What a concept!
Google Adwords, eBay's Skype and Salesforce.com are a potent collaboration of three market leaders. Each have direct to user sales models and self-administered services. All three dominate the small business sectors, or are on their way to dominate.
The first $1 billion of Google Adwords users were small businesses. I know, I was the marketing executive at one of them. My miniscule marketing budget was totally focused on getting to the top of the paid and organic searches for the rather cryptic but important to us, 'AS2'. Being there at the moment of search was the key to getting involved in a deal or not.
Skype and Salesforce.com enabled a collaboration earlier in May 2007, where users of Salesforce.com could click on a user contact and their Skype client would begin dialing, or when finished with a SkypeOut can have the client's record popup so that the record of the call can be detailed. This simple integration improves the productivity of Salesforce.com users, who otherwise have to cut and paste, or retype the phone number of the user. A few seconds saved on each of dozens of repetitive processes adds up to serious productivity improvement in no time.
The integration also enables screen pops, so that when so-and-so client calls on the SkypeIn, the context of the contact record appears in the browser.
The more recently announced Adwords and Salesforce.com collaboration is a backoffice integration that simplifies the marketer's job by allowing a responder to a search advertisement to complete a request for followup to be automatically entered as a 'LEAD' in the Salesforce.com system. But Salesforce.com allows the Adword program attributes - campaign, keyword, ad - to follow through the sales cycle - pipeline, forecast and results, and allows the marketer to adjust their keywords, campaigns as feedback from the complete sales cycle drives the search engine advertising input to the model. Tightening this integration lets the marketer gain access to information faster and more conveniently. That way better decisions are possible. Knowing which keywords generate the most $ return, for example, can provide better support for the critical ones and weaker support for those less deserving.
Although an integration like this may not be the best for every business or Skype user, or AdWords marketer or Salesforce.com user, it does have a role to play in improving the productivity and decision making of their users - something our economy has plenty of room for.
Peter Brockmann is a high tech consultant and market researcher. Learn more at www.brockmann.com.
It is called an Enterprise Mashup. All the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) vendors in CRM such as Netsuite, Salesboom.com and RightNow offer bi-directional web services APIs that can be used to create similar software mash-ups on the fly.
Posted by: Tom Greenberg | August 19, 2007 at 11:25 AM