Using information gleaned from what clients watch on a newly launched streaming platform, Salesforce is building a meticulous profile of its customers to tailor future offerings to them, said company officials.
Salesforce used the company’s Dreamforce conference, its annual event held this year from September 21 to 23, to celebrate customer success and to launch Salesforce+, an online collection of original material and content. The collection includes interviews with executives, such as IBM chief marketing officer (CMO) Carla Piñeyro Sublett, and athletes like the Arizona Cardinals offensive tackle Kelvin Beachum, alongside training videos and product demos from events held by Salesforce over the years.
The company recommends the material to Salesforce+ viewers using another one of its own products, Interaction Studio, which identifies viewers, monitors their digital behavior, and then responds to them in real time based on what they watch on websites.
In turn, that information about viewers, such as whether the video content they watch relates to business-to-business commerce techniques or data management products, is funneled into Salesforce CDP, the company’s customer data platform (CDP).
“We’re using the martech product portfolio including CDP in order to build rich profiles of our customers and prospects,” said Michael Kostow, marketing cloud executive vice president and general manager at Salesforce. If a customer showed interest in a keynote speech on, say, the company’s marketing cloud roadmap, the likelihood is great that the customer will also be interested in marketing technology, added Kostow.
The viewership data from those video streams is then combined with information previously tracked by Salesforce on its customers and gathered through the company’s sales and customer service channels, such as emails, chats, or phone calls. Finally, that data is affixed onto the purchase information of products that clients have already signed up for use.
Overall, the reflexive approach illustrates how Salesforce wants its own customers to take first-party data into the company’s CDP to prepare for the time when Salesforce embarks upon marketing to its customers.
The company recently added the CDP to its AppExchange, the suite of software applications that plugs into Salesforce technologies, to let clients more easily connect first-party data to data from third-party companies available in the exchange. Combining that output with what customers tell the sales team at Salesforce can bring about unexpected, but helpful insights into customer behavior, said Kostow, the Salesforce executive. Headquartered in San Francisco, Salesforce is a cloud-based software firm providing customer relationship management (CRM) services, as well as a complementary suite of enterprise applications focused on customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development. This year, Fortune magazine ranked Salesforce second on its list of 100 Best Companies to Work For, just behind technology conglomerate Cisco Systems in first place, based on a survey of employee satisfaction.
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Alex is responsible for writing about trends and changes that are impacting the customer experience market. He had served as Principal Editor at Village Intelligence, a Los Angeles-based consultancy on technology impacting healthcare and healthcare-related industries. Alex was also Associate Director for Content Management at Omdia and Informa Tech, where he produced white papers, executive summaries, market insights, blogs, and other key content assets. His areas of coverage spanned the sectors grouped under the technology vertical, including semiconductors, smart technologies, enterprise & IT, media, displays, mobile, power, healthcare, China research, industrial and IoT, automotive, and transformative technologies.
At IHS Markit, he was Managing Editor of the company’s flagship IHS Quarterly, covering aerospace & defense, economics & country risk, chemicals, oil & gas, and other IHS verticals. He was Principal Editor of analyst output at iSuppli Corp. and Managing Editor of Market Watch, a fortnightly newsletter highlighting significant analyst report findings for pitching to the media. He started his career in writing as an Editor-Reporter for The Associated Press.
