<p>December 18, 2012, 10:00 AM Salesforce.com has tied its Sales Cloud CRM (customer relationship management) application into its Work.com employee performance management software, in a combination the company says can make average salespeople better and good ones great.</p><p>Work.com is the result of Salesforce.com's acquisition of Rypple in late 2011. It employs a Facebook-like milieu that enables managers and team members to comment on, praise and recognize the work of employees on an ongoing basis, rather than roll everything up into an annual performance review.</p><p>There's an erroneous perception that salespeople are "simply managed, coin-operated kinds of people," said Daniel Debow, senior vice president of Work.com. "But data is coming out that the best sales managers are great managers. They give recognition [to salespeople], they know how to motivate them."</p><p>While nothing stops managers from noting high performance by an employee as it occurs, that kind of recognition can get lost in email messages. Work.com provides a much more public way to give praise, said Linda Crawford, executive vice president of Sales Cloud. "Even top performers get very, very motivated by other people saying things about them," she said. "This plays to their ego."</p><p><a href="http://www.itworld.com/software/328675/salesforcecom-ties-workcom-performance-management-app-crm-app">Keep reading...</a></p>