Two Heavyweights Weigh in on CRM and Sales 2.0

With nearly 600 sales professionals and 35 sponsors in attendance, the recent Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco proved that Sales 2.0 solutions represent the most vital segment of the CRM market. Presentations by featured keynoters Brett Queener, senior vice president of products at salesforce.com, and Mark Woollen, vice president of social CRM products at Oracle, highlighted different aspects of how Sales 2.0 is changing the face of CRM.

Queener devoted much of his presentation to Chatter, a social-collaboration platform based on Force.com, and noted that interactions on Facebook, which build from the bottom up, are replacing project-management and workflow models. He believes that sales teams can use social-networking capabilities to work internally, but the collaboration needs to be private, not public. He also believes that a company’s internal social network needs to be integrated with its CRM system so that sales and marketing departments will be working from the same page.

By contrast, Oracle’s Mark Woollen pointed out that Sales 2.0 tools have the potential to eliminate the administrative busywork associated with CRM systems. CRM, he said, is a “little shop of horrors’ for sales reps [that] keeps saying, “Feed me, feed me.'” A better approach? Track information based on the interactions that sales reps make daily, and use it to automatically populate the database. For example, a sales rep shouldn’t have to manually log the fact that he or she made a call to a particular customer. Instead, the system should be smart enough to update itself in response to the activity on the rep’s smart phone.

In other words, salesforce.com sees Sales 2.0 as a way to create new applications layered on top of the core CRM system, and Oracle sees Sales 2.0 as an opportunity to create greater integration between disparate activities taking place in the sales environment.

It’s not surprising that the two firms have such distinct takes. Salesforce.com’s CRM strategy is to provide a core system along with a platform for the development of additional Sales 2.0 applications from third parties. It offers its system exclusively to rent on demand (and to the vendors who layer atop it) and retain ownership of computers and software. So it makes sense that salesforce.com regards Sales 2.0 as a way to attract additional vendors to its platform.

The Oracle strategy is more complex, because it involves products that run on demand, as well as products that run on site. That complexity is partly because Oracle’s product set grew through corporate acquisitions, which meant its customer bases ended up running incompatible products. Unlike salesforce.com, however, Oracle is able to position itself as something of a one-stop shopping solution for both the core CRM capability and any other applications (marketing, sales support, inventory control, etc.). As such, Oracle wants Sales 2.0 to be part of that overall integrated approach.

Either way, Woollen and Queener both agree that Sales 2.0 will be an important factor in the ongoing development of CRM.

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