News 2: ONBOARD LAUNCHES ITS NEW WEBSITE

Onboard Plc has launched a brand new website in six languages. We'd like to thank Exigio Ltd who are responsible for the original web design and user-friendly functionality. You can find here company history and other information, meet some of our competent team members, learn all about the services we offer, sent us an enquiry, read about successfully completed projects, apply for a vacant position and many more. Enjoy!

News 3: SALESFORCE AND GOOGLE:
Your focus should be your business, not the tools you need to run it. With Salesforce and Google working together, you can now run your business on demand with a powerful combination of applications that are easy to use, so you‘re free to concentrate on making your business succeed. Enjoy the freedom, simplicity, and collaboration that come with the powerful combination of two software-as-a-service leaders.

Salesforce for Google Apps:
A New Way to Work Together. Experience the power of collaboration made easy. Salesforce for Google Apps is made up of simple, yet powerful, Web-based business applications that make it incredibly easy for users to communicate, collaborate, and share business information. Salesforce for Google Apps includes several new applications to help businesses of all sizes work in new ways:

Watch the Salesforce for Google Apps Product Tour.

News 4: Salesforce for Google AdWords

Reach New Customers and Grow Your Business. With Salesforce for Google AdWords, companies can manage and measure search engine marketing campaigns directly from within Salesforce. Now marketers can enjoy complete visibility and control over their search engine marketing investments-all the way from keyword selection to closed deal.

Watch the Salesforce for Google Adwords Product Tour.

 Professional Edition Featuring Salesforce for Google AppsNo Downloads. No Software to Install.
Register below and for 30 days you'll have full access to all the features and capabilities of Professional Edition, including integrated access to Google Apps (Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and more). See how easy it is to run your business with software as a service with the leading Web-based CRM and desktop apps from Salesforce and Google.

 
News 5: SALESFORCE.COM AWARDED BEST CRM SOLUTION

Salesforce.com receives CODiE Awards for Best On-Demand Platform and Best Customer Relationship Management Solution

SAN FRANCISCO - May 1, 2007 - Salesforce.com, the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, today announced that it has been honored by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) with two of its prestigious CODiE Awards, given annually to companies for excellence in products, services, corporate leadership and philanthropy. Salesforce.com's multi-tenant platform was selected as "Best On-Demand Platform" and, for the sixth straight year, salesforce.com was chosen as the "Best Customer Relationship Management Solution."

"The Salesforce Platform has fundamentally changed the way companies design, deploy and manage their enterprise applications, making it faster and easier to reap the benefits of The Business Web. We're excited that the SIIA has judged Salesforce Platform as the Best On-Demand Platform, acknowledging the superiority of a multi-tenant platform and our unique approach to delivering and enabling on-demand business services," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO at salesforce.com.

"We're equally thrilled about Salesforce once again being named the Best CRM Solution," Benioff continued. "These accolades are yet another illustration that the game has changed, and that old-school software vendors are on the wrong playing field."

"I applaud all the companies selected as winners or finalists in the 22nd annual CODiE Awards," said Ken Wasch, SIIA President. "The software and information industry continues to move at a dizzying pace, and being recognized by your peers for getting to and staying at the head of the pack in such a dynamic environment is a major accomplishment. It is one of the reasons why the CODiE Awards hold such a special place in our industry."

News 6: SALESFORCE EVENT KEMPINSKI HOTEL

Salesforce.com spring '07 launch event - Kempinski Hotel, Sofia
SalesForce.com returns to Sofia with Spring '07 release (April 26, 2007 - Kempinski Hotel)
Salesforce.com is leading the on-demand market with an innovative "no-software" approach. Celebrating the 5000th customer in Europe (Rolls-Royce), we are bringing the latest edition Spring '07 to the East European market. Bulgarian businesses, institutions and non-profits will see for themselves the most innovative product of "The Business Web" not only for managing relations with customers but a platform for developing custom applications.

Discover the latest features of this award-winning CRM platform:

• Salesforce automation
• Campaign and event management
• Customer service and self-service solution management
• Process optimisation and workflow management
• Mapping your business and customisation
• Customer-centric, process-driven applications and best practices
• Applications for non-profit organisations and the public sector

News 7: ONBOARD ENTERS NEW OFFICE

SOFIA, BULGARIA - November 7, 2005 - Onboard Ltd (now Onboard PLC) a Business Process Outsourcing provider of Channel Development and Incremental Sales services, announced that it has moved into a new office space located in the Admin building of the NDK office complex in the city center of Sofia, Bulgaria. "Our new facility more than triples in size the former Onboard office and is equipped with state of the art technology platform to meet the needs of Onboard's growth now and in the future", said Onboard's President Lozan Stefanov. "The need for companies to outsource business processes such as Direct Marketing, Sales Leads Generation, Channel Development and Channel Auditing to a price-competitive location such as Bulgaria will continue to grow. The step to upgrade to a new 1st Class office facility will maintain our leadership position as Bulgaria based company serving Technology Clients internationally and will provide scalability for our operation to meet increasing demand from existing and new customers."

