Category: MarketingAI

MarketingAI

Salesforce Announces Global Launch of SalesforceIQ CRM for Small Businesses

Back in September, Salesforce unveiled SalesforceIQ, which it referred to as “the future of selling for every business.”

It was designed to help both large and small businesses and included two SalesforceIQ products: SalesforceIQ for Small Business and SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud’s iOS, Android, and Chrome apps. The former is obviously geared toward small businesses, helping them manage deals, accelerate pipelines, and guiding them through the sales process. SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud sees relationship intelligence integrated into sales reps’ email.

At first, SalesforceIQ for Small Business was available in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. The company announced today that it is now available worldwide and that it is now called SalesforceIQ CRM from SalesforceIQ for Small Business.

The product, the company says, makes the predictive capabilities of Relationship Intelligence available to all.

SalesforceIQ CEO Steve Loughlin says, “As small business owners ourselves, we knew all too well that salespeople don’t have the time or the resources to keep track of all of the crucial information on their customers and prospects. To solve this problem, we developed Relationship Intelligence technology that automatically captures, analyzes and surfaces information for customer relationships from email, calendars and more. Relationship Intelligence seeks out the patterns needed to surface insights into future outcomes and proactively recommends actions for teams to build stronger relationships with customers and accelerate sales.”

“Startup customers, such as Peerspace and Storyful, have been leveraging SalesforceIQ to work more efficiently, with the technology matching their fast-growing pace,” a spokesperson for Salesforce tells WebProNews. “A survey of current customers found 70 percent increased the number of deals closed per month and on average saved over 4 hours per week from manual data entry using SalesforceIQ.”

The company is offering the product to businesses with a fourteen-day free trial.

Image via Salesforce

January 21, 2016
Salesforce Infographic Looks At 2015 State of Customer Service

Salesforce polled 1,900 “global customer service leaders” about their practices. Findings can be found in the new 2015 State of Service Report.

“Just a few years ago, customer service was an after thought for most companies,” says Salesforce’s Matt Wesson. “If a customer had a good experience, great. If not, oh well. Today that mentality is ancient history. Successful companies realize that exceptional customer service can be a serious differentiator that opens the door to more sales, upsells, and referrals. Delivering this level of service is all about meeting and exceeding expectations? But what are those expectations and how are the most successful service organizations meeting them?”

The following infographic looks at some of the main highlights from the State of Service Report.

The whole report can be downloaded here.

Image via Salesforce

November 30, 2015
Microsoft Aims To Improve Mobile Work With PowerApps

Microsoft announced a new enterprise solution called PowerApps aimed at helping workers connect, cretae, and share business apps with their teams on any device.

Employees can create apps that work on any device using what the company refers to as a Microsoft Office-like experience, templates, and a visual designer to automate workflows. PowerApps can be connected to cloud services like Office 365, Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, Dropbox, and/or OneDrive as well as on-premises systems like SharePoint, SQL Server, Oracle databases, SAP, etc.

PowerApps can be shared like documents. Employees can type an email address and co-workers can use accordingly.

For developers and IT personnel, PowerApps include Azure App Service for employee-facing apps. Additional data connections and APIs can be built for existing business systems. Data security and privacy controls are respected by PowerApps.

In discussing why Microsoft developed PowerApps, Bill Staples explains, “The way we do work today is fundamentally different than just a few years ago. Work happens on our phones, tablets and laptops everywhere we go: on manufacturing floors, in airplanes or at customer meetings. The mobile revolution, together with nearly limitless compute and data in the cloud, has transformed our professional experience.”

“And yet, the apps we use to do business have been slow to keep pace with employee demand,” he adds. “While companies are increasingly turning to SaaS solutions for specific scenarios like CRM, travel and HR, using services like Microsoft Dynamics, Concur or Workday, most business app scenarios still remain locked on premises, dependent on corporate connected PCs. Too often, they’re not optimized for mobile, not easily integrated with other services, and not accessible when and where people need them most – on the device they want to use in that moment. The business app category continues to lag behind consumer app scenarios in terms of richness and ubiquity. ”

According to Staples, Microsoft identified three key problems causing the “innovation gap”. These are a lack of skilled mobile developers, business data proliferation, and friction when it comes to IT agility and app sharing.

PowerApps is supposed to be the answer to these problems.

Image via Microsoft

November 30, 2015
dotmailer First Magento Marketing Platform To Get Platinum Technology Partner status.

dotdigital’s multichannel marketing automation platform dotmailer has become the first Magento marketing platform to achieve Platinum Technology Partner status.

The Platinum Partner program provides for deeper collaboration in different merchant categories, and requires partners to pass strict audits and guidelines to make sure their products are worthy of inclusion.

