Facebook is creating a string of software tools for its sales team, with a new version already released in April for its 2,000-strong salesforce professionals to help connect with advertisers.
The new system has integrated the old platform that used to run on Salesforce with the new Facebook platform, which helps sales reps manage accounts and contacts, track leads, manage marketing campaigns and automate workflow, says The Wall Street
Journal, which attributes massive reduction of data entry to the new platform.
In an interview with CIO Journal, Facebook CIO Tim Campos declared, "We want our sales people working with clients and not on data entry. We want to give them insights without them having to do a lot of work."
More than a year was spent by Facebook’s software engineers in preparing the customer graph, which is the link between brands, parent companies and their employees. Subsequently, the software was crafted for the purpose of connecting and surfacing the data no matter where it was in Facebook’s system.
Campos said that their aim was "to connect the dots to have one view of the customers". This is analogous to what Facebook does while delivering updates from friends to the page of a user who has logged into their site.
Possessing solid auditing, workflow and compliance, Salesforce Inc. still forms a vital ingredient of the Facebook software as well as the Force.com cloud development platform.
According to a Salesforce.com spokesman, the company has had a lengthy affiliation with Facebook, which deems Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud as one of the 13 marketing developer partners favoured by it. The upshot of this is the benefit of having early access to the pre-launch products of Facebook.
Facebook says that it has plans of adding more capabilities in the future; for instance, alerting their sales team to potential problems regarding the accounts of customers even before they have had a chance to spot any.
