Salesforce is fundamentally changing its go-to-market strategy by moving from individually positioned applications to a comprehensive suite approach. This shift emphasizes the strength of their platform, highlighting the various applications and the integrations between them.
Salesforce has a broad portfolio of applications that are all available separately. The products can operate independently or through integration with each other. Salesforce initiated the unified strategy years ago aiming to make their products more intertwined and collaborative. Soon, customers will experience this suite approach more prominently, with access to basic versions of all applications under a single Salesforce suite. If customers find value in specific applications, they can extend functionality through different licenses.
Salesforce core platform
Salesforce now thinks and operates much more from the Salesforce core platform. That is the platform on which most applications are based.
Historically, Salesforce built a portfolio through development and acquisitions. It then used the MuleSoft layout to facilitate integration between applications. That worked well for a while, but does not provide the uniformity, integrations and data quality that organizations need today, let alone for the proper deployment of AI.
The Salesforce core platform was developed to address these challenges. Sales Cloud and Service Cloud were the first applications based on this platform, followed by other clouds being redeveloped on the same foundation. During Dreamforce, the company announced that versions of Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Tableau are now available on this core platform, making it significantly easier for organizations to combine and utilize data across different applications.
No migrations imminent, but a gradual transition
Current Marketing Cloud or Commerce Cloud customers may not have noticed these changes, as they currently apply only to new customers. Eventually, all customers will gain access to the new marketing, commerce, and Tableau applications.
Because the existing marketing, commerce and Tableau solutions are very comprehensive, completely replacing and migrating them is out of the question for now. Salesforce is opting for a transition transition, with more and more functionality becoming available in the new applications over time. By also significantly improving the user experience in the new applications, customers will increasingly use the new applications. The idea is that in this way, organizations will slowly move the work themselves to the new applications.
Whether this approach will succeed remains uncertain. While it’s understandable that a fully-developed marketing solution cannot be easily replaced with a completely redeveloped solution using a different data stack, having users switch between old and new applications may not be ideal.
New vs old
We have watched some demos of old and new applications, and we do see the added value of the newly developed solutions. The user experience is faster, more intuitive, and significantly more user-friendly. This is mainly due to the direct integration with the Data Cloud and other Salesforce solutions. For example, users can make data selections directly from the marketing solution due to improved integration, whereas legacy solutions only allow selection of pre-prepared target groups from Data Cloud.
However, in our conversations with Salesforce, it appears that the new Marketing, Commerce and Tableau solutions cannot yet measure up to their predecessors, which simply have many more features. The 2024 versions are more suitable for SMBs than enterprise organizations. Salesforce’s marketing offering is currently based on two software solutions that it has adopted and developed over the years, namely ExactTarget and Pardot. Pardot’s features are already reasonably reflected in the new solutions. But ExactTarget matching in terms of feature set still needs some more time.
In the near future, however, we will see more and more features becoming available in the new applications. Enterprises will also gradually start using the new applications more and more. The challenge of transferring existing data and workflows without migration tools remains significant. As the new solutions mature, they may be able to automatically take over more tasks, potentially accelerating the transition.
The word migration is currently something Salesforce is trying to avoid. They see it primarily as a natural transition over several years, with customers moving more and more things on their own. Whether it will work that way, or whether we will be talking about migration in a year or so anyway, the future will have to tell.
Taking a suite approach with the core platform
Previously, Salesforce sold customers only the Sales Cloud, for example. Customers only had access to the Sales Cloud through their Pro or Enterprise license. If they wanted to work with other Salesforce products, licenses also had to be purchased.
That’s about to change. Salesforce has developed a new SME portfolio with the introduction of the Salesforce Starter Suite and Salesforce Pro Suite. These SMB products are stripped-down versions of the Enterprise editions. For many smaller customers, this is just enough; others can expand their licenses modularly.
For existing Salesforce Professional and Enterprise customers, the Salesforce Starter Suite will be available free of charge for all Salesforce products, in addition to their existing Professional or Enterprise license on a particular Cloud application. This will allow customers who only use Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or Marketing Cloud, for example, to also use the other Salesforce products for free. This gives access to a limited feature set, but it is sufficient for small operations and a good way to get acquainted with more Salesforce products.
Ultimately, it’s a freemium model through which Salesforce is trying to get customers to use the entire platform of Salesforce products more. As a result, that customer ends up buying more licenses for various other products so that they can use the more advanced features as well.
Salesforce also for SMEs?
Salesforce now also has a clearer proposition for SMEs. These are the familiar Salesforce products, but with a limited feature set. Whether Salesforce is thus really suitable for SMEs or whether it is more a means to get customers excited about the products and eventually convert them to a more expensive Professional or Enterprise license is hard to say. Ultimately, it very much depends on what the customer wants and needs. If the customer cannot settle for the features offered but still wants more,it will have to pay.
In European countries, the SME offering will only really become available soon. In other countries, it has been available for a while, and we understand from Salesforce that the company is signing up a lot of SMEs there who are opting for these cheaper licenses.
Best-of-suite is the future; SME possibly the next growth opportunity
Salesforce’s shift to a best-of-suite approach offers customers the opportunity to experience different solutions before committing financially. By integrating applications effectively, Salesforce creates a unique platform relevant to various business teams, addressing the challenges of expensive, complex, and time-consuming self-integration as organizations seek faster innovation.
Salesforce is on the right track with its platform. In the coming years, we will see how the newer applications evolve. Finally, there is Salesforce’s revamped SME strategy, which, on the one hand, warms up existing customers to new solutions and, on the other hand, offers huge growth potential.
Ultimately, there are far more SMEs worldwide than enterprise organizations. The revamped SME strategy not only introduces existing customers to new solutions but also offers significant growth potential in the much larger global SME market, where Salesforce has less penetration compared to enterprise organizations.
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