Within this release of salesforce.com you will find over 50 new features, spanning all of the application product line.  This marks the 3rd release this year and reminds us of Salesforce’s growing commitment to provide the worlds #1 hosted CRM solution on the planet.  Highlighted in this posting are Salesforce.com Opportunity Splitting and Campaign Influence.

The new Opportunity Splitting features address some of the current shifts in business needs.  Back in the day a sale would almost always be attributed to one person, but today we know that often a couple people, or even a team, are involved in a sale.  With Opportunity Splitting you can track all the individuals that participated in a sale.  This will effectively eliminate duplicate records and having reports that accurately reflect where the sales reps are spending their time as well as their productivity.

Another great new feature is Campaign Influence. This is one of the most exciting features to come out with Winter 09 and is a Salesforce Marketing attribute.  This will dramatically increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaign by allowing you to track on an opportunity by opportunity basis, determining which campaigns are working and which are not.

Automation is also improved in this new edition of Salesforce.com.  The Schedule and Email Reports was one of the most requested features.  This new feature allows customers to have reports automatically generated and sent out to the appropriate individuals. No more having to manually run a report then sending out to the same people every week. It is all automated! We want to thank our customers who requested this feature.

Force.com also receives some new and improved features in the Winter 09’ edition.  Customers will be able to leverage the power of Visualforce to create email templates.  This will allow customers to pull information form anywhere within their application to build dynamic email templates.

New features like these will make you more productive and profitable. May the Force be with you.

Cloud computing is a new concept that many confuse with grid computing. This emerging technology incorporates technologies like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Web 2.0 where reliance is on the internet to satisfy user needs. A few examples would be Salesforce.com, Google Apps and Amazon EC2, where the software resides on servers in the cloud, and users merely access them, most commonly through an internet browser.

Applications served up via the cloud usually occur at much lower costs to the consumer because there is no software to buy, no licensing, or no maintenance to deal with. When used as a service most customers are billed for usage, or have a subscription as is the case with Salesforce.com, the leader in SaaS for Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Salesforce.com is able to further reduce costs by running their application on a multi-tenant architecture. What this means is they have only one copy of the application serving multiple customers. This reduces development costs by having only one application to maintain and upgrade. It also reduces server cost, because servers are not sitting around idly waiting for requests, as is the case with dedicated servers or client-server architecture.

CRM is built on the premise of fostering long term relationships. Often however, personal information on prospects, customers, vendors, partners and suppliers eludes us. Most CRM systems have static information. The resulting profiles inevitably lack information about hobbies, interests, and relationships outside our native CRM. Applications and networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace are changing all that.

Imagine being able to find relevant information about a new prospect instantly and before making your first sales call. You can discover common bonds such as a sports team, music, favorite books and restaurants. Clearly the probability of a successful sales call increases significantly when we are able to establish and share interests.

In a similar way an existing customer who has a relationship with a new prospect can help us establish rapport and increase our success rate. Simply we can ask our client for an introduction. As we know referrals are the strongest means to new business.

Faceforce for “Appexchange complements traditional CRM data with dynamically updated personal data and photos. The integration pulls Facebook profile information into your Salesforce Account, Lead, and Contact records in real time, providing a full view of customers, prospects, and business associates.”

The LinkedIn Company Insider widget allows you to paste a Javascript into your HTML page to instantly discover relationships. Try it and also use the script for your own site.

See the LinkedIn Widget page for more information

Example HTML using the popup method:

 <html>
  <head>
  <script src="http://www.linkedin.com/companyInsider?script&useBorder=yes" language="javascript"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
  LinkedIn <span id="li"></span> is a wonderful networking tool for professionals.
  <script type="text/javascript">
     new LinkedIn.CompanyInsiderPopup("li","LinkedIn");
  </script>
  </body>
  </html>

When organizations implement their CRM, the concentration is often on demand generation and getting new customers. Attracting customers can be 10 times more costly than retaining your existing clients. How a company interacts with its customers across all touch points is important not just in terms of the customer experience, but also in tangible terms such as customer loyalty and retention. Customer loyalty is a tangible. If you doubt this, just calculate the average revenue each of your customers contributes to your profitability.

Opportunities coming from the internet, bricks and mortar, referrals, e-mail, lead generation efforts, customer service and support must all be engaged with a connected focus. CRM must bond all these touch points to provide clients a seamless experience. Moreover, having a CRM ecosystem that shares the right information at the right time also increases sales to existing customers.

Imagine customer service sharing with sales customers and profiles based on solid business rules that identify new cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Effectively and proactively implementing such strategies will result in greater profits and customer satisfaction. Customer service can become a profit center launching many sales opportunities.

Implementing CRM that is specific to your company requires more than customizing some fields. You must engineer your instance to reflect a cohesive customer centric experience. Aligning with industry specific best practices and your ‘business model’ builds your brand and long-term success.