Five CRM Initiatives that Can Help You Build Better Customer Relations To improve the ability to ascertain the relationship between different documents and events within its customer relationship management (CRM) software, Salesforce at the Dreamforce 2015 conference today unveiled SalesforceIQ tools that capture information from email, calendars and other sources of data to generate customer […]
Five CRM Initiatives that Can Help You Build Better Customer Relations
To improve the ability to ascertain the relationship between different documents and events within its customer relationship management (CRM) software, Salesforce at the Dreamforce 2015 conference today unveiled SalesforceIQ tools that capture information from email, calendars and other sources of data to generate customer insights and recommendations based on the patterns observed.
Tim Fletcher, vice president of product for Salesforce, says that based on technology that Salesforce gained when it acquired RelateIQ last year, SalesforceIQ is designed to capture metadata from other applications and data sources in a way that creates actionable intelligence for salespeople. The end goal, says Fletcher, is to reduce the amount of time it takes for sales teams to sort through data to determine where a given customer might actually be in the sales process.
SalesforceIQ comes in two forms as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. The first is as a standalone offering called SalesforceIQ for Small Business, which will now essentially represent Salesforce’s CRM platform for small business. In the enterprise, Salesforce is making available SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud, which embeds what Salesforce is describing as relationship intelligence software directly within its existing CRM application.
In a CRM market segment where competition has become fierce, Salesforce is clearly counting on making use of Big Data science within a cloud application environment to differentiate its offerings. And it seems that just about every other application vendor is racing to incorporate similar intelligence capabilities in almost every application imaginable.
Naturally, the degree to which sales teams will actually use the relationship intelligence still remains to be seen. But at the very least, sales managers will have a baseline in terms of how best to direct the efforts of their sales teams based on what the customer is actually doing.
Michael Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist, with nearly 30 years of experience writing and editing about enterprise IT issues. He is a contributor to publications including Programmableweb, IT Business Edge, CIOinsight and UBM Tech. He formerly was editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he launched the company’s custom content division, and has also served as editor in chief for CRN and InfoWorld. He also has held editorial positions at PC Week, Computerworld and Digital Review.
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