'Net Features : salesforce

Salesforce Unveils Self-Serving Social Ad App

Allison Howen — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:55:00 GMT

A new self-serving social advertising application, dubbed Social.com, is now available through the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

The app connects social ads with CRM and social data, which allows brands and agencies to power ad campaigns on Facebook and Twitter using real-time customer and social listening data. Moreover, the launch of Social.com adds new technology to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which already includes social listening app Salesforce Radian6 and publishing app Salesforce Buddy Media.

“Today Salesforce.com is doubling down on social ads,” said Michael Lazerow, CMO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce.com. “Social ads cannot be disconnected from your business. By bringing together Social.com with the world’s #1 CRM, Salesforce CRM, and the world’s #1 social listening application, Radian6, we’ve made it possible for marketers to connect social advertising with their customer data and real-time trends to maximize return from their advertising dollars.”

With Social.com, brands can create, optimize and automate social ad campaigns. Here are some of the self-serving social ad app’s features:

Create social and mobile ad campaigns – Users can build, test and launch social ad campaigns that reach consumers on any device. Marketers can execute more effective campaigns by testing all of the available targeting, creative and placement combinations, to drive both localized and relevant ads. Additionally, they can leverage Facebook and Twitter data to identify the best content for advertising.

Optimize social ad campaigns – Users can track and analyze metrics over time with live campaign monitoring and receive immediate feedback on social ad performance based on particular goals.

Automate social ad campaigns – Users can adjust ad spend by defining rules to make real-time optimization decisions across all ads and campaigns.

It is important to note that Salesforce.com is building on the success of Social.com by delivering new innovations for targeting social ads to make campaigns more relevant and effective. For example, Social.com customers will be able to use Salesforce CRM to connect offline and online purchase data, customer loyalty data, as well as data from contests, sweepstakes, whitepaper downloads and other conversion pages directly to their social ad campaigns in real-time. Furthermore, connecting Social.com with social listening app Radian6 will allow marketers to tap into real-time conversations from more than 500 million sources, including the Twitter Firehose. That said, although Social.com is currently available to the public, its real-time customer data and listening is currently scheduled to be generally available in Summer '13.

CRM for Sales: Tylr Mobile Connects the Inbox to Salesforce

Allison Howen — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:19:00 GMT

New technology from Tylr Mobile is helping connect salespeople’s inboxes with CRM data while on the go.

The technology, dubbed WorkinBox, is essentially an iOS app that connects to Salesforce. The mobile email solution allows salespeople to prioritize emails from customers and prospects, focus on important opportunities and access relevant customer information. Moreover, the technology allows users to turn messages into actionable tasks and update salesforce.com as they work. According to the Tylr Mobile blog, the first version of WorkinBox focuses on making sales professionals more productive and responsive to their customers.

“We help you focus on your priorities by organizing your inbox by account, opportunity or key contact,” the blog states. “We help you be responsive to your customers by giving you access to email templates, files and relevant CRM information. Create tasks from your email, remember what you commit to your customers and manage your activity list on the go. Spend your time selling, not doing data entry – WorkinBox helps you update your CRM as you work.”

It is also important to note that WorkinBox is built on a secure mobile work platform that is able to handle unique sales processes at different companies and is easy for IT to configure, deploy and manage. However, those interested in trying out WorkinBox won’t be able to download it in the app store yet, because the service is currently in beta and only being released in private deployments to pilot groups and companies leveraging the Salesforce platform. That said, those interested in trying WorkinBox, as well as have an iPhone and use Salesforce, can sign up to join the beta trial.

“The way we work on the go is broken – every mobile app is a silo, and email is the biggest silo of them all,” said Ryan Nichols, CEO & Co-Founder, Tylr Mobile. “Someone needs to bring all these silos together to help people get work done. That’s what we’re building here at Tylr Mobile.”

Bunchball Gamification Bounces into Salesforce

Michael Garrity — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 18:05:00 GMT

Salesforce is one of the biggest cloud computing service providers on the Web, offering everything from customer relationship management (CRM) to help desk software for businesses of all shapes and sizes. And now, through an exclusive partnership with Bunchball, the company is able to add gamification functionality to its Salesforce Service Cloud solution.

The product will be a purpose-built application using Bunchball’s famous Nitro platform, cleverly known as Nitro for Salesforce, which will extend the company’s game mechanics and motivational techniques to sales and service organizations and making it the only fully integrated gamification solution offered by Salesforce.

