SmartMoney Achieves Return on Salesforce Investment in Just Two Months

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Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM - News), the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service, today announced that SmartMoney, a Hearst Corporation and Dow Jones & Company media organization, has achieved a return on its Salesforce CRM investment in less than two months, and projects a 570 percent return in the first three years of its deployment. The Salesforce Software-as-a-Service CRM solution enabled SmartMoney to increase its sales, as well as gain faster and easier access to information for better short- and long-term forecasting. Results of SmartMoney's success with Salesforce CRM were published in a Nucleus Research study available at http://www.salesforce.com/industries/media-center/.

SmartMoney is one of the 41,000 companies of all sizes, industries and geographies that comprised the salesforce.com customer base as of January 31, 2008. Revenue and subscribers will be recognized as the service is delivered.

"We had data in a number of different places, and were struggling to understand our pipeline and apply resources where they had the most impact," said Joseph Dressler, National Advertising Director, Magazine & Online at SmartMoney. "Salesforce CRM has enabled us to consolidate all our information and gain a greater understanding of our current business opportunities as well forecast into the future. As a result, we've increased our sales with both new and existing customers and are growing our business."

SmartMoney deployed Salesforce in just a few weeks, and immediately gained easier access to critical customer information. Now users can retrieve historical customer data, and then analyze and use it to provide better service, make more targeted customer contacts and close more deals. With more timely and accurate data, SmartMoney management can now forecast more effectively and apply resources to maximize opportunities.

"Salesforce CRM has provided so many benefits, including automating manual processes and eliminating duplication of efforts, that have made us more agile and more efficient," added Dressler. "It's a benefit across our organization, from our sales and marketing teams who easily adopted it to management, who now has new on demand insight. And, since it's delivered as a service, our IT team doesn't have to spend resources maintaining it."

Salesforce for Media and Communications
Media and communications companies around the globe, including DoubleClick, Dow Jones Newswires, InterActiveCorp, Polycom, Siminn and Sprint Nextel, put their trust in the Salesforce on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) application to support their most critical business relationships. Salesforce enables these companies to succeed in an increasingly competitive marketplace by delivering easy-to-use next generation technologies that give management a better understanding of business opportunities and help sales teams close deals. Salesforce.com customers have access to pre-integrated industry-specific solutions available via the AppExchange, so media sales, marketing and production teams can leverage a 360-degree view of the customer to streamline their business, improving both efficiency and results. All of these solutions are built on the Force.com platform, the world's most powerful and trusted on-demand platform. For more information, please visit http://www.salesforce.com/industries/media-center/.