.

Rather than taking a shotgun approach to customer engagement, Woollen says that sales representatives want to be able to use their knowledge of customers to provide marketing activities that can be personalized to individual customers. With Salesforce1 Sales Reach, that information can be accessed from any mobile computing device at any time, adds Woollen.

With the rise of the cloud, the entire sales management process has been transformed into a multi-billion-dollar industry. With the convergence of marketing and sales management in the cloud, the size of that ecosystem is about to expand by several orders of magnitude.