Dreamforce 2017 - Navigating to customer cloud success
- Summary:
- Customer-centricity is at the heart of the new Success Cloud which formally launches this week at Dreamforce.
As we repeatedly say at diginomica, the best proof point for any tech vendor pitching its wares is to tone down the snake oil sales presentations and let the customers speak for themselves about what they’ve achieved and how they’ve achieved it.
That principle is at the heart of a new offering from the firm - the Salesforce Success Cloud. This is a combination of bringing a number of disparate Salesforce units/groups under one umbrella as well as formalising a methodology-based approach to rolling out Salesforce cloud programs across organizations. As the marketing bumf puts it:
Previously, the group has been organized under different aegis - Customers for Life; Cloud Services Group… Success Cloud is focused on sharing the people, methodologies and innovations our customers keep asking for to help them be successful and decrease their time to success and business value. Success Cloud helps customers manage their Salesforce investment to ensure that it continually maps to the most strategic priorities of the customer.
Before Dreamforce kicks off in a few hours, I had a chat with Tony Colon, Success Cloud Product Leader, about the reasoning behind the new initiative. Colon has been at Salesforce for 8 years, initially focused on Service Cloud before moving into post-sales activities around customer service.
Essentially Success Cloud is about encouraging and facilitating cloud adoption across enterprises and working with customers to identify and support strategic priorities based on customer priorities. Those priorities will vary from customer to customer and have evolved over the years. Where once the priority was the single view of the customer, now it might be the concept of shared value, for example:
It starts with a joint assessment with the customer where we say, ‘Here’s where you are, here’s where you want to be’. How we get there isn’t always going to work in a linear fashion. We have customers coming to us and saying, ‘There’s so much to your platform, where do we start?’. So we’ll put a timeline on things and check in every three months to see where it’s at.
While clearly Success Cloud is primarily intended to encourage take-up and deployment of Salesforce offerings, there’s a wider mission statement of encouraging cloud adoption per se. So what the customer learns from its engagement with Salesforce can be transferred to Workday, Google and other cloud enterprise offerings. Colon explains:
We’ve been in this space for 18 years now and what we asked ourselves is, ‘How do we take the knowledge that we have and make it available to customers?’.
He cites the example of Coca-Cola as a case in point:
Coca- Cola is becoming a software firm for bottlers. They said to us, ‘You are a software platform, can you teach us how to do Devops and how to do agility?’. They want this within the context of Salesforce, Workday or GSuite etc. They want to learn how we do things internally…At Coca Cola, there were Workday foks on site dong work but leveraging work we did for Salesforce. Development and release strategy was based on Compass.
Steering a path
And what is Compass? Compass is essentially a methodology for putting in place the necessary building blocks for successful cloud programs. Colon argues:
Any approach to digital transformation has to be based around a methodology, it can’t just be around our people.
According to Salesforce, there are four principles underpinning Compass - ‘north, south, east and west’ to drive successful cloud adoption:
- Inspiring Team.
- Customer Obsessed.
- Accelerated Execution.
- Purpose-Driven Organization.
These principles in turn are supported by ten core competencies that characterise success cloud adoption:
- Empowering Leadership.
- Digital DNA.
- Collaborative Culture.
- Inspiring Designs.
- Single View of Customer.
- Rapid Innovation.
- Decisive Roadmap.
- Connected Systems.
- Continuous Learning.
- Shared Value.
At this point, it might be suspected that this could be construed as a step into the waters of Salesforce becoming a professional services provider. This would in turn raise some potentially challenging questions about the ‘co-opetition’ implications for the cloud firm in terms of its relationships with big systems integrators (SI) and consultancies, such as Accenture, IBM/Bluewolf or Deloitte, all top sponsors of his year's Dreamforce.
The counter-argument from Salesforce is that it is and will remain a product company and that co-existence with the big SIs is the intention with Success Cloud. Colon points out:
Many of those large SIs have been embedded in accounts for many years, doing things that aren’t just Salesforce. So when the customer selects us as a platform, it comes down to us working with whoever the SI is, be it Accenture, Bluewolf, McKinsey or whoever. We have an equal playing field. What we see is that as more and more companies hire Chief Digital Officers, they are buildling out Digital Transformation Offices. These are typically run by the customers or by the SI, but we all have a seat at the table. When we look at the competition, we don’t look at the SIs, we look at our software products competition.
A case in point, he says, is Citibank, which worked with Salesforce on its digital transformation program and which had Accenture already engaged in-house:
We’ve spent a lot of time with Citibank focusing on what they wanted to do with their future. Banking is a sector that has been disrupted by fintech. There’s a really great relationship going on between our CEO and Citibank’s CEO. So this started with the pre-sales process, then we asked ourselves how we could do this together. Citibank had already done three initiatives to create the digtial bank of the future that they wanted. In the end, they built their own fintech.
My take
The customer-centricity of this new initiative is in keeping with the Salesforce corporate DNA and the whole Success Cloud formalisation is a canny move. If I have a quibble to make at this point, it’s to ask why it’s branded as the Salesforce Success Cloud rather than the Customer Success Cloud? A question to be asked over the course of the next few days…