Salesforce plans Sales Reach, aims to meld sales, marketing

Salesforce on Thursday said it will launch a service called Salesforce1 Sales Reach, which combines its Pardot lead scoring and grading system with its communities.

The move highlights how Salesforce has been integrating its acquisitions. Pardot, founded in 2007, was part of ExactTarget, an acquisition that closed last year.

According to the company, Sales Reach combines Sales Cloud, Pardot and Communities to allow sales people to launch micro campaigns and track prospects as they respond to marketing content.

The overall goal is to enable companies and sales teams to target the "notion of the one click buyer." Amazon's Fire Phone is an example of a tool that allows consumer to go from message to insight to purchase, said Salesforce.com's Mark Woolen, senior vice president of product marketing for Sales Cloud. "We wanted to empower sales people in the mobile driven world just like consumers are," said Woolen.

What Salesforce is trying to do is improve the collaboration between marketing, which creates the content used in campaigns, and sales, which closes the deal. "If give salespeople capability to create their own marketing campaigns, marketing can see what they're doing and improve," said Woolen. Today's reality is sales already does its own campaign content on the sly.

Here's a look at the lead nurturing and how a prospect can be added to campaigns with marketing approved collateral from Precor, which makes fitness equipment.

The features of Sales Reach include:

• Micro campaigns for 1:1 email marketing to a prospect. 
• Real-time activity notifications on the mobile app. 
• Lead tracking dashboards with 36 hour activity records and drilldowns. 
• Mobile nurturing campaigns that allow marketing collateral to be sent with a few clicks from a device.
• Communities for prospects and sales reps to engage.

Salesforce1 Sales Reach will be available in the first half of 2015 with pricing to be announced. Today, a customer would have to have Sales Cloud, which runs $65 a user, and Pardot, which costs $1,000 a month for 10,000 contacts.