Nitro for Salesforce uses an array of motivational techniques to engage customers, improve collaboration with service agents and make their work smarter and faster. These techniques include goal-setting, real-time feedback, competition, virtual rewards and the ability to level up.

Organizations using this platform will be able to set their service teams on priorities and goals that present targeted missions and challenges that can be used to incite them to increase productivity. In other words, sales and service managers can use Nitro for Salesforce to motivate employees by offering them rewards for key productivity milestones, improving service quality, taking training courses or whatever other important accomplishments they make.

This new gamification platform will also integrate with the Salesforce Chatter solution, as well as the Salesforce Chatter Communities for Service, allowing managers to create missions and rewards that can motivate their agents to respond to complaints or queries from social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Through the Salesforce Service Cloud console, managers and employees will be able to see their current point tallies, figure out how many more points they will need to reach a milestone and view the rewards that they’re currently attempting to earn; all of these game mechanics and status displays will minimize automatically so that time-pressed agents will be able to stay focused on their current tasks.

However, Nitro for Salesforce isn’t the only Bunchball Nitro-integrated solution through Salesforce; in fact, the software company is unveiling a whole line of Integrated Nitro Solutions that enable companies to apply game mechanics to their services out of the box.

Salesforce Gamification with Badgeville

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 21:08:00 GMT

The Web has gone gamification crazy – and that’s a good thing. When people are motivated to compete and excel in their jobs – that’s exactly what they do (to the benefit and greater good of the enterprise).

While gamification itself is a trend covered across the Web, and of course within Website Magazine (see “Game Play: Where Science & Branding Merge” from Website Magazine’s November 2012 edition), digital workers are only now beginning down the long road of integrating game mechanics into the applications they use on a daily basis. One of the first types of those integration's of course will be into the CRM platforms – and some providers have already begun.

Last month, behavioral gamification platform Badgeville, launched on the SalesForce AppExchange. The module or application essentially brings a gamification layer to a SalesForce Cloud deployment. Users are able to earn points for behaviors including creating or responding to a lead or converting a lead to an opportunity and closing a deal - typical busienss gamification stuff. There are different achievement thresholds which can be set by an administrator, which can reward users for achieving key milestones such as converting a specific number of leads into qualified opportunities.

“We are proud to deliver a native gamification layer for the world’s most widely-used sales application, enabling companies across the globe to drive the most valuable sales behavior” said Kris Duggan, CEO, Badgeville. “Badgeville for Salesforce was designed to reinforce the right sales behaviors that lead to the right outcomes time and again and increase collaborative effort and success among sales teams.”

Expand Your Brand with White Label Solutions

Allison Howen — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 19:00:00 GMT

There are a lot of great new technologies being developed for the Web everyday, and much of it can be used to benefit businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Even if you run an enterprise-level organization, however, you may not have the resources necessary to develop your own unique technology, so most of us end up using robust solutions from third-party companies that specialize in those specific fields. And while this is the ideal method for the vast majority of Web companies, it does sometimes create a branding problem and many of these solutions can cause an inconsistent experience for customers. Brands can combat this problem by leveraging white label solutions – which just so happen to be the only type of white that is still okay to wear after Labor Day.

These white label solutions (occasionally referred to as “private label”) allow companies to utilize their own unique branding to offer a service without having to invest in the creation of the technology or infrastructure. This enables you to build up your own brand, sell products or services directly from your website and simplify your customers’ conversion path.

The best part is, there are white label solutions for pretty much everything! So if you’re interested in adding daily deals to your site, creating your own YouTube-like video platform, building mobile apps or even creating a private social network for your company, there’s a service for that. Check out five of the best white label platforms available below.

App Building

Do you love apps enough to launch your own app building service? If your answer is yes, then check out iBuildApp’s white label Reseller Program, which allows clients to use the company's technology to provide their customers with a mobile app building service. The software comes with promotional and marketing tools, and allows resellers to set their own prices and add a set up fee. By offering app building services to clients, businesses can generate a recurring revenue stream and maintain close relationships, who can use the service to create apps for iOS and Android devices.

Daily Deals

After the initial industry boom a couple of years ago, the daily deal sector seems to have tapered off a bit. However, one thing is for certain – saving money will always be in style. This is why some publishers have found success in creating their own branded daily deal sites through white label software programs, such as PoweredByTippr. This software is ideal for Web workers who already have an audience and merchant relationships in place. It enables users to start their own group buying site, which brings new customers to local merchants, local deals to consumers and traffic and revenue to publishers.

