3 Reasons Why Salesforce.com is the World’s Leading CRM Vendor

It looks like 2013 is going to be a huge year for our partner Salesforce.com. In 2011, Gartner reported that Salesforce.com’s CRM market share was 16.7%, second only to SAP. However, Gartner is now predicting that 2013 will be the year that Salesforce.com will be crowned leading CRM vendor worldwide. While developing a native enterprise application that works seamlessly with Salesforce.com has not always been the easiest task, we’ve never been a company to scoff at a challenge. Our team, including many of our key advisors, are veterans to the Salesforce.com ecosystem. We’ve chosen to integrate with Salesforce.com in no small part due to Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff’s transformative vision and inspiring execution of his Software as a Service (SaaS) model.

Aside from Marc Benioff’s legendary ability to amp up excitement for his products, here are 3 reasons why we think Salesforce.com is on top.

Key Acquisitions 

CRM Magazine declared Salesforce.com the winner of their 2012 CRM roundup. One of the primary reasons they cited for Salesforce.com’s victory were several important aquisitions that the company made last year.

A prominent theme of Salesforce.com’s 2012 Dreamforce Conference was the need to manage, monitor and benefit from social media. There are more than 800 million active Facebook users, many of whom are broadcasting data that could be utilized by companies to close deals. Yet 90% of Facebook wall posts are not answered by brands. It’s clear that brands need more adroitly leverage social media. Salesforce.com is addressing this pain point by doubling down on social marketing tech with their acquisitions of  Radian6 in 2011 and Buddy Media in 2012.

Attention to SMBs

One of Salesforce.com’s advantages has always been scalability. Salesforce.com’s SaaS model has always offered businesses the opportunity to purchase the tools they need without hemorrhaging resources on unneeded services. While Salesforce.com can service colossal enterprise customers like HP, it also offers packages that are priced for smaller businesses. By targeting multiple tiers of businesses, Salesforce has been successful at bringing droves of huddled masses into its fold.

Monster App Ecosystem

Salesforce.com has done a great job of providing tools to help businesses manage their customer base. However, one of Salesforce.com’s biggest advantages is its rich app ecosystem, which allows innovative third parties to develop tools that can help address any needs not currently being met by Salesforce.com.

At Revenue.io we are aware that Salesforce.com’s millions-strong user base is hungry for new tools that can help add visibility, optimize ad spend and close more deals. To that end, we decided to launch our first suite of apps for Salesforce.com users. While marketing automation platforms like Hubspot and Marketo can be coupled with Salesforce.com to track leads’ online engagement, it has been more difficult to gain visibility into a lead’s offline activities. Enterprises spend millions of dollars a year in order to gain visibility into their leads’ activities, but too often that visibility is lost the second the phone rings. Revenue.io offers Salesforce.com customers opportunities to gain expanded insight into marketing efforts and lead activity, enabling businesses to optimize sales and marketing ROI.