Tag: Salesforce

Salesforce Launches Quotable Content Site For Salespeople

This week, Salesforce announced the launch of Quotable, a new site with articles aimed at benefiting sales professionals of all types.

According to the company, it will be full of helpful sales advice from salespeople “who’ve lived it.”

“Let’s say you’re a vice president of sales at a startup or a company that’s just getting off the ground,” writes Sara Varni on the Salesforce blog. “You’re tasked with building a sales team from scratch and are thinking about all of the processes that involves. You could really use some practical hands-on information about how to get up and running.”

“Or say you’re a sales account executive who has had a lot of success where you are in your career,” she adds. “You’re looking for advice on how to make the jump to the next level. What does it take to become a sales manager? Would you even make a good sales manager, or should you stay where you are and keep crushing your quota?”

This is who Quotable is for. You an peruse the site here, and find content about technology for concept selling, how prospects can tell if you’ve done your due diligence, how to respond to a particular blow off, etc.

Image via Salesforce

March 11, 2016
Salesforce Introduces Updated App Cloud

Last fall, Salesforce announced Salesforce App Cloud, which it called the “next evolution” of the Salesforce1 Platform. It brought together Force.com, Heroku Enterprise, and the previously announced Lightning user interface, in addition to a 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.

The company just announced the updated App Cloud with the general availability of Heroku Enterprise. From the Salesforce blog:

Since launching App Cloud in 2015, we’ve noticed many of our customers growing their business by creating a superior customer experience through digital technology. Apartment List has saved renters time and money through an elegant, multi-device app experience. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines engaged fliers through social and mobile tools they already use. So in September 2015, we announced Heroku Enterprise as the next step in helping organizations create the new Internet consumer experience.

Since then, the Age of the Customer has exploded–with businesses of all sizes racing to build and deliver the elegant, unified and digital customer experience once only seen from the Ubers of the world. Our mission with App Cloud is to give everyone, from citizen developers to CIOs, the tools to deliver modern and innovative customer experiences. Heroku Enterprise is a key part of how we enable that, joining App Cloud’s already best-in-class stable of services that range from the democratizing power of point-and-click programming tools to extra levels of trust and control around business-critical applications.

You can learn more about Heroku Enterprise features here.

Salesforce will host a webinar about App Cloud and Heroku Enterprise on February 18.

January 26, 2016
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 Holiday Marketing Trends

Another day, another interesting infographic from Salesforce.

Earlier this week, we looked at one the company released about the state of customer service based on its new 2015 State of Service Report.

This one looks at holiday marketing and how to sell more stuff.

“Digital influencers are more important than ever before,” says Salesforce’s Lauren Jung. “With approximately 200M people using ad blockers, it’s time to move on! The majority of customers want brands to be less intrusive, so the best thing you can do is partner up with a trusted advocate in your industry to drive your message home to a targeted audience.”

“If your product is visual in nature, user-generated content is huge for sales,” Jung adds. “Customers are a lot more likely to buy something from you if they’ve seen a piece of user-generated content through a social network. Instagram is a great vehicle for that. ”

Image via Salesforce

December 1, 2015
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
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
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 A Has Building With An Awesome Pac-Man Wall

Businesses can expect to see a lot of Saleforce news this week as the company kicks off its big Dreamforce event on Tuesday. According to Forbes, it could just be THE conference of the year for entrepreneurs and startups.

In fact, the news has already been coming out with a big announcement last week about the new Salesforce App Cloud.

While it’s not exactly a major news story, Business Insider points us to a video from Chris Kubbernus that shows a pretty awesome Pac-Man video wall that Salesforce has in one of it’s building. It’s just too cool not to share.

The wall reportedly appears in the lobby of 50 Fremont, which is part of the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. It’s apparently the ninth tallest building in the city.

All I know is that I want one of these walls in my house.

On a sidenote, if you simply Google the word “pacman” Google serves you an answer box with a playable Pac-Man Google Doodle, which it ran on its homepage a few years ago.

Images via YouTube, Google

September 14, 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
Infographic Compares Meerkat & Periscope For Business

Meerkat and Periscope both quickly made names for themselves with their live streaming apps launched earlier this year. A lot of businesses have been testing the waters and trying to figure out which if either (or both) are best for them.

