In Dec. 2006 I penned “Google could so create a Salesforce killer“. If you look at Google’s products, namely:
- Gmail
- Docs and Spreadsheets
- Google Payment (what’s the name again?)
- Google Talk (replace all of the other instant messaging services you use as a sales person)
- Google Maps (for directions to clients’ offices, or meeting spots)
- Google Calendar (obvious, to track dates, calls, meetings, etc.)
- Picasa (so you can see what people look like or people can put a face to their favorite salesperson’s voice and name)
- Video player (for demos, presentations etc.)
- Analytics (prospecting tool par excellence, I mean most sales people rely on Alexa, not Nielsen Net Ratings or comScore)
- Blogger (so your clients can read about you, your products and services)
- Jotspot (so employees can share intelligence, or clients and salespeople can share information)
- Alerts (a prospective client announces something, you can hit them up ASAP)
- Finance (so you can check out the size of the company you are hitting up)
- I could go on.
You can bundle it and create something compelling to take on Salesforce. Google can launch many X-killers, but executing on the product to make it even compete with, let alone kill it…
A younger, brasher Google would have done just that, but I think Google now realizes that a go-at-it-alone strategy does not always make sense. So today Google and Salesforce finally announced plans to collaborate. This is a no-brainer: Google has its hands tied on many fronts and short of simply buying CRM, this business development relationship is a first step towards that, or simply launching a competing product if Marc Benioff’s price is too high.
Read more.
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