October 6, 2014
No one needs a report to know that Salesforce is the king of CRM. But a new report fills in some of the blanks about how companies are using the popular platform — and its role in digital transformation.
“The State of Salesforce” is the third annual report on the subject from New York City-based global business consulting firm Bluewolf, in collaboration with the MIT Sloan School of Management.
The report includes some big takeaways from over a thousand Salesforce customers worldwide, according to Bluewolf global CMO Corinne Sklar:
— “We are seeing organizations focusing on business outcomes to drive initiatives,” she told VentureBeat.
That is, the business reasons for using tools such as Salesforce are again driving the priorities of strategic initiatives, instead of companies feeling compelled to become the latest on the block to get a new toy.
“Some of our customers would say, ‘I want a 360-degree view of the customer,'” she said. “We’d say, ‘So what? What does that [view] do for you?'”
The report found, for instance, that nearly three quarters of surveyed companies are diverting budget to back cloud-based solutions like Salesforce rather than on-premises ones, because of its impact on overall growth and especially on improving customer experience.
— Customer engagement is the key business reason driving many initiatives at companies.
Businesses see that their products and services can easily be compared online for price and quality, so making sure the customer has a good experience — and hopefully becomes engaged with the brand — can become the differentiator.
“Salesforce has become a customer engagement platform,” Sklar noted, highlighting one of the company’s evolutions since its early days of focusing on sales.
Seventy-one percent of respondents said they are planning to increase their Salesforce spending over the next year. Bluewolf said that better customer engagement through cloud-based services, mobile, and intelligent data are key drivers of this emphasis.
— In many companies, marketing is in the driver’s seat.
“The focus now is on the customer,” Sklar told us, and “marketers are really [the ones] looking at their experience.” The report found that 91 percent of Salesforce-using companies say the marketing department is a key player in the executive suites. Eighty-three percent of customers using Salesforce with marketing automation, such as that company’s ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, report that they are drivers of innovation in managing the customer lifecycle.
