Search engine Google and hosted software provider Salesforce.com announced a joint product that combines Google’s search result advertising program, AdWords, with Salesforce’s customer relations management software.
The goal of the product, called Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords, is to allow the companies to work together to target small to mid-sized businesses.
The deal is less than many market observers had anticipated, but is significant because it aligns Google and Salesforce on the application side, at a time when Google is upgrading its applications effort. Google faces efforts by Microsoft to leverage its software business to enter the advertising business more aggressively.
Here’s how the Google/Salesforce product works: A company using the product can connect directly to Google’s advertising platform, called AdWords. The company can decide to place an ad for itself beside a desired search result. People clicking on that ad are then taken to the company’s Web site, where they are presented with a form to fill out. This becomes a new lead in Salesforce’s CRM software.
Here’s more from InfoWorld:
Tags: co:google, co:Salesforce.comThe new product will immediately replace Salesforce.com’s Team Edition offering, said [senior vice president of marketing Kendall] Collins. It will be available in 14 languages and in the 43 countries where Salesforce.com operates. Under a promotional deal, the new offering will initially cost $600 for a five-user edition per year, as compared with $995 for the five-user Team Edition. The list price will end up as $1,200 per year. For users in Canada, Mexico and the U.S. who are new to AdWords, Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords also comes with a $50 AdWords credit.
Under the terms of the nonexclusive agreement, Salesforce.com will take 100 percent of the $600 annual subscription fee, while Google will garner the lion’s share of the advertising revenue generated, with the CRM vendor receiving a small undisclosed portion of those ad sales. Google’s hope is that teaming up with Salesforce.com will enable the company to reach new SMB customers.
It’s likely that this is the start of an intensification of the Google, Salesforce.com relationship, with perhaps the tight integration of Google Apps and Salesforce CRM to come.
4 Comments
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booooring said:
adwords pretty much dont work for most highly targeted small businesses, as both google and salesforce know well. sure they work great for retailers and select service providers,but this does not overlap the salesforce user community well at all. this is a big nothing announcement!
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Jon Miller said:
Although this alliance reconfirms the importance of mashing up Salesforce and Google into a seamless integrated process, 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
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Small business CRM said:
Jon, this is a very good point: “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’.”
This requires an email drip marketing capability, offered by email newsletter marketing vendors like Aweber (http://www.aweber.com) and many others.
Relenta, a newer player on the small-business CRM block, has this capability built-in: http://www.relenta.com
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Aditya said:
Hmmm.. looks interesting. But I’d always prefer open source applications and that’s why I prefer sugar CRM
But did you know that sugar crm already has these features offered?Check out eSpecial Softech for some innovative Open Source CRM solutions..
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VentureBeat » More thoughts on Google-Salesforce said:
[...] more on the product integration announcement yesterday between Google and Salesforce, two of the most important players in online applications [...]