Google, Salesforce.com announcement disappoints
The blogosphere was all atwitter today in anticipation of a joint announcement from Google and Salesforce.com.
Then came the announcement: The two companies are forming a “strategic global alliance,” teaming up on a new tool for SMBs that joins CRM on-demand software from Salesforce.com with Google’s AdWords.
Not exactly life-altering news. Microsoft CRM Spot is less than impressed:
“Based upon all of the press excitement last week, you would have thought that Google and Salesforce.com’s big announcement today was to be a takeover by Google … Instead, Salesforce users will be able to integrate Google Ads into their marketing campaigns. Not exactly the killer announcement that was expected.”
Said Ephraim Schwartz on his blog Reality Check of the announcement:
“So now Google AdWords will be promoted in Group Edition. A user wanting to sign up can punch out from Group Edition to Google and sign up. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.”
So much for that.
Posted: June 5th, 2007 under Product announcements, Web 2.0.
I agree with Ephraim, this is kind of boring. Although it reconfirms the importance of mashing up Salesforce and Google into a seamless integrated process, the product side of the announcement falls short of addressing the real pain points that marketers feel when trying to use AdWords to drive new business leads.
1) Landing pages are critical for driving conversions and improving ranking, but 3 out of 4 companies still send clicks to the home page. Google doesn’t care because they still get paid for each click, but the marketer ends up with fewer leads. It’s just too hard to get the right IT support to have enough targeted pages, and the Google-Salesforce alliance provides no solution to this problem.
2) Bidding well is hard for most marketers, and Google-Salesforce provides no help for bid optimization. Again, this suits Google just fine since it’s in their interest to have companies over-bid, but it leaves the marketer with suboptimal results.
3) A click is just the beginning of a business sales cycle. Only 25% of the people that click on an ad and fill out a form are ready to speak with a sales rep. Companies need to put in place a relevant and patient nurturing process that guides the prospect from the research stage to being truly “sales ready”. Once again, the Google-Salesforce alliance doesn’t address this gap in the marketer’s business process.
You can read more at http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2007/06/some_gorillas_c.html.
Comment by Jon Miller — June 5, 2007 @ 4:37 pm