Response from: Jon Miller    (06/05/07 3:05pm)

Although this alliance reconfirms the importance of mashing up Salesforce and Google into a seamless integrated process, the product side of the announcement falls short of addressing the real pain points that marketers feel when trying to use AdWords to drive new business leads.

1) Landing pages are critical for driving conversions and improving ranking, but 3 out of 4 companies still send clicks to the home page. Google doesn't care because they still get paid for each click, but the marketer ends up with fewer leads. It’s just too hard to get the right IT support to have enough targeted pages, and the Google-Salesforce alliance provides no solution to this problem.

2) Bidding well is hard for most marketers, and Google-Salesforce provides no help for bid optimization. Again, this suits Google just fine since it's in their interest to have companies over-bid, but it leaves the marketer with suboptimal results.

3) A click is just the beginning of a business sales cycle. Only 25% of the people that click on an ad and fill out a form are ready to speak with a sales rep. Companies need to put in place a relevant and patient nurturing process that guides the prospect from the research stage to being truly "sales ready". Once again, the Google-Salesforce alliance doesn't address this gap in the marketer's business process.

You can read more at http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2007/06/some_gorillas_c.html.