Archive for the ‘Salesforce’ Category

Ribbit delivers…my news.

Monday, June 8th, 2009 | located in Productivity, Salesforce | No Comments »

Ribbit for Salesforce offers some amazing sales productivity tools where you can dictate your activities from the field, and have them flow through salesforce.com just by using your mobile phone. It is the most obvious feature with the most value.

Until yesterday, I overlooked what I now consider Ribbit’s unsung hero; the Mobile Backup within salesforce.com.

For 42 weeks, my wife and I have been expecting our first baby boy. It is something you dream about for years and plan carefully with your partner. You prep for EVERYTHING around the house and the car. You prepare your pets for a new arrival. You get everyone ready for the news that there is a new addition to your family.

On the big day, you charge your camera and cell phones and make sure that you have AC plugs at the ready. If you are like me and bring your laptop everywhere, you have that bag ready to go. Everyone waits with baited breath. It is a time for high anxiety and overwhelming joy. You drive to the hospital and in between checks on your wife in the front seat and looking for hospital parking, you’re on your Bluetooth talking to your mother-in-law and close friends giving them the scoop. The last thing you hear them say is, “call us as soon as you know something”. Easy enough right?

THEN……you get to the hospital and see the dreaded sign that forbids mobile phones.  Wait, what? What do you mean no mobile phones? How can that be? Everyone has a phone. Some people have 2 or 3. That is nonsense! What is a father-to-be to do? How do you continue to make and take your calls and share the best news of your life to your family and friends?

Ribbit for Salesforce to the rescue.

Once I logged on to the hospital wi-fi (a service they offer for free if you can believe that), I opened up Salesforce and was immediately able to start making calls via the Ribbit Flash Phone to my family and friends with the news that I am now the proud father of a baby boy!

Now, if only Ribbit could change diapers, I would be set.

Selling Power Webinar: Technologies that Improve Sales Performance

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 | located in Events, Productivity, Salesforce | No Comments »

On June 9th, Selling Power will be hosting a webinar for sales professionals looking to improve their sales performance.  This will feature various Sales 2.0 technologies which help sales organizations accelerate the sales process, improve sales effectiveness, decrease costs, and enhance the customer experience.

The technologies being featured are:

1. Hoovers (increases volume and quality of sales leads)
2. Birst (increases visibility into sales pipeline)
3. Ribbit for Salesforce (connects your mobile phone to email and Salesforce.com)
4. Xactly (sales performance management tools)

This webinar is free to attend, we just need you to register beforehand.

Speak, Copy, Paste, Format, Send

Thursday, May 7th, 2009 | located in Productivity, Salesforce | 1 Comment »

Have you ever been driving to work or a meeting and realized you forgot to send someone a follow-up email?

Maybe you had a new thought or strategy that you wanted to share with someone but had to wait a bit before you could log into your computer to whip up an email. How frustrating is that? How many emails never get written because you either forgot or told yourself you would “do it later”?

One of the things I find myself doing on a daily basis is giving myself a list of emails to “write” as I commute to our HQ in Mt. View, CA. Since my daily commute is just over an hour each way, you can imagine how many emails I could send. This could be an email to one of my customers saying “thanks” or perhaps I need to write a new prospect that just test drove Ribbit from the AppExchange. It could be that I want to say “Thanks for your time today” after a demo or sales pitch?

I don’t drive a special car by the way nor do I use my iPhone to type while driving (hello $300 ticket). How do I do this? Simple! I use Ribbit!!

Since Ribbit allows voice messages up to 3 minutes (that can be left by myself using * + ‘5’ in the Ribbit Voice Menu), I can dictate an email right from the drivers seat while speaking into my mobile phone via Bluetooth headset. Once I complete the message, Ribbit transcribes the call to text and then delivers the message to my email (and puts a copy in salesforce.com).

When I get to my office, fire open my email, I can see all the new messages I have left myself. At this point, all I have to do is Copy, Paste, Format & Send! Simple.

Here is an email I dictated to my friend (and Partner) at Model Metrics, Sachin Saste.

(Image 1: Email copy of the transcripted voicemail)

(Image 2: Highlight the transcription and copy it to the clipboard)

(Image 3: Paste the transcripted text into a new email.)

(Image 4: Format the email & clean up any language or punctuation. Then click send. Done.)

Jeff Kaplan Discusses Mobility and SaaS on Webinar Next Week

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 | located in Events, Salesforce | No Comments »

Ribbit for Salesforce is hosting a webinar on Thursday, May 14th at 9 am PST, featuring Jeff Kaplan from THINKstrategies where we discuss mobility in the SaaS space.

We will also be joined by Will Stacy, from Santander Consumer USA (aka Drive Financial) who will share how their sales team has increased sales productivity within their field sales team, using with Ribbit for Salesforce. Check it out!

Here’s how to register:  https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/446385693

Ribbit Hits the Cloudforce Tour

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 | located in Events, Salesforce | No Comments »

Ribbit continues on the Salesforce Cloudforce Tour and will be in Chicago this Monday (May 4th) and in Minneapolis on Wednesday (May 6th). If you happen to find yourself at one of these events and looking for ways to help your sales team become more productive - stop by the Ribbit booth and say hi to Greg (he’s the one on the left) who can show you all the goodness Ribbit for Salesforce has to offer. I know he’d like to meet you, and I am sure you will find it was good to meet him too.

