There were several key announcements by Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, at this year’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. Over 45,000 people attended the event while 35,000 streamed it live. It was the first time I had to wait in line to cross Howard at Fourth to get to the keynote.
The theme of the conference was the “social enterprise” – showing how social media and new collaboration tools are changing the way we do business. According to the Salesforce.com press release issued on August 31st, the social enterprise leverages …”social, mobile and open cloud technologies to revolutionize companies’ relationships with their customers.”
Here is a quick summary of a few of the announcements made during the keynote that sales and marketing professionals will find of interest. All offerings are scheduled to be available in late 2011.
- Chatter Now: Salesforce.com’s social collaboration tool, Chatter, will allow users to see who else is logged in Salesforce.com and fire up an instant chat session and screen share.
- Chatter Customer Groups: Chatter will also allow people from outside your company (partners and customers for instance) to privately collaborate on projects such as RFPs, account plans, and product implementations.
- Chatter Service: Creates self-service, social communities that allow customers to ask a question in a social feed such as Facebook and get an instant answer from agents monitoring the feed. This offering leverages Radian6 (which Salesforce.com bought earlier this year) for social media monitoring.
- Data.com: Salesforce purchased Jigsaw in April 2010 and has now entered into a partnership with Dun and Bradstreet. The combined offering has been renamed to “Data.com” which according to it’s website offers over 30+ million contacts and 200 million companies. For $99 per user per month, a Data.com button will appear on the Contact or Account screen allowing users to populate Accounts with D&B information or Contacts from the crowd-sourced Jigsaw database.
- Data.com Clean: This is an offline cleansing of your Salesforce.com data by the Data.com team. Pricing is based on the number of records processed.
- Data.com Lists: In addition, marketers can purchase lists from data.com. The records are refreshed quarterly and the license is good for one year.