This article is from WeChat official account:Linear Capital (ID: LinearCapital), guests: Stella Ding (Salesforce product designer), Sherry Li (former Salesforce user experience designer), editor: Xiao line bacteria, original title “Linear Academy｜How does Salesforce do marketing?” Let those who have participated in it tell you, the head picture comes from: unsplash
China’s 2B entrepreneurship is booming. But overall, compared with mature markets (such as the United States) is still in the growth stage. How can 2B companies sell products/services to customers? Last month, “Linear Academy” invited two user experience designers from Salesforce’s pre-sales group to talk about Salesforce’s “Secrets of Success”-as a CRM provider (Customer Relationship Management) As a software service company, Salesforce has ranked first in the Forbes list of the world’s most innovative companies for four consecutive years. In addition to the hard core technology and good products, excellent marketing is an important factor for Salesforce to lead the industry. What’s the secret of Salesforce? Below is a condensed version of the online event.
1. Some thoughts on B2B
I once talked to a friend about the situation of 2B and 2C at home and abroad. 2B is an emerging track at home, but it is very mature abroad. In contrast to 2C, domestic Taobao and WeChat are very powerful, and even the products of many American companies are not comparable. why? This is a very interesting question, I can start my sharing from this perspective. Then I will mention talent, safety factors and soil issues.
First of all, why are domestic 2B-end products not as good as those in the United States, but 2C can produce many catchy products?
The biggest difference between 2B and 2C is that 2B needs to be stable and slow, and requires very high product quality. A designer of Ant Financial said in a previous sharing that 2B needs a mature designer who can stand loneliness and calm down. 2B end products need a more stable and slower pace of development, rather than frantic expansion, which is completely different from the growth mode of 2C end products.
Customers rely very heavily on 2B end products. Most of Salesforce’s customers are businesses, and many of them are Fortune 500 companies. They may have more than 20,000 employees. After buying a Salesforce product, it will take months to implement alone, and it will take months for employees to learn and use new products. If the product changes every day, users will feel very uncomfortable. Therefore, Salesforce generally releases three times a year, so that users do not feel that there are too many changes, but also allows users to use the company’s latest and greatest products in a timely manner. This means that 2B end products should be stable and slow.
Product quality, on the one hand, is design, on the other hand, it requires very high-quality code. In the product group I am in, a feature will be tested before it is released. It is divided into three steps: Pilot, Beta, and GA. Each step has different requirements. Pilot is the first stage of testing the product, Small Set of Participant Organization; Beta is the public release function test, Require Additional Enabling; GA is the last step of the test, Generally Available. Only at the stage of General Available will we start marketing. These three stages have some hard requirements for the code written by engineers. In Salesforce, if an engineer needs to write 100 hours of code, usually 70 hours are tested to ensure that the code is free of bugs. In short, we have very high requirements for product quality, and we must ensure that customers do not need to worry about safety and bug issues when using our products. This is also one of the reasons why the release of new features in 2B products is much slower because of the need to ensure quality.
Second, the product purchase layer and the use layer are far apart, so the sales and marketing team is very demanding, which directly leads to a very different growth rate between 2B-end products and 2C.
First talk about the growth of the 2C side. The growth of the 2C side is mainly achieved through Funnel(Funnel). Take an advertisement as an example. 1,000 people click on an advertisement — 500 people continue to register — 200 people go to the login interface — 100 people complete a task, and these data will be recorded by the company. The growth process is actually a lot of Conversion (conversion) superimposed. As long as there are funds to advertise and the quality of the product itself is in place, someone will use your product. Therefore, most 2C-end companies adopt this model of burning money for growth.
