Earlier this week salesforce unveiled a new marketing tagline to the public. The message was carefully planted, shared with media and advisers earlier, then employees, and now a selected and small group of customers and partners at an event at the Walldorf Astoria in New York. And as usual with salesforce, the company will align (or has already aligned before the event) with the new message.
So when applying this to an enterprise software vendor that makes a living in the front office then a connected customer company looks like this:
But you don't only need to connect to your customers, you likewise need to connect with your employees (Chatter, work.com), your partners (salesforce PRM) and products (expect some infrastructure investments and announcements here). Are there customer companies already? Benioff produced the below slide - and personally I would argue on H-P - but that's a different matter. Not surprisingly all 5 are salesforce customers:
And then Benioff presented eight key questions (and how salesforce software can and will answer them), to make sure that the audience was aware, that they did not have to wait a day with their transformation to become a customer company.
And salesforce wants enterprises to buy a lot of their service software on the way. While questions 1. and 2. go in the marketing direction and Radian6 (always listen), sales only gets one, Partner Relationship Management one (a revival) , 3 product answers go towards service.
If salesforce is serious and sticking to the customer company strategy - expect a large salesforce booth at CES 2014. If the company follows up on the vision, then salesforce will have the complementing services on everything connected and touch that CES 2014 will present. And Benioff deserves free attendance for life for dropping CES a few times to often for my taste (heck, MWC was happening in parallel).
But keeping up with a 30% growth rate on the social message is a challenge. It's not the first time the hype around marketing automation has let vendors down - thinking of the first wave of marketing automation vendors, who all got swallowed up by larger CRM vendors living in the sales field. Some financial analysts had already started to worry in regards of salesforce falling short on growth (Cowen & Cos Peter Goldmacher for instance). And salesforce's old foe Oracle did not stand still and acquired eloqua that complemented the overall already impressive Oracle Social Relationship management suite. As salesforce appetite for acquisitions has been dampered after the (costly) acquisition of Buddy Media, it left salesforce with a long product development roadmap. Not a scenario close to a marketeer's heart - so a change in tagline and direction was due. Or in Siliconvalleynese - a pivot.
The focus on the Service automation side is consequential, given the focus of Customer Company. It also makes sense, because salesforce has under penetrated the service market in comparison to sales. But the announcements made around Service Cloud are basically the uptakes of the work done for the Touch interface and social integration (chat) -solid engineering and re-use, but not a breakthrough.
On the other side salesforce must be careful not to focus too much on service, as the service focus of Clarify, Scopus and Vantive ultimately lead to their demise - a few generations of CRM products ago.
The good news for salesforce is, that the architecture required for running a customer's company is much more similar to what salesforce has been building for in past:
Turning too fast is not good for enterprise software vendors, as it takes time to build (good) software, make it work, train sales and partner and make customers successful on it. Marketing positioning can switch fast, bits and bytes are stubborn and take their time.
MyPOV:
Benioff is one of the best high tech marketeers around. You can debate the Oprah-style walking delivery of the presentation, but he is on record to be very good at sniffing out marketing trends early and then amplify them to salesforce's advantage with no holding back. The customer positioning is much better suited to lead salesforce to continued success than the CMO / social combo - as it plays more to the company's product's strengths - as they are a CRM company. It was already all about the customer, before Benioff started salesforce, marketed the cloud, the social enterprise and is now back to the roots of CRM, the customer and customer centric strategies.
Customer Company
Benioff credited his summer reading habit with finding an IBM report, which got the synapses going in regards of realizing that enterprises really need to become a 'customer's company'. For that they need to listen, be able to interact with customers on all channels, 24x7, consistently and efficiently.What makes the Customer Company click?
In order to listen more and better to your customers, you need to connect with them. These connections are critical and need to go across channels. Maybe Benioff did not only read publications from IBM, but also listened to Cisco's plans (he is a board member there). Not surprisingly connections matter to Cisco greatly: |
| From Cisco Company Presentation for Investor |
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| Screenshot from salesforce's event webcast. |
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| Screenshot from Larry Dignan's report on ZDNet. |
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| Screenshot from salesforce's event webcast. |
The best informercial since ... a long time
No keynote without an infomercial to pitch the vendors, products these days. But Benioff and team did a superb job here - consistent message to keynote and sublime pitch, I am truly impressed me - have a look:Will salesforce be at CES next year? Benioff was this year.