Magento Commerce CEO Mark Lavelle said, “dotdigital, and the dotmailer platform, is in complete alignment with Magento’s strategy to enable retailers to extend Magento with the most advanced capabilities provided by our partners.

dotmailer CEO Simone Barratt added, “This partnership, combined with the ease-of-use of the dotmailer platform, puts the power in the hands of online retailers to unlock an unparalleled level of marketing insight, ensuring a personalized and optimized journey for every customer”.

dotmailer is appearing at Magento Live in Australia this week to talk about the release of the second edition of Magento 2.

November 19, 2015
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Adds Pinterest Features

Salesforce just announced that Salesforce Marketing Cloud is now a Pinterest Marketing Developer Partner for Content Publishing with the addition of new tools for Social Studio.

Marketers can use Social Studio to compose, preview, schedule and publish pins across Pinterest accounts.

A spokesperson for Salesforce tells WebProNews, “Because this all happens within the easy to use Social Studio desktop and mobile apps, sharing assets and coordinating content approvals across teams is simple.”

Marketers can also add tracking tags for web analytics, marketing automation, and CRM to pins using Social Studio’s analytics capabilities, which the company says makes it easy to track how Pinterest content drives web visits and conversions.

You can also review content performance as part of overall digital content reporting and share successful pins with multiple teams and across social networks, Salesforce explains.

“Brands are already seeing that Pinterest is an incredible place for engagement,” the company says in an announcement. “In fact, two-thirds of content saved to Pinterest comes from businesses. This means that with the right Pins, brands can connect with customers, develop loyal advocates and even inspire them to take action. Research released by Millward Brown found that 87 percent of Pinners have made a purchase because of Pinterest content and 93 percent have used the platform to plan a future purchase. By providing a platform for brands to naturally engage with Pinners as they actively discover products and services, Pinterest has become an important channel for digital marketing and ecommerce.”

Other Pinterest Marketing Developer Partners for content publishing include Ahaology, Buffer, Curalate, Expion, NewsCred, Percolate, Shoutlet, Spredfast, Sprinklr, and Tailwind.

Image via Pinterest

November 2, 2015
Facebook Lead Ads Now Available To All Advertisers

Back in June, Facebook announced a new ad unit called Lead Ads, which enable users to fill out forms on mobile with a few taps of the finger. The initial launch was just for a a limited group of businesses, but on Wednesday, the company announced general availability to all advertisers.

During initial tests, Facebook says Land Rover saw a 4x reduction in cost per lead and Stuart Weitzman saw 54% more efficient cost per lead.

The ads also have some new features including CRM integration, real-time response, and customizable questions.

“If businesses work with one of our integrated marketing platforms such as Marketo, Oracle Marketing Cloud and Salesforce, businesses can collect lead info in real-time,” a spokesperson for Facebook says in an email. “Now businesses have the ability to customize lead ad forms with open-ended questions or multiple choice questions, so they receive the info that matters most to their business.”

Salesforce’s Scott McCorkle said, “Facebook and Salesforce can help businesses by pre-filling digital forms with customer information and decreasing the friction involved with sharing this information, helping them meet their goals more efficiently.”

“Here is a simple explanation from Facebook on how it works,” he adds. “When someone clicks on your lead ad, a form opens with the person’s contact information automatically populated, based on the information they share with Facebook, like their name and email address. Automatically populating the contact information that people share with Facebook makes filling in the form as fast as two taps: one click on the ad to open the form and another to submit the autofilled form. Like all of our ad types, lead ads were built with privacy in mind. People can edit their contact information before submitting the form, and this information isn’t sent to the business until a person clicks ‘submit.’”

“As one of Facebook’s strategic partners, Oracle Marketing Cloud helps marketers retrieve information from Facebook lead ads and quickly and easily sync it with their own marketing solution,” a spokesperson for Oracle said in an email. “This means no list import, no manual data entry and no exported spreadsheets.”

Facebook has a video and plenty more to say about Lead Ads in a blog post here.

Image via Facebook

October 7, 2015
Salesforce Kicks Off Dreamforce By Unveiling SalesforceIQ, Salesforce IoT Cloud

Salesforce opened its big Dreamforce conference on Tuesday with 160,000 registered attendees. The event kicked off with two major announcements from the company – SalesforceIQ and the Salesforce IoT Cloud.

Salesforce IQ

Salesforce calls SalesforceIQ “the future of selling for every business.” That might be a bit much, but it is designed to help both large and small businesses.

“Powered by groundbreaking Relationship Intelligence technology, SalesforceIQ utilizes advanced data science to analyze company relationships with prospects, customers and partners, and surface insights to drive businesses forward,” the company says.

With the announcement comes the introduction of two SalesforceIQ products: SalesforceIQ for Small Business and SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud’s iOS, Android, and Chrome apps. The former is obviously geared toward small businesses, helping them manage deals, accelerate pipelines, and guiding them through the sales process. SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud sees relationship intelligence integrated into sales reps’ email.

SalesforceIQ for Small Business is generally available now in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. It will run you $25 per user per month.

SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud is in beta and free to Sales Cloud users in English. Pricing will be announced when it becomes generally available early next year. It will also open up to additional languages.

Salesforce IoT Cloud

The Salesforce IoT Cloud connects “billions” of events from devices, sensors, apps, etc. from the Internet of Things to Salesforce to give businesses insights from these things so they can take the right actions for customers when they make sense.

As businesses are already struggling to make sense of the data they do have, it’s going to be increasingly important to understand customers as they use more and more connected-devices. Tools like this will continue to be more imperative.

“The IoT Cloud is powered by Thunder, a massively scalable, real-time event processing engine built on a modern architecture and frameworks that can ingest billions of event streams. With IoT Cloud, business users can use intuitive, point-and-click tools to define, modify and set rules and logic for events that can trigger actions across the Salesforce Customer Success Platform.”

There isn’t a release date on this product at this point. It will reportedly begin pilot in the second half of next year before opening up to general availability later in 2016.

Image via Salesforce

September 15, 2015
Salesforce App Cloud Launched As Unified PaaS Complete With Learning Resource

Salesforce announced Salesforce App Cloud, which it calls the “next evolution” the Salesforce1 Platform. It brings together Force.com, the new Heroku Enterprise, and the recently announced Lightning user interface, in addition to a new learning resource called Trailhead, which includes tutorials and guides.

App Cloud falls under the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) category aimed at enterprise businesses focusing on building apps, whether they are for company use or for customers. It’s essentially a consolidation of several of Salesforce’s products that unifies the experience and makes things less confusing for enterprises and developers.

“App Cloud enables our customers to quickly build the apps they need, in the way they want,” writes Salesforce’s Tod Nielsen on the company’s blog. “Any builder can leverage our Lightning user experience point-and-click tools to create custom employee apps for any role and department. Every app is instantly mobile and social. Plus, there are pre-integrated, pre-vetted, and customizable grab-and-go apps available through the AppExchange.”

“Developers get a whole new coding experience using all the same technologies every consumer startup uses,” he adds. “Think open source languages, build packs and add ons, and robust microservices. Devs can focus on coding amazing apps, rather than setting up and managing databases, deployment, scalability, and configuration.”

Trailhead, the learning resource destination, features a variety of learning “trails,” such as: “Admin Trail – Migrating to Lightning Experience,” “Developer Trail – Beginner,” “Developer Trail – Intermediate,” “Admin Trail – Intermediate,” and so forth.

Salesforce’s big Dreamforce conference is coming up next week, so expect plenty more announcements from the company in the coming days.

Image via Salesforce

September 11, 2015
Salesforce Announces What It Calls ‘The Future of CRM’

Salesforce just announced Lightning, which it calls the future of CRM. It combines a major redesign of the user experience, which the company calls the “Lightning Experience.”

The design is based on feedback from over 150,000 customers. Essentially, Salesforce Sales Cloud has been rebuilt from the ground up.

Also part of the announcement is the Lightning Design System, which is described as a how-to manual for developers based on the new design principles, which include “clarity, efficiency, consistency and beauty.”

“The Lightning Experience brings a consumer-grade experience that is modern, efficient and intelligent to every Salesforce user on every device—desktop, tablet and mobile,” a spokesperson for Salesforce tells WebProNews in an email. “Relevant information is surfaced for each screen, streamlining processes and making workflows more intuitive.”

“The Design System is a how-to manual for Salesforce developers, enabling any developer or partner to build beautiful components that work with Salesforce on every device and operating system,” they said.

Salesforce Lightning App Builder was announced at Dreamforce 2014. They made it generally available last month. This is a way to build apps via a drag-and-drop visual interface.

The company discusses the new offerings in more detail here and here.

Image via Salesforce

August 25, 2015
Salesforce Community Cloud Gets Buy Button

Buy buttons are all the rage right now, and the latest to jump on the trend is Salesforce with its Community Cloud.

The company launched Community Cloud roughly a year ago aimed at enabling companies to create their own LinkedIn-like communities, which are connected to their own business processes. With the new announcement, it’s getting an ecommerce element.

“The new e-commerce capabilities enable communities of customers to discover, research, discuss and buy products in a single location while introducing a new sales channel for businesses,” a spokesperson for Salesforce said in an email.

“Now, companies can put a buy button right where their customers are already gathered and engaged,” they added. “Customers including PonoMusic and Avid Technology are already deploying custom e-commerce solutions.”

Essentially, it’s a way for companies to offer a similar experience to what the social giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest are starting to offer, from their own communities.

Salesforce points to numbers from a eMarketer report showing that ecommerce sales are slated to reach $349.1 billion this year.

