Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) has improved the tools for helping its sales team to do their job effectively. The company launched its own tool in April, to assist the more than 2,000 salespeople, to engage with their clients more effectively.
The new platform has been developed in-house, and incorporates the old platform made by Salesforce.com, as well as many new features developed by Facebook. Previously, Salesforce was the hub of the sales system, as it provided sales representatives with tools to manage their accounts, contacts, leads, and campaigns. The new system runs on Facebook, and minimizes data entry, leaving the sales people with more time to focus on their clients.
In order to achieve that, the Facebook developers spent over a year completing the ‘customer graph’. This charts the relationship between brands, their parent companies, and the employees working there. Facebook CIO Tim Campos said “Our goal is to connect the dots together to have one view of our customers.” The new system operates in much the same way as Facebook provides news feeds between social network contacts.
Salesforce is still at the heart of the new system as it has essential auditing, and compliance functions. With the addition of several new Facebook apps, the system has become more powerful. Salesforce has been working with Facebook for a long time now, and their ExactTarget Marketing Cloud is regarded as one the 13 preferred marketing partners, receiving advance copies of pre-launch products from Facebook. Facebook has said that it is not yet finished with the development of the new system, and it hopes in the future to enable it to anticipate problems with accounts, before even the customers notice them.
