Perspectives on Salesforce.com

As a Salesforce.com Partner, I am able to take advantage of a new offering from Salesforce for Partners, Syndicated Content. This allows partners to add a page to their website that pulls in content from Salesforce.com and allows website visitors to learn about Salesforce.com products without leaving the partner’s site. There are also links that allow visitors to start a Salesforce.com trial and the partner gets a referral from it.

The cool thing about it is that it’s implemented with about 20 lines of code and the code is provided, so it’s a simple copy/paste action. Arrowpointe’s page is located at http://www.arrowpointe.com/salesforce.

I think it’s a nice offering from Salesforce on several fronts:

• It’s optional
• Partners have incentive to use it to get referral fees via trials that are started that eventually lead to license deals for Salesforce
• It adds a lot of very professional content to a partner’s website
• The content’s design is clean and does not dominate my website’s design. Although, it would be nice if I were able to modify the CSS to do things like change the font size to match my website font and some other things. Maybe I can, but I need to investigate it. It’ll be a hack if I do it. No information on this was provided to me.
• A website visitor does not need to leave arrowpointe.com to read the content
• As a partner, I don’t need to keep this content up to date. It’s all pulled from a content server controlled by Salesforce. This ensures the content on my site doesn’t grow stale.

I don’t know how successful it will be for Arrowpointe specifically, but it’s a nice offering that does not seem to discriminate between large and small partners.