Benioff made numerous references to his visit to this years CES conference, telling how amazing it was and how he basically field tested his new positioning. Dropping Canon (a salesforce customer) as a name, he told about visiting the Canon CES booth and how there was a cool innovation to control pictures from a smartphone - but how customer service support was completely missing. He provided more examples of connected devices from Samsung's fridge to LG's dishwasher - all missing the enterprise software needed to support them.If salesforce is serious and sticking to the customer company strategy - expect a large salesforce booth at CES 2014. If the company follows up on the vision, then salesforce will have the complementing services on everything connected and touch that CES 2014 will present. And Benioff deserves free attendance for life for dropping CES a few times to often for my taste (heck, MWC was happening in parallel).
Remember - Social Enterprise
It's less than 6 months ago when Benioff positioned salesforce as the social enterprise company, as all business is social. Ironically Benioff also then credited an IBM report, that turned the light on. He also unveiled that message in New York in November 2011. The strategy was to follow on the increased marketing spend and leverage the CMO is supposed to have according to recent analyst reports. Who else than Mark Benioff was perfect to lead that transformation, from marketeer to marketeer?But keeping up with a 30% growth rate on the social message is a challenge. It's not the first time the hype around marketing automation has let vendors down - thinking of the first wave of marketing automation vendors, who all got swallowed up by larger CRM vendors living in the sales field. Some financial analysts had already started to worry in regards of salesforce falling short on growth (Cowen & Cos Peter Goldmacher for instance). And salesforce's old foe Oracle did not stand still and acquired eloqua that complemented the overall already impressive Oracle Social Relationship management suite. As salesforce appetite for acquisitions has been dampered after the (costly) acquisition of Buddy Media, it left salesforce with a long product development roadmap. Not a scenario close to a marketeer's heart - so a change in tagline and direction was due. Or in Siliconvalleynese - a pivot.
Mobile and Service
The focus on mobile is certainly reasonable and should be helping salesforce. It remains to be seen if salesforce can pull off the cross HTML5 based cross device strategy - which is highly desirable - but was proven to steep for Facebook in the recent past (Facebook created native apps for their users, due to performance problems). It's somewhat disappointing that the co-browsing feature will only come later in the year - given that GoInstant was acquired about 8 months ago. Maybe there is extensive retooling happening for the mobile architecture? My money is on that.The focus on the Service automation side is consequential, given the focus of Customer Company. It also makes sense, because salesforce has under penetrated the service market in comparison to sales. But the announcements made around Service Cloud are basically the uptakes of the work done for the Touch interface and social integration (chat) -solid engineering and re-use, but not a breakthrough.
On the other side salesforce must be careful not to focus too much on service, as the service focus of Clarify, Scopus and Vantive ultimately lead to their demise - a few generations of CRM products ago.
Major Infrastructure Work in progress
Salesforce finds themselves still in a massive retooling and architecture effort. Though the company does not elaborate, it has made more than clear, already back at Dreamforce 2011 - that it will not be able to move forward with the Apex architecture. Too much first cloud generation and getting old and too prorietary. Hence the Heruko acquisition, which should form the base of salesforce's going forward. Understandably the company is pretty mumm on the topic. It 's also not clear where that project stands, but it will have a major ripple effect through the core salesforce business functionality. And then you could be concerned to run all of salesforce on Amazon AWS - but as Netflix has shown, even close competitors can work well together in the cloud.The good news for salesforce is, that the architecture required for running a customer's company is much more similar to what salesforce has been building for in past:
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| Screenshot from salesforce's event webcast. |
The risks of pivoting too often, too fast
When you pivot - turning something around the point of rotation in a lever system - you may end up doing a pirouette. Something young ballet dancers are learning to perfect over years. But pirouette too fast and you get dizzy and fall.Turning too fast is not good for enterprise software vendors, as it takes time to build (good) software, make it work, train sales and partner and make customers successful on it. Marketing positioning can switch fast, bits and bytes are stubborn and take their time.
MyPOV:
Benioff is one of the best high tech marketeers around. You can debate the Oprah-style walking delivery of the presentation, but he is on record to be very good at sniffing out marketing trends early and then amplify them to salesforce's advantage with no holding back. The customer positioning is much better suited to lead salesforce to continued success than the CMO / social combo - as it plays more to the company's product's strengths - as they are a CRM company. It was already all about the customer, before Benioff started salesforce, marketed the cloud, the social enterprise and is now back to the roots of CRM, the customer and customer centric strategies.