View Ribbit Cloudforce Tour in a larger map

To see where we have been on the Cloudforce tour so far, do that magical thing called ‘clicking’ on one of these links below:

• London: April 7th
• Houston: April 1st
• Boston: March 26th
• Santa Clara: March 18, 2009

Benioff likes us. He really, really likes us.

Monday, April 20th, 2009 | located in Salesforce | No Comments »

At the April 7th Cloudforce London event, Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, Salesforce.com - here on stage with Bill Murphy, MD, BT Business - let everyone in the room know (and now everyone on You Tube) that he is a fan of Ribbit.

The comment comes in at 3:07 where Benioff gushes that ‘Ribbit for Salesforce is the most exciting app he’s seen in the AppExchange‘.

Nice. Nothing like getting a little love from the big guy himself. Thanks Marc.

Ribbit Webinar: Maximize Your Sales Teams Productivity

Thursday, April 16th, 2009 | located in Events, Productivity, Salesforce | 1 Comment »

On May 14th, Ribbit will host a free webinar with THINKstrategies Founder and SaaS/cloud computing guru, Jeff Kaplan, and Ribbit customer, Will Stacy from Santander Consumer USA (Drive Financial), to share their experiences on how Ribbit for Salesforce can maximize sales efficiency.

There will be a live demo of Ribbit for Salesforce and a Q&A session following. We are also happy to take your questions beforehand, so feel free to leave a comment here or email sia [at] ribbit [dot] com and we will do our best to get that into the queue beforehand.

Jeff and Will are sure to bring out some nuggets of wisdom here, so be sure to register now.

Use Ribbit to make calls from 36,000 feet.

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 | located in Productivity, Salesforce | No Comments »

I’m writing this post from 36,000 feet above the earth on a Virgin America flight from San Francisco to New York. Very comfortable seats with TV, radio, video games and Internet Access. Oh wait - NOPE. I picked a flight that hasn’t been turned on yet! Argh!

In sales, I find myself on planes quite a bit. I have an iPhone and a Macbook, but neither are connected to the outside world up  here. I wonder what’s going on. There is no radio, no satellite TV and no Internet connection.

For the last 9 or 10 years, I have brought a laptop with me on flights. For the first 3 or so years, I would watch a DVD and maybe edit a PowerPoint deck. After that, I would download a show to iTunes and watch a few episodes and maybe edit a PowerPoint deck.

Well, its 2009 and things have changed.

Most of the major airlines are now offering wireless Internet on their cross country flights!! It just turns out that this one doesn’t. Missed the boat big time on this one!

However, this is great news as I want to know what’s going on when I travel and sometimes, being offline for 4-5 hours is near impossible. I want to jump on Facebook and update my status. I want to read if anyone has Twittered about Ribbit. I want to send/receive my latest email (both business and personal) AND, I have a few calls to make. Yes, that’s right, calls.

Ribbit could help me do that if I was connected.

I would like to call my mom and sister to see if we can have a family dinner tonight. I would like to call my tennis buddy to see if we can play this afternoon. I would like to call my friend Chad and say goodbye before he moves to Denver.

Ribbit (and in my case, Ribbit for Salesforce) allows me to make and take all my mobile calls right in the browser. If I was connected, I could turn on my Motorola bluetooth thingymajig and call all the people I just mentioned right through salesforce.com!

Now, think of this in the context of the business world!! You have vendors, partners, prospects, customers and boss’ all trying to reach you. How much more business could you close if you could answer every call and take an order?

The possiblities are endless.

Ribbit for Salesforce launches in the UK

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 | located in Salesforce | No Comments »

Thought there was no better way to launch our new Business Mobility blog than with the announcement Ribbit for Salesforce is available exclusively from BT Business to all new and existing UK Salesforce CRM users through a free trial now, and will be commercially available later this year.

Ribbit for Salesforce is delivered as a cloud computing service and can be implemented quickly without infrastructure or management overhead costs of traditional on premise applications. Businesses can store and organize voicemail as email in Salesforce CRM, categorizing leads, contacts and in progress deals. All voice messages are also delivered as SMS or email so that users can respond or forward to others in their organization without having to dial into voicemail.

“There’s a big problem for SMEs that they haven’t been able to address around the mobility and productivity of their mobile workforces, primarily because it’s difficult for them to take an existing application and mobilize it,” says Chris Lindsay, general manager, BT Business applications. “In the current climate, productivity is key to how businesses can survive. Survival is the key word this year.”  Some 20% of SMEs are looking to take mobile technology into their workforce, full scale productivity suites and applications.”

With Ribbit for Salesforce, BT is providing its customers with a huge competitive edge in today’s highly dynamic environment. Helping to improve business processes, the application will help firms make the most of every customer opportunity during the recession and put them in a strong position to thrive when it ends.

Ribbit for Salesforce launched in the US in April 2008 and was recently named as the Best Mobile App in 2008 by Salesforce customers.

The UK availability of Ribbit for Salesforce was announced during the Cloudforce London event on April 7th.

Ribbit has attended other Cloudforce events, most recently:

• London: April 7, 2009
• Houston: April 1, 2009
• Boston: March 26, 2009
• Santa Clara: March 18, 2009