The company also announced new Lightning components, which are generally available with the current release of Salesforce and are included in all Community Cloud licenses.

“With new e-commerce Lightning Components from Salesforce partners like CloudCraze, Demandware and Bigcommerce, companies will be able to seamlessly incorporate e-commerce into their communities,” the company said in an announcement. “Lightning Components are reusable building blocks that enable companies to quickly add rich new capabilities into their communities without programming. The Winter ‘16 release of Community Builder will enable customers to easily drag and drop Lightning Components into any community.”

AppExchange for Components is also live and available for everyone. Partner components on the AppExchange are priced individually on a per user or per Salesforce instance basis, the company said. New ecommerce Lightning Components from partners are expected to be generally available early next year.

Image via Salesforce

August 13, 2015
Google Makes Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Pub/Sub Generally Available

Google announced that it has removed the beta label from Cloud Dataflow, its managed cloud service and programming model for batch and streaming big data processing, and is making it generally available.

“Cloud Dataflow is specifically designed to remove the complexity of developing separate systems for batch and streaming data sources by providing a unified programming model,” Google says in a blog post. “Based on more than a decade of Google innovation, including MapReduce, FlumeJava, and Millwheel, Cloud Dataflow is built to free you from the operational overhead related to large scale cluster management and optimization.”

With Cloud Dataflow, Google promises a “fully managed, fault tolerant, highly available, SLA-backed service” for batch and stream processing as well as a “comprehensive model for balancing correctness, latency, and cost” for dealing with unordered data at “massive” scale. It also promises “great” performance.

“Cloud Dataflow is 2-3x faster and cheaper than Hadoop when evaluating classic MapReduce based pipelines, such as PageRank and WordCount,” the company says. “And with dynamic work rebalancing, Cloud Dataflow effectively optimizes resource utilization which provides additional performance gains without requiring manual intervention.”

They’ve also expanded partner efforts with Tamr, Salesforce, Clearstory, springML, Cloudera, data Artisans.

“Running within the Google Cloud Dataflow service Tamr will enable enterprises to unify, clean, transform and move their data from many diverse sources without investing in expensive data integration expertise or infrastructure,” a spokesperson for Tamr tells WebProNews in an email.

Cloud Dataflow also includes native Cloud Platform integration for Cloud Storage, Cloud Datastore, BigQuery, and Cloud Pub/Sub.

Google also announced general availability of Cloud Pub/Sub. More on this here.

Image via Google

August 12, 2015
Salesforce Looks At The State Of Sales

Salesforce just released its 2015 State of Sales Report looking at industry trends after surveying over 2,300 sales leaders around the world. It looks at priorities, behaviors, and technology in use by sales teams and finds that the best performing teams are more likely to maximize technology, especially when it comes to analytics and mobile.

“Technology is rapidly becoming the difference between big quarters and big misses,” said Mike Rosenbaum, executive vice president of Sales Cloud at Salesforce. “The companies who deliver strong sales results not only use modern CRM platforms to gain critical insight into all the customer touchpoints, but are also deploying newer technologies like sales analytics to sell smarter and mobile to respond anytime, anywhere.”

The report finds that high-performing sales teams are three and a half times more likely to use sales analytics than under-performing teams, and predictive analytics represents “the next phase of analytics innovation.” 19% of those polled are currently using predictive analytics, but Salesforce expects adoption to grow by 135% over the next twelve to eighteen months.

High-performing sales teams are more than twice as likely to be “heavy tech adopters” than moderate and under-performing teams. Technology accelerates sales processes three times more often for high-performers than for under-performers, it finds.

“Mobile is becoming a key accelerator for sales,” the company says. “Inspired by consumer adoption, mobile devices and apps are now becoming mainstream for business users,” Today’s highest performing sales reps use mobile apps for everything from lead management to sales forecasting.”

According to the report, the top sales organizations are about five times more likely to rate their mobile sales capabilities as “outstanding” or “very good,” and 60% of the high-performing teams currently use or are planning to use a mobile sales app. Among those surveyed, mobile sales app use will more than double in the next two years. Over half currently deliver or plan to deliver sales directly via a mobile app in the next two years. A surprising 83% of all sales teams are currently using or planning to use wearables in some form in the next two years.

“Sales success now begins with a collaborative culture,” Salesforce says. “Creating a culture where sales is the collective responsibility of the entire organization is critical to success. In many cases, that means breaking down silos and unifying sales and marketing processes to get a complete view of the customer.”

Those with high-performing sales teams are three times as likely to view sales as the responsibility of the entire company. These high-performing teams also largely (93%) rate employee satisfaction as very important.

You can find the full report here.

Earlier this week, we looked at another report for the company which examined CPMs across leading social platforms.