Social Networks

The Internet gets more social everyday, so why not add a branded social community to your website? A few weeks ago, Salesforce launched the pilot of Salesforce Communities, which enables businesses to create a customized and private social community where they can connect with customers and partners. This platform combines social networking features like profiles, real-time feeds, trending topics, recommendations and influence measurement with business information and processes from the Salesforce platform. While general availability isn’t available until 2013, those who are interested in participating in the Salesforce Communities pilot can register here. However, if you can’t wait that long to add a social community to your site, you can check out some other social website creation platforms, like Ning or SocialGo.

Video Services

If you’re looking to deliver professional quality videos to your audience on every conceivable type of screen, look no further than Brightcove’s Video Cloud platform. It comes with a number of easy-to-use tools and various features, including uploading and encoding, customizable video players, secure delivery, HTML5 video, social media integration, advertising and monetization capabilities, analytics and much more. Moreover, publishers can totally customize their channel within the Brightcove Console, where they can update details like its name, logo and description.

Gamification

Web businesses have been learning how to play with their consumers by using gamification services. Big Door is one of the ‘Net’s best gamification services, allowing publishers to add game mechanics to the Web interactions on their site by enabling points, badges, levels, leader boards, virtual currency and virtual goods to increase visitor engagement. Built on top of a white label engine, the Big Door platform helps users create a customized rewards program that offers both virtual and tangible rewards to increase customer loyalty.

Create Your Own Private Social Network

Michael Garrity — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 17:30:00 GMT

For the general public, social media seems to have exhausted much of its potential (for now, at least). Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr and other sites have allowed users and businesses to connect, communicate and share content and links, and for the most part, that is primarily all that they’re used for. (Well, that and advertising, of course.)

Likely, the next major wave of social innovation will come from private social networks designed to enhance communication among smaller groups. Services like Yammer cut directly to the chase, allowing users to engage and share with one another on the pressing topics of the day within their private network, without being bogged down by unnecessary content or advertising.

Hot off the heels of its Buddy Media acquisition, Salesforce has announced Salesforce Communities, a new social media platform for “enterprise and social communication” that allows users to connect with partners, coworkers and customers by creating private branded social communities that utilize traditional social media features. This includes user profiles, real-time news feeds, a trending topics section, recommendations and influence measurement scores.

This new service is meant to help Salesforce customers collaborate better with one another, but also to monitor how well a brand or marketing campaign is resonating with consumers.

Combining “knowledge-driven, peer-assisted and agent-assisted customer service” into a single experience allows Salesforce Communities users to provide their customers with quicker, more efficient service and support, as well as immediately create various marketing communities around events, campaigns or focus groups as needed.

Companies can also use the platform to connect with their partners, suppliers and distributors to establish customized communities for increasing sales through seamless deal registration, access to proven sales tools and collaborations with industry experts.

And, of course, Salesforce Communities comes with the trusted service of the Salesforce brand and its cloud-based business processes and database services, which will allow customers to build and deploy branded communities in minutes, move seamlessly across multiple communities under a single identity and instantly scale their communities to support anywhere from just a few users to millions of members.

The limited pilot version of Salesforce Communities will launch this fall, and the product is expected to see general availability in the second half of 2013.

Nurturing Users in the Buying Cycle with LoopFuse & Salesforce

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 02 May 2012 15:24:00 GMT

Marketing automation platform LoopFuse announced a deepened integration with Salesforce, introducing two new enhancements that will help its users make the most of the popular CRM system.

LoopFuse announced the release of LeadFlow Enroller, a plugin which allows users to add leads and contacts into an existing LeadFlow program directly from Salesforce and even displays which programs are active for a particular lead or contact. Features like this ensure that prospects are receiving all essential marketing messages, nurturing them through the buying cycle.

The marketing automation platform is also now providing the ability to create a testing environment through its Sandbox Connector feature that can be used with sandbox functionality available in premium Salesforce editions.

“Our customers are always seeking ways to add tighter integration between their sales and marketing teams,” said Sean Dwyer, CEO of LoopFuse. “The addition of these two capabilities does just that with the LeadFlow Enroller allowing salespeople to directly add or remove prospects from lead nurturing tracks and the Sandbox Connector offering greater workflow testing capabilities.”

