By this point in time, it pretty much goes without saying that Salesforce is an enormously powerful tool for tracking your leads, contacts, and opportunities. Further, most people know that Salesforce can also be used to generate proposals, track funnels, and report on contact activities.

But did you know that Salesforce can also be used to send content to your leads and customers, and track whether they opened the document? This tool is called Salesforce Content Deliveries, and it enables you to convert Microsoft PowerPoint, Word, Excel and Adobe PDF documents into web pages stored within your Salesforce SAAS platform, and make those pages available to your prospects and customers for viewing.

Salesforce content deliveries not only optimize how you send content, but through Salesforce you can also track who opened it, and whether or not they were internal or external users. You can also set a password on the document if you want, if the content being shared is confidential or proprietary.

You can learn how to enable Salesforce content deliveries here. In addition, below are some additional Salesforce tips and tricks to consider when implementing content deliveries:

• There is a limit on how much content can be viewed. Salesforce limits the number of content-delivery views to 20,000 within a 24-hour period, or 1GB of downloads within the same period of time. For many instances this should be way more than enough, but if you’re planning to blast out a huge marketing campaign, you might want to take this into consideration.
• You should preview content before sending out any links. When Salesforce converts the files into a webpage-style view, there are instances when the content may not translate well, and aspects of the colors or layout may not translate exactly. This doesn’t happen terribly often, but it does happen, so make sure you review your content and layout before you send it out.
• As mentioned above, every time one of your recipients clicks on the link to your content, Salesforce records that click, and provides a report on how many clicks you’ve received. It also shows how many clicks came from internal users, i.e. users that are part of your corporate Salesforce account, or external users, which are users not associated with your corporate Salesforce account, i.e. external customers, prospects and partners.
• You can put any content type into a content delivery, but only some types will display as a web page. If you upload a Microsoft Office 97 through 2007 Word, PowerPoint, or Excel file, it will most likely display just fine as an online view. If you’re using another office suite, or another type of file altogether, you can still distribute them via content deliveries, but they’ll just need to be downloaded for viewing, as opposed to a web-based display.

Salesforce content deliveries are just another tool available, and these capabilities are part of why Salesforce is not only as popular as it is, but still growing. And it’s also why Simplus has put so much effort into becoming one of the top Salesforce integration and implementation service providers around – because we understand what Salesforce is capable of, and we’ve worked really hard to be a part of it.

If you want to explore the full capabilities that are possible with Salesforce and other SAAS platforms, contact us.