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I’m excited to share some stories from some incredible trailblazers today and I’m going to speak about how Salesforce and our customers are leading through change. It should come as no surprise to all of you that we’re in a health crisis, that we’re in economic crisis, that we’re in a racial crisis. For us at Salesforce it is a very good time for us to lean on our values. Our values really guide us. And as a company, they’re at the root of everything that we do, and those values are trust, customer success, innovation, and equality. And what we’ve tried to do over the course of this pandemic and through this challenging year is to really live those values.
Guided by Trust
If you think about trust, which is our number one value, we want to have trust with all of our stakeholders, our customers, our partners and the communities in which we live. And one of the things that we’ve done is to source hundreds of millions of dollars worth of PPE.
We knew that PPE was difficult to find and healthcare organizations all over the world were struggling to get that personal protective equipment for their patients and for the doctors and nurses. That’s one of the things that Salesforce did is to go out source that PPE and get it to the places where it was needed most.
CRM for All
When it comes to customer success, we realize, especially through this new distributed work from anywhere in the world, that it’s incredibly important that all of our customers have access to our product. We really doubled down on the reliability of our platform. In a lot of cases, we’ve been giving free products out to those who are most in need so that they could find ways to keep their business going: to find ways to connect with customers and to ensure the success of their customers.
One of the things that we came out with over the course of the last couple of quarters is a new offering around work.com. We realized that our customers needed to find ways to bring their employees back to work and to do it safely. They needed to find a way to do contact tracing, especially government entities. Now they need a way to safely distribute all these new vaccines, which are coming online.It forced us to really rethink and pivot our product strategy and come to market with new products.
Promoting Equality
Last, but certainly not least is equality. We realized that this pandemic has really impacted a lot of the small businesses in our community. And one of the things that Salesforce has done over the last couple of months is put together a set of grants to help small businesses keep the lights on, to help them find new ways to connect with their customers whether it’s a retail shop who wants to do curbside.
Salesforce is giving out grants and also free products to help these companies to survive and thrive through the pandemic. These values have really guided us at Salesforce as we have led through this very, very challenging year.
Work from Anywhere is the New Normal
We also believe that the changes that you’re seeing now and this new distributed work for any work from anywhere in the world are not temporary. We believe very strongly that a lot of the changes you’re seeing now are going to survive well past the pandemic when we go back to work and we use this framework to think about and help guide our customers through the challenges that we’ve seen over the course of this year.
At first it was really around stabilization. How do we get all of our employees back home with a functioning internet connection? How do we all stabilize in our lives and find ways to educate our children or take care of our parents? At Salesforce, we helped our customers by giving away free products, and making sure that our platform was up and running and available for all of them to use. I feel like all of us are now past this stabilization phase.
The second phase for us has been really reopening. That’s getting employees back to work and we’ve delivered a product with work.com that helps our customers get their employees back to work and to do it safely. We’re certainly not going back to work quite yet but we know at some point this is going to be relevant for us and we’re going to need a platform to help us do that.
For a lot of companies it’s about getting back to growth in this new world which is really working from anywhere- it’s highly distributed. It’s even more important now than ever that you have a customer 360 view of your customer and a single source of truth. You need that in order to deliver a unique and differentiated customer experience.
Connecting to Customers from Anywhere
This framework has really helped to guide us and also guide our customers as we’ve navigated through the last year. We’re not unique in that we’re not working from home. We’ve got to find ways to connect with our customers. We’ve got to find ways to create that great experience. Now it’s really around the B2B marketer owning the customer experience. That really requires a marketer to work well beyond sales to really think across the entire organization because you as a B2B marketer or a marketer in general are really on the front lines of creating a unique customer experience.
If you think about different organizations, you’ve got really great marketing teams who are doing really innovative stuff. Same with sales organizations and same with service organizations but what they’re doing is they’re innovating within their respective function. What you end up seeing is a really great MarTech stack, a really great sales tech stack, or a really great service tech stack. That’s great, and that certainly can help you to grow the business, but the power comes from how all these things come together.
If you’re just innovating within one of these respective functions then you’re going to have data in multiple places. You’re going to have a set of processes which are different across all these different functions. If you do, it’s very difficult for you to be able to create a unique customer experience. We are guiding our customers and helping them through digital transformation to think about how they can evolve together. How can they bring all of these things together and have a single platform to do sales, marketing, and service to create those unique experiences?
Single Platform = Single Source of Truth
Salesforce is uniquely positioned to help our customers do that by having a single platform and giving our customers a single source of truth on their customers. As marketers, you also have to evolve and shift your roles as we work through this pandemic. Our roles have really changed and to be a successful marketer in this new age really requires us to leverage the technology that is available today.
How are you leveraging AI to deliver a unique personalization? How you are bringing all your data together in a single place across sales and service and marketing to create that unique experience? We all know as marketers through an economically challenging time that there’s a lot of scrutiny on our budget.
Analytics becomes even more important as you think about how you measure the effectiveness of your marketing, how you find those places where you’re seeing a positive return, and how you double down on those.
To hear some great marketers share their stories and talk about how they’re leveraging technology in order to do that, watch the video above.
