Salesforce.com: Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty?
Marketing / PR, SMB / SME September 4th, 2009

Is Salesforce.com’s glass for SMBs half full (of lemonade) or half empty? I borrowed the lemonade metaphor from Venturebeat’s post announcing Salesforce.com’s new Contact Manager offering for (very) small businesses.
On second thought we should use orange juice as a metaphor – as in disappearing orange juice, by Tropicana which offers less juice in a redesigned pitcher for the same price, and even tries to sell it as a benefit to consumers
Salesforce.com “pulled a Tropicana” with the announcement of their $9 Contact Management edition, and the funny thing is, nobody seems to have noticed it. No, the media duly buys what Salesforce.com PR sells, welcoming the new edition as “giving something back to the little guy” , “breaking through a price barrier”, “making it affordable for SMBs to get in the Cloud”.
Nobody bothered to do some fact-checking, which would have unveiled that in the new Edition is in fact offering less for the same price, a’la Tropicana. Salesforce.com has pulled off a price increase and it went largely unnoticed.
Prior to this announcement the lowest-priced edition of Salesforce CRM, the Group Edition was priced at $9 per user per month, and it is now increased to $35.  The few media outlets that noticed this refer to it as temporary promotion for August, that has now expired.  Let’s see just how temporary it was: the “promo” started not in August but in June, and not in 2009, but 2008.
This promotion was supposed to expire in July of last year, but it did not – and I correctly predicted it would transition into a permanent price-cut, without much fanfare. Indeed the $9 pricing lasted over a year. And just for the record, prior to dropping the price to $9, CRM Group Edition had cost $20 – so the $35 new price is definitely not just ending a promotion, it’s a price hike of several notches.
But forget history, let’s look at value: having a Contact Manager functionality is certainly useful, although I suspect Google Apps (which is integrated with this Salesforce.com offering) will also offer enhanced Contacts functions.  Still, nice – for 2 users only, as that’s the maximum number allowed for this edition. Talk about 2-person companies, let’s remember that Salesforce.com used to offer a free single-user Personal Edition CRM. I’ve just checked my dormant account, it’s still working – but the offering is no longer available for new users.
So let’s see: from free CRM for one user, later $9 CRM up to five users, we’ve gone to $9 Contact Manager for two users. Quite an improvement.
Now if you have 3 users, the lowest entry point to Salesforce.com is now Group Edition at $35 per person = $105 vs. the previous price of $27.  And if you have 6 users, you no longer qualify for Group Edition, your entry point now is Professional Edition at $65 per user.
Oh, well. Math lesson over, it’s a nice sunny morning, time for my glass of OJ ( not half full, not half empty – just full.
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(Disclosure: I’m Editor of CloudAve, a group blog sponsored by Zoho. This article is cross-posted there.)
Tags: contact management, crm, crm price hike, pr, salesforce.com, software pricing, transparency, xref
Southern Comfort dumps old media, and pours (pun intended) their entire $8 million media budget on the Net. Let’s hope they’ll spend it smarter then they did on this ad four years ago.
What’s wrong with this banner? Nothing – unless you place it in context. It appeared just days after Hurricane Katrina almost wiped out New Orleans… which gives the words “where anything can happen” a special meaning. And if you think it was just an innocent mistake, read the details here.
Related posts:
- Southern Comfort Pours Entire Media Budget Into Digital
- Southern Comfort Dumps Cable For Hulu, Facebook
- SoCo and Lime, and Facebook, and Hulu…
- Southern Comfort goes all in on web advertising
Tags: ads, adsense, advertising, Blogging, blogs, Hulu, marketing, southern comfort
Fiber One. Cardboard No (?) Deceptive Yes. Do They Think We’re Stupid?
Business, Marketing / PR July 19th, 2009
Fiber One has a risky tagline: Cardboard no. Delicious yes.
Why risky? Because ..well, cardboard is indeed the first word that comes to mind when I taste it. Oh, well, my Dad likes it. Lucky for him, since he needs it for health: it’s hard to find this much fiber in half a cup of breakfast cereal elsewhere. I assume that’s the reason for this product’s popularity, not taste…but wait, building on the base product’s success, there is now a whole range of Fiber One products, cereals, breakfast bars..etc.
They went mainstream. Translation: sweet, tasty, sugary, less healthy. From 57% of your recommended daily fiber intake down to 20% in some cases. But wait.. there’s one cereal likely a lot tastier and not that far from the original fiber content:

