Does Salesforce need a rebrand?

0:00Hey, everybody, Benji here. What you're about to listen to is a snippet from what we're calling the B to B Growth round Table. James has been hosting events at our Creator House down in Orlando, Florida. We're getting together some of the brightest minds in marketing to have in depth discussions. You can watch the full length video over on our YouTube page. Subscribe so you never miss anything. And honestly, we are experimenting and doing so much on the YouTube page this year that it would be worth your time to go visit and take a look at the new things that we're doing. More to come definitely over the next few months. Okay, check out this clip from the B to B Growth Roundtable. What do you think of when I say the word salesforce? Have just fallen asleep at hearing that word, or you might be in the tech space and know that they are a massive technology juggernaut.

1:08They were the ones that really set death to on premise software and created the entire industry that is now SaaS software as a service. They created the CRN category so much so that their call letters on the stock market are CRM Customer Relationship Management. They're a Behemoth company. But everybody that I talked to I mentioned Salesforce don't really like them that much. It's a product that's really hard to use, very complex. You got to hire somebody for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to just get you up onboard the product correctly because it's so customizable. And so we wanted to talk about Salesforce in this video and what they could do to change the perception that they have in a lot of different markets. So we were talking about this before Sarah I mentioned that it needed to come down to making their product more user friendly, because it seems like the recurring theme I hear is the product's just too freaking hard to understand how to use. It's so complex. I mean, in the one time that I'd use Salesforce and like, this looks like it was built in nineteen ninety two and hasn't been updated since, just from a UI perspective, But you

2:31had a different thought. You actually don't think that to change the perception, they need to change the product. Explain that I think it's so antiquated and it's been around for so long, and so many other businesses have built onto the back of the Salesforce ecosystem that if you change a button, if you change the font, if you change anything, it's going to cause an uproar. When Marcato slash Adobe changed internal UI, the Mark HEADO consultants were hissed, and they're your biggest advocates for the most part, they're the ones implementing.

3:07It's all for those of the ones being you know, hired by the customers to create a best in class instance. And so when you change the way that your power users use the product, you're going to lose your power users and then it's going to take you a really long time to be able to build up new power users using a UY that's never existed before, and you kind of get pushed back to square one. And so unfortunately, I don't think that Salesforce as a product can change so much, and that's how the perception of it will change. I think it needs to do more with who they are and what they bring. Mark Benioff was such a personality and such an agent for change. When Salesforce was just starting up, he was out in the street. He was doing guerrilla marketing. He was talking to people and he was trying to make communities and companies run better, and so they've lost that. They'll build a Salesforce tower and you get a billboard, but you don't get Salesforce employees out, you know, volunteering in those communities or man on the street interviews that are super popular on TikTok. Right now, you can't walk through Washington Square part without getting stopped for an interview.

4:23They don't do that and relate it back to their business. They don't do the you know, millionaire makeover where they then equip this new, newly designed small business with their software. They just exist and they do billboards, and they don't have that same like charisma that they had when Mark Unoff was trying to make a name for Salesforce dot com. Uh. And I think that's kind of what they need to bring back. I think that kind of motion for change is what appeals to younger people in business and in the world, is like, they don't care about software. Are you doing something good for my community through yes? Or now? You have some thoughts nay around just how sticky that product is, So how can they capitalize on that stickiness but change the perception that so many people have them as this kind of Dusty brand.

5:21Yeah, so I do think and I quantify it. But it's the stickiest product ever in the history of products, because, first of all, I think at a circule stage, an E B to B company, especially software company, has to get Salesforce. It's just you can survive using other things for a while. But when you hire a big salesforce that has used Salesforce, it's the name. They're going to want to use something that they know how to use it. If they've used Salesforce for twenty years, you're not going to teach them something new, right, So it's it is this thing where you just have to have it. And on day two of having Salesforce, it's completely customized in a way that there's probably no other instance on earth that looks, say, exactly like yours. On day seventeen, you've got to integrated with a marketing tool, an HR tool, and out about sequence tool, your contract signing tool, and once you had I don't know seven integrations, the propensity for someone to rip them out decreases to just aboutter zero. You're bottled, You're bubbled, and so brilliant for Salesforce to do that, brilliant for them to have an integration to marketplace play. But the

