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Category Archives: New Salesforce Features

Salesforce.com, Jigsaw and Marketing Automation: What is Missing?

Posted on by Posted in New Salesforce Features, Salesforce, Selling

The cloud based data services space is worth $3billion a year. Salesforce announced that it is buying Jigsaw thereby entering this lucrative field.

“With Jigsaw, we’ll make it as easy as Wikipedia to source data, as easy as iTunes to buy data and as easy as Facebook to stay updated as the data changes,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement. Jigsaw is a supplier of “crowd-sourced” data services.

Every business needs two things, more customers and more sales. Achieving those goals just became easier. Benefits can be realized with the following integrated efforts:

  • Demand Generation
  • Systems Marketing Automation
  • Lead Qualification & Scoring
  • Optimizing Marketing
  • Lead Nurturing
  • Aligning Sales & Marketing with Automation

First you must develop your own special workflows and business processes that align with Salesforce and Jigsaw.  After all, marketing is not a spectator sport.  You need to do your part. The process has to originate with you and must be specific to your business and customer engagement strategy. Communications can be based on sales stages, driven by product offerings, cross-sell and up-sell, sales channels, etc. In our world of automation, plug and play, and “there’s an app for that” we still need human input. It is not completely self-service.

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Salesforce.com Winter 09’

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Within this release of salesforce.com you will find over 50 new features, spanning all of the application product line.  This marks the 3rd release this year and reminds us of Salesforce’s growing commitment to provide the worlds #1 hosted CRM solution on the planet.  Highlighted in this posting are Salesforce.com Opportunity Splitting and Campaign Influence.

The new Opportunity Splitting features address some of the current shifts in business needs.  Back in the day a sale would almost always be attributed to one person, but today we know that often a couple people, or even a team, are involved in a sale.  With Opportunity Splitting you can track all the individuals that participated in a sale.  This will effectively eliminate duplicate records and having reports that accurately reflect where the sales reps are spending their time as well as their productivity.

Another great new feature is Campaign Influence. This is one of the most exciting features to come out with Winter 09 and is a Salesforce Marketing attribute.  This will dramatically increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaign by allowing you to track on an opportunity by opportunity basis, determining which campaigns are working and which are not.

Automation is also improved in this new edition of Salesforce.com.  The Schedule and Email Reports was one of the most requested features.  This new feature allows customers to have reports automatically generated and sent out to the appropriate individuals. No more having to manually run a report then sending out to the same people every week. It is all automated! We want to thank our customers who requested this feature.

Force.com also receives some new and improved features in the Winter 09’ edition.  Customers will be able to leverage the power of Visualforce to create email templates.  This will allow customers to pull information form anywhere within their application to build dynamic email templates.

New features like these will make you more productive and profitable. May the Force be with you.