Forget the standard industry trick that the new box contains only 14.25 ounces instead of the original 16.2 for the same price… it’s almost as healthy and likely tastes better. Let’s check the small print:
At first glance the two products are close: 14g vs. 13g fiber. But how come the tastier version is listed with 42g Carbs while the original had only 25?  And 160 Calories vs. 60?
Oh, there’s the trick: the ingredients are listed as per serving. However, the original serving size was half a cup, while the tastier Honey Clusters’ serving size is 1 cup.  I repeat:
General Mills, makers of Fiber One is using (almost) double the serving size to compare fiber content. The true comparison would be on the same serving basis, which would show a drop from 51% fiber content to roughly 25%.
This is an outrage: while technically correct, it gives false impression, especially since these products are typically placed right next to each other on supermarket shelves – and on the company’s website, for that matter.
Shame on you, General Mills for treating us as if we were stupid.
Tags: carbs, cereal, consumerist, deceptive marketing, fiber content, fiber one, general mills, grocery shrink ray, health, marketing, nutrition
Accessorize Your Algorithm, Amazon :-)
Humor, Marketing / PR June 2nd, 2009
I think this email promo I’ve just received from Amazon after purchasing the replacement filters (first item shown) speaks for itself. I guess if I had bought a kitchen sink or some furniture, they would offer a house as accessory.![]()