6:28perception piece of it is, I think what did they enable? And you were talking about what companies enable for like you know, social giving or the Salesforce Foundation or whatever. But like if their whole idea is we're enabling everyone to do business, like we are that kind of cornerstone that everyone has and this is the way business gets done, then what else are you enabling? If you're enabling some kind of you know, improvements in the streets of San Francisco room for whatever. I don't know, just making that up, but like it could the message could be all about what Salesforce enables, not just through the product, but through giving, through the foundation, through learning, through whatever. I love your idea about like, you know, doing the I forget what you said about bringing a small business and like showing them what was it? Like, how did you say it? Like like a millionaire makeover kind of situations like redesign the whole thing, give them, say to the art software. It happens here on on Salesforce. Yeah, because I don't see them, and I think it's probably because they have the whole you

7:29know, all the consultants that are helping on top of salesforce, but you don't see salesforce as being opinionated about here's how you improve, Like they don't do that. They're the container where you store the things that you do have your own and enabling is great, but I think there is an opportunity to be a little bit more opinionated, to be more of a I'm going to suggest that this is how you change. And in a world now where every buzzword is AI, it's going to be about how you can change for the better. And so I think putting those messages together and finding a way to show companies how to improve based on the data you've seen and other companies that have succeeded you have that data. I think bringing it all together and being more of like a supportive partner that can help a business grow and Expand that's something that I don't think they've done because they had it like they were so opinionated in the beginning, and then as you grow you have to be a little bit more even now. But like people read Mark Beniau's books for the Edge, they're not like, oh, what are the demand gen Strategy's like

8:31no, and how did you change the way that people installed in software in their business because you fundamentally didn't believe that the way that they were doing it before it was the right way. Like that's so strong and then to be like run your business, we'll be here is so different and tame and doesn't stay out at all. And when you stand for everything to say for nothing. Yeah. What's always nice to me though, is that companies at a certain stage a Microsoft as Salesforce or whatever that is sitting on so much data that they could actually give pretty give advice to people that are just starting out or you're at the stage and you're stag dating. We've seen that if you actually do this at this time of day or if you you know, your opportunity stage seems to be you've got to fall off here, which means you're qualifying tour like they have the data. Yeah, I think part of it is just a fear of too big brothery. But I wonder if there is a way the plant does it in a way where was like, give me more information about mere about me the thea like, you can do it in a way that's not like we've analyzed your data because you gab it re fait

9:31watching. You can do it in a way where it's packaged really nicely, Salesforce wrapped, yeah, Salesforce advisor it yeah, or just like tooltips. But then the product itself where it's an overlay, so you're not messing with the UI, but it's and then it can direct to that AI product. But I think that with AI becoming whatever, everyone just thinks with AI is the value prop instead of being like, here is the the exact piece of information that is so valuable to you and any guy did it, but you don't have to say, Yeah, it's it's the data that is predicting what to do next? Yeah, And everyone, like everyone at every stage of their day, career whatever, is saying what do I do next that has the most impact? Yeah, whether that's impact like social good yeah, whether that's impact getting in another sale like this idea of show me what to do next that has the highest probability of best impact and or not they had the Einstein brand use it. Yeah. What are your thoughts? John, being from a sales background, sales yeah, shit, Now in marketing, so you talked about Dave is the founder Mark Mark excuse me, Mark is the

10:46founder, right, So that tells you how much I know about salesforce, But when a salesperson is starting out with a client and they're trying to be extremely effective and speed up the sales cycle, it's very wise to get to the want behind the want, behind the want, what is the emotional driver. It sounds like the organization was built initially on the emotional driver. It went out to create a lot of velocity in understanding that that want behind the want behind the want of a sales team, what's the emotional driver? They need information, they need it fast. It's gonna help with conversion rates, it's going to allow you to really hone in. There's all these different things, so it helps sales teams to scale rapidly. Right. They then grow to a size where it becomes very much product centric because you've already identified how you impact people emotionally and the problems that you solve, and now it gets to a point where that story's being told from one sales department to the next, to the next to the next, So you don't really need to tell that story anymore. It just kind of is being told because that's what the

