TMCnews Featured Article
January 26, 2011
Salesforce.com Sales Software: Cloud 2 and the New CRM
By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor
There is much excitement in sales software and Salesforce.com (News 
- Alert) is leading much of that excitement. In this recent Salesforce.com customer resources piece, executive vice president of CRM, Alex Dayon shared his predictions for 2011. Dayon recently spent time in New York, Boston and San Francisco to meet with industry influencers and members of the media.
Much of his focus in sales software was on Cloud 2, considered the new paradigm of enterprise cloud computing.Cloud 2 is designed to be social, mobile and open and as a result, is changing the game overall for CRM. Dayon’s time in key U.S. locations followed closely on the heels of the recent Spring ’11 release from Salesforce.com.
This solution is the 36th release in the company’s history and expected to be a strong industry performer. Dayon also shared his insight in a brief conversation that was posted on the Salesforce.com page and is the first in a series of planned interviews with Salesforce.com executives that will be posted this week. The focus of these interviews will be on what 2011 holds for CRM, collaboration, platform and application development, partner ecosystems and more. In his interview, Dayon shared that CRM systems need to be built for Cloud 2 to optimize customer success in 2011 and CRM systems offered by legacy vendors are truly the antithesis of Cloud 2.
These systems are not social, cannot be accessed by any mobile device and are not open.When asked about trends looking forward to 2011, Dayon shared that there are actually three: social networking where customers engage together outside the traditional channels of CRM; 2) enterprise collaboration; and 3) business intelligence, demonstrating a radical shift to a collaborative decision making process.
Dayon also shared what is most exciting for Salesforce.com – CRM due to Chatter as it changes everything in collaboration and speed. Service Cloud is delivering new components to deflect interactions to the website or social networks. And, sales and BI are offering empowerment to allow the organization to be faster in their reactions to the business.
The competitive landscape, according to Dayon, in 2011 will be exciting as competitors are still rebuilding old CRM systems that really don’t connect with the new world of customer interaction. This will ensure customer companies do not get the capabilities they need to perform well in the new world of social interactions.As for Dayon’s CRM predictions, he highlighted that message disruption is essential. Waiting is no longer an option – you want to engage in customer conversations and know where customers are. We will also see a rapid integration of enterprise collaboration and social integration. He also stressed that Salesforce.com is very excited about being the leader in the CRM market.
Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Juliana Kenny
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