An extension of their existing AdWords relationship, Google and Salesforce.com are offering a more tightly integrated application or suite of applications to enterprise users and advertisers:
Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords provides an integrated and effective solution that gives companies of all sizes all the tools they need to acquire new customers and grow their business. By encapsulating every element of the customer lifecycle – advertising, creating leads, closing business and retaining customers – in one solution, Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords enables any company to jump start their business by creating an online marketing and sales presence.
Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords enables users to:
- Advertise Online – With Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords, companies can immediately connect to Google AdWords, and create an ad that is displayed with the relevant search results on Google.com or across the Google AdSense™ content network of partner websites. Users can create an ad in as quickly as five minutes and with as little as $5.
- Attract Prospects – When people search the Web for the products and services that your company sells, your ad appears with the relevant search results. When they click on your ad, visitors are taken to your website.
- Capture Leads – Once you have potential customers on your website, you can entice visitors to fill out a name capture form on your site with an offer for a Webinar or white paper. The information collected on the form flows directly into Salesforce as a new lead.
- Acquire Customers – As soon as a lead is added into Salesforce, it is distributed to the sales team. Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords enables businesses to effectively manage and share leads, track opportunities through the sales cycle and close deals faster. Sales teams can manage all customer interactions in Salesforce and turn qualified leads into new customers.
- Analyze Growth – Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords features dashboards that gives companies a bird’s eye view into lead generation, sales metrics, and company growth. Dashboards and reports are quick and easy to access with real-time information and allow companies to make decisions quickly and alter advertising strategies appropriately.
- Mash-up Other Business Applications – Through the power of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange directory, customers have the opportunity to mash-up any of 600 business applications including technologies for mapping and productivity.
But for Salesforce’s $5+ billion market cap, it would be an almost certain near-term acquisition candidate for Google, which is building more and more products for the enterprise.
Screenwerk 
June 5, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Although this alliance reconfirms the importance of mashing up Salesforce and Google into a seamless integrated process, I believe 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.
In particular:
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.
June 6, 2007 at 11:24 am
I write this without knowing the profile of a typical Salesforce.com user, BUT the last thing you want is your sales people focused on advertising, which is is a marketing function. The ‘manage all aspects of the customer lifecycle’ sounds great in a press release but will be really difficult to execute effectively.
I think the real deal here is that Google / AdWords gets exposure to Salesforce.com’s customers that have a defined sales methodology and are ‘presold’ on the SaaS (software as as service) model.
Salesforce.com is a company that Google is salivating to buy!
January 30, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Salesforce + Google : the extent of their partnership…
The two giants have successively announced during the last 6 months a flurry of partnerships concerning the integration of their tools (even leading to rumors of a merger). Here is a brief overview of the products that are concerned by those partnershi…