Forgive the Star Wars reference, but since they (officially) announced Force.com today I wanted to be one of the first to make a Jedi joke honoring tomorrow’s keynote, George Lucas.
Force.com is Salesforce.com’s new platform for application development, “platform as a service,” complete with some pretty cool flexibility with regard to advanced control over the UI. With that flexibility comes the ability to easily develop applications for a variety of platforms, including tablet PCs and even an iPhone. I don’t know if I see any companies rolling out iPhones to their field teams yet, but when someone does Force.com will be ready.
All in all it was really fascinating stuff, especially if you are a developer…but I’m not a developer so I was actually more intrigued with some of the new marketing enhancements coming in the Winter ’08 release. Specifically, the ability to create campaign hierarchies (think easily rolling a multi-channel marketing campaign featuring email, telephone and direct mail pieces into one easy to track campaign “family”) and some advanced reporting. Overall, very nice.
And of course, everyone’s number one requested feature, the ability to edit single fields in Salesforce.com without having to go to a separate edit screen. Winter ’08 is going to be a big release, and I’m looking forward to trying it out.
For the breakout sessions I went to see Salesforce.com’s Kraig Swensrud talk about best practices in utilizing Salesforce for Google Adwords. I’ve seen him talk before, but he is just so knowledgeable with regard to pay-per-click it is always fun to hear him speak about it. I cornered him on the Expo Hall floor, and he agreed to come speak to the San Francisco User Group in November. If you have any questions about tracking your Google performance in Salesforce.com or best practices with regard to landing pages he’s your man.
I also went to a lead management discussion, with the highlight being Bluebird Marketing’s Tricia Reilly speaking about some familiar topics to readers of this blog…lead scoring, communication between sales and marketing, and data quality. Check out her blog here.
Overall a great first day. Come back tomorrow for more highlights.
