This morning at Dreamforce 2011, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff took the stage to address 45,000 registered attendees, and over 35,000 online attendees. He started his presentation with this statement about Salesforce: “We were born cloud, now we’ve been reborn social.”
The company has passed a $2 billion annual run rate in revenue, and now power more than 36 billion transactions a day for over 100,000 customers.
Gartner reported today the worldwide social customer relationship management (CRM) market is forecast to reach over $1 billion in revenue by year-end 2012, up from approximately $625 million in 2010. Worldwide social CRM is projected to total $820 million in 2011.
Gartner says that spending by buyers on social software for marketing, customer service and sales has increased by 40% in 2011, but social CRM remained less than 5% of the total CRM application market. More than 100 vendors have social CRM offerings, but most are not profitable and generate annual revenue of less than $1 million.
Dreamforce, the cloud computing industry event of the year kicks off tomorrow in San Francisco! At the four day event, you will learn how the next wave of cloud computing innovation and collaboration tools can help your businesses soar. It’s more than just a typical user conference, Dreamforce brings together all the leaders in cloud computing to share, connect, and inspire.
With more than 30,000 attendees expected, a jammed expo floor and some of the best keynote speakers in less than a week, it can be a dizzying event if you’re not prepped. Need a survival guide? Check out the Dreamforce Survival Kit from our friends at Eloqua. You will find the apps, advice, required reading and Twitter streams to follow.
Marketers are gaining leverage in the continuous war with their friends at their local sales department.
It’s true, once upon a time, long before automated technology took a significant role in the field of marketing, the sales guys were to blame for failed efforts at potential client meetings. However, they always rebuked: “Marketing isn’t doing a good enough job at pre-qualifying the leads they send us!” So once marketing gained a significant advantage with marketing automation tools that would measure campaign performance and the quality of each lead, marketing once again got the upper hand.
Marketing and sales may continue to fight like cats and dogs forever, but that doesn’t change the fact they really have to get along despite their rivalry.
Salesforce.com has it on all objects. In fact, most CRM systems follow this general concept: each object in the system is owned by a user of that system. Further, most platforms make this a mandatory relationship.
For instance, here is an example of a test Contact from our SFDC instance (owned by me):
To some of you, you may see this and think of the million ways your organization is leveraging this particular relationship in CRM. Perhaps you use this during employee transitions, allocating all the accounts from an old employee to a new one. Maybe, you keep a close eye on the number of opportunities owned by a given salesperson and ensure your pipeline is allocated to those people who can adequately manage the potential deal. Maybe, you don’t use this relationship at all strategically, the owner is simply the creator of the given object and that’s that.
That said, this article isn’t about CRM Object ownership. I could expand the examples above to an almost endless list, including Lead Assignment, but where I’d like to go with this is from a Marketing perspective; within your Eloqua system. Continue reading →
Chad: Got you - thx!...
Mike MacFarlane: Hey Chad,
In the past I have not used this method, but you could easi...
Chad: Good post Mike - do you use query strings in your URLs from LinkedIn a...
Mr.H: Love it!...
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