marketing cloud

  • October 17, 2014

    • dreamforce_logoDreamforce has always been about many things happening at once — a three-ring circus in a good way. There are announcements about applications, platforms, philanthropy, entertainment and, importantly, parties. This year there was all of that and then some I was a guest with a ringside seat.

    Since most of the product announcements came out over the last few weeks some of us were wondering what there would be to talk about but in retrospect that worry wasn’t worth the effort, there was plenty. Beginning in Indianapolis a few weeks ago with the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud event and continuing with the announcements of Sales Cloud1 and Service Cloud1last week we had a good sense that Salesforce was doubling down on core products to make them more at home in the mobile and social environment of modern business.

    Perhaps the worst kept secret of the event was the company’s announcement of Wave, its analytics cloud and it was a minor controversy among the chattering class. Wave tries to leapfrog ahead of conventional analytics and business intelligence for the obvious reasons that those other technologies are based on old, legacy, set piece paradigms for the most part and therefore less suitable for handheld business.

    Salesforce wanted to deliver analytics to the hands of people on the front lines who need information to make good decisions in the moment of truth and I think the company’s first offering does that. Wave is not only graphical to an extreme but also somewhat animated if by animation you mean being able to change presentation styles on the fly. Two things I like about the UI — first, it enables the user to switch from a bar graph to a pie or donut chart with a finger point. Second, it’s zippy, the graphics are live meaning, for instance, that you can turn a donut chart like a dial to get to the segment you want to drill into. It’s also intuitive and I think any reasonably smart person (i.e. someone who can draw a breath and a paycheck) can easily think up questions to ask of the data and get a usable answer.

    The snarking class is asking if the product is ready for prime time but this is stuff I’ve heard for 15 years. Salesforce has developed a reputation for not talking about things they can’t deliver so I am a believer when they tell me they have some very large companies involved with the product.

    With Wave Salesforce appears to have built out its platform, which now includes clouds for sales, marketing, service, app development, social, mobile, and analytics. So with all of that you can in theory build an application that will run everywhere from the desktop to the handheld, in multiple operating systems and browsers.

    Of course there will be new versions and improvements but to me this now signals the closing of the frontier and the opening of the market to settlement and expansion. In practical terms, I hope this speeds up the adoption of more process oriented business — as opposed to a more conventional transaction orientation. In other words, I think the biggest changes are ahead of us. Vendors want transactions but customers expect process and the newest technology at last enables vendors to meet customers half way.

    It was one thing when the company could point to standard CRM plus a mobile browser capability but quite another now that a vendor can capture its customers’ data, analyze it, and offer up next best actions in a wide variety of situations. With this capability, we turn a corner from ad hoc business designed to capture a single transaction to a kind of customer science that operates inside of customer moments of truth. When I say science I mean it literally, not as a metaphor. Customer science will someday be seen as a specialty part of sociology, I am sure.

    The difference between the old order and science is not only striking but the science is so much more efficient and adept at developing and maintaining the customer relationship that I doubt we’ll see very much of the old approach to business in a few years. This is a tipping point enabled by big data, analytics, and a lot of technology and it is amazing to me that so few software vendors have understood the moment they inhabit.

    I can accept that the above might sound confusing or perhaps even tantalizing. In either case I write about it in more detail in my new book. My buddy and former CMO at Salesforce, Cary Fulbright, tells me I am not making a shameless plug for the book if I don’t reveal the title so let’s leave it there. But watch this space.

    Finally, it has to be said that Dreamforce might someday be referenced as the show that ate San Francisco if this year’s numbers are any indication. There were 145,000 registrations and I am told 5 million online viewers. Having all those people in the Moscone neighborhood presented challenges such as when using the sidewalks. But the crush also brought into close proximity an abundance of like-minded people who at times seemed to think as one. I liked the mind meld but can do with fewer humans — however, for a few days it was tolerable especially when considering the upside.

     

     

    Published: 9 years ago


    journey-into-fall-louisville-kentucky1

    ExactTarget said “The Journey Is Its Own Reward” and they were right.

    There was a lot to like at Salesforce ExactTarget’s Connections 2014 user conference in Indianapolis last week. Now all they need to do is reduce the size of the name — the words Marketing Cloud need to be fitted in there too but I forget how.

