Sales Force Marketing - Salesforce.com CRM:
Google + SalesForce = GooForce

In 2007 Google and SalesForce announced a partnership where SalesForce would start offering integration with leads that come from Google Adwords. Principle is simple: lead clicks on a Google Adwords ad, lands on a special setup page that contains a form to capture the lead details and that is sent directly into the SalesForce account where the standard CRM features come in. Advantage of this is that the marketers using this can see exactly how much they paid for the Google Adwords lead, and how much did they gain from converting some of the leads. However, it's interesting to speculate what are the advantages of SalesForce from this partnership.

I mean Google is clearly advantaged because its Adwords service was promoted to the SalesForce customers, but what does this mean for SalesForce:

first of all when the announcement was made they gained some momentum from all the press-releases another advantage is that SalesForce became this the only company that officially offers Google Adwords integration (this doesn't mean that capturing details from Google Adwords into other crm softwares is not possible with a little programming). According to their press release "salesforce.com will be the first on-demand company to resell the Google AdWords platform, acting as an official distribution channel for the Google AdWords product. The alliance is across 43 countries and encompasses distribution, technology and co-marketing efforts."

Is there anything else? Publicly nothing was mentioned, but does SalesForce receive a percentage of the spendings of their customers in Google Adwords? Also, recently it was discovered that in the source code of Google Apps (actually in the CSS file) SalesForce is mentioned, does this mean that another step of this partnership is to be announced? Future will reveal this for sure, maybe Google has plans in purchasing SalesForce, after all it seems to go more and more into business solutions and a web based CRM solution to integrate with Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Custom Search does sound appealing.

Anyway, back to the SalesForce/Adwords integration, here are more details about setting up the account and how the process works:
after you signup, you can choose Google Adwords from the upper right corner to start the integration

if you have already a Google Adwords account you can add it in there and link it to your account (9 digit AdWords Customer ID) or create new account
after that you are redirected to the Google Adwords account where the wizard guides you through the steps necessary to create your Google Ad (Target customer > Create ad > Choose keywords > Set pricing > Review and save

Once the ad is created, the Salesforce/Google Adwords combination works this way:
when the user clicks on the Google ad he lands on a page that you set specially for them
in there you have to have a form to collect user information, information that once the Submit button is clicked will be transported to the Salesforce account as a lead

Salesforce alerts you when a new lead signs up and is added
in Salesforce in the Lead details page you will see the Lead source as coming from Google Adwords

the advantage here comes from the fact that on the Lead details you can see on what ad that lead clicked in Google and what keyword did he search for
if you consider the lead is important you can convert it to a sales opportunity and start communicating with him

Another key point of this integration is that with the Google Adwords Dashboard you have the opportunity to see what works best in the integration between Salesforce and Google. For instance, you can:

see the Top 5 Lead Generating Text Ads
the Top 5 Lead Generating Campaigns
the Top 5 Lead Generating Keywords
Lead evolution in time from this source
top 5 Lead Generating Keyword Phrases
you can see how much time it took to convert the lead to a customer
you can see the revenue (income - spend) generated by the Google Adwords usage
Pricing for SalesForce with Google Adwords integration is $1200/year for 5 users. A free trial is offered too.

I'm sure that's more to come from this partnership, after all Google has some catch-up to do to match what Microsoft offers through its Dynamics CRM line.

Signup information for SalesForce with Google Adwords: SalesForce.com/Google or services.google.com/adwords_salesforce  link

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