Salesforce.com Rolls Out Mobile Tools With Sales Reach

Salesforce.com unveiled Thursday several interconnected sales and marketing tools for its mobile CRM platform designed to empower sales reps in the field with greater insight into the activities of prospective buyers so they can more effectively close deals.

Sales Reach, the new product built on top of the Salesforce1 mobile platform, will improve the ability of sales reps to market to, track and communicate with prospects in a world of increasingly non-linear sales processes and one-click buyers.

Mark Woollen, Salesforce VP of product marketing, described Sales Reach to CRN as the ’most recent innovation in a string of innovations here at Salesforce over the last 15 plus years.’

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The new offering continues Salesforce.com’s work in modernizing the CRM by taking inspiration from cloud, mobile and social technology trends, Woollen said. It combines the company’s Pardot marketing software with the Sales Cloud and Communities social forum.

’We’ve identified and figured out a better way to tap into mobile-empowered buyers,’ Woollen said, noting that 80 percent of purchase decisions are influenced by what is being messaged across mobile channels.

’In the consumer world, you’re seeing an acknowledgement of this and interesting products and services to address this,’ Woollen said.

Sales Reach adds five new capabilities to the CRM platform: Micro Campaigns, Real-Time Activity Notifications, Lead Tracking, Mobile Nurture Campaigns and Salesforce Communities for Prospects. The new tools all access existing Salesforce1 APIs and capabilities.

Corinne Sklar is global CMO at Bluewolf, a cloud consulting firm with an international practice. Bluewolf recently conducted a State of Salesforce survey in which 71 percent of sales professionals said access to real-time data on mobile devices is crucial.

’Traditional departmental silos must disappear and marketing, sales and service departments must all collaborate on unlocking customer data in a useable and personalized way,’ Sklar told CRN.

’Sales Reach’s CRM and marketing automation alignment drives this type of collaboration and gives sales employees instant customer visibility in the field, and empowers them with mobile solutions that allow them to focus on selling, not technology,’ she said.

NEXT: New Capabilities

Woollen said the Micro Campaigns feature lets individual sales reps easily create and execute marketing campaigns localized to their region.

’They want the ability to get hyper-local in some of their markets that may not connect to the message from corporate. At the same time, marketers can see what sales people are doing, what’s resonating, and can in turn become more responsive to customers in those markets,’ Woollen said.

Lead Tracking helps sales reps better monitor and understand the online activity of prospects they are trying to interact with, enabling them to spot trends and behavior patterns.

Real-time notifications provide instant visibility into how prospects are engaging with a company and its products.

’In many cases, the right kind of activity can be a very important buying signal, and they want to strike when the iron’s hot,’ Woollen explained.

The Mobile Nurture Campaigns tool allows reps to instantly add prospects to marketing campaigns.

’People may respond to email but not register for an event. Just because they’re not likely to buy now doesn’t mean they’re not likely to buy later. The only way to know for sure is to stay in constant contact with them and keep sending them highly relevant messages,’ Woollen said.

And Communities for Prospects brings prospective buyers into the online forum, facilitating direct engagement between sales professionals and multiple prospects, as well as prospects with each other, to exchange knowledge and insights about getting the most out of their CRM platform.

Andi Giri, CEO of Softsquare, a Maryland-based Salesforce partner, told CRN that ’Salesforce Reach appears to be Salesforce CRM with enhanced campaign management on mobile steroids.’

Giri said Softsquare is looking forward to using Salesforce Reach to give customers the ability to market to prospects in real-time with greater agility.

’In terms of consumer-led innovations that can have a meaningful impact on business, Sales Reach is very much one of those,’ Woollen told CRN.

Marketing and CRM are coming closer together, and technology is becoming increasingly personal, enabling customer-facing employees to cultivate more personal, lasting customer relationships, Sklaro of Bluewolf, said.

’Today’s customers expect an exceptional experience when they connect with your brand, on any channel and at any time they choose. Salesforce.com’s Sales Reach validates Bluewolf’s proposition that companies need to be customer-obsessed across all departments, to meet heightened customer expectations in the moment,’ Sklar told CRN.

Bluewolf has already helped global companies, such as Stanley Black & Decker, GlaxoSmithKline and Alcon, streamline sales processes with mobile solutions and differentiate their customer experience, Sklar said.

’Sales Reach will provide an additional framework to guide mobile enterprise initiatives towards the right use cases. That is where mobile has the power to transform the end-customer experience,’ she said.

PUBLISHED JULY 24, 2014