5 ways Salesforce Reach will turn sales reps into moonlight marketers

The sales and marketing function of a business are often heaped together into one category despite being two distinct lines of business – heck, we even do it on ITBusiness.ca with the way we organize our content.

Now if Salesforce.com Inc. has its way the line between those two departments could be blurred even further. It announced plans yesterday to launch a new optional module to the Salesforce1 mobile app that is designed to put professional-grade marketing software tools in the hands of sales people. Salesforce1 Sales reach isn’t priced yet and it won’t be available until the beginning of next year, but a news release put out by Salesforce.com indicates the app will tie together capabilities from the sales cloud, Salesforce Communities, and Pardot. Pardot is a company that Salesforce.com inherited when it acquired ExactTarget last year – Pardot has been acquired by ExactTarget a few months earlier to incorporate its marketing capabilities such as lead tracking and nurturing.

So Salesforce.com is now looking to tie those capabilities into its mobile platform to allows sales people some basic marketing capabilities. They’ll be able to design “micro-marketing campaigns” that are personalized to the leads they’re interested in. Just like marketers trying to get a grip on the digital realm, sales people will be able to set up automated messages sent based on a lead’s behaviours and actions, and then track it all from their mobile device.

While we haven’t yet seen the software in action, here are five features describes by Salesforce.com that will have sales reps testing their marketing chops:

1. Setting up an automated e-mail campaign to send a message to anyone that downloads a specific asset.
2. Take real-time action to offer discounts when a lead visits the company website, thanks to notifications delivered from the Saleforce1 app.
3. Track prospects and understand how they’re reacting to marketing tactics with a 36-hour dashboard displaying their activity. The dashboard will offer ability to drill-down based on priority, and specific data points.
4. Add a prospect to a nurture campaign that is set up based on templates, adding them to an email mailing list and tracking their engagement with a company’s website.
5. Add a prospect to a Communities group, which is basically like a little social network or forum where they can talk to other prospects and ask questions of the company as well.