“Salesforce helps us work in the new connected world.”

For more than 75 years, Canon has been known for pioneering innovative imaging products. One of the world's largest manufacturers of cameras, copiers, and printers, the company maintains its leadership position by continuously innovating new features and technologies. And as it seeks to compete in a new social, mobile world, Canon is using Salesforce to connect with customers and employees, and focus its business around them.

"The world is in the midst of a paradigm shift and just being new is not enough," explains Haruo Murase, Chairman. "Unless we capture what our employees and customers are thinking, we won't be able to take Canon to the next stage. Salesforce offers a way for us to work in this new world."

The company has a large direct sales staff, but hasn't always had visibility into the team's activities. Customer information wasn't captured, and there was a lot of wasted effort. With Salesforce, Canon can capture customer activity, while avoiding overlap—and managers and peers can view complete customer information and get key insights to what's happening on the front lines. In addition to being able to find everything they need in one place, sales reps can provide updates on customer engagements to supervisors from the field—in real time.

Canon continues to pay close attention to new product announcements and track how they are received by customers. "With Salesforce we can track how much business new products generate, and manage these new opportunities," explains Murase. The company has close relationships with many leading professional photographers and uses Sales Cloud to fulfill their requests to try new equipment and capture their feedback.

Canon also uses a Chatter social network to connect and collaborate with employees across the company to ensure that everyone is aligned around customer needs. "Employees can communicate in real time," adds Murase. "Salesforce has been key to helping us share information effectively so we can do more to help customers."

"It's fast and easy to build and deploy new apps with Salesforce," says Oota. "Instead of spending time on development and maintaining infrastructure, we can stay focused on building tools that help us meet customer needs."