Salesforce Connections 2015: Time To Think in Terms Of Customer Engagement

The thing about end users is that while IT vendors tend to think of them as having defined roles inside their organization the reality of their everyday existence is very different. Most line of business executives (LOBs) these days move between different job functions multiple times a day, especially in smaller companies where there’s not a lot room to stand on ceremony.

For that reason solution providers should be paying attention to what Salesforce (CRM) is up this week at the Salesforce Connections 2015 conference in New York. During the event, Salesforce unfurled an update to Salesforce Marketing Cloud that extends the reach of its Journey Builder tool for crafting and tracking marketing campaigns.

The latest version comes with pre-built integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud application services that makes it simpler to manage customer interactions that span marketing, sales and service functions.

For example, there are now pre-built triggers inside Salesforce Marketing Cloud that automatically modify data in the customer contact records based on specific events or set up a series of messages to be delivered at different times from sales, marketing and service organizations. As part of that evolution, Salesforce this week also showed how the next generation of its Active Audiences ad platform synchronizes ad targeting with data in the Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) application.

Gordon Evans, vice president of product marketing for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, says while Salesforce Marketing Cloud is aimed at marketers, many salespeople have achieved enough sophistication to use the Customer Journey tool in Salesforce Marketing Cloud to manage customer interactions on their own. In fact, given the prevalence of Salesforce software inside sales organization, it may very well turn out that the biggest users of Salesforce Marketing Cloud might wind up being salespeople that want to manage the customer interaction process from end to end.

Of course, depending on the size of the company, it may very well be the CEO or some other senior business executive crafting that customer journey story. The point is that roles inside organizations are blurring as organizations begin to focus more on customers rather than specific products or even lines of businesses. In its place there is emerging a new business culture that is not only keenly aware of what each customer bought, but also how profit each of those customers represent to the business and what those customers are most likely to buy next.

There’s no doubt that competition in the sales and marketing software category is no doubt fierce. But perhaps the time has come to reimagine what these categories really are all about. It may even be time to abandon these category names all together in favor of a simpler customer engagement category that better reflects what it is the end customer is actually trying to accomplish. Whatever the outcome, the one thing that is for certain is that selling silos of applications no longer reflects what customers are actually trying to accomplish.