Salesforce.com, an on-demand business services, and Google announced that they have formed a strategic global alliance to help millions of businesses leverage the Internet to achieve success. The newest product resulting from this alliance, Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords, is a robust offering that combines the power of Salesforce on-demand CRM applications with the Google AdWords platform to achieve integrated sales and marketing success. This joint solution provides businesses of all sizes with the same tools used by larger enterprises to successfully attract and retain customers.
“The Web has quickly become the most powerful tool small and medium sized businesses can use to compete and win in today’s economy,” said Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer at Google. “Combining the power and simplicity of Salesforce with Google AdWords helps businesses find and keep customers to ultimately drive their continued success.”
“The alliance of Google and salesforce.com brings together the world’s leading platforms to empower small and medium sized businesses to accelerate and thrive. The Internet has completely changed the landscape for small and medium businesses and the alliance between Google and salesforce.com enables companies of all sizes to acquire new customers and streamline their business to experience unfettered success,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com.
Originally posted on June 5, 2007 @ 8:08 am
Although this alliance reconfirms the importance of mashing up Salesforce and Google into a seamless integrated process, I believe the product side of the announcement falls short of addressing the real pain points that marketers feel when trying to use AdWords to drive new business leads.
In particular:
1) Landing pages are critical for driving conversions and improving ranking, but 3 out of 4 companies still send clicks to the home page. Google doesn’t care because they still get paid for each click, but the marketer ends up with fewer leads. It’s just too hard to get the right IT support to have enough targeted pages, and the Google-Salesforce alliance provides no solution to this problem.
2) Bidding well is hard for most marketers, and Google-Salesforce provides no help for bid optimization. Again, this suits Google just fine since it’s in their interest to have companies over-bid, but it leaves the marketer with suboptimal results.
3) A click is just the beginning of a business sales cycle. Only 25% of the people that click on an ad and fill out a form are ready to speak with a sales rep. Companies need to put in place a relevant and patient nurturing process that guides the prospect from the research stage to being truly “sales ready”. Once again, the Google-Salesforce alliance doesn’t address this gap in the marketer’s business process.
You can read more at http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2007/06/some_gorillas_c.html.