Salesforce.com Wins Aberdeen Group's ''What Works'' Award for Third Consecutive Year

Business Wire, April 7, 2003

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 7, 2003

Engage, Inc.'s replacement of conventional CRM software with

salesforce.com's on-demand Enterprise Edition to achieve CRM

success earns accolades in "What Works: Top Ten Significant

CRM Implementation of 2002"

Salesforce.com, the technology and market leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM), today announced that Aberdeen Group, a leading market analysis and positioning services firm, recognized salesforce.com's implementation at Engage, Inc. to be a Top Ten CRM Implementation of 2002. This is the third consecutive year that salesforce.com and its customers have been honored for a Top Ten CRM Implementation. A full case study on salesforce.com and Engage, which details the company's successful switch from CRM software to salesforce.com Enterprise Edition following its separation from CMGI, Inc. (Nasdaq:CMGI), is included in Aberdeen's new research report, "What Works: Ten Significant CRM Implementations of 2002" (www.aberdeen.com).

"Engage converted to salesforce.com from a conventional CRM system because the latter became too hard to use and maintain, and simply wasn't delivering the results that the company expected," said Denis Pombriant, the report's primary author and CRM research director at Aberdeen Group. "The company was able to achieve rapid success with salesforce.com's full-featured suite of CRM applications, implementation support and training."

"Companies who have been burned by conventional CRM software systems are now finding success with salesforce.com's on-demand CRM service," said Marc Benioff, CEO and chairman of salesforce.com. "Our customer base includes organizations that have switched to salesforce.com from Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle and SAP for immediate success without software, hardware or ongoing upgrade and maintenance fees."

Recent Aberdeen research shows that hosted solutions continue to gain momentum. According to the joint Aberdeen-Realmarket CRM Spending and Satisfaction Survey 2003 published in February, 52% of prospective CRM buyers in Fortune 1000 companies said they would investigate hosted solutions before making a decision. In its case study, Aberdeen highlights the difficulty and expense that Engage, recently separated from CMGI, experienced with its incumbent CRM software, including lack of usability and exorbitant upgrade costs. Turning to salesforce.com Enterprise Edition, the company was up and running in less than one month on the innovative on-demand CRM service. Within days of salesforce.com implementation, technical support calls plummeted to zero. Engage was also able to remove one full-time employee and reassign two part-time workers who had previously been assigned to server maintenance. In addition, the company was also able to significantly reduce its exposure to the high costs of a VPN. In total, Engage now spends about one third of what its annual maintenance bill was with the client/server application.

Engage mapped salesforce.com to its crucial business processes and is driving new efficiencies that it could not achieve with its old system. For example, Engage has established a link from its Web site to salesforce.com to enable the smooth transition of leads from the field to individual sales reps. In addition, leads from an outsourced telemarketing agency are fed into the systems, ensuring that no possible opportunities fall through the cracks.

"With our old CRM system, we recognized the possibility that we were losing potential deals due to the lack of what appeared to be a relatively simple automation functionality," said Jessica Allen, senior director of sales and marketing operations at Engage. "If we can now close a handful of deals that were leads from the Web site or the 800-number or from trade shows -- leads which we easily capture in salesforce.com but could not capture before -- it more than pays for the investment and clearly makes us a more successful organization."

Salesforce.com's utility model delivers robust CRM technology on a pay-as-you-go basis for immediate success. Salesforce.com currently has over 6,000 customers and 80,000 users in 110 countries, making it the world's most successful application utility.

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com builds and delivers customer relationship management (CRM) applications on demand via its web services platform. The salesforce.com product suite -- Team Edition, Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition, Wireless Edition and Offline Edition -- gives companies of all sizes a complete 360-degree view of the customer. The company's award-winning CRM solutions provide integrated online sales force automation, customer service and support management, and marketing automation applications to help companies meet the complex challenges of global customer communication. Salesforce.com has received considerable recognition in the industry, including Editors' Choice and two Five-Star ratings from PC Magazine, two Deploy Awards from InfoWorld, Red Herring 100, Upside Hot 100, Investor's Choice Award from Enterprise Outlook, Editors' Choice from TMCLabs, Top 10 CRM Implementation from Aberdeen Group, and InfoWorld's 2001 CRM Technology of the Year. Founded in 1999, salesforce.com is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia.