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Most salespeople spend a fair amount of their time these days managing customer interactions via a customer relationship management (CRM) application such as Salesforce.com. The problem is that most of the interaction with those customers takes place outside the context of the CRM applications using, for example, traditional email.
Tellwise this week moved to close that gap by integrating its Tellwise Smart Messages platform for engaging customers with Salesforce.com. Via support for the application programming interfaces (APIs) defined by Salesforce.com, a salesperson can now engage customers from within the Salesforce.com CRM application. When a customer clicks on a message sent by the salesperson, they are automatically transferred into a Tellwise Smart Message platform, through which they can directly engage with a wide variety of rich content assets that are often too large and cumbersome to send via email.
The ability to integrate with Salesforce.com, says Tellwise CEO Conrad Bayer, then allows salespeople to better analyze which prospects responded to certain messages and the degree to which they engaged with a particular piece of content stored in the Tellwise Smart Messages platform.
The integration of the Tellwise platform and Salesforce.com is part of a shift where individual salespeople are being given more direct control over how products and services are marketed to customers. Instead of sending email blasts, for example, Bayer says individual salespeople now have direct control over which customer gets exposed to which piece of marketing and sales collateral at any given time.
Thanks to the rise of cloud applications and open APIs, the traditional dynamic between sales and marketing is fundamentally being altered. Marketing organizations will continue to develop most of the sales collateral that organizations create. But salespeople will clearly have a lot more control going forward over who at any particular moment is actually engaging with that content.
