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Salesforce.com: Managing Customer Relations with Social Media
Salesforce.com specializes in on-demand software that helps manage customer information for sales, marketing, and cus- tomer support. While continually evolving in the marketplace, Salesforce.com report- ed a 27 percent sales growth in 2011. The company has become synonymous with sales force automation and customer rela- tionship management. Part of Salesforce.com's success is its
understanding of the role that training and certification plays in product adop- tion and building sales pipelines. Last year the company introduced Chatter, a social-networking feature. The company will soon release a human resources product line.
PREMIER SUCCESS PLANS Customers who were trained by Salesforce.com have 52 percent higher user adoption rates and have increased their sales pipelines by an average of 132 percent, according to MarketTools Inc., a company that studies logon analytics for Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com has made training available
for all of the key roles they support: end users, administrators, implementers, and developers. With its role-based training, Salesforce.com pledges that companies can greatly increase their adoption rates, as well as their ROI with Salesforce CRM. Those goals are accomplished by what Salesforce.com calls its Premier Success Plans. These unique venues integrate support,
training, and administration services to give clients unlimited access to their entire online course catalogs, supported by expert assistance needed to achieve success with the product. By broadly redefining learning, Salesforce.com arms everyone at a client site with the knowl- edge they need to be successful with its product suites.
MANAGING THE INTERFACE BETWEEN BUSINESS AND CUSTOMERS Marc Benioff, the chairman and chief executive of Salesforce.com Inc., said his company has moved beyond sales force automation to manage the broader interface between businesses and their customers. Benioff asserts that businesses need
communications that go further than the sale to create customer relationships and repeat business. Benioff told the audi- ence at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference that "Facebook has changed the game because it's trained a billion people in what a new user interface look likes.
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product adoption, pipeline building, and customer relationship management, the company's contract sizes have increased substantially. Salesforce.com signed an $80 million contract with Hewlett- Packard Co. in the fourth quarter of 2011. The company said that such large deals will become more common as big companies scramble to create a social marketing presence.
NEW ACQUISITIONS LEAD TO NEW CHALLENGES Salesforce.com has grown through acqui- sitions. It recently acquired Radian6, a company that produces a suite of products to help clients track and analyze outreach efforts, while monitoring what is being said about their brands. Salesforce.com's movement towards cloud-based solutions is represented by its acquisition of Assistly. This deal allows the company to offer cloud servic- es to small and emerging busi- nesses. It also purchased, Model Metrics, a company that provides mobile and social cloud consulting services. Salesforce.com's learning
Brian Komar, Industry Solutions Director, Salesforce, pictured with Angeli Primlani (left) and Joe DiDonato (right) EMG
Benioff said that Facebook and other
social media companies have altered how people exchange ideas. For businesses that realize it, social media can also potentially change how they buy products. He intends to make Salesforce.com the plat- form that companies need to build that social interface. With training enabling
Salesforce.com's incredible success with Elearning! May / June 2012 21
organization has the challenge of incorporating all these new services into their training. As more and more acquisitions move the company closer to its vision, the learning and devel-
opment team will be an integral part of paving the way to success. Salesforce.com's learning team's ability
to align strategically with business goals is unrivaled. The team presents an excel- lent example of the role that learning can start to play in a company's market pene- tration strategy.
Learn More:
Experience Salesforce.com: http://youtu.be/_Igg3yJ1m3s