Salesforce.com is introducing new and updated products based on its Lightning application technology that are designed to enable businesses to run their sales operations entirely on mobile devices.
SAN FRANCISCO—Salesforce.com is using its Lightning technology to revamp its suite of cloud Customer Relationship Management applications to enable businesses of every size to run their sales operations on smartphones and tablets.“Mobile isn’t just about bringing the Salesforce app to the phone, that will never work,” said CEO Marc Benioff at an event here for customers, analysts and press.“We've a vision that every company should have the ability to run their business on a phone.” He noted that every application ever built for Salesforce is available to run on a mobile device and that apps like its Chatter for collaboration have been “reconceptualized” for mobile.The introduction of a new interface and capabilities of the Salesforce CRM platform based on its so-called Lightning technology at the company’s Dreamforce conference in September was the start of a major shift at Salesforce. In keeping with the February 2 event’s Super Bowl theme, Benioff said the announcements were designed to be like a “half time” between the annual Dreamforce conference, showing new products and a peak at what’s next. During a Q&A session, Benioff said the company had to “hit the reset button on every one of our apps” to keep them at the cutting edge, “which is what we’ve done with Lightning.Among the new announcements are:Saleforce SteelBrick CPQ that uses technology it acquired when from the earlier acquisition of SteelBrick. Where Sales Cloud gives sales reps leads and opportunities to generate new business, SteelBrick CPQ completes the sales cycle covering everything from sales leads-to-cash.Lightning Voice, a new feature embedded in Sales Cloud Lightning that gives sales reps click-to-call, auto-logging of calls and call-forwarding to take calls from wherever they are.SalesforceIQ Inbox that basically brings the CRM features of a separate app right to the email inbox. One of its features prompts sales reps to enter the results of a sales call, questions, next steps and more right after they complete a customer contact. This relieves reps of having to set aside time afterwards to enter all of the information for multiple calls into a separate CRM app.Salesforce1 Mobile gives Salesforce users the ability to enter information offline on Android and iOS, for example during an airline flight. All the information updated across the platform once the device reconnects to the network.SalesWave App is a data-driven analytics app for sales reps that includes new dashboards for pipeline trending, performance benchmarking and activity management designed to help reps close more deals.The event also featured Salesforce customers talking about their experience using the platform and why they chose it. Julie Sweet, Group CEO of North America for giant consulting firm Accenture, said she’s been very pleased with how quickly it was to implement.“We went from zero to 25,000 employees worldwide in five months, that’s tremendous,” said Sweet. She stated Salesforce users at Accenture are getting information and developing insights more quickly than with the software it replaced. “I can play with the data and look at the future and different outcomes far more easily,” she said.
- eWeek