Salesforce – Another Sign of Their Business Brilliance
WOW…talk about timing on this news. I’m sure Salesforce didn’t time this with the Facebook fiasco (or did they?), but the news that they now have a Winter 07 preview section of their web site is another great business move by salesforce showing that they are listening to their users. What are they doing? There are previews of all the new features that salesforce may roll out this winter that users can vote on. This shows they are very serious about giving their customers what they want. If you are a web 2.0 company (or any company in general), make sure you make your product decisions with the help of your customer. It looks like they are investing in a desktop calendar and are looking for customer feedback. I’ve used salesforce personally, and I can see the future possibility of organizing your whole job in salesforce if they keep adding features to their already rich feature-set. Microsoft Outlook could face some stiff competition to hold their ground with companies utilizing salesforce. Managers would love it if people used salesforce to send all their e-mails and tracked all their phone calls, since custom reports and dashboards are so simple ot set up. In addition to their calendar application, they have lots of logos to vote on for Winter 07, the most popular being the image below. 
So, the question Magnus raises is this- Is anyone doing a better job of listening and communicating with their users than salesforce? What do you think?
I think you’re absolutely right about Web 2.0 businesses needing input from customers about which features to include. These days, it’s so easy to get instant feedback from a wide demographic that there’s really no excuse not to do a bit of marketing research first. Facebook, are you listening??
Let’s hope they are. I have always been a huge Facebook fan, so I’m hoping they come through this ordeal in one piece. If facebook had launched this with the support of their community, it would have been a hit. They need to listen to Scoble and start engaging bloggers around the blogosphere to win some support back.
[...] I just watched Robert Scoble’s interview with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and it was very insightful. I’ll definitely be tuning into future interviews on the Scoble Show (this was the 1st one). Sun’s biggest challenge according to Jonathan? Getting the word out to the developer and IT community. Given that I love the future prospects of Salesforce, another thing I found interesting was how impressed he seemed with Salesforce.com (one of their larger clients). I agree with his point that more and more small businesses are going to start turning to salesforce to handle their CRM needs rather than try to develop something in-house. How does this help Sun you might ask? Economies of scale- as an example, it is more efficient for Sun to work with very large datacenters than to try to help a small flower shop build a system to handle their own IT needs. [...]
[...] certainly a huge fan of Salesforce and their future growth possibilities. I think every company can benefit [...]