What are the differences? Is one better for something than the other? Which one should you use? Consider all the information in this infographic from Salesforce (via SocialTimes), and you might get closer to answering these questions for your own business.

Click To Enlarge

Via Salesforce

The CMO of Chariot Solutions and Chief Digital Strategist at Bell Digital Strategies recently shared their thoughts comparing the two services after testing them out at a conference. Read this for some pros and cons they took away from the experience.

Image via Salesforce

August 26, 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
Looks Like Instagram Is Going to Be A Pretty Good Advertising Option

Salesforce is sharing data around early performance and cost numbers related to Instagram advertising campaigns over the past month. The companies partner via Salesforce Marketing Cloud products like social,com, Active Audiences, and Social Studio.

Do you expect Instagram to be a major part of your advertising efforts as time goes on? Let us know in the comments.

“Instagram is a relatively new platform for digital advertising, but initial results show it has the potential to be a powerful one,” says Salesforce Marketing Cloud CEO Scott McCorkle. “Our results show that engagement on ads is high. We are excited to be working with great brands and agencies around the world to kickstart advertising to more than 300 million Instagram users.”

According to the data, the overall click-through rate (CTR) is 1.50%, compared to a CTR of 0.84% in Q1 2015 on Facebook. Instagram has a global CPM of $6.29, Salesforce says, adding that this is an “early indicator” and about 90% higher than Facebook’s overall global CPM in Q1. The CPC for the ads is $0.42, which is two cents higher than Facebook ads.

“The high engagement rate can likely be attributed to Instagram’s premium, large-format ad type,” a spokesperson for Salesforce tells WebProNews. “According to a recent report from eMarketer, Instagram is expected to represent over 10% of Facebook’s global revenues by 2017.”

Instagram said last month it would make ads available to businesses of all sizes in the fall. The company’s director of marketing operations told eMarkter:

We’ve spent the last 18 months establishing the platform for large brands. The next logical step is to empower businesses of all sizes. Being able to target narrower segments and achieve different types of objectives is essential. We want to offer a complete solution that allows businesses to purchase through self-serve interfaces and achieve the objectives they want to achieve.

We’re testing the action-oriented formats and buying through the API now, and we will be doing that through the summer with select partners and clients. Then we’ll be opening up globally and to all advertisers in the early fall timeframe.

Earlier this month, Instagram’s API Partner Program launched, opening the gates for much more advertising on the service. Third-party API partners include Salesforce, Hootsuite, Kenshoo, Ampush, Nanigans, SocialCode, Brand Networks, Unified, and 4C.

A Salesforce spokesperson told us about its integration at the time, “The integration allows marketers to use Social.com for managing advertising campaigns at scale, Active Audiences to unlock and sync CRM data in Salesforce to optimize advertising and Social Studio for publishing, engagement, customer service, and analytics.”

“Instagram is the mobile marketer’s platform of choice for a highly engaged and growing audience,” says Jesse Pujji, CEO and co-founder of Ampush. “It presents a great opportunity to deliver in-feed, mobile advertising at true scale with its user base of over 300 million monthly active users. AMP’s integration with Instagram will allow our customers to advertise across a visually dynamic environment for consumers with a highly active community. Our strategic and in-house creative expertise, paired with our marketing solutions, delivers a unique ability to bridge audience engagement with revenue.”

Pew has new research out showing significant growth in user engagement on Instagram. Last September, 49% of Instagram users were using it every day. The number is now up to 59%.

If you’re looking to improve your Instagram marketing efforts, check out this infographic from “social media scientist” Dan Zarrella on the “science” of Instagram:

More on Salesforce’s findings here.

Are you excited about the potential of Instagram ads? Let us know in the comments.

Image via Instagram

August 20, 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
Marketing Tools Get Instagram Ads API Integration

In June, Instagram announced it would make advertising available through an Ads API and Facebook ad buying interfaces in the ensuing months, in an effort to open up ads to businesses of all sizes. It said it would open API access to a select group of Facebook Marketing Partners and agencies first, and would expand it globally throughout the year.

On Tuesday, the API Partner program launched. Whereas in the past, advertisers would have to work directly with Instagram sales people. Now, they don’t. They can start advertising on Instagram as they’ve been able to do on Facebook and Twitter.

Make no mistake. This is big. In fact, it’s even been referred to as “one of the most anticipated moments in the evolution of advertising.”

Business Insider shares a statement from Instagram: “”The Instagram Ads API will help us make ads more relevant to the community, serve more diverse business objectives, and make buying on the platform easier for advertisers. We started working with a group of Facebook Marketing Partners a few weeks ago and they’ve brought great experience and technological savvy onto the platform. We’ll continue to build upon the Instagram Ads API in the coming weeks and months.”

Third-party API partners already on board include Salesforce, Hootsuite, Kenshoo, Ampush, Nanigans, SocialCode, Brand Networks, Unified, and 4C.

“The integration allows marketers to use Social.com for managing advertising campaigns at scale, Active Audiences to unlock and sync CRM data in Salesforce to optimize advertising and Social Studio for publishing, engagement, customer service, and analytics,” a spokesperson for Salesforce tells us about its us of the API.

“Instagram is the mobile marketer’s platform of choice for a highly engaged and growing audience,” says Jesse Pujji, CEO and co-founder of Ampush. “It presents a great opportunity to deliver in-feed, mobile advertising at true scale with its user base of over 300 million monthly active users. AMP’s integration with Instagram will allow our customers to advertise across a visually dynamic environment for consumers with a highly active community. Our strategic and in-house creative expertise, paired with our marketing solutions, delivers a unique ability to bridge audience engagement with revenue.”

Instagram has over 300 million monthly active users. Beyond the API, Instagram has been doing more to improve its ad offerings including direct response that enable users to buy products or download apps, and expanding targeting options. More on all of that here.

Image via Instagram

August 4, 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
Facebook Marketing Partners Program Takes Effect

Back in October, Facebook announced its Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program would become a new program called Facebook Marketing Partners, and that it would be restructuring things to make it easier to find partners based on specific needs. That all goes into effect today.

The new structure enables businesses to find partners in specific countries and industries. There’s also a revamped matching tool that lets you search by specialty, country, and industry, and then directly contact the partner.

The program features hundreds of partners (new and existing), and they’re categorized based on the areas of expertise: Ad Technology, Media Buying, Facebook Exchange (FBX), Community Management, Content Marketing, Small Business Solutions, Audience Onboarding, Audience Data Providers, and Measurement.

Adobe, which is a partner, sent us some comments on the change from senior product marketing manager for Social Advertising Solutions, Monica Lay:

“The four-badge PMD program provided opaque direction for marketers looking for a technology partner based on their needs. As the digital media landscape became even more fragmented and marketer’s needs became more specific, you can see why Facebook did a complete overhaul. The new structure basically moves away from an API centric approach to marketing-driven descriptors.”

“What’s interesting is the introduction of new players, the most noticeable one being advertising agencies under the Media Buying category. This is an important move for our industry, as agencies will have to undergo certification with Facebook. There is a significant need to enhance expertise in paid social, especially when this environment is so agile.”

“The nine Facebook Marketing Partner specialties create a more cohesive environment for everyone involved in this complex ecosystem, leading to more clarity, more choices and more impact. It’s a positive outcome that is a win-win for all those involved.”

Salesforce also announced that it has joined the program, and is telling its partners and customers that nothing has changed.

You can find the new Facebook Marketing Partners website here.

Image via Facebook

February 17, 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
LinkedIn Sales Navigator Gets Official Mobile Launch

LinkedIn recently unveiled a big redesign of its Sales Navigator tool on the web, promising mobile apps in the future. Earlier this month, it looked like the future was here for iOS users as the app became available in the App Store.

It didn’t stay available for very long, however, as LinkedIn pulled it, confirming to WebProNews that it had gone up prematurely, and that they were still finalizing some of its functionality.

For iOS, the future is now officially here.

Here’s the app description:

Keep up with your accounts and leads with LinkedIn Sales Navigator – now on your iPhone.

Whether you’re waiting for a meeting, travelling between clients’ offices, or just in line for a latte, Sales Navigator Mobile gives you access to Sales Navigator’s key features where you need them most: everywhere.

Find and view people for key insights and common connections, get updates on your accounts and leads, and connect or send a message. It’s never been easier to stay up to date from wherever you work.

Sales Navigator also adds notifications, lead recommendations, and outreach features to Contact and Account Profiles within Salesforce.com.

More here.

Images via Apple App Store

September 18, 2014