Salesforce.com announced today that Facebook, citing scalability benefits, has selected Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud 2 as its CRM solution. Facebook’s been growing fast: last year it took in $700 million and expects to reach $1 billion in revenue this year. In Q1 of this year, Facebook surpassed both Yahoo! and Microsoft in total ads displayed. The company is certainly in need of a scalable sales solution.
According to Salesforce.com, Facebook replaced its own in-house CRM system Sales Cloud 2 after considering the benefits of using a SaaS CRM solution instead of maintaining its own system. Facebook has already deployed Sales Cloud 2 to its sales staff and integrated the software with six other existing systems.
Sales Cloud 2 is Salesforce.com’s sales automation suite featuring its own social networking system Chatter, among other features. Salesforce.com has previously offered a Salesforce.com and Facebook mashup called originally called FaceForce and now called Facebook Connector, but it’s not clear whether Facebook will be using either Chatter or Facebook Connector internally. Update: Faceforce developer Clara Shih has clarified that FaceForce/Facebook Connector is not an official Salesforce.com offering.
