Salesforce’s Do.com Gets Social for Contact and Sales Management
Do.com, a social task management and collaboration service known as Manymoon when it was acquired by Salesforce, today unveiled two new features that add a social twist to contact management and enable deal progress tracking for sales organizations.
The social task management and collaboration service works across PCs, smartphones and tablets. According to Do.com co-founder Amit Kulkarni, its HTML5, consumer Web-like underpinnings help provide a consistent, user-friendly experience across device classes.
Do.com employs social media-inspired functionality, like activity streams and notifications, to foster communication and collaboration between team members on tasks and projects.
What's New in Do.com
Do.com is growing its feature set in a bid to evolve from a “social productivity application into a platform,” says Do.com co-founder Amit Kulkarni. And while Do.com is free for unlimited users — and will remain so, assures Kulkarni – the new Contacts and Deals features are the service's first foray into freemium pricing based on usage.
First is Contacts, new contact management functionality that “leverages your contacts wherever they live online,” says Kulkarni. With support for Facebook and Google out of the gate — and more to follow — the feature pulls contacts from social networks and integrates them into Do.com's tasks, notes and activity streams.
One of the benefits of social integration is that the system will “automatically display the latest information” about fellow team members, says Kulkarni, provided they keep their social profiles up to date.
Perhaps it's not the most critical requirement if all of one's contacts toil under the same roof. However, Kulkarni notes that Do.com's “prosumer” approach to collaboration blurs the lines between business and personal productivity tools. As such, Do.com has caught on outside of business settings. It's not uncommon for the platform to be used for the administration of charitable organizations and campaigns or to coordinate social functions and informal events, he says.
And when it comes to stringent security and privacy, Salesforce's influence resonates in the company's most consumer-friendly offering. “By default, those contacts are private,” according to Kulkarni, alleviating fears that social circles will unravel and run amok. Contacts can also be grouped into lists, like on a per-project basis, for instance.
Also unveiled today is Deals, a sales process tracking option. Deals encapsulates Do.com's social productivity features into a tool that guides sales teams through the various steps involved in closing a sale, from start to finish. Sales managers can track their teams' performance via real time reporting that offers an at-a-glance view of statistics such as revenue and the size of the average deal.
Contacts and Deals are currently in private beta. Sign-ups for invite-only access are available at Do.com.
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.
Pedro Hernandez contributes to Enterprise Apps Today, and 11Press, the technology network. He was previously the managing editor of Internet.com, an IT-related website network. He has expertise in Smart Tech, CRM, and Mobile Tech, Helping Banks and Fintechs, Telcos and Automotive OEMs, and Healthcare and Identity Service Providers to Protect Mobile Apps.
