Salesforce.com Sets the Agenda for the Next Decade of CRM Success with Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 18 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Salesforce.com Dreamforce Conference -- Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing company, today set the agenda for the next 10 years of customer success in CRM (http://www.salesforce.com) with the Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2. Sales Cloud 2, the world's most popular and complete sales application, is delivering unprecedented customer success and generating market momentum by bringing the best of the consumer Web to business applications. Service Cloud 2 represents the next chapter in the customer service revolution, exponentially increasing the quality of customer service while lowering the cost by leveraging the expertise of the community. Together, Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2 help companies achieve a 360-degree view of their customers at a time when it is vital to remain on top of every lead, prospect and customer.

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Sales Cloud 2 - The World's Most Complete and Popular Sales Application

-- In 1999, salesforce.com revolutionized sales force automation (http://www.salesforce.com/crm/sales-force-automation/) by introducing the Sales Cloud and making it as easy to use as consumer sites like Amazon.com and eBay. The industry response was nothing short of amazing, making the Sales Cloud the world's most complete and popular sales application. -- Today, thousands of companies are experiencing success with the Sales Cloud, including Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Yamaha Corporation of America and Dell. -- A recent customer satisfaction survey of more than 6,000 global salesforce.com customers found that executives surveyed are growing their businesses using Salesforce CRM, with a reported 40% increase in forecast accuracy, 27% increase in sales revenue and 32% increase in sales productivity(1). -- The Sales Cloud has been honored with countless industry awards and accolades including eight consecutive CODiE Awards for the "Best Relationship Management Solution." Salesforce.com was also placed in the leaders quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation(2).

-- Salesforce.com has delivered 30 seasonal releases to customers with more than 1,000 features over the last 10 years. Salesforce.com has set the tone for the industry with an unmatched pace of constant innovation.

Sales Cloud 2 - Bringing the Best of the Consumer Web to Business Applications

Looking ahead to the next decade, the Sales Cloud 2 is bringing the best of the consumer Web, with its popular services like Twitter, Evite, Google and Youtube, to Sales Cloud 2 customers. In the past year alone, salesforce.com has delivered more than 150 new features and three seasonal releases, creating the world's most complete sales application. The new innovations focused on helping sales professionals drive more sales and generate more leads include:

-- Salesforce for Twitter: Twitter provides a free platform for users to answer the question "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or less and broadcast the answer to a community. Salesforce for Twitter will help sales and marketing professionals increase their pipeline and sales by helping marketers convert Twitter conversations into customers and make it easy for sales reps to tweet back to interested prospects. Marketers can run Twitter campaigns that capture interest on Twitter and then measure the return on their investment. Sales reps can also send and track tweets to customers or prospects right from a contact record. -- Real-time Quotes: With real-time quotes, sales reps can now use the Sales Cloud to automatically populate quotes with relevant customer data. Sales reps can generate and send sales quotes with just a few clicks, as power sellers do on eBay. -- Cloud Scheduler: The cloud scheduler will allow companies to schedule meetings with colleagues and outside customers and partners. The cloud scheduler will also allow users to set up meetings from within a contact record with drag and drop simplicity. Built on the Force.com platform, users will be able to automatically find available meeting times and schedule business meetings with colleagues, customers and partners by sending a meeting invite as Evite users do. -- Mobile Content: Sales Cloud users can now view any document accessible through the Salesforce CRM content library, like presentations and spreadsheets, on their mobile phone. Not only can users view the content, but they can also send the content to prospects and customers directly from their mobile device. The new mobile content feature makes accessing content on a phone as easy as finding and watching Youtube videos on a mobile device. -- New Charting and Report Builder: Companies now have even more control when it comes to building and analyzing their dashboards and reports. New chart types, color options, and data hovers make it even easier to get fast insights from dashboards. Users can also now drill into specific subsets of chart data by clicking on chart sub-sections, like a specific wedge of a pie chart. Building reports will be faster and more intuitive with the new reporter builder, and users will be instantly brought to the underlying report data, like users of Google Analytics. Users can create reports with drag and drop ease and preview the report and corresponding charts in real time - drag in a new column or field and instantly see the impact on reports and charts.

-- Partner Connection Finder: The partner connection finder lets Sales Cloud 2 customers find new partners to connect and share information with in real time. Customers can now easily find new partners who are also salesforce.com users and start sharing leads and opportunity data as easily as sharing photos with friends on Flickr.

Service Cloud 2 - Customer Success and Market Momentum for the New Customer Service Standard

-- More than 8,000 companies have selected the Service Cloud for their customer service operations - representing a 175% growth in business year over year. -- Companies using the Service Cloud have seen a 28% increase in customer satisfaction, 25% increase in call deflection, 30% increase in first call resolution, 37% rise in service and support productivity and a 26% increase in customer retention, according to a recent third party survey(3).

-- Salesforce.com was placed in the leaders quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Support Contacts(4).