The 2B side is completely different. 2B-end buyers and users are two kinds of people. For example, if I want to sell products to Coca-Cola, the person who decides to use our company’s products may be the CTO, and the person who actually uses our products may be an ordinary engineer or after-sales service personnel, which is often far behind the CTO. In the sales presentation, the people we connected were C Suite, and the end user experience was not the most important consideration for them. What they care about is whether the product can help the company’s strategy. So this is why 2B has high requirements on the sales team, and the sales team must be able to talk to these executives and decision-makers. Of course, sales will also be adjusted according to the buyer’s strategy. If it is a CMO, it may be the target customer of our Marketing Cloud. He will consider how his Marketing team will operate; CTO may be more concerned about Infrastructure or Platform data models; CFO cares about ROI, how much money is spent on buying this product, and how much it can help them make money. Our sales staff need to fully display our products from various angles to be able to convince these people.
The domestic 2B side does lack relevant talents
I personally feel that the 2B end has a lot of demand in China, but there is no good product. A very important reason is that there are no relevant talents.
From the perspective of product manager(Product Manager), the PM must know technology well. In this field, you will never see a 2B end product manager who can’t write code. Things on the 2B side are very complicated and require a deep understanding of Data model and Infrastructure. If a product manager can’t answer the designer’s questions in these technical-related aspects, he needs to find an engineer, and the efficiency will be very low. Most of the customers on the 2B side are very technical. When PM communicates with customers, they also need to have a certain understanding of the technology of their products. In contrast, the 2C end is not necessarily. MBA graduates become product managers abound, because the 2C end is not that complicated, and it needs the business acumen of PM to understand customer needs.
The same goes for designers. Domestically, it seems that UI design is highly valued. In fact, UI design is not very useful on the 2B side. Whether it is from the perspective of buyers (Buyer) or product users (End User ), the UI is not particularly useful. Buyer hopes that the product can help digest some needs or strategic things. End Users use 2B end products, often not independent choice, but use this software to complete the work. For them, the product needs to help them increase efficiency, so UI is not important. The 2B side needs UX more, which can digest complex functions, help save employees’ time, and also need to be closely integrated with business.
Third, 2B’s sales, marketing, and product operation models are completely different from those of 2C. I will talk more about it later.
Security considerations
Every executive within Salesforce has a public annual plan, the first of which is Security. The first of our corporate values is “Trust is Our No.1 Value”, and we must ensure security. The consequences of security risks on the 2C end and 2B end are completely different. From the perspective of the user, the 2C end, taking Taobao as an example, one day Taobao suddenly goes offline, even if you are angry, there is a high probability that you will use it again the next day. But for the 2B end, such as Stripe, one day suddenly broke down. The user’s transaction volume on that day was 0, and there was no receipt. You may not use Stripe again tomorrow. If the user signs with himA one-year contract will result in a loss of one-year orders. If it is a top 500 customer, the consequences will be even more serious. So Security is definitely the first.
All software used by Salesforce employees is subject to security audits. Salesforce acquired Quip as an internal documentation product. Google doc is also used internally, but Dropbox is never used because Dropbox cannot pass Salesforce’s security audit.
Soil problems
Many domestic companies do not have the awareness of spending money to optimize the business process (Business Process). This is a challenge and an opportunity. Starbucks is a typical example. Before entering China, there was no coffee culture in the country. Starbucks created a coffee culture and created consumer habits. Its marketing and marketing are very successful. In fact, there are many areas that can be explored in the domestic 2B end, and demand can be generated, but there must be a good marketing and sales team.
Second, sales and marketing strategy
Three-legged architecture diagram
Salesforce’s architecture presents a three-pronged situation of Marketing, Sales, and Product. Two of these groups are related to marketing, which shows that Salesforce is really a market-led, product-assisted company. If you look at Salesforce’s reports, Salesforce’s 10-Q product R&D and marketing expenditures account for 30% and 70%. On the other hand, a 2C company like Facebook is the opposite. Almost all the money is spent on product development. This is an important difference between 2B and 2C. If you look at Microsoft again, as a successful 2B company, their budget for R&D, sales, and marketing is about half and half. Although Microsoft is one of Salesforce’s strongest rivals, we definitely surpass them in marketing.
Why the Salesforce marketing strategy is so successful
Salesforce does marketing through storytelling. All products except Sales Cloud (CRM), each product alone may not be the best in the industry, but the entire line of products Together is great. The biggest difference between Salesforce and other companies is that it places great emphasis on Marketing Message. Salesforce in 2019 tells a story about data. The Marketing Message of Salesforce 2019 is “Everything about Your Customer in One Place”. Customers bought a series of products, these products are interconnected, data can communicate with each other, helping our customers to understand their customers better through data integration.