    First, a quick shout out to Indy, home of the big Memorial Day race. I don’t get to spend a lot of time in the middle of the country because I am so often in Boston, New York, or San Francisco and it was nice to experience the Mid-West. The city was open and clean, the people were friendly and very helpful. Good on them.

    Perhaps it’s ExactTarget’s Mid-West roots but I can see a genuine concern for the customer emanating from the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud and it plays well. For a long time, I’ve been writing that capturing customer data and running random analytics against it was insufficient for modern customer relations and I’d been disappointed with what I’d seen from vendors addressing the issue.

    For me, and I write about this in my forthcoming book (consider this a shameless plug), the customer relationship is a process that’s built up from many moments of truth that vendors simply have to be in and must navigate successfully to endear customers and earn the right to do it again.

    Too often companies are unaware of what their moments of truth even are and consequently, and inadvertently, they disappoint customers. It’s too bad too because nobody goes into business with that mindset but the disappointment is real and it results in tepid endorsements to others AKA advocacy, which depresses sales and all manner of success in the market.

    ExactTarget gets that and it was wonderful for me to be in the audience as speaker after speaker demonstrated just how ExactTarget enables them to be in their customers’ moments of truth. Testimonials came from the likes of boutique hotel operator Kimpton, apparel maker, Diesel, and a little company from Chicago named McDonalds. I believe they are in the restaurant industry.

    What enables these companies and many others to be in their customers’ moments of truth is a new product announced at the conference called Journey Builder, which is just what this doctor ordered. As you might expect with that name Journey Builder enables marketers to map their customers’ moments of truth so that they can plan authentic and appropriate programs for just those moments.

    Journey Builder is not a lone; it’s part of a big machine that captures customer signals, uses analytics to interpret them and to predict customer next steps so that the vendor can marshal the right responses. A complete solution uses Radian6, another Salesforce acquisition, for social listening and Buddy Media to develop and deploy the right messages at the right time. It also uses its own analytics to evaluate responses and figure out how to improve.

    That was the overt and subliminal message of the event — the journey is the reward. It sounds corny but it’s true. The journey doesn’t stop and a good vendor customer relationship goes through cycle after cycle of listening, responding authentically, and evaluating the results. Lather, rinse, repeat. Simple. Success in today’s journey is what enables us to play again tomorrow.

    If there was a kink in the hose it is that the moments of truth that Journey Builder maps seem to appear from nowhere. Of course, these moments are distilled from a lot of direct observation and engineered by savvy marketers into the programs alluded to. But I have a nagging fear that we’ll see a mini-hype cycle develop in which cowboy marketers assume they just “know” what customers want in their journeys and engineer very nice programs that are nonetheless wide of the mark.

    In fact, understanding moments of truth is a science all by itself and that part of the process deserves to be acknowledged. But the tools and techniques required have their foundations in community and community was not really on display at this event. So some work on a fuller end-to-end approach still needs to be done and that brings me back to process. Journey Builder and its associated parts provide a nearly complete process oriented approach that sure beats a more transaction oriented legacy approach. But we need to close the loop and that means community so that the cowboys don’t get the wrong idea.

    There are huge numbers of companies in the world that have not gotten this religion yet and for many it will be a big lift, but certainly do-able. This kind of attention to customers is not free. It requires technology, methodology, and trained people as well as some new thinking in the corner office. Wait a minute! People, process, and technology. Where have we heard this before?

     

    Published: 9 years ago


    You might be tempted to consider social marketing just another idea in an endless stream of things dreamed up by the software industry (and pundits like me!) to generate more business.  Well, you’d be right about some of that but I’d like to argue that the idea is more than hype and is, in fact, in synch with the times.

    Conceptually, marketing and sales have not changed for a very long time.  It’s all about finding someone with a problem to solve and budget for the purpose.  It doesn’t matter if the situation is business to business or business to an end consumer, it’s all about finding a need and filling it.  I can agree with that but at the same time I know that if this is as far as you take it you’ll starve.

    Look at what’s going on in the marketplace.

    Things are getting incrementally better nearly four years after the bottom fell out of the economy but CFOs still watch budgets like hawks.  Demand is still squishy everywhere and the gross domestic product of the U.S. — and the whole planet for that matter — hasn’t grown in five years.

    Moreover, new product category introduction is low, and this is very important.  When a category is new everyone, at least in theory, needs it and sales people do great business.  Marketers’ jobs are streamlined too.  They need to focus on building brands and communicating the basic features and benefits of what they have.  Products are also relatively simple.  They typically come in one flavor and function as general purpose cousins of what they will eventually become as the market grows and differentiation sets in.

