Spanning Salesforce Goes Public
I've talked to sales professionals from many companies who've told me they'd love to have a way to track new leads as they come in, but they don't want messages flooding their email inbox, and they don't have time to log in to Salesforce.com several times a day. They've said they'd like a simple list of new leads—with basic contact information and a link to the lead on Salesforce—delivered to their Blackberry, Treo, laptop, or desktop—wherever they happen to be. Well, here you go.
Spanning Salesforce is a new service that lets you subscribe to updates to your Salesforce.com account with RSS. To get started, all you need is an Enterprise Edition account on Salesforce.com and an RSS reader that supports secure feeds. Popular choices include FeedDemon for Windows, NewsGator for Outlook, and NetNewsWire for Mac OS X.
Just point your RSS reader at https://feeds.spanningpartners.com/sf/rss.xml and log in using your Salesforce.com user ID and password. It's simple and secure.
Please try it out and email me to let me know what you think. Or even better, post a comment here. The service is in its infancy, so your feedback will have a big impact on its direction.
Sounds great, Charlie. But I wouldn't use this without a robust privacy statement.
Posted by: Ross Mayfield | July 18, 2005 at 12:10 PM
Ross, you're absolutely right. I need a privacy policy that says that I'll never look at or disclose any of your information to anyone.
I was going to use SocialText's policy, since I'm sure it's simple and powerful, but Google can't find it. The ones it does find, from Yahoo, Amazon, and Google itself, seem too complex and therefore suspect.
As soon as I find one that says what I want it to say and has some legal teeth, I'll post it and adhere to it.
Thanks for bringing this up.
Regards,
Charlie
Posted by: Charlie Wood | July 18, 2005 at 12:44 PM
The Spanning Partners Privacy and Security Statement is now up:
http://www.spanningpartners.com/2005/07/spanning_partne_1.html
Posted by: Charlie Wood | July 23, 2005 at 06:16 PM
My early looks have been great. It is more convenient particularly when I am on the road or when I am on conference calls and I don't want to be looking at each of the leads. It would be great to have the ability to see summaries of my opportunities and/or my forecast.
Posted by: Bill Dolan | August 03, 2005 at 10:08 PM