The CEO spends half a year on refining the new Marketing Message of the year, constantly communicating with different customers and asking for feedback. This refined Marketing Message will be used in Salesforce’s annual conference Dreamforce – almost the largest industry conference in North America 2B. The CEO will show the company’s direction this year in his Keynote. So we did spend a lot of effort on Marketing.
With Message, what Salesforce then does is to ensure that all employees are on the same page. Our company employees must pass the Corporate Message Certificate every year to ensure that every employee can understand the company’s Message. We update the content that needs to be certified every year because it is different every year.
Other companies make a product and then make Message. In contrast to Salesforce, our annual Message is “Everything in One Place”, which means we need all types of products. If the cost of doing it ourselves is too high, we will choose to buy other companies, such as Marketing Cloud, Integration Cloud, and Vlocity. These menThe company was acquired, and the company rebranded it as part of its product line. In short, the core idea of Salesforce is to complete the story needed for marketing. Sometimes the story you want to convey can even affect the company’s Product Roadmap. Of course, there are pros and cons to this approach, but it can be regarded as a feature of our company different from many other technology companies.
The sales team and marketing team have a huge right to speak
First, the sales team.
First of all, there are many people. The sales team accounts for about 50% of our total number of employees, so it can be understood that Salesforce’s sales strategy is basically a crowd tactic. The more phone calls you make, the more products you sell and the greater your turnover.
In addition to sales staff, the sales team also has various auxiliary roles. In the sales team, we often say that Sales is a team sport. We have UX Designer, such as Sherry and I; Demo Engineer; Creative Strategy; and Business Value Analyst. We have various auxiliary roles to help sales to complete sales work.
The sales team and the product manager will communicate directly. The sales team has a special place to record some customer needs, which is often why the product function that did not succeed in sales, called Voices of Customer, is in our internal database. Every quarter sales will communicate with the product manager to communicate the reasons for missing orders and find ways to improve. The improved content may be promoted to the Roadmap of our products. We hope that in the process of communicating with customers, sales can help us develop a Product Roadmap that can bring more value to the company and customers.
The marketing team also has a lot of voice.
Our Product Marketing team is responsible for these annual conferences, including Dreamforce, and does a lot of publicity, which will affect our Product Roadmap. The promotion work is much earlier than the time to make the product. We will use these conferences to do experiments, and if everyone’s response is good, we will continue to build these products. The same is true for sales. For example, a certain feature is ranked fifth in the Product RoadmapThe sales team sold a big order, and the customer showed a strong demand for this feature. We will put this feature on the top of Roadmap to accelerate the formal launch.
Second, each product has a dedicated Product Market Manager and is an official member of this product group. The product’s monthly meeting, Product Market Manager, will be there and will also participate in speeches. He needs to fully follow up the progress of the product to ensure that each of our Feature is followed up by Marketing, so he has a great say.
Third, the product manager himself has to participate in many Marketing activities. For example, give presentations or Build demos at some product conferences such as Dreamforce or TrailheadDX to show product features. For example, we need a person with a technical background, generally a product manager, when we want to make a demo of Flow Builder(the product of Automation in my middle station) . This is hard to imagine in many 2C-side companies, but it is very common on the 2B-side.
Three, Salesforce Sales Department Detailed Explanation
Salesforce’s division of functions
Sales staff are mainly divided into AE(Account Executives), responsible for maintaining customer relationships, finalizing specific products and prices, etc.; SE(Solution Engineer), we must provide customers with suggestions from a technical perspective.
Separating these two roles, a big advantage is that AE can focus on the sales link, and SE can be more focused on providing professional advice, starting from users, and providing customers with technical support. SE generally has a computer science or engineer background, and can understand the product line well and provide customers withProfessional advice. In addition, we have some other functional personnel as support, such as business cooperation representatives (BDR: Business Development Representative). Their main function is to find potential customers. Some customer lists are obtained by us at the annual conference or other large-scale events. These people usually call or send emails to proactively contact customers and ask them if they are interested in our products. If the customer expresses interest, they will transfer this Lead to AE to start formal sales.
