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Salesforce, which has been buying up companies on a regular basis for the last three or four years in search of new functionality it doesn’t have to develop by itself, is now seeing the integration of those properties bring some new value-adds to the platform.
A prime new example is Sales Performance Accelerator, launched on July 17, which combines the company’s frontline Sales Cloud with targeted lead and customer data from Data.com and coaching and feedback tools from Work.com.
Using Sales Performance Accelerator, sales teams now can connect and access all the information they need to improve their performance, Salesforce Marketing and Communication Vice President Nick Stein told eWEEK.
This gets even further under the hood than the usual data streams: previous sales records, sales cycles, budgetary information and so on. Sales Performance Accelerator also includes information for salespeople about a potential customer’s own personal and corporate motivations for wanting–or not wanting–to purchase certain products and/or services.
Salesforce’s sophisticated back-end analytics provide this type of information to Sales Cloud users. The whole idea is to get fresh, completely up-to-date information on the sales targets and pipelines and strong sales leads into the hands of the sales people.
“Now with the addition of Work.com and its social and employee profiles to our Data.com database, you can now see what goals they’re (the potential customers and sales leads) working on, who else is working on that goal, who they’re connected to,” Stein told eWEEK.
With Work.com, salespeople also can see what their colleague–and even potential customers–are talking about on Twitter and LinkedIn, for example. “So you can immediately understand how they’re progressing on personal goals, on business goals and whether they’re aligned to the right things,” Stein said.
Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of Research at Nucleus Research, said that her company has found that “companies employing social, integrated sales performance management like Work.com can increase close rates by as much as 10 to 15 percent. Adding more complete data with Data.com and tactical collaboration with Chatter make salespeople even more effective.”