Microsoft Just Showed Off Exactly What Salesforce Was Worried About (cnbc.com)

Microsoft just took a direct swipe at Salesforce with a new enterprise-ready version of LinkedIn's customer relationship management product called Sales Navigator. From a report on CNBC: "Today's announcements take Sales Navigator to the next level," Doug Camplejohn, LinkedIn sales solutions head of product, said in a blog. The new product steps up competition with arch rival Salesforce. Microsoft beat out Salesforce to acquire Linkedin for $26.2 billion -- by far the company's largest acquisition to date -- in June. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was so concerned, he accused the company of "anti-competitive behavior" and urged regulators to investigate. Flash-forward less than a year and Microsoft's new Sales Navigator Enterprise Edition incorporates many features aimed at turning LinkedIn into a must-have tool for sales teams at big companies.

Comments

Alternative competitiveness

[bruce_the_loon]

Oh boo-hoo Salesforce, MS has had a CRM for decades, just not a particularly good one. Now it has a somewhat better one, all of a sudden you can't compete in an open market with what you've got? Build a better one then.

And while you're at it, can anyone build a CRM that doesn't require signing off souls to all three Hells to make it work? I've only got one and Satan, Cthulhu and Kali all require exclusive rights to it.

Re: Alternative competitiveness

[I'm New Around Here]

I'm signed up with LinkedIn. Every so often is spams me that someone else I know is also on LinkedIn, or asks me to spam other people I know to join LinkedIn.

Other than that, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with it. I never have used it as any resource. I think it simply convinced a few people to sign up with them, and infected the internet from there.

Re: First of all.

[fizzup]

Salesforce tracks sales opportunities, clients, contacts, products, prices, defects, competitive intelligence, product requests, sales tasks, and documents. It also offers an instant messaging application.

Salesforce helps maintain a consistent sales process. It has a reporting system that lets you analyze your pipeline and bookings. The reporting system is good for tracking current sales performance of individuals, product lines, and companies. It's good for evaluating the likelihood of meeting bookings targets in the current month, quarter, or year. In a business, it's important to track bookings because they are a leading indicator for future revenue and, to a lesser extent, costs. You can also use salesforce to help create sales forecasts and targets for future years.