The Leadflow Enroller is available through the Salesforce.com AppExchange, and the Sandbox Connector is available now to all paid LoopFuse Oneview accounts.

Gain Greater Business Insights from Desk.com

Michael Garrity — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 19:00:00 GMT

Desk.com, the social and mobile help desk owned by Salesforce, rolled out in January and has already been beneficial to many small and medium-sized businesses on the Web. Now the company has released a slew of new analytics tools that will make the platform even more useful.

Desk.com was built to give SMBs a single, clean inbox to organize customer service requests among various channels such as email, phone or social media. The solution’s new feature set, known as Business Insights, offers a simple and affordable platform for companies that may have fewer resources but still want to take advantage of the real-time data that Desk.com can generate.

The data offered with Business Insights shows users how many customer service requests have been opened, resolved, replied to, reassigned or reopened, even if they are not the user originally assigned the case in question. It also provides an efficient way to observe other insights such as which customer service methods are most well-received by customers, response vs. resolution times, etc.

Users can also garner and share their Desk.com data within their company through various means, including a dozen distinct, pre-built, auto-generated reports and a number of different exporting tools. Business Insights is available now to all Desk.com customers.

Supercharge Sales Email with ToutApp for Salesforce

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:38:00 GMT

Email management and analytics company ToutApp has released a Salesforce integration that builds sales and email management into the CRM solution.

The app gives email senders some powerful insights into their emails with updates on when and where they are read and what links are clicked. The app also features some interesting timesaving features such as templating, automatic file attachments, and performance reports.

ToutApp for Salesforce also syncs outgoing email to the right content without having to add a tracking address to the BCC field – a big issue for many.

“ToutApp is addressing a major pain point in Salesforce: the ability to template, track and manage your day-to-day sales emails,” says Tawheed Kader, CEO of ToutApp. “We believe our comprehensive yet simple-to-integrate solution between Salesforce, iOS and cloud-based app will not only save hours of emailing time but will also provide deep insights into your sales communications.”

VisiStat Integrates with Salesforce, Adds CRM Module

Allison Howen — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:45:00 GMT

Looking for a little help in the lead management department? Cloud-based analytics company VisiStat has announced two new ways that its LeadCaster solution can help small businesses do just that.

Salesforce Integration

Through an integration with cloud-based CRM solution Salesforce, users of both solutions will be able to import leads from their LeadCaster account directly into Salesforce.com.

The simple integration is completed when LeadCaster users input their Salesforce.com account number into their VisiStat account settings. Then, the LeadCaster solution identifies website visitors by company name and provides contact details, which enables small businesses to capture leads directly from their website visitors.

“The process of generating and managing leads from website visitors is now fully integrated into one simple process with LeadCaster and Salesforce.com,” says Jim Bennette, CEO of VisiStat. “Salesforce.com users can now send new leads directly from LeadCaster to Salesforce with a simple click of the mouse.”

LeadCaster CRM Functionality

For businesses that aren’t ready to invest in a third party CRM like Salesforce, VisiStat announced the release of its own CRM module that is built into its LeadCaster solution. It features the ability to import and export leads, set follow up dates, rate leads, add notes and log events. Furthermore, it provides detailed pageview history for each visitor, which includes information about products or services that prospects are searching for.

“Our customers asked us for more tools to help manage the leads they are generating from our LeadCaster solution,” says Bennette. “The integration with Salesforce.com and our new ‘built-in’ LeadCaster CRM are important additions to the VisiStat ecosystem as we continue to build end-to-end solutions to help small/medium businesses manage their entire web presence.”

In the Cloud: Sales Performance Management from Xactly

Software Everywhere : feature — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 16:30:00 GMT

Xactly today released version 1.6 of its SMB sales compensation management solution Xactly Express. The self-service sales compensation management software enables users to create sales commission plans, calculate commissions, and export payments to payroll...(read more)

Five New Apps for Web Pro's on Force.com

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:43:00 GMT

The interest in SalesForce.com's AppExchange never ceases to amaze me. New applications are added frequently, so if you're a SalesForce user and responsible for improving the user experience as well as the efficiency of your own business and marketing efforts, keeping up to date with new releases on Force.com is a smart move.

