Find out what “Things We’ve Learned About #CRM this Week” has for you. A lot of things happened this past week; Salesforce positioned for the 9th year in a row, as a leader for sales force automation; and on another CRM related topic we have some interesting stats on mobile email and landing pages trends that you want to know about….
All this and more in our Things We’ve Learned This Week.
1) Salesforce Positioned as a Leader in the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation
Gartner has published the 2015 version of the Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation and ranked Salesforce.com as the leader in its category. The Magic Quadrant reflects the considerable change in the SFA marketplace that Gartner has observed in the past year. As part of this discovery process, Gartner surveyed more than 160 companies.
Gartner defines SFA as applications that “support the automation of sales activities, processes and administrative responsibilities for B2B organizations’ sales professionals. Core functionalities include account, contact and opportunity management. Additional add-on capabilities focus on improving the sales effectiveness of salespeople.
Among those capabilities are sales configuration, guided selling, proposal generation and content management, and sales performance management support, including incentive compensation, quota, sales coaching and territory management.” Gartner finds that SFA deployments continue to focus on core functional capabilities for accounts, opportunities, forecasting, selling processes and sales operations, but mobile capabilities, easy of integration, and usability are also very important criteria.
“Everywhere we look, sales organizations are being disrupted by compressed selling cycles and increasingly sophisticated buyers. To thrive in this environment, companies need a sales solution that is data-driven, mobile, and focused on productivity and results,” said Mike Rosenbaum, executive vice president of Sales Cloud, Salesforce. “Sales Cloud continues to set the standard for modern SFA and we’re honored to have been named a Leader in Gartner’s SFA Magic Quadrant for nine years in a row.”
https://www.salesforce.com/form/pdf/gartner-sfa-magic-quadrant-2015.jsp
2) A New Salesforce E-Book Was Released this Week
Quite often Salesforce releases a new E-book with interesting insights and recommendations about customer services, marketing, sales and run on; this time they released “Small Business, Big Name: 4 Ways Your Sales Team Can Help Build Your Brand” e-book. This e-book is dedicated to small businesses that are looking to ramp up their branding strategies and that want to get some brand recognition and company presence out there. The recommendation this time is to work with your sometimes overlooked sales team, because sometimes when companies think about branding strategies, brand name and so forth they normally think of their marketing team, which is correct, however it doesn’t mean that this tasks are reserved just for the marketing department.
Why to get involve your sales team with your branding strategy? First of all, your sales team is always on the “battle field.” Therefore they are the first ones that have to speak up positively about the brand, to carry your brand logo and to be the brand image. Secondly, they often understand your customers and clients better than you do, so it is important to make them part of this branding process as your company grows.
This e-book is divided into 4 parts, each part will give you tips on how to leverage your sales team’s knowledge to build a brand from the inside out faster.
- Build Brand Awareness Internally
- Keep Branding Practical
- Deliver the Right Message
- Listen to Feedback
You can download a free version of the e-book by going to the link.
https://medium.com/grow-for-growing-companies/small-business-big-name-a-new-salesforce-e-book-9079c59f48fa?d=70130000000tP4G
3) Research between Litmus and Salesforce Marketing Cloud show Mobile Email and Landing Pages Trends for 2015
In one of our recent posts we talked about the”Mobile Revolution” and how important it is for companies to embrace this and to adapt to this “new” form of consuming information in order to offer more value to their customers and to increase rate conversion. This new research made by Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Litmus touch base precisely on that, and it also provides some insights on how to close this gap. The infographic analyzes data from Litmus Email Analytics and highlights (as one of their main findings) the gap between consumer adoption of mobile and marketer adoption of mobile-friendly email and landing page design.
After reading the report, it becomes clear why more and more businesses are using landing pages to custom-tailor their marketing messaging to various traffic sources and different customer types and why they are customizing their strategies to be more mobile friendly, but it also shows that even though the “Mobile Revolution” is nothing new there aren’t that many companies that are doing everything they can to make things easier for their customers, for example it says that 52% of B2C brands do not have emails and websites that are both mobile friendly.
If you want to read the whole report, you can go to this link https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2015/07/mobile-friendly-email-infographic.html
4) Social.com Q1 2015 Advertising Benchmark released recently
Recent Salesforce report finds that Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn together saw a 49% increase in ad revenue in the past year. That’s one of the takeaways from Salesforce’s Q1 2015 Advertising Benchmark.
This report is based on data from the advertising management platform Social.com in its Marketing Cloud. The ad revenue extended from Q1 of last year to Q1 of this year.
Although the analysis was made from all platforms, the revenue reflects mobile’s surge over the past year, with people now spending more minutes daily on mobile devices than on watching TV, again with the “Mobile Revolution”.
Here are some other findings we thought you might find interesting:
- Engagement rates for Twitter Promoted Tweets fell 12%.
- In the U.S., ads placed in Facebook’s desktop News Feed are more expensive than ones placed in its mobile News Feed.
- LinkedIn’s ad revenue rose 38% in 2015 compared with last years.
The data in the report came from more than a trillion ad impressions and hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising spend across this three major global social networks.
https://www.salesforce.com/form/marketingcloud/sc/advertising-benchmark-report.jsp
5) App of the week
The App exchange offers more than 2.800 Apps to its customers in order to fulfill their needs, but we know sometimes is difficult to find what you need that’s why we have created the App of the Week so you can stay updated on new Apps that are released and in order to help you out filter a little bit more that search. This week we found an interesting blog post done by Rebecca Brown a senior writer at Salesforce that tackles 5 Business Challenges and offers 5 App recommendations to overcome this Challenges.
This Challenges being:
- Customers wait too long for field service agents to show up.
Recommended App: FieldExpert - There’s no pricing consistency in customer quotes and proposals.
Recommended App: SteelBrick - Call center agents spend more time finding and inputting data than servicing customers.
Recommended App: inContact - Sales reps returning from summer vacations need a little help getting re-inspired.
Recommended App: Hoopla - There aren’t enough employees scheduled during peak demand times.
Recommended App: Shift Expert
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2015/07/5-business-challenges-appexchange.html
If you want to learn more go to the Salesforce Appexchange web-page or Contact us for more information by clicking here