July 9, 2015
Salesforce Report Looks At Social Media Ad CPM Trends

Salesforce released its Social.com Q1 2015 Advertising Benchmark Report, analyzing data from over a trillion ad impressions and hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spend across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

According to the report, the overall CPM decreased by 11% globally to #3.30, which the company says reflects normal seasonal trends (with higher costs in Q4 due to the holidays). In the U.S., the overall CPM for Facebook decreased quarter-over-quarter to #3.72, while CTR increased to 0.86%, suggesting a “healthy engagement” level with Facebook ads.

Here’s a look at global Facebook ad trends:

“Mobile apps are a critical component of how consumers spend their time; according to Yahoo, 88% of the time that consumers spend on mobile devices is spent in apps, totaling 37:28 hours per month, according to Neilsen,” writes Zachary Reiss-Davis on the Salesforce blog. “Overall, New Zealand and Sweden were the most expensive countries to run mobile app install campaigns in Q1, at $6.16 and $5.28 respectively. After that is Australia ($5.22), Canada ($4.72), and then a cluster of European countries ranging from Germany to Spain. The United States ($3.04), and Japan ($2.79) follow.”

Here’s a look at how mobile app install ads, CPM & CPI vary by country:

The study found that in Q1, Desktop Feed CPM was significantly higher than Mobile Feed CPM in the U.S.

“Consumers are increasingly spending time in Facebook on a mobile device, which increases the available inventory of impressions on mobile,” says Reiss-Davis. “Several types of advertisers still focus on desktop ads, including eCommerce companies which are still using traditional re-targeting solutions on Facebook that are desktop-only instead of the brand-new Dynamic Product Ads. At the same time, the percentage of Facebook users who only use the desktop app continued to drop, reaching a low of 14.7% in Q1, down from 16.2% in Q4 and 24.1% in Q1 2014.”

While still fairly new to the game, the Facebook Audience Network also gets a look in the report:

You can find the full report here.

Images via Salesforce

July 8, 2015
Salesforce Brings Big Customer Service Features To Apps

Salesforce announced Service for Apps and the general availability of Salesforce SOS, which the company says will improve the in-app customer experience.

“Service for Apps enables any company to easily embed multi-channel customer service – including live video chat with a customer service agent, live text chat, and click-to-call capabilities – directly into mobile apps, giving customers instant access to the help they need to resolve questions without ever leaving the app,” a spokesperson for Salesforce explained in an email. “Salesforce is empowering customers to easily provide the most connected, instant and customer friendly support, made specifically for the mobile world.”

Salesforce says it’s accelerating the shift to mobile, in-app customer support with Service for Apps. It includes Chat for Apps, Tap-to-Call for Apps, Knowledge for Apps, Cases for Apps, and Salesforce SOS for Apps. The product enables companies to embed service inside their mobile apps to enable instant and personalized support.

With Chat for Apps, customers can instant message an agent without leaving the app. The company uses the example of a mobile gamer being able to chat with a support agent in real time for personalized advice on a gaming technique while the agent has the right context.

Tap-to-Call for Apps lets customers access live phone support with one tap. Knowledge for Apps lets them access knowledge articles and FAQs without leaving the app. Cases for Apps lets customers create and monitor cases, sue the camera and location to provide more details, and receive a notification when the case is resolved. SOS for Apps is similar to the Amazon Mayday button in that it provides live, personalized, and interactive video support with on-screen, guidance assistance and screens-sharing with an agent.

“The mobile app revolution has created a new requirement for instant, always on service,” said Mike Milburn, SVP and GM of Service Cloud at Salesforce. “With Service Cloud’s groundbreaking innovations, companies will be able to deliver in-app mobile customer support, allowing them to deliver a whole new level of service to customers.”

Salesforce also announced Desk.com for Apps, a new SDK powered by Desk.com for SMBs.

Last week, Salesforce unveiled Wave Analytics, its first app for Wave, the Salesforce Analytics Cloud.

Image via Salesforce

June 26, 2015
Salesforce Unveils ‘Wave Analytics’ Application

Back in October, Salesforce announced Wave, the Salesforce Analytics Cloud, marking the company’s entry into the $38 billion analytics market. On Thursday, it unveiled its first Wave Analytics App, Sales Wave Analytics.

Sales Wave Analytics marks the inaugural app for the Wave Analytics Apps line of apps, more of which will come later. Sales Wave Analytics will provide sales teams with personalized templates, historical analysis, and the ability to take immediate actions.

“Until today, analytics were not built for everyone,” said Alex Dayon, president of products, Salesforce. “We are changing the game by combining intuitive analytics with business processes in Wave Analytics Apps, so every business user can not only see performance in real-time, but also take actions directly within the apps.”

The templates in Sales Wave Analytics are called Sales Wave Accelerator Templates, and let you browse all Salesforce sales data, including things like pipeline management, forecasting, quarterly business reviews, team performance, etc.