Tags: adveritising, amazon, online shopping
Atlassian $timulus Package Inching Towards Finish Line
Collaboration, Marketing / PR, Startups April 24th, 2009
Quick update on the Atlassian $timulus drive I previously reported about: at 2pm on the last day of the promotion, they are at $93K – the $100K donation is realistic… but they may need a little push.
So I decided to put my money (well, a little) where my mouth is and have just purchased 10 5-person licences of Confluence, the market leading enterprise wiki. Not that I can use them all – so I will find a way to give them away in the future.
If you want to help them donate $100K to Room to Read, you can do your part easily … and just as a reminder, you’re buying a $1,200 licence for $5.  What a bargain to close out the week.
Update: With 3 hours to go Atlassian is just $2.5K short of reaching the target. See coverage map at Mike’s blog.
Update #2: Ah, the drama of the last minutes:
$640 short of $100k… with 20 minutes to go, my maths says we’re just going to miss!
$590 short. Need $30/minute now… at least we did $35 last minute!
Just tipped $99,510… I wonder if we should just leave it up for 10 minutes extra, or does that seem dodgy?
Well… computer says it’s…over $100k!!
Woo! Woo!!! Dancin’ around the room. Atlassian Stimulus Package 400% of $25k goal. What a week. Simply staggering. THANK YOU EVERYBODY!
Atlassian Stimulus Package (preliminary) final total – $100,350 for Room To Read in 120 hours from 7284 _awesome_ startups and teams!!
Tags: atlassian, charity, Collaboration, confluence, donations, Enterprise Software, jira, marketing, room to read, stimulus, wiki
Atlassian $timulus Package Supports Charity. Two Days Left To Get Your (Almost) Free Confluence or Jira Licence.
Collaboration, Enterprise Software, Marketing / PR, Startups April 23rd, 2009
This must be do-good-week. Amongst all the talk about Ashton Kutcher’s challenge to CNN, how the follow-on Oprah show pushed Twitter to never-seen height, little attention was paid to the small fact that this initiative generated over $1 Million donations to Malaria No More. Ashton started with his $100,000 check and was soon joined by Demi Moore, Ted Turner, Oprah and I don’t even know who else .. I lost count at $1M.  Hype aside, this is a major contribution to a good cause.
This week we’re also seeing a for-profit company, Atlassian drive to raise $100,000K for the benefit of Room to Read, an organization that builds schools, libraries in rural communities in Nepal, Cambodia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Laos, Zambia …etc. Doing good is in Atlassian’s DNA, likely coming from the co-Founder, who is a major Kiva Supporter. His company had set up the Atlassian Foundation which donates basically 1% of everything:
- 1% of company and employee time to Foundation projects
- 1% of company equity to the Foundation
- 1% of our products to non-profit groups
But wait! This isn’t a post about charity only. There’s a Deal in it for you!
The Atlassian $timulus package is a 5-day drive, during which you can get either Confluence, the excellent Enterprise Wiki, or Jira, the issue tracker – Atlassian’s first product that’s still an IT favourite for $5 for 5 users.
Now I hear you ask: is that $5 per person per month? That would by typical (actually low) pricing for most SaaS offerings.  NO! It is:
- A five-user licence (ie. $1 per person)
- For a full year
- For the full-featured entrerprise strenght products
My only regret is that it does not involve the hosted versions of these products.  But if it’s the downloadable, installable version, what’s this per year licence? Most enterprise software is sold with a perpetual licence: you can use it forever. But then the vendor pushes the (almost) mandatory maintenance fees to the tune of 20-25%, and major new releases every 4-5 years.
Atlassian does not play such games, their philosophy is transparency and simplicity. Software should be easy to learn, easy to use and easy to buy. Hence the annual licence whish involves support. (Update: I misunderstood this part: the licence is a perpetual one, the additioal annual fees are for maintenance / support, and the are optional.) And for comparison, the minimum annual licence for both Confluence and Jira is $1,200.
So Atlassian is essentially giving away $1,200 licences for free – but it’s actually a lot more. This isn’t just your introductory price. Customers who purchase during the $timulus week (only two days left) are locked in to their $1 per user price for the lifetime of the product, and those fees will be donated as well.  That goes way beyond giving up revenue – they can’t possibly provide support for $1 a year, so Atlassian is reaching into their pockets big time for years to come.
The initiative appears to be more wildly popular than they expected. The initial goal was to raise $25,000 for Room to Read, and they exceeded that target on the first day – hence the new objective of $100,000K.
Early this morning they were at 66% of the increased target:
Now, before someone thinks I am doing a paid commercial here: I am not receiving any form of compensation or incentive from Atlassian. I simply like what they are doing. A lot.
But I’m not naive. This isn’t just charity. It’s damned good marketing – in more ways then one. First, as you may suspect is Brand recognition.
The second is perhaps less obvious: Atlassian’s initial product, Jira took several years to take off – the second, Confluence had much faster growth. Part of their secret sauce has always been relying on a very loyal, very satisfied customer base, mostly IT-types who buy additional products from their trusted vendor.
So yes, Atlassian is seeding their market with thousands of free customers this week. Which is fine, I’ve said before: you don’t have to be purely altruistic to do good.
Update: The Atlassian $timulus Package is now listed in Consumerist’s Morning Deals, along with Blu-Ray Discs and Casio Cameras
(Cross-posted from CloudAve. To stay abreast of news, analysis and just plain opinion on Cloud Computing, SaaS, Business grab the CloudAve Feed here.)
Tags: @aplusk, altruism, ashton kutcher, atlassian, charity, Collaboration, confluence, donations, Enterprise Software, jira, kiva, marketing, oprah, philantropy, room to read, stimulus, Twitter, wiki
Startups, Remember: Transparency, Transparency, Transparency
Marketing / PR, Startups January 17th, 2009
- How can people even think of launching a service without revealing the price upfront?
- How can they expect users to go through the hassle of signing up, installing software, only to find the price info after all this?
- Why do people still fall for this?
I’m discussing the above and more using Zumodrive’s launch as case study over @ CloudAve – read the details here.

Tags: box.net, dropbox, live mesh, online storage, pricing, Startups, storage, sync, synchronization, syncplicity, transparency, zumodrive
Startup Entrepreneurs who did not make it to the recent 


Zoli Erdos