Work flow of the sales department
The sales cycle on the 2B side is relatively long, sometimes even one to two years. From the discovery of potential customers, to in-depth product matching for customers, to telling stories from the perspective of users, and finally to determining a deal. At the beginning, we will have a preliminary understanding of the current situation of customers, their industries, needs, etc. These are generally dominated by AE. Then SE will join, and from his perspective, we will have a deep and specific understanding of what customers need, what pain points they have, and what products we will match. SE will be divided according to different products, and we will also invite SE of different products to participate in sales activities according to customer needs. The next very important part is telling the story and designing how to tell the story.
Why storytelling is so important in the sales link
Salesforce has a lot of products and features. How to let customers, especially buyers, understand how these products and features match their business models or pain points, you need to use storytelling(Storytelling) mode. For example, we will hold a workshop and invite customers to participate. Through the analysis of the whole workshop, we will produce a complete set of story lines and visual effects, so that users can feel firsthand that our products are not just a stack of functions, but standing on them. To help them improve efficiency and create value. After demonstrating the product, the next step is how to completely match the product with the story. This step is mainly done by SE. The company will also provide a lot of Demo resources. After the specific product is finalized, there will be AE for further finalization, including the finalization of the contract.Shi et al.
Specific division of sales department
First, according to different product lines, we have special SEs. They understand the specific functions of each product and how to talk about the use cases of different products. (Use case) to understand how to do demos with customers.
The second is to divide according to business department, according to the different scale and size of customers, for example, for small and medium-sized customers, we will provide some streamlined displays. For larger customers, we will invest more resources, and different sales resources will unite to help sales activities.
The third is to divide it according to industry. We have demos specifically for different industries. Products of different industries (such as medical, transportation, telecommunications, finance, etc.) will have their own demo environment called Demo org. These Demo orgs will have different product customization functions for the needs of different industries. Many of these Demo orgs were created and maintained by our SE volunteering.
Some sales resources for the sales team
First Call Deck
This can be understood as a very general PPT, which contains a detailed introduction to the functions of our product, and instructs sales staff on how to show its main functions to customers who are in contact with this product for the first time. This will ensure the consistency of our product promotion.
Demo Video
In addition to PPT such as First Call Deck, Salesforce also has some corresponding videos, which are very complete records of the functions of some of our company’s products. In different industries, we will also have special demos.
BusinessInvestigation reports and customer success stories
These two are based on some of our previous experience, analyzing why customers are successful. We will pay attention to which products they use and which important indicators to improve, record these and turn them into a successful business report, and then feed it back to our sales process, which will be told to potential customers as successful cases.
Competitor Group
Do some analysis on competitors, and there are roles like 007 inside the company to conduct corresponding competition investigations. Every month, they will post some current news of these important competitors, many of which are internal information that we have tried every possible way to obtain. They will also post some successful cases of our customers competing with these companies to help us better understand the weaknesses of our competitors.
Dreamforce, Trailhead DX and Connections
These three events are held by our company every year. In addition to being a good place to showcase our products, they are also a scene for sales staff and customers to deepen the connection.
Measure and motivate salespeople
Our company uses our own CRM products to record sales activities, such as what kind of communication we have with customers(telephone, email, or meeting), are there any customers interested in (important members targeted for sales will be recorded), which sales staff participated in these sales activities, etc. No matter what kind of sales activity, you can find historical records. We can record our own contributions in it, and there are also some innovative projects to measure and even predict the probability of some sales.
4. Salesforce’s corporate culture
How to balance Alignment (consistent words and deeds) and Innovation(Innovation)? The former needs to be from top to bottom, and the latter needs to be from bottom to top.