Service Cloud 2 - New Product Innovation for Customer Service and Support

Salesforce.com announced the next chapter in the customer service revolution with Service Cloud 2. New product innovations introduced for the customer service industry include:

-- Salesforce Knowledge: Salesforce.com offers the world's first multi-tenant knowledge base (http://www.salesforce.com/crm/customer-service-support/knowledge-base-s ystem/) that is fully integrated with CRM and designed for cloud computing. Salesforce Knowledge delivers one multi-channel knowledge base for agents, customers and partners. The core Service Cloud 2 knowledge base delivers the same benefits available to any application built on the Force.com platform, including rapid deployment, immediate results, simple customizations, automatic upgrades and more. -- Salesforce Answers: For years, customer service centers have been limited to knowledge articles produced by company employees and have not benefited from the explosion of consumer wisdom that exists across the Web. Utilizing Service Cloud 2, Salesforce Answers will deliver a unique online experience that helps companies leverage the expertise in the cloud for their customers. Salesforce Answers will enable companies to start the conversation with a unique online customer community, crowd-source knowledge and leverage Facebook. -- Salesforce for Twitter: In today's Web-driven world where there is an expectation of real-time interaction, Salesforce for Twitter and Service Cloud 2 give companies an easy way to join the real-time customer service conversations happening on Twitter by enabling them to search Twitter in real-time, monitor service issues on Twitter, join Twitter conversations, establish a Twitter support channel and deliver real-time knowledge. -- Five-Minute Upgrades: Salesforce.com is unveiling another revolution for the cloud computing industry with the new five-minute upgrade. The five-minute upgrade represents an incredible technology achievement demonstrating the power of the Force.com platform and infrastructure. Never before have companies been able to take advantage of the latest technology innovations and evolve their customer service at the rate they are able to with Service Cloud 2. Salesforce.com is the only company able to provide its customers with five-minute upgrade technology because of salesforce.com's real-time, mirrored data centers and multi-tenant infrastructure.

-- Cisco and Salesforce.com: Salesforce.com and Cisco have come together to deliver a complete contact center in the cloud. The Cisco and salesforce.com Customer Interaction Cloud brings together salesforce.com's Service Cloud 2 with Cisco Unified Communications. The solution empowers small and medium sized companies to run their customer service completely in the cloud. Salesforce.com and Cisco share a vision of moving technology into the cloud and leveraging social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google to deliver services to their customers where they are already collaborating.

Supporting Quotes

-- "Today's announcement marks the next chapter in CRM success for salesforce.com customers. Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2 represent the best the industry has to offer for sales and customer service professionals, helping companies grow their business even in times like these," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. -- "HD Supply Facilities Maintenance is a prime example of how cloud computing can help a company transition from manual processes to sophisticated opportunity management quickly," said Mike D'Adamo, vice president of sales at HD Supply Facilities Maintenance. "The Sales Cloud has transformed our business, and we're looking forward to getting our hands on the new innovations from salesforce.com so we can continue to enhance our ability to exceed our customers' expectations and gain market share." -- "Salesforce CRM has helped us improve our business in every way, and it's translating into greater profitability," said Brian Vass, vice president of marketing at The Sant Corporation. "The Sales Cloud has helped our company achieve 83% revenue growth and we are resolving customer support issues 60% faster with the Service Cloud. We've reaped all these benefits of cloud computing without the hassle of deploying and maintaining software. With the new features coming from salesforce.com, we are confident that our success will continue to grow."

-- "Salesforce CRM has set the agenda for the CRM industry over the past 10 years. The innovations introduced for Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2 ensure that salesforce.com will be one of the leaders to watch for years to come," said Rebecca Wettemann, VP Research, Nucleus Research.

Pricing and Availability

-- Salesforce Knowledge is generally available today. -- Salesforce for Twitter is available today at no additional charge on the AppExchange for Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited Edition customers. -- Chart mixer, color picker, mobile content and partner connection finder features are available today for salesforce.com customers. -- Real-time quotes is currently available in pilot and is currently scheduled to be generally available in February 2010. -- Salesforce Answers is currently scheduled to be available in pilot by January 2010 and to become generally available by February 2010. -- The five-minute upgrade feature is currently available in closed beta and is scheduled to be a limited pilot starting in February 2010. -- The cloud scheduler feature is currently scheduled to be in pilot in February 2010. -- The report builder feature is currently scheduled to be in developer preview in February 2010.

-- The combined solution from salesforce.com and Cisco is currently scheduled to be generally available in the first quarter of 2010.

Supporting Resources

-- For more information on the Sales Cloud, please visit, http://www.salesforce.com/salescloud2 -- For more information on the Service Cloud, please visit http://www.salesforce.com/servicecloud2

-- Follow salesforce.com on Twitter @salesforce

About the Magic Quadrants

The Gartner Magic Quadrants are copyrighted 2009 by Gartner, Inc., and are reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. The company's portfolio of Salesforce CRM applications, available at http://www.salesforce.com/products/ , has revolutionized the ways that companies collaborate and communicate with their customers across sales, marketing and service. The company's Force.com platform ( http://www.salesforce.com/platform/ ) helps customers, partners and developers to quickly build powerful business applications to run every part of the enterprise in the cloud. Based on salesforce.com's real-time, multitenant architecture, Salesforce CRM and Force.com offer the fastest path to customer success with cloud computing.

As of October 31, 2009, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 67,900 customers including Allianz Commercial, Dell, Dow Jones Newswires, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, and SunTrust Banks. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM". For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com , or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.

Copyright (c) 2009 salesforce.com, inc. All rights reserved. Salesforce and the "no software" logo are registered trademarks of salesforce.com, inc., and salesforce.com owns other registered and unregistered trademarks. Other names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

(1) Third-party research of 6,000+ customers by Market Tools, Inc. commissioned by salesforce.com, June 2009 (2) Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation by Robert P. DeSisto July 22, 2009 (3) Third-party research of 6,000+ customers by Market Tools, Inc. commissioned by salesforce.com, June 2009 (4) Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers, by Michael Maoz, April 2009

SOURCE salesforce.com