Salesforce Customer 360 Platform, Resilient Business Model, and Customer-First Approach Driving Strong Performance

Salesforce Records One of the Best Quarters in its History Despite Multiple Crises, Powered by the Cloud-based Salesforce Customer 360 Platform

Businesses are extensively leveraging Cloud, AI and Customer Success Management platforms to amplify their digital transformation paths, creating innovative tactics and approaches to align their business goals in a heavily crowded ecosystem. Today, almost every business group is using at least one Cloud product, and the number increases as the size and revenue of the companies grow.

The global leader in Marketing and Sales Cloud and Customer Service platforms Salesforce has reported a strong quarter in Q2 2021. The financial results reflect a very strong commitment to customer-first service even as the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and other geopolitical crises around the globe have made a dent on CRM revenues everywhere. For Salesforce, it’s never been a hard task to lead the way when it comes to restoring the belief in stakeholders, partners, employees, developers, and above all, their customers.

At the time of announcing Salesforce Q2 2021 fiscal results, Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce poignantly pointed out the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and other multiple crises seriously affecting communities around the world.

In June 2020, Salesforce had announced Salesforce Everywhere, a real-time collaboration app for the remote workforce. 

Marc revived the faith and vision on which Salesforce was created and run for so many years, dodging numerous challenges with “belief in stakeholder capitalism and core values of trust, customer success, innovation, and equality.”

Marc said, “Our success in the quarter brought all of this together with the power of our Customer 360 platform, the resilience of our business model, putting our customers first and doing our part to take care of all of our stakeholders. We know that together we have an opportunity to emerge from these times even stronger.”

We spoke to Salesforce partners and CRM leaders in the technology world. Here’s what the martech leaders had to say about Salesforce’s continued success and leadership position in the global Cloud and SaaS markets.

Steve Wit, Director of the Public Sector at Nintex

“The pandemic has caused organizations to rely on cloud technology more than ever. Government agencies, and others slow to adopt newer, Cloud-based technologies, have had to compress multi-year transformation plans down to a matter of months. Salesforce has allowed these agencies to deploy new cloud-based solutions in weeks, allowing them to quickly adjust to the new environment they work in while setting them up to be more agile going forward. These earnings confirm that agile, secure, Cloud technologies are more important than ever before.”

Craig Traxler, co-founder and principal at Avionos

“Enterprise companies largely began settling into the realities brought about by COVID-19 in the past quarter with remote work becoming the new norm and people moving forward with initiatives, including those involving Salesforce products. We saw a shift in priorities as digital initiatives that drive revenue and improve customer engagement replaced operational efficiency and internally focused initiatives.

We saw a trend of organizations deprioritizing one Salesforce solution due to its internal focus only to prioritize a different Salesforce solution to drive digital engagement, such as eCommerce and Communities.

n these cases, Salesforce simply closed a deal they were targeting for later in the year while the deal they were originally expecting was pushed out. Although there was a re-prioritization of initiatives in favor of digital transformation projects, there was and continues to be scrutiny of any project and its funding. Salesforce has worked to counter that slowdown by incentivizing customers to purchase now and new product offerings such as Work.com.”

Kris Rudeegraap, CEO at Sendoso

“Salesforce’s solid quarterly earnings show that despite the pandemic’s negative impact on most businesses, customer relationship management systems are critical to maintaining operations. Salesforce has been both quick and effective in their response to COVID-19, enabling their success among buyers during this time. Strong product innovation, engaging customer stories and smart social impact initiatives are keeping them relevant, as they’re addressing what’s important to their ecosystem in this new normal. The head start will fuel Salesforce’s lead in the upcoming year, compared to other CRM systems such as those offered by Microsoft and Oracle.

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The company’s continued strong performance shows that having connected customer data is more important than ever. The ensuing recession and slow reopening of the economy caused by the spread of COVID-19 have made it difficult to close deals and achieve growth. Revenue-generating teams have realized the need to make data-driven decisions if they hope to thrive, let alone survive, turning to Salesforce as a tool.

It will be interesting to see how Salesforce continues to innovate as the company is hungry, adaptable, and willing to meet the needs of its buyers. In lieu of in-person events, it’s likely Salesforce will add offline engagement channels to their Customer 360 platform. Direct mail and gifting is one channel seeing increased growth YOY (36% from 2018 to 2019) and would be a natural next step for the company.”

Conclusion

Most industries are now relying heavily on AI-based Cloud and CRM Automation platforms to gain insights on Customer 360 profiles to deliver better CX.

Salesforce Customer 360 platform is helping businesses turn to full-stack cloud solutions. Yes, some industries have been rather late to cloud adoption, such as the government sector, companies like Salesforce, Oracle, Genesys, Adobe, IBM and Zendesk are doing years worth of work in a matter of months.

You can read the full transcript of the Salesforce.com (CRM) Q2 2021 Earnings Call here.

To share your Technology insights and martech Cloud stack concepts, please write to us at sghosh@martechseries.com