The news as of Salesforce.com's user and developer conference, Dreamforce, San Francisco this morning, and the music is The Very Best of Stan Getz. Yes, "Girl From Ipanema" is the next track up:
InsideSales.com, a vendor of hosted dialer and lead response management products, has announced the production release of its Lead Management suite integrated into the Salesforce.com CRM platform.
The newly-unveiled Lead Management Suite is comprised of PowerDialer, JabberDog and ResponsePop for Salesforce.com. Each of these components "helps inside sales representatives call, contact, qualify and sell more at far less cost," according to InsideSales officials.
Mark Pardy, market analyst with Dun & Bradstreet, said the InsideSales.com suite "allows us to increase the number of leads a single rep can effectively manage."
"Dreamforce is unequaled in its representation of the top SaaS and Cloud Computing technologies worldwide," said Dave Elkington, InsideSales.com's CEO and Chairman, adding that in his opinion, the "response and lines at our booth at Dreamforce indicate a groundswell of need in the area of technologies facilitating remote selling."
InsideSales.com is a telephony-based lead management vendor with dialer technology who has produced research papers in conjunction with Kellogg and MIT on the impact of immediate response to Web leads. Its newest product, PowerDialer for Salesforce.com, integrates its flagship power dialer product directly using the Salesforce API.
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ExactTarget, a vendor of on-demand e-mail and one-to-one marketing products, has launched a series of new integrated capabilities designed, company officials say, to "simplify marketing automation for Salesforce CRM customers."
The new capabilities are supposed to give marketers "the ability to automate their lead nurturing process with drag and drop interface to create dynamic Web pages and lead capture forms. Marketers can also aggregate data from multiple sources and use a point and click interface to schedule a sequence of follow-up communication activities," company officials say.
"Today's marketers need to be equipped with capabilities that are both powerful, but at the same time easy to use and affordable," said Brian Smith, vice president of product management for ExactTarget. "Our approach is to put automation and control into the hands of the marketer."
The new capabilities, available for customers to use with ExactTarget's fall 2008 product release towards the end of the week, all come with a pre-configured integration to Salesforce CRM. By creating a direct application-to-application connection, company officials believe, "joint customers can benefit from an automatic integration and avoid common data mapping and synchronization challenges."
ExactTarget's marketing automation capabilities include a drag and drop content editor for designing Web pages with intelligent lead capture forms. The data can be routed directly to Salesforce CRM and initiate business rules for follow-up communications and activities.
The product also has pre-configured ExactTarget integration that allows automatic access to Salesforce.com report, campaign, contact, lead and account data. A point and click interface allows automating sequential aggregation, segmentation and communication activities.
The vendor offers four editions of its on-demand software application along with integrated products such as ExactTarget-Salesforce Integration and ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM
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Informatica, which sells enterprise data integration and data quality software and services, has announced Informatica On Demand Data Synchronization Service for Salesforce.com, the newest addition to its family of On Demand Data Integration Services.
The product is designed as a SaaS offering automating the steps required to ensure that on-premise data is kept consistent and current with data in Salesforce CRM and the Force.com platform, letting users synchronize their Salesforce CRM information, including customer, product, opportunity and sales data.
The company says the new service offers a mapping framework for designing multi-object transformations, a Web-based wizard with over 100 built-in functions for building transformation rules, flexible job orchestration for managing complex transformation rules involving multiple Salesforce CRM Orgs, files and databases and a Web-based management console for monitoring all data synchronisation jobs as well as support for Salesforce CRM and Force.com.
Pricing starts at $1,000 a month.
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BigMachines, a vendor of on-demand sales configuration and proposal software, has announced at Dreamforce that it is developing a new native application on the Force.com platform from Salesforce.com to let sales teams and channels generate professional sales documents from within a Salesforce CRM opportunity.
Using the new application, according to the BigMachinists, sales reps will be able to add products and quotes to opportunities and manage pricing and discounts. System administrators will be able to build templates for sales documents, such as proposals, quotes and contracts, using BigMachines Document Engine, and publish the templates to sales reps, who select their selling documents from within the Salesforce CRM interface.
The new application will be available for purchase on the Force.com AppExchange online marketplace.
The Force.com platform "simplifies the development of on-demand applications and allows them to be shared, exchanged and installed via the AppExchange," according to BigMachines officials: "By building the new application directly on the Force.com platform, BigMachines gains the benefits of Salesforce.com's global infrastructure and ensures that the application will be automatically integrated with Salesforce CRM applications."
The Force.com platform powers the Salesforce CRM applications, more than 800 ISV partner applications and more than 85,000 custom applications used by Salesforce.com's 47,700 customers.
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Bluewolf has launched what company officials describe as a new cloud-based product designed to allow multi-channel media companies to manage the advertising sales lifecycle on Force.com.
Expanding on its MediaTrak SalesPack offerings, the new Bluewolf AdBooker and AdSync products manage the advertising process from sales lead to placement to billing -- for print, broadcast, online, seminars and more, company officials say, adding that Bluewolf's consulting clients include FOX Interactive Media, The Wall Street Journal and CNN.
Corinne Sklar, vice president of marketing for Bluewolf, called MediaTrak "easy to customize, with quick time to value," providing an alternative to traditional on-premise media products like Mactive and AdMarc "that are cumbersome and difficult to customize."
The newspaper industry is "struggling to compete in today's market," said Mike McLeland, a 20-year media industry veteran with Hearst and Gannett. "One of the challenges that the industry faces is the fact that we've traditionally been slow to adapt and change. Changes on a traditional system from current vendors can take one to two years or more. The same changes on this Bluewolf system take weeks or months, and would be implemented instantly for all users."
The product includes a MediaTrak Client Manager. Launched in 2007, company officials say this media-specific Salesforce CRM tool "allows media organizations to track relationships among brand, advertiser and agency, providing a complete view of the business. It manages client insertion orders in one interface and has pre-built media-specific reports."
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As First Coffee was unable to attend Dreamforce this year from his home in New Zealand, thanks to industry observer Dan Farber for reporting that during Neil Young's curiously irrelevant but charming appearance at the keynote address he didn't mention cloud computing, but "talked about his 1959 Mark IV Lincoln Continental" instead.
According to Farber, "Young has spent more than $100,000 to green his 5,000-pound Thinkin' Lincoln former gas hog. 'It's a piece of America art,'" Farber quotes noted car nut Young as saying, and notes that Young "hopes to get the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon and take the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize."
And at a cost of only $100,000 per car, no doubt they'll be all over American roads any day now.
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