Salesforce.com Calculates Marketing Value

As return on investment is becoming more of a concern for C-level executives and marketers, CRM vendors are forced to prove their worth. That is why Salesforce.com upgraded its online CRM product to enable marketing departments to automatically calculate ROI for each marketing campaign. "Marketing departments are under constant pressure to justify their budgets and improve the efficiency of their programs," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. "Salesforce.com campaign management is the first affordable and practical solution to help marketing managers prove the revenue-generating effectiveness of their marketing campaigns." Thanks to the upgrade, marketing departments can plan and execute online and offline campaigns in one location; create and manage customer lists; track responses to campaigns from any channel; ensure leads are captured, routed, and qualified by sales in a timely manner; and measure and compare the efficiency of each marketing campaign. One of the benefits to having a hosted CRM solution is the 4,5000 Salesforce.com customers can take advantage of the marketing ROI upgrade without purchasing any new hardware or software. This naturally cuts costs over the lifecycle of the CRM solution. "The lucky guys break even in two years with a licensed CRM solution. With ours you break even in six months," said Benioff. Customers are rapidly buying in to the economical CRM hosting solution. Since February, Salesforce.com has garnered more than 1,300 new customers with an average of between 15 to 20 users at each end-user organization, putting the company's user-base at roughly 70,000 users. The upswing in end-user acceptance of late is helping Salesforce.com's bottom line. "We've been cash-flow positive since November and anticipate profitability in the third quarter of this year," says Benioff.