Salesforce Debuts The "Sales Cloud"Salesforce Debuts The "Sales Cloud"

Over at Salesforce.com, they seem to have a cloud for just about everything. Just last month the company launched the "Service Cloud" and its Spring 09 release is all about the "Sales Cloud."Last month I explained the Service Cloud, but what exactly is a sales cloud? Basically, it's a set of new sales and marketing features built into Salesforce.com:

Opportunity Genius (seriously, that's what they're calling it) is a suggestion feature that notifies sales reps of similar deals based on designated fields. THe idea is to help salespeople work together and leverage each other's work. Content Assembly lets Salesforce users create new presentations by dragging and dropping slides from existing presentations stored in the system. Content Delivery lets you "package" large files into a Web page that can be shared with prospects, who can view or download the information. And Content Tracking lets you see who viewed or downloaded the info. My take is that these enhancements are useful, but not groundbreaking. Still, they're available automatically to all Salesforce users at no extra cost, so there's no real downside unless you were expecting something bigger.