We've seen many examples of the power of social media in the BtoB space, however, few companies have been able to truly leverage social media within their own organizations. I've written about this quite frequently across our CMO and Sales Advisory Service blogs. (e.g., How Social Media Helps Enterprises, Rise of the Social Media Function) This has also been a key growth area within one of IDC's five sales productivity levers: Sales Enablement. That is, how can sales organizations best leverage new social media capabilities to improve their productivity.
Well, with much fanfare and pizzazz as part of its recent Dreamforce event in San Francisco's Moscone Center, Salesforce.com announced its newest offering to help companies leverage the power of social media: Salesforce Chatter. Chatter, which will be officially launched in 2010, is both a collaboration application and a platform for building social cloud-computing applications. Please refer to Mike Fauscette's blog review of this new product/platform for a more comprehensive analysis of its capabilities.
This new SF.com platform will provide sales organizations with the capability to better leverage social media across their organization; not just pulling in market, customer and competitive data from publicly available social media sources, but also better connecting individuals within the organiztion. (e.g., sales reps, presales, sales ops, product management, marketing) The potential value add here for sales organizations is improved productivity; for example, sales reps will be able to more efficienctly use their SF.com deployment (e.g., you can be notified regarding updates/changes in opportunities or other parts of SF.com); competitive information will be more easliy accessible (e.g., internal CI communities can be established within the SF.com application); communication amongst sales teams and managers will be enhanced (e.g., status updates will be available); and sales reps can be better connected with customer interactions (e.g., updates from other applications regarding product fulfillment). As with any new application, the true productivity enhancements will depend upon companies' abilities to quickly adapt to this new and evolving paradigm and leverage it's capability for their unique situations.
How much will this additional offering cost? Salesforce Chatter will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. A new Chatter Edition will be sold for $50 per user per month and will include Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Content and Force.com.
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