Salesforce finally moves forward on 3rd party developers
Salesforce has long been my own preferred database / sales management tool. I’ve used it since 2003 and have been recommending it to clients since then.
Seems they are finally working out that FUNDING is important for bright young developers who have ideas to write add-in programmes for AppExchange [the part of Salesforce where third party suppliers can promote their add-in programs]. Business Week picked up the story.
For creative businesses, I find Salesforce has enough functionality to allow a proper sales / business development pipeline management with a bit of CRM thrown in. It isn’t expensive, it isn’t complex and it provides a sufficient framework for most organisations. Salesforce does not work for CRM for clients. It won’t store files (only a few ‘centralised’ ones) and so is inappropriate for that purpose.
As far as creative incubators go, the only one I knew about was run by Wilson Harvey (now part of Loewy Group) and Charlie Hoult was MD and rather manically trying to buy all the organisations he was incubating. And of course a couple of large agencies sub-let vacant office space in 2001-3 to small start-ups…. but it was hardly incubation at that stage. Tonic started off in offices like that at FCB. Not sure what happened to them all…… is it time for creatives to incubate again?
What would an incubator do for a young creative agency?
1 - offices (meeting rooms, reception, cafe)
2 - business support (accounts, telephone)
3 - water cooler ideas / discussions
4 - opportunity to collaborate on clients (but only driven by the host, probably)
What can an incubator offer that somewhere like the Hub in Islington (a shared office space for creatives) can’t?
Thanks to Sam Sethi for the info.