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One of the first companies to embrace and fly up to the clouds, Marc Benioff, a former Oracle executive launched Salesforce in March 1999. The longtime leader in Salesforce automation (SFA), Salesforce is one of the few solutions, which successfully crosses over multiple areas of functions providing mass mailing, campaign management, lead management and marketing automation functions. It also provides social media monitoring as being a cornerstone in customer relationship management. Marc and Mark, as in Zukerberg, have been out to lunch on more than one occasion and Marc’s understanding of the impact of social media platforms evolved into the launch of Chatter, allowing employees to create profiles, socialize and instant message.
It continues to evolve, grow, expand its platform allowing developers all over the world the ability to extend and customize its platform. The platform extensibility and capabilities are currently why Salesforce is ranked the most innovative company in America by Forbes magazine.
Strengths
Salesforce automation, customer relationship marketing, marketing automation functions (originally created for sales teams but have now evolved for marketing teams), including lead management, campaign management, mass email, social media monitoring, social media engagement & social networking.
Weaknesses
Salesforce, similar to SharePoint and Eloqua, is built for the enterprise. The platform had its roots in Salesforce Automation, and now really has extended to be all things to all people. There are other specialized platforms in the market, however, whose core focus is more exclusive, and you specialized applications, rather than the “all-in-one” Salesforce solution for “all of your needs”. ZenDesk, as an example is a very rich and focused application competing with the Salesforce “Service Cloud” - ZenDesk may offer a better cloud-based application for your customer service & support needs. Pipedrive offers a lighter sales force enablement tool, which isn’t as “heavy” an application and is great for mid-size companies with not as deep integration, or who do not have needs for complex features and functionality, and simply want a light tool to track their sales funnel.
Mad Tip
A powerful platform for cross-functional teams to be working within the same platform and sharing information to drive your business forward. There is lots of “mash up” potential and ability to interface to other cloud tools within the platform as well, or make customizations for your business. Again, built for the enterprise, the Salesforce platform is very scalable and extendable. Companies can not only integrate a lot of applications into Salesforce, but they can also use the platform as a starting point, and build off its own custom applications and features into the platform.
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