This week's "In the Spotlight" guest is William Moxley -- VP of Product Management for the Sales Cloud. Will talks about what's in store for the Summer '12 release, when touch.salesforce.com is coming out, and how he and his team monitor the IdeaExchange. 

If you have questions for Will, you can post them on our Facebook page. He will be participating in a live Q&A session this Wednesday at 12pm PST. Join us!

* Please note that this product discussion falls under our safe harbor agreement.

Tell us a bit about your background and career journey at salesforce.com?

I’ve been in the software business for 15 years, with the last 11 being in product
management.  Much of my software experience has been in CRM – including working at Scopus (an early CRM company) and Siebel.  I joined Salesforce in 2006 to help build out the PRM product. It was a tremendous amount of fun working on that product and we enhanced it quite a bit.  After spending about 2 years on PRM I took on responsibility for certain parts of the Sales Cloud including the Forecasting engine.  After about a year I was running the product management for the Sales Cloud.

What is your current role at salesforce.com?

I run the product management organization for the Sales Cloud.  I have a team of great Product Managers that work on different aspects of the Sales Cloud.  Some of the areas we work on are Opportunities, Quoting, Accounts, Contacts, Tasks, Outlook Integration, Forecasting, and part of the mobile offering.

What new and exciting Sales Cloud features can customers expect with the Spring'12 release?

I’m excited about a lot of new capabilities we are adding to the sales cloud this spring.

First we’ve spent a lot of time on Social.  Last release, we added Social Contacts which allows customers to link a contact to their social profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.  I was really excited about this because it brought contact management into the social enterprise.  Contact Management is no longer a list of interactions your company had with a customer – it is now a complete view of a contact including what they say about themselves on social media.  In the Spring Release we are expanding this capability to many other parts of the product.  We will now have Social Accounts so you can get a wealth of information on Companies from their social presence.   We are also delivering Social Leads and Social Person Accounts.  Additionally, we’ve added two more social networks: YouTube and Klout.  On YouTube you’ll be able to see any related YouTube videos on your customers.  And Klout is a great service that measures the social influence of a person or company.

Here is the scoop on Touch:

And finally, we’ve added some critical features to Salesforce for Outlook.  With this release customers will be able to prevent private meetings, contacts, or tasks from being synchronized with Salesforce.com.  This is really critical to the adoption of Salesforce for Outlook because many customers don’t want their doctor appointments in Salesforce – which I completely understand!  We also added the ability to take an email from a customer and automatically turn it in to a Case.

What’s on the horizon for the Summer release? Can you divulge any new features we should be looking forward to?

Sure, I can share a little something. 

First, we’ve got some enhancements to our new forecasting engine. Specifically we’ll be opening it up to all customers and adding quota tracking capabilities.

We’ll also be releasing the #1 idea on the IdeaExchange: multiple contacts on an activity.  Hear more:

Third, we are going to be adding a CRM Context panel to Salesforce for Outlook.  This panel will allow you to see CRM data about a contact when you bring up an email from that contact in Outlook. It’s a great way to bring the CRM information to your inbox.

And finally, we’ll be making Touch, the new mobile product I was speaking about earlier, available to all customers so anyone can use it to manage their sales. 

What is your vision for the Sales Cloud – where is it headed in the next few years?

What are challenges do you encounter when growing and evolving the Sales Cloud?

We’ve got a lot of customers and we’ve got the biggest product footprint. When we change something, we have to be extra careful because of the huge number of users we will be impacting.  That can slow us down sometimes.  But the upside is that we know when we release something that a huge community of users will benefit from it.  That is incredibly rewarding.

What are the upcoming trends in CRM and Cloud Computing?

One lesson you have learned at this job?

We have an incredibly passionate user base.  When they don’t like something they let you know loud and clear. And I love that because that means they care.

Fun fact about you?

First, I love hip hop. A lot of people say "Oh, I wouldn't have expected that from you," but I do love rap and musicians like Jay-Z and The Roots.

Second, I love cooking. Unfortunately, I’m a bit rusty because I don’t get enough time to do it.  I’m too busy with the Sales Cloud.

--

Have more questions for Will Moxley? Ask them on our Facebook page -- he will be answering at 12PST Wednesday, Jan 25th!