This post was written by Kara Gibraltor
Salesforce.com has become the on-demand CRM software market share leader. Salesforce.com’s strengths include its never before witnessed marketing push, strong brand recognition, reasonable ease of use, good online product documentation and array of programming tools to customize and integrate the product. Salesforce.com disadvantages include high recurring subscription costs, mixed customer support reviews and a lack of feature sets and functionality that forces users to pay extra for AppExchange products or pay for customization tools to accomplish what several other SaaS CRM systems deliver out of the box.
Salesforce.com has announced that Plantronics, Inc. is rolling out Salesforce CRM to its distribution partners around the globe to foster greater communication and collaboration for increased partner success. In addition, Plantronics has deployed Salesforce CRM to track and manage its customer data and improve service from its call centers in the U.S., Mexico, Netherlands, India and China. With the assistance of salesforce.com professional services, it took Plantronics just a few months to design, deploy and customize its global Salesforce CRM solution.
CODA Group has announced that it has completed a successful beta programme for CODA 2go, and has made available a free 30 day online trial and demo at http://www.coda2go.com/freetrial. CODA 2go is the first international SaaS accounting system developed on salesforce.com’s Force.com platform. The service is integrated with Salesforce CRM applications and runs on salesforce.com’s trusted global service infrastructure. Companies trialling the software included salesforce.com customers CyberSafe, Model Metrics, SaaSpoint and Xenogenix. The first CODA 2go release delivers Opportunity to Cash functionality.
ExactTarget has launched a series of new integrated capabilities organized with the purpose of simplifying marketing automation for Salesforce CRM users. The new solutions enable the marketers to automate their lead nurturing process with drag and drop interface so that dynamic web pages and lead capture forms can be created. Marketers can also easily aggregate data from various sources. They can use a point and click interface for scheduling a sequence of follow-up communication activities. The new capabilities come with a pre-configured integration to Salesforce CRM.
ommunities are used to market everything from subcompact cars in India to travel-agent services. Successful communities generate benefits ranging from increased sales to favorable word-of-mouth campaigns from influential market leaders. That’s one reason why CRM vendors such as Salesforce.com Inc. and SugarCRM Inc. have put a lot of effort into building communities for the users of their products.
Appirio introduced the Appirio Contact Sync tool for Salesforce and Google Apps. The tool is the fifth product offering from Appirio for users of Salesforce for Google Apps, enabling users to intelligently synchronize contacts from these two solutions, bringing together the business context of Salesforce with the ‘add-as-you-email’ convenience of Gmail. Through this product users save time by eliminating the need to enter and maintain duplicate data in different systems, and they improve productivity by being able to access their contacts no matter which application they are in.
In the past, customer relationship management (CRM) tools were often outside the reach of small businesses due to its complexity and high cost. However, with the increasing availability of CRM tools on the Internet, small business executives can manage their relationships with customers across a team of colleagues easily.