Below are five recently released (last 45 days or so) applications for Web professionals available to SalesForce.com users (these apps are mostly paid by the way) with a few alternatives thrown in for good measure:

ExactShip: This paid app helps to streamline operations for Internet retailers by managing all shipping from a single packing & shipping solution designed for high volume fulfillment. Supports all major US parcel carriers (UPS, FedEx, USPS & DHL) & more than 3000 LTL/TL freight carriers. Also see FedEx and UPS.

iContact: Email marketing with iContact for Salesforce allows you to create, send and track relevant and targeted email marketing without the need to learn a new application. This is a paid application bu there is no per-user fee. The app also provides results on messaging performance. See also the apps from Vertical Response, ExactTarget, Marketo and BlastWizard.

Bime: A BI application with some impressive visualization capabilities that mixes data from cloud and on-premise sources, allowing for the analysis of all data in one place. The app enables users to take data from SQL databases, Excel spreadsheets, and XML webservices and manipulate it to form predictive models. Also see GoodData Analytics and Sales Pipe Insight.

SalesForce for Google Adwords: Allows online marketers to track Google advertising campaigns and website lead generation activity. If you're looking to more deeply integrate and balance paid advertising insights with your CRM, this paid app (which is included with all SalesForce editions) is one to use. Search Marketers may also be interested in SEO for Salesforce and HubSpot Inbound Marketing Software.

Great Wave Surveys: A solid feedback management application to gather, analyze, and distribute customer feedback. The paid, fully native application enables users to receive real-time responses and utilize standard security permissions to control user access to feedback channel. Also see Timba, Survey Force, ClickTools and FormAssembly.

Apps for SalesForce: Free, Popular and Downright Nifty

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:47:00 GMT

If creating and maintaining positive relationships with customers is your focus (like it should be) then you won’t need convincing that CRM software is a key to your success. While there many vendors touting their wares, market leader SalesForce is where many companies are turning. In addition to being the most robust solution available, SalesForce’s openness (which comes in the form of apps) is impressive and provides an additional layer of value to users. Let’s look at some of those apps now:

SalesForce for Twitter: Take the pulse of the Internet as it relates to your brand by searching and monitoring tweets in real-time. This app is perfect for those interested in finding customers that need help, letting customers create cases with tweets, and even sharing knowledge with the real-time social community. The app enables users to tweet their customer service issues and instantly create a case within the Service Cloud. Once created, internal business processes can be leveraged to route the case to the most effective service representatives.

In2Clouds: The predictive analytics add-on gives you the opportunity to rank leads based on its probability of closing. Charts are provided to offer insights about the health of the sales pipeline, and its efficiency and effectiveness. The rankings can be used to prioritize your sales efforts and help new staff get up to speed quickly.

Eventbrite: The Eventbrite (online event management and ticketing services) Connector app enables you to import attendee data into Salesforce from any Eventbrite events, including custom registrant surveys. Users can optionally check the data for duplicates in Salesforce before importing, and assign new leads according to an organization's lead assignment rules.

Jigsaw: The Jigsaw Prospector app for Salesforce puts business contact information (complete with Name, Title, Company, email, phone, and address) within reach of your sales team. Users of the app can build and import customized prospecting lists using Jigsaw's array of selects enabling sales teams to cross sell into your existing accounts with additional contacts found in Jigsaw.

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Salesforce.com Certification Program

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:59:00 GMT

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider SalesForce announced an official certifications program for Salesforce CRM administrators and Force.com developers.

The program will provide administrators and developers a valuable set of industry credentials that will signal their skill set to their employers and to the marketplace and give employers a way to train and assess current team members, identify, evaluate and hire qualified new professionals, and ensure their Salesforce CRM and Force.com deployments are being run by qualified experts to maximize their success.

JangoMail For SalesForce

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:24:00 GMT

Email marketing provider JangoMail announced that it is now certified on SalesForce.com's AppExchange, an application sharing service that provides a range of add-on functionality for SalesForce.com environments, and that JangoMail for Salesforce is now available.

The application enables SalesForce customers to send email campaigns to their contacts, leads and campaigns in Salesforce. When users view a particular contact or lead, they can also view that contacts complete history, including emails received as well as any actions (opens, clicks, unsubscribe's, forwards and bounces) that have taken place. The service also incorporates "rendering", so that users can see how an email will appear in Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and other email client interfaces before sending.

Salesforce users can view the JangoMail for Salesforce application by viewing a read-only demo account here.

Previous Coverage of JangoMail:
- JangoMail Now Habeas Certified
- JangoMail Enhances Reporting Features