Salesforce update includes new content packaging feature

Salesforce.com [1] is known mostly as a CRM tool, but in April, 2007, it bought content management vendor Koral and content management services were integrated into the product. In its most recent release, known as the Spring 09 release, Salesforce has developed some new functionality for packaging, delivering and tracking content in Salesforce Content, the company's content management component.

Sales people can now search for content, then assemble it into a content package. After creating this package, Salesforce Content generates a unique URL, which the salesperson can send to a prospect for viewing. When the prospect accesses the custom web page, they are presented with an iTunes cover view-type flow and they can quickly view the materials by dragging a slider. What's more, they can share the content with others inside the organization, which provides a way to have social media effect inside a large organization where different members of the prospect team share information.

Al Falcione, Salesforce.com's senior director of product marketing says, "This leverages Salesforce Content where companies can manage content and now can assemble and deliver content in the cloud." Falcione says that makes sales people smarter about how they share content.

This functionality makes it easy for sales people to assemble packages of existing content quickly and generate custom packages for prospects. In addition, once the content is delivered, the sales person can view usage statistics to see how many people are viewing various parts of the package.

There are a lot of intersections between CRM and content management and this approach makes a lot of sense for organizations. If your company is using Salesforce.com, it gives your sales staff tools for sharing content with customers, then letting the customers share content to help sales people get a message flowing throughout a prospect organization.

For more information:
- see the Salesforce.com press release [2]
- also see Integrating CRM and Content Management [3]on InsideCRM

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Salesforce.com news from FierceCIO [4]