Salesforce and Google Announce Group Edition with AdWords

I've been meaning to start my blog about business to business marketing and sales enablement for some time now, and I thought yesterday's announcement about salesforce.com and Google forming a formal partnership was the right opportunity. I was privileged to be invited to the launch event, which was a small gathering of customers, partners, and employees. The biggest news of the day was the launch of Salesforce Group Edition, which will replace Team edition, and comes complete with Salesforce for Google Adwords built-in.

Group Edition is a great way for small businesses or start-ups to get up and running with Leads, Google Adwords, Opportunities, Contacts, and Dashboards. Erin Jacobs, Director of Marketing at TFC Inc., a Salesforce customer, commented that implementing Group Edition is the equivalent of the first sales and marketing hire, which I thought was an interesting perspective for small business owners. Because they wear so many hats, they need a CRM system which will automate a lot of the intial interactions with customers, before they are ready to pick up the phone.

The product is targeted at small business, but no doubt enterprises will benefit from an improved UI and tighter integration between the two solutions. It seems that they are also working on additional technology integrations such as the Google One Box, Google Docs & Spreadsheets and intend to work together to help non-profits.

When I asked Marc Benioff and Sheryl Sandberg of Google if the Group Edition roadmap included plans to integrate Google Analytics, he gave me the usual corporate response that they were looking at a number of different features and that they had a lot of ideas. It seems like the plan was to get this product out the door and figure out what comes next based on customer feedback and requests, which tends to be Salesforce's development MO.

Another downside is that at least for now, Group Edition doesn't appear to include access to the AppExchange, Salesforce's marketplace for on-demand applications which integrate directly with their platform. So if you're hoping to get AppExchange services like email, landing pages, data tools, etc. you might have to upgrade to either Professional or Enterprise or wait for it to be added to Group. Although not all apps are available to Professional users. All in all, it's good news for B2B marketers. And at $10 per user per month (max 5 users), it's a no brainer.