Salesforce.com is combining its Pardot marketing software, sales automation application and social communities platform into a new product called Sales Reach. The new product is intended to help salespeople nurture leads and make deals in real time.

The hyper-connected, mobile customer of today has altered the sales process forever. Sales Reach gives salespeople the ability to closely track a prospect's buying mood and then strike while the iron is hot, all from their mobile devices, according to Mark Woollen, senior vice president of product marketing, Salesforce.com Sales Cloud.

Sales Reach provides real-time activity notifications that get pushed to a salesperson's device. For example, a salesperson might get notification that a prospect just downloaded a white paper from the company's website and looked at pricing information.

In the past, they would set up a task in their CRM (customer-relationship-management) system to remind themselves to call the prospect later. With Sales Reach the rep can now, for example, send this prospect a special discount from their phone immediately, engaging the potential customer while he or she is still thinking about the product.

Sales Reach goes beyond enabling immediate action, too. If the salesperson gets the prospect on the phone only to learn they don't have time to have a serious phone conversation right now, the salesperson could trigger a 30-day lead-nurturing campaign that sends out follow-up emails.

These emails could include value adds, like an invitation to join an online community, also run on Salesforce.com's systems, where the prospect could interact with peers considering the purchase of the same products and services.

Sales Reach sends a notification if and when the prospect joins the community. It also logs all of their posts into their original customer record. With this data in hand, the salesperson can better judge when to call the prospect again, and what to talk about when they connect.

Sales Reach is slated to be released in the first half of 2015, with pricing to be announced at release.

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