Salesforce.com seminar

I attended the Salesforce.com seminar ysterday. Salesforce bills itself as usable by large and small businesses alike. Because of its business model and lack of large up front costs, this is true.

What I found interesting though is that the seminar that I attended was defined as an introduction for potential users of the product. They did have an introduction to the functionality, however, most of the focus was for large multi-nationals and how they can integrate Salesforce.com into their business. They focused on Cloud computing. The partners were there promoting the add ons that they provided. The signs identified the companies and their products by name, not by value or functionality.

While it is nice to see that they are trying to make their product easy to set up and use by introductory users and small businesses, their marketing of the product in this forum leaves a lot to be desired. Most small business users will not care about cloud computing or components. They are looking to get value from the software. They don't have time to analyze the productss. They just want to make it happen.

Software companies that want to sell products to small businesses need to change their approach, if they want to provide solutions to small business. They need to get out of the technology and into value.