There’s been a lot of speculation about Salesforce and Google lately. Tomorrow the two companies will announce a marketing and distribution alliance that will tightly bind Google Adwords to existing Salesforce tools that track sales from online advertising.
Salesforce and Google will be starting an extended partnership encompassing marketing and distribution of their products across 43 countries. It will begin with the integration of Google Adwords and Salesforce’s lead generation tools into a new application called “Group Edition”, available here. Group edition replaces Salseforces earlier version Team edition.
Group Edition will enable Adwords users to track Adsense referrals to their site and build up a customer profile based on a the data a user enters into a site and their navigation path. Businesses will handle their Adwords campaigns through Google, as usual, but Salesforce takes over from there. When potential customers click through to the businesses site, Google tells Salesforce what search terms brought the user to the page and where they navigate throughout the site.
It is our understanding that the technology behind the salesforce side of the deal comes from Kieden, an company that they acquired late last year.
Site owners can also drop “web lead forms” onto the site, which can collect any other customer information (names, email, phone numbers) and bundle it into customer profile. All of this data is enumerated on a dashboard view, which you data on lead generation, sales, and growth. As with any other Salesforce application, users will also be able to mash up the data with other AppExchange Apps. The application will cost $600 for 5 user accounts and come with $50 of Adwords credits.
This will be another nail in the coffin of MS Office. It can’t come soon enough for my liking.
Rather lame…as I mentioned in my comment on your previous GoogForce post earlier, SF needs all the hype it can get to keep its stock price up and it is unlikely that it will meet the growth rate targets demanded by its current PE ratio, considering that
* SAP will soon enter the small business market,
* Microsoft at some point will get its act together with Dynamics (Microsoft has made so many mistakes with Dynamics in the past, that the next move they make has to be better than what they’ve done in the past)
* And Google Apps strung together may be able to create CRM functionality that is sufficient for a small business.
Congratulations to Kraig Swensrud for his innovation in creating Kieden and ultimately enabling this partnership to happen
I think lead is more value for web site onwer then the CPC based methods so i hope this will godd for all the web site onwer to get good traffic and coversions
Heyo, not that it’s a big deal, but the link to Salesforce Group Edition is incorrect. Just pull out that ending period and it works.
Cheers!
This is going to be a big disappointment relative to speculation on the news. Any good SEM firm was already able to integrate and track leads generated by Adwords and optimize bids on the fly using bid management systems. SalesForce was already able to automatically integrate data from online forms. And to top it off, Google Analytics was quite adept at letting users compare Adwords costs to keyword level conversion tracking. The news is nothing more than a new interface to view these stats within SalesForce. Furthermore, it doesn’t look like the end user can take action in SalesForce based upon the results. Obviously, there’s potential for a tighter integration, but this is a half attempt (admittedly at half the price of the previous version).
well, Google dealing with other company in partnership, i think is just the start of taking over that company. maybe after sometimes, we’ll hear rumors that Google is acquiring that company.
we will know all thing tomorrow but not now!
This will definitely help the launch of the Cost Per Action program…
You have to admit that this is great for Google. Now there’s an excuse for a company’s sales people to waste all sorts of marketing dollars on Google AdWords ads. The typical “salesperson” knows absolutely nothing about marketing, let alone how to manage a PPC account properly without wasting a bunch of money.
They’ve been doing this for ages through App Exchange…what am I missing?
Great partnership … -RB
Google continues to form great partnership.
Part of their secret to success is to align themselves with adjacent market.
They have also done an exceptional job at retaining a steady flow of customers and snatching up the search market
Other tech moguls should learn for you fellows.
Congrats Google !
I think that sound you hear is a million collective yawns.
I was expecting something much bigger. This is just a re-packaging of capabilities that have been available for months using AppExchange.
While this is great for an Enterprise-level business that can afford to let SalesForce control most of their data, their both forgetting about the SMB market.
Etelos has built a very robust CRM tool that integrates quite well with Google Apps (or Netvibes or Pageflakes or Windows Live). More information can be found at http://www.eteloscrm.com.
As Mike speculated earlier, there isn’t much to this announcement. LAME.
As Matt Marshall captures well at http://ventureb...gle-salesforce/
Salesforce has been floundering for a strategy in this whole office apps space. Marc Benioff has had a history of talking up companies only to be ditched well shy of the altar: Writely (Google took them), Numsum (RIP), iRows (that damn Google again!) and now lately he is talking up EditGrid, with reported dalliances with Zoho & ThinkFree thrown in. It is getting pretty lonely up there for Benioff …
There’s basically no new product news in this announcement. It’s the same old Salesforce for Google AdWords product. It’s great to mashup Google and Salesforce.com into a single seamless process (it’s something we do very well at http://www.marketo.com with our Marketo Search Marketing offering). But it doesn’t address any of the key pain points that marketers feel when trying to use AdWords to drive new business leads.
1) Landing pages are critical for driving conversions and improving ranking, but 3 out of 4 companies still send clicks to the home page. It’s just too hard to get the right IT support to have enough targeted pages. Google-Salesforce provide no ability to create landing pages without IT support.
2) Bidding is hard for most marketers, and Google-Salesforce provides no help or support for bid optimization.
3) A click is just the beginning. Only 25% of the people that click on an ad and fill out a form are sales-ready. What’s needed is a disciplined marketing-driven process for helping qualified prospects who are not yet sales-ready to move through their buying process. There’s nothing in this announcement about that either.
This product looks weak. Sorry but the tools that our own company developed (with less resources than Salesforce for sure) in house are more formidable.
you have to be a complete idiot to think that this ‘alliance’ is going to ‘go after’ Microsoft—a quarter trillion dollar market cap co. with 48 billion in cash who has invented and owned just about any software marketplace they’ve wanted to—wait until MSFT unloads the guns in CRM.
CEO of Salesforce is a blowhard.
Another google partnership. Maybe google will buy salesforce too one day..
For sure there has been a huge buzz around this big alliance announcement and many would have expected much bigger consequences from this partnership!
The limited benefits of the Adwords integration into salesforce only consists in offering an interface gathering already available existing services. The value added here is far from being exceptional!
I have been personally using Google Adwords and Salesforce for a long time now and this new partnership won’t allow me to do more than what I’ve been able to do for far! Most of companies have been able to integrate and track leads generated by Adwords and at the same time optimize their bids. Furthermore the web-to-lead form function was already there before the alliance exists. FormVester, a free application for Salesforce (available at the AppEchange directory) for example has been able to capture data from any online forms and generate them as new leads directly into Salesforce long time before the alliance was done!
So yes, nothing really new here and the entire marketing buzz around this partnership announcement may appear a bit disappointing.
However, I’m convinced that the real effects of this partnership will take its entire dimension on the next following month/years. It is obvious that both of the companies would benefit from this partnership, especially if they want to be serious competitors of Microsoft, but they need to deliver more valuable services to both Salesforce and Google users!”
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