What Enterprise Marketers Should Takeaway from Salesforce1

Salesforce the ultimate sales monster that is the top CRM for almost every company. And at TrackMaven, we began using this beast several months ago and it’s become a permanent fixture. There isn’t a day where I don’t log into Salesforce, as a marketer, and I know our sales team can fully attest to Salesforce being one of their lifebloods.

No one on the team was able to make it to Dreamforce; however that doesn’t mean we didn’t try to stay in the loop in all of the happenings. The biggest announcement at Dreamforce that we wanted to stay in the know about was the new Salesforce1 platform.

I use both Salesforce and Hubspot, our marketing automation, almost equally, so I wanted to dive further into Salesforce1. I watched almost all of the demo videos and read all of the top articles about Salesforce1. At first glance it seems that is mainly for a sales team and developers; however, there are some takeaways and major implications for marketers as well.

What Enterprise Marketers Should Takeaway from Salesforce1

Importance of Mobile and Simplicity

Benioff during his keynote sited Gartner’s report saying that by 2017 there will be 5 billion people on mobile, so now is one of the most important times for enterprise tech to make the shift from stagnate desktops to more mobility. Salesforce1 does just that. Salesforce1 is first a mobile app for the enterprise suite. With the Salesfroce1 app you can access custom pages or marketing dashboards that you have set up, chatter There are two components for the Salesforce1, first the actual Salesforce1 app and then SalesforceA which is the admin side for Administrators to “edit, unlock, freeze, and deactivate user accounts, reset passwords, and assign permission sets.”

I talked to my fellow B2B Marketer, Trevor Lynn, from Social Tables about Salesforce1 and he said it best “the mobile app is what they should have already had 12 months ago.” In general, the mobile app of Salesforce1 is much better than their previous versions. The data is cleaner, the interface is friendlier, and allows for you as a marketer to continue to move beyond your desk without fear that data will slip through the cracks.

Saleforce1 sets the tone that mobile is very important, but also fills the need for centralized simplicity. With the amount of content, analytics, tools and channels a marketer must manage there is an urgency to create all-in-one platforms like Salesforce1. Salesforce1 is one of the first platforms to lead the way and enterprise marketers need to take note that the desktops won’t have the rule forever.

Relevancy and Following Opportunities

When a lead comes in and then becomes an opportunity, marketing shouldn’t just handoff to sales blindly and leave it to them. Although, Sales owns the lead and will have the now opportunities attention for the most part, marketing can help with the sales throughout the entirety of the funnel. With Salesforce1, marketers have at their fingertips to check on how an opportunity is progressing.

For example, let’s say a lead, turned opportunity, came in from Google searching for ways to track competitors’ Twitter accounts. The sales team will see this and hopefully cater their messaging to that. But let’s say this opportunity becomes a little unresponsive and the deal is on the verge of getting lost. This is where a marketer can step in. Seeing this on the go through the Salesforce1 app, you as the marketer can step in with relevancy, potentially follow this opportunity on Twitter and maybe shoot over extra resources to the Salesperson to send over to the opportunity. Salesforce1 has collaboration and social at it’s core for connectivity across your team helping to align sales and marketing even further.

Another important note on the customer side — In one of the first videos that I watched about Salesforce1 it exclaimed that this platform was for customers exclaiming that it’s the Internet of Customers and “behind every app, every device, and every connection, is a customer.” If you aren’t relevant, providing support, and moving ahead of your customers to provide them with what they will need in the mobile future. The mobility, ability to follow opportunities quicker, and help provide relevancy into the sales pipeline as the enterprise marketer are all things that are provided in Salesforce1.

App Integrations

As an enterprise marketer, think about the number of channels you have to keep track of…ok now think about the number of apps…and then now think about all of your other tasks. Head exploding yet? I rarely write down all of the apps I use or attempt too because I know it will just overwhelm me. However, Salesforce1 is attempting to streamline all of this by adding in the capability to easily grab APIs and connect with any of the apps on the AppExchange. Salesforce has millions of apps on the AppExchange and they all integrate with Salesforce1 bringing everything into one place for you as a marketer.

Here are some quick links to all of the demo video paths of the Salesforce1 platform:

Salesforce1
Salesforce1 Platform Demo and Overview
Download Link to the Mobile App

Salesforce1 is downloaded and ready to go on my iPhone; did you download it yet?