    If you take an objective look at most of the marketplace today that’s about where we are.  Established markets are already crammed with products that may not be the latest and greatest but they work and customers need compelling reasons for buying what’s newest.

    You might say, what about products like the iPhone or the iPad?  Every time Apple comes out with a new version the market goes wild and buys the new product even though the old ones still do their jobs.  That’s all true but the phone industry has a different cadence run by the planned obsolescence embedded in the service contract.

    After two years, you get a new phone and a new contract.  If you don’t you stay on your old plan paying the same rate.  Effectively, you pay the same rate to use a new phone or to stay with the old one, so it’s no surprise that iPhones sell briskly and no surprise that the company sells an increasing record number of new phones with each introduction.  Every two years there are more “old” iPhones than ever and more people ready to change.  But this is a digression.

    In today’s markets, where there is no forced obsolescence, we need other reasons to buy new and there are smaller numbers of new buyers entering the markets for the first time.  Smart vendors have realized that this means taking a different approach to sales and marketing.  Rather than the selling-to-anyone strategy of early markets, smart vendors today recognize that they have to model who their customers are as well as model the sales cycle.  For many this means using social tools but it also requires a different set of techniques with the tools themselves.

    In one approach, marketers simply substitute outbound social media for things like email and direct mail.  This gets them into social but not very effectively since their technique is still decidedly old school but with new technology.  In my research, more vendors find themselves right here at a transition point somewhere between conventional marketing and social marketing.

    The other approach, which I think is closer to “real” social marketing, marketers make great efforts to capture customer data so that they can filter it for telltale signs of interest.  The same approach also works for service organizations seeking signs of customer dissatisfaction.  That’s all good but it is also limited.  If a vendor relies on keyword filtering or hashtags it will miss many instances that need a little nuance in the filtering.

    The nuance takes a lot of forms.  I once did a small project in which I searched for sentiment.  My criteria were simple.  In repeated Google searches I looked for two word combinations, a company name and the word ‘sucks’.  Now, I will admit this was crude but it was also extremely effective.  Suck may be the generic summation and judgment in our society for all that is wrong in any situation.  My searches always came up with hits — hundreds of thousands of them.

    So, the experiment proved a point but it also proved to be a rather blunt instrument.  The search approach did nothing for a legitimate cry for help like Company + Product + Problem unless I made an explicit search.  But you can see where this is going.  If you had a way to do all kinds of searches at once you could turn up signs of people interested in a solution or a product category, people looking for help and people upset with something related to your business and much more.

    To get there you need analytics and not just one kind but several.  Humans can determine the difference between someone with a real problem and somebody just being sarcastic.  Computers need to do multiple scans of the data using different software tuned to each to arrive at the same conclusion more or less.

    In social marketing today there is a proliferation of software packages that help marketers to get close to understanding customers and markets in multiple dimensions.  There are tools for emotion analysis, natural language processing (NLP), predictive and trending analytics, affinity and segmentation and influence.

    Last week at Cloudforce, New York, salesforce.com announced the Social Insights Partner Ecosystem, a partnership between third party analytics suppliers and its Radian6 division.  The announcement’s significance is that Radian6 users can now process their social data through as many filters as make sense for their situations.  This was an important introduction because it addresses the way we market (and sell) today and it’s different from the way it was several years ago.

    Now let’s go back to our original discussion.  In a marketplace as constrained as today’s it’s critical for vendors to understand at a very fine grained level what customers are thinking.  Are the installed customers generally happy?  What are their simmering issues?  Might we want to proactively address those issues before we introduce the new version of the product that won’t be successful unless we have significant buy-in from the base?

    What about the possibility of gaining net new customers from the competition?  How satisfied are our competitors’ customers?  What openings might there be?  How can we exploit them?

    Don’t for get brand new customers.  What ideas are trending in the market that relate to our business?  Finally, are there new product ideas lurking in the data stream?

    To me answering these questions is the key to successful social marketing because they are crucial to success in business today.  Salesforce’s announcement suggests to me that they continue searching out Blue Ocean opportunities — markets and niches that have either not been penetrated at all or that have only been lightly touched.  I expect that our dependence on social marketing will increase and that the approaches now being proposed through announcements like this will be critical to future success.

    Published: 11 years ago