Each company may have different answers to these two questions. For Alignment, our company is more top-down(Top down), we have a tool to help us set the annual Plan-V2MOM (Vision, Value, Measure, Obstacle and Methods). Every year, the CEO will first publish his V2MOM in March, and then go down one by one to ensure that employees are aligned with their superiors. Salesforce conducts open conversations in this way. V2MOM is one of our communication methods. We may have hundreds of groups. I don’t know what other groups are doing, but by looking at their group’s V2MOM, you can understand what they are doing this year. The sales team spends a lot of time doing Alignment. The (End of Q4) is the end of our Fiscal year in February every year. Use that time to Align. We will have many different meetings to ensure that our annual goals are consistent, including CKO(Central Kickoff), AKO(Area Kickoff), RKO(Regional Kickoff). People at every level will make their own one-year plan. There will also be a Mid year refresh, starting with V2MOM in April of each year, and refreshing V2MOM in October. Check the completion and whether you need to change V2MOM. Even if V2MOM is not fully implemented, it also helps us Align.
The corporate culture is reallyVery good
Our company has a famous 1: 1: 1 Model (we donate 1% of profits, 1% of products, and 1% of employees every year Time to give back to society). Our founder said that there should be a 1: 1: 1 Model on the first day of business. He feels that Business is the best way to create positive change. Salesforce will donate 1% of the company’s profits to charity activities such as opening schools and hospitals every year, and let non-profit organizations use 1% of its products for free, allowing employees to spend 1% of their time(7-day holiday) to do volunteer service. I think this is a corporate social responsibility. It is because of this that some employees choose to stay in this company.
I think as an entrepreneur, there are two ways to expand your influence among employees and those around you. First, give your time to more people, and give your wisdom to more people. Second, through the corporate culture, these values can be infiltrated into your company. The company itself is a primer, attracting people with the same values. Whether you are an entrepreneur or a supervisor, corporate culture is a very important part. One of the biggest responsibilities of a supervisor is to create a good team culture.
Your Managers Have Your Back
If there is any failure, we are not complaining about others, but finding a way to solve the problem together. This concept runs through the entire company. Subordinates have a high degree of trust with their superiors. Subordinates dare to try, because even if you fail, the supervisor won’t let you back the pot. They will only praise you when you succeed. The company encourages innovation, because innovation always has to be from the bottom up. The management philosophy of our supervisor is I’m here for your success. If you have a good idea, he will help you report it to his supervisor, and the idea can be passed on. It is this culture that we take into account innovation.
Emphasis on cooperation
The entire company culture places great emphasis on cooperation. For example, my colleagues in another group may not know each other at all, but if there is any problem, send an emailIn the past, they would definitely reply. Or you can find someone from Salesforce on LinkedIn and say you want to learn about sales. He will reply 99%. We emphasize cooperation and cooperation with different people. In the process of cooperation, ideas continue to collide, making it easier to innovate.
V. Q&A
What principles does Salesforce use to determine whether customer needs can be added to the Product Roadmap?
We don’t have any principles. It’s difficult to have principles. We need to judge by ourselves. This person must have experience, be able to deal with people in different departments, and be willing to actively contact customers and verify their needs. In this way to influence Roadmap. Not all problems can have a system.
Salesforce has a system-ideaExchange. Customers can write the Feature they want and vote on it, telling the features they want or what adjustments they want the company to make. Our Product Manager will regularly check the above information , This is a channel for our users to take the initiative to speak out.
Salesforce’s distribution ratio of sales roles, are there telesales?
Our telemarketing is called BDR. In terms of personnel ratio, BDR is more, AE is second, and SE is the least. The more sophisticated the working staff, the fewer. Each AE manages about 1,000 customers, and maybe 500 of them are demos made by him. The needs of major customers need SE support.
What is the process for Salesforce to handle the individual needs of customers?
There are trade-offs for individual needs. The smaller the customer, the less personalized demand. Salesforce can basically do what big customers want. Any product needs to find its own target market. SMEs do not need so many functions, nor so much customization, but need speed and simplicity. Big customers want all functions, so you can’t do both, you must have your own direction. From the perspective of customization, we do not implement Implementation and only ensure that the products meet the basic needs of customers. You just