“For example, a sales operations executive will be able to instantly conduct a real-time pipeline analysis and cross reference it with product sales performance from their mobile phone to determine whether they need to reset forecasts or identify which deals need to be accelerated to hit key targets,” the company explains.

With the historical analysis feature, sales leaders will be able to surface historical metrics quickly from any device. Salesforce says they’ll be able to “organically explore every facet” of the team’s historical performance to discover trends and potential investment areas.

With Sales Waves Actions, teams can create new tasks, change close dates, and engage with people from within the app.

Sales Wave Analytics is in pilot mode for the time being. Only select customers can access it, but it’s expected to be generally available in English later this year. Additional language support will be added in time.

The app will be available on a per user per month subscription model, but the pricing won’t be announced until it becomes generally available.

The app will be available on iOS at first with additional device support (presumably Android) later.

Images via YouTube

June 18, 2015
LinkedIn Sales Navigator Finally Hits Android, Gains Microsoft Dynamics CRM Integration

Last summer, LinkedIn Sales Navigator got a big refresh, making it a standalone experience with a separate login, letting salespeople get comprehensive information directly. For the first time, it got features like lead recommendation by account, news mentions, and account recommendation.

Shortly thereafter, it launched on iOS. Now, it’s finally available for Android.

“Now available in Google Play, Sales Navigator Mobile for Android provides access to Sales Navigator’s most-used features, including access to prospects, contacts and account information wherever you are,” LinkedIn said in an email. “All of the features customers have come to rely on with our iOS app are available in the new app. Sales professionals can now get real-time news and information about accounts and leads, InMail and TeamLink on Android. Current LinkedIn Sales Navigator users can download the Android app today.”

Also new is integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

“Sales Navigator now integrates with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, allowing sales reps to access information from Sales Navigator right in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM interface without having to toggle back and forth between solutions,” the company said. “The integration opens new market opportunities for Microsoft customers to connect their social selling activities to their pipeline, forecasts and workflow to improve performance and productivity. CRM integrations with Sales Navigator save sales reps 30 minutes on average per day while increasing sales productivity by 17%, according to Accenture. After launching LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Salesforce last September, we’re extending our commitment to helping sales reps save time by integrating Sales Navigator with Microsoft Dynamics CRM.”

The Android app requires version 4.0 are higher. More on the Dynamics integration here.

Images via LinkedIn

June 11, 2015
Adobe Aims To Improve ‘Internet of Things’ Marketing

Adobe held its digital marketing conference Adobe Summit, and made a slew of marketing-related announcements

“The product and partner announcements cover where marketing is going next: bringing digital experiences to the physical world, IoT and wearable devices, mobile marketing innovations for the entire app lifecycle, and the convergence of marketing and ad technologies,” a spokesperson for Adobe tells WebProNews.

Connecting Businesses and Consumers via the Internet of Things

First off, Adobe Marketing Cloud is getting an upgrade related to the Internet of things (IoT). The company says it’s enabling brands to bring “highly personalized experiences” to physical spaces like retail stores, hotel rooms, vending machines and other IoT devices. It’s doing so by offering a new IoT SDK to let brands measure and analyze consumer engagement across any of these devices.

“What’s driving this is the digital transformation of the enterprise, catalyzed by the marketing department. Previously siloed, marketing data is now being used in concert with data collected by other departments like sales and customer service, creating a richer view of the customer,” Adobe says.

“Marketing is moving beyond existing digital channels to include new physical experiences in the real world,” said Adobe SVP of DIgital Marketing Brad Rencher. “Adobe Marketing Cloud helps brands use their online marketing data to create unparalleled personalization in retail, entertainment, and travel and leisure experiences.”

In addition to the SDK, Adobe has new “Experience Manager Screens,” which it says enable marketers to extend interactive content to these physical spaces with one author user experience to ensure consistency across devices. It supports multi-touch so content can easily move among screen sizes. It’s all tied into Creative Cloud.

“Adobe Experience Manager Screens allows us to redefine the way clothing lines are designed and displayed,” comments Jody Giles, SVP of Product Integration at Under Armour. “Instead of physical samples, we are able to create rich digital designs and experiences in record time and extend them to our Catalog app. We can also see customers using the technology in our stores and engaging with our brand on life-size touch screens.”

Marketing Cloud also has new “intelligent location” capabilities, which let businesses tap into GPS and iBeacon data to optimize their physical brand presences.

“With the visualization of iBeacon data, brands are able to view traffic patterns and customer engagements within retail stores, sports stadiums, airports, hotels, museums and other points of interests,” the company explains. “Marketers can view and measure dwell times throughout the day, consumer interactions with push notifications and in-app messages triggered by iBeacons and more. The visualization of data enables them to reconfigure store layouts and optimize the display of merchandise to fully maximize ROI.”

