Salesforce

Thats right, 51,800 companies ranging from fortune 500 giants to small startup businesses, that show many customers Salesforce.com has according to their latest press release dated 5th January 2009. Thats not a customer base, that is a market!

The database management software company Ingres was their latest large addition to the impressive list of Salesforce customers which just seems to keep expanding rapidly. This base of 51,800 companies is a fantastic market segment for several technology companies who have products and offerings specifically built as solutions for existing Salesforce customers and keeping a tab on which is the latest company to turn to the Salesforce CRM is essential and spot early opportunities. A perfect example of this scenario is how Intacct was selected to integrate in this deal to help with financials, Vtrenz for the marketing automation needs and Xactly for sales compensation as add ons.

With such a wide market base for AppExchange and Force.com applications, building strong marketing data on Salesforce.com users and gathering account intelligence on them can effectively give you an edge while exploring opportunities and requirements in this market. Building this kind of a database is a long and painful process with the need to gather intelligence on each potential account as well as locating suitable decision makers. Over the course of the next year ActiveContacts will look at expanding the number of Salesforce using target accounts within the SFDC database and provide marketers updated data on this every expanding market. It may not be anywhere close to 51,800 for now but every lead counts!

 

 


Salesforce.com Customer Database

 

Our Salesforce.com customers database with decision maker contacts just finished getting an overhaul with a complete verification check to update and weed out any business contact data which is no longer active. The process which has kept the ActiveContacts data team busy over the last few weeks is finally complete and contact information for a few thousand of decison makers within almost 1000 Salesforce.com customer companies were checked for quality and updated to the online database.

 

There will be further updates on the number of companies within the database as we work to improve on this SFDC customer list. We aim to continue adding to this database to help appexchange partners and companies which develop Salesforce.com applications which need a reliable customer list of companies using salesforce.com with decision makers they can reach out to for their sales and marketing. We will have more updates on this soon but for those who have been looking for salesforce.com customers, the ActiveContacts SFDC Database is fresh!

 

 


Salesforce.com Companies:Who is Your Decision Maker

 The rise of Salesforce.com as the CRM of choice amongst tens of thousands of companies also triggered the market for salesforce add on applications for salesforce automation, document management, analytics, security and a lot more. With over 800 such applications which can switch your salesforce.com capabilites to nitrous oxide mode, its given companies that use salesforce.com a plethora of applications to choose from but at the same time with that many applications, several companies wouldn’t be completely aware of all these options. This is where the marketing and sales teams for these companies face their challenges and compete for a piece of that SFDC pie.

Whatever the application and fuction of the product they have to sell, there are two factors that every appexchange product marketing team needs to start with:

  1. A list or databse of Salesforce.com Customers
  2. Identified decision makers or business contacts within those accounts who are involved with SFDC
The first point is really the key qualifier for any company selling a salesforce related product or service into a company. If the company is using Salesforce.com within the company or some part of their operations then it becomes a target account. The second requirement is where it can really change from company to company depending on the nature of your product. While most companies target the head of sales and marketing or the person responsible for sales operations, depending on the nature of the product, the right decision maker can differ. For example a company that sells a security application for SFDC users, the key decision maker or influencer may be within IT Security or a more technical contact. If the product is about document control, the decision maker maybe from the compliance side.
So while the best contacts to have are those who work directly with the salesforce application within the company, the best decision maker for your product will depend on what has worked best for your product and may need that extra effort locate. Once you have your target companies and decision makers in place, the rest will fall into place.