At the Dreamforce Europe party this evening I took the opportunity to chat to some Salesforce.com customers. Most were traditional CRM customers (and seemed happy on the whole), but one person I spoke to used the platform more extensively. His business repairs domestic appliances. The entire booking system runs on Salesforce; and they use a mashup with Google Maps to inform their engineers of upcoming jobs.

I was told that Google Adwords is the most effective advertising they do. They have done some fine-tuning in order to get the best results. If potential customers search for upmarket brands, the wording of the ad might emphasise professionalism, whereas for budget brands the wording might focus on value for money. They analyzed the results and have proved the benefits of these adjustments. They do not use the content network at all, as they only want to target customers actually searching for something related to their business.

Another twist: they like being able to switch off Adwords temporarily when they have too much work.

All of this has been achieved on a low budget, mostly by configuring Salesforce rather than writing code. Interesting.