News 8: CRM - FASHION OR BUSINESS NECESSITY

CRM, or Client Relationship Management, is a company-wide business strategy adopted with the purpose to reduce overall running costs and maximise customer loyalty. Such a strategy is generally implemented in departments that build on relationship with a customer, such as marketing, sales and service & support, with the idea to encompass all customer-related data into one place in order to better follow its life-cycle.

In their efforts to become more profitable, companies have invested big amounts of time and finances in their marketing and sales operations, while their return on investments turned out to be minimal, if at all existing, without fully understanding where they went wrong. This is due to the fact that working on acquiring new leads (or potential customers) can cost up to 10 times more than serving and rewarding already existing customers. Marketing efforts put in targeting and creating leads, combined with Sales involvement to convert these leads into clients has become a nightmare for most companies. Most of the times, the information flow between marketing and sales is cut off somewhere in the middle, thus letting good leads go away because of a lack of integrated communications means and a real customer-centric strategy.

True CRMs bring together all information from all data sources from within an organisation (and sometimes even from the outside, depending on the needs) to give one holistic view of each customer in real time so that opportunities can be valued at maximum. With this holistic view, any CRM strategy relies on 3 pillars: people, processes and technology. In its article, "Winning the Battle for High-Value Customers through CRM", McKinsey, a consultancy company, acknowledged that "CRM is fundamentally a strategic approach to managing customer value and experiences. It is not a technology solution. However, technology is often an enabler of the benefits that accrue from a well-crafted customer strategy, superior analytics, and innovative programs". Directly linked with analytics, any CRM system must ensure a wide range of reporting and analytics tools spread throughout the entire organisation. This should allow multiple interactions and data collecting and displaying across all departments with the purpose of better customer segmentation for better market approaches and innovative customer strategies. Thus, since it is an organisation-wide strategy, companies should answer the following questions, based on analytics and reporting:

Which of my customers are profitable or unprofitable?
Do I know their lifetime value?
Which of my products and services are they buying and not buying?
Have I measured customers' purchase behaviour patterns, their loyalty/retention/repeat purchase and multiple product purchases?
What channel preferences do customers have?
Who are my most profitable customers and what is their ranking/grouping by risk, by product service grouping, by profit, and by revenue?
What strategies can I use to improve a customer's profitability profile?

Based on the information they obtain, real details about their leads and customers, their buying patterns (channels, buying cycle, quantities, etc) and products, companies, through a well-defined CRM strategy, can now better serve their existing clients and meet their needs in any moment, while allowing a better market penetration through up-to-date analytics already existing in their system. With a fully integrated CRM system, a company would in fact invest in their relationship with their clients making the most out of it: people serving the customers will always be up-to-date with the latest information, business processes will be in place and leave little room to mismanagement and technology will now serve to achieve a real return on investment.

News 9: ONBOARD ANNOUNCES NEW CLIENT

SOFIA, BULGARIA - November 7, 2005 - Onboard Ltd, a Business Process Outsourcing provider of Channel Development and Customer Acquisition services, announced that, together with its business partner MarketStar, it has been selected by Intel to provide EMEA-wide Channel Partner Auditing in the frame of various Intel reseller programs. Onboard was founded in 1995 in Bulgaria as a distribution services company. In 1997, the company expanded its coverage and services by focusing on channel development in East Europe. In 2000, Onboard extended its coverage to the countries of the European Union. Today, the company acts as a BPO with pan EMEA coverage and with main focus on B2B programs related to New Customer Acquisition, Customer Growth, Customer Retention and Channel Development.

Onboard's rapid growth is based on a methodology that leverages on East Europe based cost effective workforce and on best practices that have been elaborated in the mature West European markets. The company disposes with a large network of foreign employees, based in the main EMEA countries. Onboard's international and highly educated team is distinguished by a high degree of professionalism and extensive multi language skills; most employees speak more than two languages. We delver state of the art Lead Generation, Channel Development and Consultancy services in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Romanian, Turkish, Greek and Russian. All employees are committed to achieve ongoing revenue growth for our clients and to deliver measurable sales and marketing results.

News 10: KNOWLEDGE ALERT: SOCIAL NETWORKING AND CRM SUCCESS

The Yankee Group analyst Nitin Gupta says social networks have power beyond ad revenue to act as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool for companies selling products or services. "There's a lot of focus on advertising and banner ads and the amount of traffic. But it's important to look beyond traditional forms of web adverting to see the real potential -- which is leveraging the connectivity of the sites and using them to form communities around products, media or services to really be in contact with your users."

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1463