21st Century Public Relations

Digest...

Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud (try saying that three times fast) has launched a new visual “Journey Builder” that promises to enable marketers to understand, define, and create coherent, unified customer experiences across Web, social, email, apps, advertising, sales, and service.

 

That’s a big promise. And it’s available today.

 

Salesforce plans to deliver on this promise by providing essentially a drag-and-drop graphical user interface for customer interactions, across all your media and channels. Salesforce calls it a “canvas,” which marketers can use to map customer journeys across apps and social and email, building flows and stages through which they hope to bring prospects and existing customers.

 

Journey Builder is available today, but the new features won’t be available until about November/October of this year.

 

Pricing will start at $5,000/month for a subscription, with the dollars rising as you send more messages to customers via the system.

 

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Via Marteq

Digest...

On June 10, Salesforce.com announced Salesforce Wear, a bundle of free tools and reference applications aimed at evangelizing the power of enterprise wearables. The offering supports six different wearable devices, each with its own open-source reference application to help developers design and build wearable apps that connect to the Salesforce1 platform.

-- >  Salesforce Wear has the potential to turbo-charge the growing market for enterprise wearables.

-- >  Some of the reference applications are pure enterprise/B2B workforce enablement applications which can be generalized to other field service scenarios

-- >  Others reference apps offer solutioning for B2B2C scenarios – which Forrester has been covering extensively in our wearables research.

-- >  Salesforce Wear will offer enterprises a quicker path to creating different types of user scenarios.

-- >  In addition to I&O pros, other tech vendors should take note, too.

-- >  Salesforce’s move into this space both validates the enterprise wearables market and will spur it forward even more quickly.

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Via Marteq

Digest...

Yesterday, Salesforce.com acquired RelateIQ for $390 million. With Dreamforce right around the corner, this was a significant — and smart — move on the part of Salesforce.com to show the industry that it is finally serious about data intelligence, which it completely lacked in its customer-relationship management (CRM) offerings to date.

 

The movement to predictive from these big automation players is finally happening. Just look at Marketo, Oracle’s Eloqua, and Salesforce.com. Their experiences and workflows feel ancient and messy. With the rise of innovative companies applying big data intelligence, such as Waze, Amazon.com, Facebook, and many others, considerable interest, expectations and thus pressure has been placed on sales and marketing-automation companies to step up the intelligence of their applications too — to move beyond being just basic data bookkeeping services. There’s just too much hype, demand and real results to shy away from predictive.

 

As the world moves to predictive, the big question is if these automation players can integrate predictive properly. Is Salesforce.com ready to make the hard trade-offs to support predictive-first by designing a system around data intelligence? Or will third parties be able to innovate faster outside the core?

 

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Via Marteq

Basic/ Digest...

In the past CRM initiatives that got funding were focused on “pipeline management” projects, says Wilson Raj, global director of customer intelligence at SAS . “Now, we’re talking about advanced marketing, process re-engineering, mobile, deeper data analytics—all around digitally-savvy marketplace.”

 

We are seeing this already in certain sales and marketing apps, which combine self-learning, predictive analytics with human input from the sales reps, to predict which deals will close and which will not. Even better, some can tell you what additional steps would be needed to push a deal over the finish line.

 

Increasingly Salesforce.com is the “IBM” of the CRM world; not only was the company instrumental in putting the Software-as-a-Service delivery model on the map, but it also helped showed that CRM could be a lightweight application–in useability that is. Functionally, it was robust enough to compete with the hard-core enterprise apps that it was taking on at the time.

 

So who knows, CRM market math’s may well change. Or maybe not. In the mid 2000s the CRM industry was spooked and terrified by the prospect that Microsoft would enter the space. It did …and little changed.  The one thing that will stay constant is CRM’s popularity as the best software category to manage the customer record. Unless another category killer comes along, in which case the market math will really change.

 

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Via Marteq