Salesforce Connections Heralded the Future of Digital Marketing Technology, But What About Services?

Mid-June, HfS analysts attended Salesforce Connections 2015, which put the Salesforce Marketing Cloud at the center of its run toward digital marketing. Salesforce showed evidence of a forward-thinking technology strategy, including moving from legacy on-premises apps (evident in its “No Software” campaign), building products like Sales Analytics Wave with mobile-first design intended to be programmed and used by business users without IT or analyst help, and enabling omnichannel functionalities across sales, marketing, service and analytics. Salesforce presented a great technology vision and showcased ways in which its solutions could help its clients find success. To a degree, the “connection” with people and third parties was missing. We wanted to see more about how Salesforce could take advantage of its internal practice, partners and ISVs to enable marketers to use the Salesforce stack in new ways.

In terms of products and platforms, a feature from Connections that struck HfS as innovative is the Salesforce Customer Success Platform, an all-encompassing CRM platform that leverages the sales, service and marketing clouds. Salesforce brought to life how different apps on the Customer Success Platform are being used to drive digital marketing results. Examples include:

• Next gen email tool, which offers highly personalized, dynamic content using data and analytics, instead of static, point-in-time email promotions.
• Next gen Journey Builder, which helps create 1:1 personalized customer journeys with tools for comprehensive campaign design and execution, particularly those with digital interventions.
• Analytics Sales Wave, which integrates this first product on Analytics Wave with Salesforce so that sales teams can assign actions, manage team performance, and get forecasting and pipeline insights within the same environment.

Salesforce has made significant progress in unifying a single product/brand image for its solution stack. Although it has made strides in product development, Salesforce has long been about pushing value through its developer/partner ecosystem. One of the challenges it has had in the past is that the developer community didn’t necessarily partner and collaborate to the fullest (end-to-end) with Salesforce. In addition, marketing executives that HfS analysts spend time with often mention that while there is value in Salesforce’s entire stack, their primary struggles are in pushing to get more results from the few Salesforce applications they had already invested in, often for a single channel or product.

For Salesforce to succeed in bringing its full vision for digital marketing to life, it needs customers and partners to also embrace a revolutionary way of thinking about it.

Salesforce needs to take a more active role here, and lead or collaborate to drive a rethink by enterprises, partners and ISVs on how Salesforce assets are deployed, the span of usage and collaboration potential, the level of consumer data sharing between departments, and more. These are monumental change management initiatives for an enterprise client that has so far functioned in geographical and brand silos. While the technology element of digital marketing is becoming more and more intuitive, inclusive, and sophisticated, the next frontier that Salesforce could help champion is how sales and marketing departments can get more value out of marketing technology through the broader ecosystem.