As Marketing Cloud users can now reach IoT devices, Adobe Target now supports digital content testing, optimization, and personalization across them. Content can be served on ATMs, gas pumps, game consoles, car dashboards, appliances, etc. based on users’ personal interests. Adobe says it uses “predictive, yet anonymous” data including CRM and third-party sources to personalize content in real time. Businesses will be able to analyze engagement using Mobile Core Services and Adobe Analytics.

According to a consumer survey, the top IoT devices consumers want to interact with digitally are home electronics (61%), home appliances like thermostats, fridges, or ovens (54%), and cars (51%). 27% of those who don’t currently own a smartwatch say they are very likely to buy one in next 6 months, while 67% of those said they were very likely to buy Apple Watch (I wonder what percentage plan on buying a $17,000 model).

77% said it would be useful to receive promotions while inside a store (j84% for 18-34 year-olds), and 74% of marketers see great potential in impact of IoT and wearables.

Mobile Marketing and App Development

Also at the summit, Adobe introduced some new stuff for Adobe Mobile Services, including a new mobile app framework that brings together Adobe Experience Manager Apps, Adobe PhoneGap Enterprise, Adobe Analytics – Mobile Apps, and Adobe Target.

“Adobe Digital Index data shows a new record in the use of mobile devices and yet, building a successful mobile app experience today remains a mystery for many marketers,” said Matt Asay, vice president, Mobile Strategy at Adobe. “They struggle to synthesize a myriad of different mobile tools that address very specific needs. With Adobe Mobile Services, we will dramatically simplify this process, making it easy for marketers to build and optimize their apps.”

The framework includes tools to aid in development, user acquisition, app analytics, and user engagement. The spokesperson says it “delivers the complete, integrated solution in the industry for developing and managing apps, and is the first to eliminate marketers’ dependence on an array of disjointed point solutions.”

Adobe has added six new app tech providers to its partner ecosystem, including: Fiksu, Vibes, Kochava, Ionic, Crittercism, and appFigures. Each is integrating its tools into the framework.

“Adobe Analytics clients will be provided with mobile app store data including: app downloads, app and in-app revenue, returns, ranks and ratings,” a spokesperson for appFigures tells WebProNews. “Data provided by appFigures will be updated in near real-time. With app store data directly available in their dashboards, marketers and developers will have more insightful data to base their mobile decisions on.”

That particular integration is expected to be available in Q2.

Data-Driven Marketing and Ad Tech

Adobe also introduced a new algorithmic engine and updates to its Marketing Cloud Audience Core Services to “bring together the worlds of data-driven marketing and ad tech.”

This involves integrating programmatic buying natively to put the marketplace right in front of the marketer as they put it.

“New Audience Core Services enable brands to connect massive audience and behavioral data from a broad range of sources, including CRM systems, websites and apps while a new set of algorithms lets them reach those audiences with paid media through Adobe Media Optimizer,” the company says.

“We believe programmatic efforts to date are broken and focus simply on display ad bidding,” adds John Mellor, VP of Digital Marketing at Adobe. “Having a one-stop shop for all your targeting and data as well as transparency into technology pricing and media costs is a big step towards true programmatic. The ability to share audience segments across other Adobe Marketing Cloud Solutions brings that data to life across channels and ensures that audiences are seeing the same message no matter where marketers connect with them.”

Partnership with IBM

Adobe has also partnered with IBM Interactive Experience, which is building specialized enterprise consulting capabilities for Marketing Cloud.

“A recent IBM Institute for Business Value study indicates that there is a disconnect between what consumers say they want from digital experiences and how they actually behave,” said Paul Papas, Global Leader, IBM Interactive Experience. “Today’s announcement will help marketers close the gap between expectations and experience using a combinations of Adobe Marketing Cloud and the services of IBM Interactive Experience, a unique digital agency that brings together experience design, systems integration and strategy consulting.”

Adobe is also expanding its alliance with Accenture with a new cloud-based managed service based on Marketing Cloud. More on that here.

According to Adobe, 76% of the Fortune 50 utilize Marketing Cloud, as do 9 of the top 10 internet retailers and all of the top 5 media companies and top 10 software companies.

March 10, 2015
Google’s Susan Wojcicki Joins Salesforce Board

Salesforce announced it has appointed YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki to its Board of Directors. Her role went into effect on December 5, and increases the board size to 11 members.

“We are delighted that Susan has joined our Board of Directors,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “Susan is an extraordinary executive who has been instrumental in helping to build the world’s largest consumer cloud company, where scale, reliability and security are of critical importance. Her experience will make her an outstanding addition to our board.”

“Salesforce has revolutionized enterprise software and has an amazing culture of innovation,” said Wojcicki. “I’m very excited to be joining the Salesforce Board of Directors.”

