Innovation Management

How do you gather feedback and manage the ideas you get from your customers, partners, and employees?

Salesforce Ideas makes it easy to unleash the power of your community. By creating an interactive Ideas forum where people can vet their best ideas, you can become a more responsive company, uncovering new opportunities and instilling a sense of co-ownership with your most passionate evangelists.
 

Who Is It For?

Innovation is vital to the growth and success of any organization—large or small. The more people you can engage, the stronger your feedback loop becomes.
 

Employees
There are lots of ways you might leverage Ideas internally. Create a community for “ Sales Advice and Winning Strategies” to capture the knowledge of your top sales reps. You could also create a companywide community with categories for each department so that your employees can submit ideas to Marketing, Product Development, or HR—r egardless of where they sit within the organization.

 

Customers and Partners
Ideas can be extended to your customers and partners as well. Many companies are interested in using it to capture feedback, similar to what Dell has done with IdeaStorm. You could also use it to facilitate discussion between customers, deflecting questions to experts in the community while driving down support costs.

 

How It Works

It’s easy to drive participation with an Ideas community. First time users can start by browsing popular ideas and voting on things they like. Over time, they’ll become more comfortable submitting their own ideas and joining discussions.
 

Submit an Idea
Write a short paragraph explaining your idea. Before you hit submit, assign it to a category so that it gets noticed by the right people within your community.

 

Vote on Things You Like
Browse the site to uncover interesting new ideas. When you find one you like, you can vote for it to show your support. With Salesforce Ideas, you can control the half-life of votes so new ideas are constantly boiling to the homepage. 

 

Discuss Ideas with the Community
Add comments to spark a rich dialog with other members of the community. After reading an idea you may have a question, some added insight, or maybe you want to present a different perspective.

 

Why It Works

Salesforce Ideas provides an intuitive, engaging solution for a problem that challenges virtually every company. Your online community will be a constant source of innovation, and a competitive differentiator as you strive to be more responsive to market demands.
 

It’s On-Demand
Like all Salesforce products, Ideas is 100% Web-based so there’s no software to install, no pesky upgrades, no servers to maintain. Salesforce is the trusted leader in on-demand so you can expect reliable service, rapid innovation, and rock solid security. Start with a free trial today and you can be off and running.

 

It's Integrated with CRM
While CRM integration isn’t a pre-requisite for starting an Ideas community, it’s nice to have. It allows you to create one consolidated view of your customers so that you can run rich reports and follow up with customers based on their online activity.

 

It’s Measurable
Salesforce dashboards give you a bird’s-eye view of your community activity. It’s easy to see what percentage of customers use Ideas, who are your top contributors, and how many ideas your community has generated. All this can be displayed on the same dashboards that your executive team uses to track their sales, marketing, and support activity—dramatically increasing visibility for your online community.