A dashboard from Salesforce IoT Explorer Edition lets sales and marketing teams analyze data from connected devices. (Salesforce Photo)

As the Internet of Things becomes a thing, adopters are generating lots of data that isn’t necessarily making its way into the sales and marketing process. Salesforce is ready to give those folks an easier way to automate reactions to that data.

Salesforce IoT Explorer Edition will launch later on Tuesday as an add-on to the various Salesforce Cloud products, and it will become generally available next week. The idea is to give sales and marketing professionals better data on how customers are actually using products in the field or on potential new revenue opportunities from those products, said Woodson Martin, executive vice president and general manager of Salesforce IoT.

The idea behind IoT Explorer Edition is similar to a lot of other Salesforce products and services, in that it looks to give non-techies a way to surface and analyze relevant data without having to do a ton of coding, Martin said. In this case, it allows them to ingest data from connected devices across the smart home or industrial internet and link that directly to customer profiles within Salesforce.

Woodson Martin, executive vice president and general manager, Salesforce IoT (Salesforce Photo)

But companies that have been rolling out connected products have been “very focused on the investment on the infrastructure side, hadn’t done a lot to think about or prepare to deliver the experience for the customer behind the device,” Martin said.

One example? Companies building connected devices have a huge customer service opportunity by proactively monitoring connected devices for signs of trouble, but that data is often siloed away from the sales and marketing folks actually responsible for maintaining those customer relationships, he said.

And that’s the key feature of IoT Explorer Edition: it can be configured to automatically respond to certain triggers surfaced from IoT connected devices with marketing campaigns or offers, Martin said. “Customers are shifting business models from reactive models to proactive models,” he said.

Schneider Electric, the electric equipment giant, is increasingly selling connected products and has been using a preview of IoT Explorer Edition to identify upselling opportunities by delivering pinpoint capacity reports from products in the field. Likewise Lippert Components, which makes parts for recreational vehicles, can reach out to RV fleet operators like Camping World or Cruise America with maintenance warnings using IoT Explorer Edition, Martin said.

Salesforce plans to show off IoT Explorer Edition at its upcoming Dreamforce extravaganza in San Francisco in early November.

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