The full board is now as follows: Marc Benioff, Salesforce chairman and CEO; Keith Block, Salesforce vice chairman and president; Craig Conway, former CEO of PeopleSoft; Alan Hassenfeld, former chairman and CEO of Hasbro; General Colin Powell, retired four star general in the U.S. Army and former U.S. Secretary of State, U.S. National Security Advisor and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Sanford Robertson, principal of Francisco Partners; John Roos, former U.S. Ambassador to Japan; Lawrence Tomlinson, former senior vice president and treasurer of Hewlett-Packard; Robin Washington, CFO of Gilead Sciences; Maynard Webb, chairman of Yahoo! Inc.; and Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube.

General Powell was named to the board in March. More on that here.

Wojcicki took the YouTube CEO role earlier this year. Before that, she was senior vice president of Advertising & Commerce at Google, where she oversaw the design and engineering of AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, and Google Analytics. She’s been with the company since 1999.

Image via Google+

December 9, 2014
Salesforce Aims To Give Companies LinkedIn-Like Community Experience

Salesforce announced the launch of the Salesforce1 Community Cloud, which it says propels the company into the fast-growing $3.5 billion enterprise collaboration market.

According to Salesforce, the offering enables companies to create their own trusted LinkedIn-like communities, which are connected to their own business processes. These, the company says, can be used to engage customers, partners, and employees in a new way.

“More than 2,000 active communities have gone live since we first offered a communities product just over a year ago,” said Nasi Jazayeri, executive vice president of Salesforce1 Community Cloud. “Based on the success we have seen with customers, tremendous market opportunity and support from our ecosystem, salesforce.com is doubling down on communities with our new Community Cloud.”

Elaborating on the LinkedIn concept, Salesforce says, “LinkedIn is an example of a company, that, among other things, in the consumer world, has created a community for recruiters and job seekers. Members can personalize their job search, connect with colleagues and discover and share information about job openings—all from any device. Today, companies want to create their own communities with the same personalization and mobile access of LinkedIn, that are also completely connected to their business processes.”

The offering costs $500 per month, and it should become generally available in October.

You can get an overview here.

Image via Salesforce

August 27, 2014
Salesforce Desk.com Adds Video Customer Support

Salesforce announced the launch of a new video support center for Desk.com, which it claims “empowers companies to transform their customer service offerings through video.”

A spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews, “Now, companies can add video content from any of the leading video platforms to their online customer service strategy to empower customers to find instant, visual access to help.”

The offering enables businesses to include one-click rich video content to replace or supplement text support articles. It also includes custom help center design templates and advanced knowledge reports, which cover video performance.

Desk.com GM and SVP Leyla Seka says, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is priceless. Today customers expect video when it comes to customer service. Now any fast-growing company can use video to provide awesome customer service with Desk.com.”

Customers with Vimeo PRO subscriptions can embed Vimeo’s HD player without advertising.

Michael Weissman, GM at Vimeo, said, “Video is a powerful tool for brands to connect with customers and we’re seeing that at all levels at Vimeo, from highly produced branded films to product demo videos. As a Desk.com customer and video hosting platform, we’ve been integrating videos into support articles and understand first hand its value. We’re excited to be part of the new Video Support Center and empower other businesses with Vimeo’s affordable professional grade tools to create beautiful, well-crafted video for product overviews, how-to guides, troubleshooting and more.”

The video support center is included with a Desk.com subscription, which starts at $30 per month, per agent.

Image via Desk.com

August 5, 2014
Salesforce Launches New Desk.com, Mobile App

Salesforce announced a new version of Desk.com on Tuesday complete with a mobile app, reporting engine, and “intelligent” agent console.

The console can be personalized on a per agent basis to make each more productive, but still honor the rules, workflows, and templates set for the company.

“The new reporting engine of next generation Desk.com provides detailed metrics and invaluable insights into every aspect of customer service performance,” the company says. “These out-of-the-box reporting tools are built for speed and productivity to provide fast-growing companies with deeper insights to resolve customers’ problems. Now a manager can view comprehensive reports to identify real-time trends that fuel decision making and product innovation. In addition, Desk.com now includes 10X more APIs to quickly connect data from other apps to provide a holistic view of the customer and an effortless integration with Salesforce.”

The mobile app obviously gives businesses the ability to manage customer service on the go. Features include the ability to add notes, update statuses, and assign cases.

GM and SVP of Desk.com, Leyla Seka, said, “Awesome customer service is the new competitive advantage. With Desk.com, fast-growing companies now have the right solution to position themselves for growth—addressing their needs now and in the future.”

General availability starts today at $30 per month per agent. The mobile app is available for iPhone and iPad with Android coming in the fall.

Image via Desk.com

June 17, 2014