11:50product does. They're at that point, it would sound like to me where they need to go back to talking about the emotional driver. People don't use on pren software anymore, So why am I buying Salesforce? So what's the thing behind the thing behind the thing? What's that want? What's that emotional driver? What? And again it could well again we talked about how you get to a size where it starts to become pr it starts to become you're buying this product. Here's what comes with this. This is the impact we're having on society, This is the impact we're having in the world. This is how we help career path within the human beings that you are stewards to your salespeople don't want to sit in the salespersons seat forever, so our information helps them scale themselves so they can drive their career path because they are your future CROs right. So that story of how Salesforce isn't just helping the overall revenue genet and the controlling the sales ops and all that, but how it's actually escalate, escalating the career path and the speed at which people can move through that channel of your business. That would be the story that I would

12:59tell it. Can HubSpot ever beat them? I don't know. I think HubSpot was built for marketers and Salesforce was built for sales and until there is better alignment within the two and they are working off of the same workflows and fields. Whatever you kind of start with as a product is always what you'll be. Is really hard to reinvent yourself. And so I think HubSpot can become something that helps align marketing and sales teams. But I don't think it's gonna be that like Catalyst for change necessarily that like forces the function of everyone switches over to HubSpot. I think they've goton too big to be able to light force that. The thing with HubSpot, though, for as big as they are, when you talk to somebody that uses HubSpot, they don't just casually use HubSpot. They like bleed Orange, they love HubSpot. I casually use upspot. You casually use Ubspot. I also blieve orange when has nothing to do. Yeah, I gotta love. That's just these from being it.

14:07So you're so you're an exception at least in my little data set of people that I run around with. What like Salesforce is so sticky and two and like hubsod has like that marketplace, but not to the level of Salesforce where every single instance is special and different, and I don't and I think hubsot might be too user friendly to be able to make it. So they also I first did Yeah, right, so how does Burger King catch up to Mcgahell's right, they got the brand new HubSpot's got a great branding for sure, but Salesforce is first in the brand is just more no and there's more chatter about it, there's more conversation about it. Well, I think the stickier piece is certainly a factor there, because I think there are brands that were first and then got bet. I think there's there's lots of examples of that. But I've just sitting from Afar. I remember actually Drift and I remember hearing the DC talk about how they were come after Salesforce. Obviously that that was pretty short lived and he's now living a beach somewhere doing it just for shade. I gotta be honest. I love the way that the two work together, and I think it really helps to have something that marketing

15:23can focus on. And this is my data, and this is where I'm running my campaigns and I'm doing all my stuff, and this is where sales is going, and this is where sales does all of their stuff. Mine talks to that. Yeah. Right, the integration is really really cleanton. So to me, it's like I kind of like knowing that I'm editing my data over here, I'm doing my activities over here. It'll send to Salesforce all of the updates to all of the activity, all the data, but they can be in two separate places and in that way, like it's a it's a great integration, but it's also a separation of both in a way that I'm not worried about having the wrong rights for a sales rep in HubSpot that might by misake send an email to five thousand feet forward, right, Like that's for real. And so I think at a certain point, like the last three companies I bet at, we started with the HubSpot at CRM hired a sales team. Sales team says I need Salesforce. Okay, good.

16:15Now they still talk to each other. It's almost a duplicate CRM, but like it serves a different purpose. So to me, like HC, it's it's great how it is now. And I don't know if there's anything that HubSpot can do to be able to catch up and take over the CRM market. Maybe if everything moves to PLG and we like remove sales reps and it's all facilitated by a growth team which is directly responsible for revenue. I don't Salesforce. You can use part ot, but like do you want to seas cricket keep them and it's still like a totally separate product and it sucks, so lie shouldn't sorry shots fired, Sorry of course, But like until that becomes the norm, which I don't know if there it'll ever be a majority of how teams are structured. I don't think that there's a way that Hubsbuck can eat sales Forward necessarily, especially when you're talking about the enterprise.

17:07So Force, yeah you can. Is are they are those brands combative? I don't feel like first situation, they have to exist, like they have to like that though they're their only competition and it's like fun to watch them battle it out, but they have to exist for capitalism. But in that battle, have they ever gone at each other that you all have seen, I've never seen. I think the only super competitive Salesforce and I've seen is that like a Forester wave grid where they're all the way on the top right, and everyone else like doesn't even compare. But I don't think that they call out specifically a humpspot in that. I think it's just nobody else compares.

17:45Here. We are got it interesting, all right, Salesforce, if you're listening, we got some folks that have some thoughts for you here. If you have thoughts for Salesforce, drop them in the comments. Let us know we're out. Paps of banana, paps of