Salesforce, Inc. (CRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the call with Salesforce management hosted by Cleveland Research. [Operator Instructions] It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Ari Terjanian. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Matthew. Thank you, everybody, for joining in this morning or afternoon, depending on where you are. Today, we're delighted to have Salesforce's Head of Marketing and Commerce Cloud, Adam Blitzer. Great time as we're all sitting at home to dive into the latest and the greatest, what's going on with Salesforce and trends in Marketing and Commerce. We're just talking about how we're adjusting to working at home and teaching kids. But Adam, thank you so much for joining today on the call.

Absolutely, Ari. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be with everyone.

Awesome, awesome. Well, a lot of our clients have been following Salesforce, familiar with the story. But for those that are newer to the company, could you spend a moment talking a little bit about your role, your day to day, and just remind investors what are the major components of the business group that you're heading up?

Sure, absolutely. So just by way of introduction, I came to the company through an acquisition. So I started a marketing automation company in Atlanta called Pardot. You may be wondering why I called it Pardot. Pardot is the kind of menu you get for a company when you have $8 to spend on a domain name. So Pardot is actually the Latvian word for to market or to sell. We have no connection to Latvia, but it was available so we took it. We ran that business for 5 years and then sold it to a B2C-focused digital marketing company called ExactTarget. And then roughly 10 months later, we sold ExactTarget to Salesforce. So close -- the close was about 10 months. So I joined Salesforce through the ExactTarget acquisition in the summer of 2013. And after that, I ran Pardot as a business unit at Salesforce for 2 years. Then I took over Sales Cloud, which is our sort of franchise business that sells in Salesforce. That's what most people think of when they think of the original product at Salesforce. I ran that for 4 years. I also head Service Cloud, our call center software offering, for about a year in there. And then about 8 months ago, I really moved to the digital side. So I took over our Marketing Cloud and then most recently, also our Commerce Cloud and Community Cloud. So really, our Marketing Cloud is all of our marketing-focused products, both B2B, business to business; and B2C, business to consumer. So that's why the business to consumer offerings are things you would think of as e-mail marketing, a very sort of tried-and-true market in terms of Mar-Tech. It's DMP or data management platform that came to us through our acquisition of Crocs, and that's for doing advertising on third-party sites. It's also social media marketing. That was through our acquisitions of Radian6 and Buddy Media. We call that product Social Studio. It's a marketing analytics offering, which came to us through our acquisition of Datorama. And it's also Pardot, which, again, is the company I've started. And that's our very B2B-focused marketing offering. So we pretty much -- we run the gamut across a lot of different areas of Mar-Tech. In the commerce world, the areas that I look after are B2C commerce, so what you would think of as a shopping experience on any retail site, any commerce experience. And then also, B2B commerce, so how the stores work with their suppliers to fulfill orders for more supplies, for more merchandise, et cetera. And then lastly, our communities products. So those could be partner portals, customer communities, employee communities, ways that users or partners or employees connect with one another. My day to day is focused on the road map for all those different product areas. What are we going to build? What are we not going to build? It's doing build, partner or buy analysis on new markets that we think about. It's also working with the field and working with some of our most strategic customers to help them get value out of the platform, get up and running quickly. And then also working on the narrative, the marketing, the storytelling about how these all come together. So it's sort of split between those areas largely focused on product and road map.

Got it. Got it. Yes, it sounds like you've had a taste of all the different pockets of Salesforce's portfolio and probably have a good insight on Customer 360, which I'll get into. I guess did you want to address kind of the topic of the day, how you guys are thinking about messaging, and we're talking to customers around COVID-19, how you're advising them they should go about their marketing. I'm just kind of curious like have you seen any changes in terms of how clients are thinking about advertising and e-commerce projects? And then how is Salesforce kind of adjusting which products they prioritize, which projects they can deliver on kind of in this new world we're living in?

Sure. And this is, I mean, certainly top of mind for everybody, every marketer. We're all figuring out -- if we weren't already working at home, we're all figuring out how to work from home. And certainly, you'll see a lot of messaging from us around sell at home, market at home, service at home and really pivoting your enterprise to be able to operate from wherever you happen to be. What you're seeing in the world that I work on, all these products actually see a surge in usage. So if you think about how sales are still happening, it's really digital, right? If stores are shut down, if retail locations are shut down in various jurisdictions, the things that are still open, the places where transactions are still happening are storefronts. And so certainly, we see a surge with e-commerce customers. You see usage. I mean not only ours, just e-commerce, in general, you're seeing huge surges. What's also interesting is you're seeing many companies who are not traditional e-commerce companies getting into the e-commerce game. So these might be consumer packaged goods companies to traditionally sell-through supermarkets or the sell-through big-box retailers, but they're now saying, "Hey, those channels are even slower than they used to be. They're disrupted in some way." Customers don't want to go to those places even if they're open. We need to have a direct line to our customer, direct relationship to their customers. And so we're seeing kind of these more traditional CPG companies asking for e-commerce that can be stood up incredibly quickly so that they can have that direct relationship with their customers. And that's interesting because we're sort of seeing new avenues of retail outside of traditional retail. The other thing is digital marketing sees a surge, right, as live events and traditional channels like that, sort of off the table, you're seeing everything move to digital. So it's only accelerating the move to digital, and they certainly convert to digital. So that is critically important. So we see that there across pretty much all aspects of the Marketing Cloud as well. And then lastly, communities. We've seen really nice adoption and roles of new community sites, both for companies addressing their employee concerns, so ways to bring all of their employees together since they no longer are together in offices. They're doing it in a more virtual environment where they can post information related to COVID-19, related to what their employees need to know about benefits they may have, how to work from home, et cetera. We're also seeing plenty of governments adopting communities to get information out to their customers -- sorry, to get information out to their constituents to let their constituents know, "Hey, what's coming? What are the new rules and regulations? How could they get financial relief, things like that?" So this is really an area where you see all these digital products that were already quite important really become even more important. And what's interesting, I think, when we come out of this, there was already a secular shift for more and more of commerce to move to digital, more and more of marketing to move to digital. I think this just continues to accelerate that because companies are making these pushes further and further into it now. I don't think you're going to see that let up at all once we come out of this.

Yes, makes a ton of sense. Yes, really helpful. And with all this and what we've seen out there as well in terms of touching customers and citizens digitally, one question we've got a lot from investors, I just kind of want to double-click on. Any change in terms of like how delivery is done, or how you're selling to customers in this environment? Again, just being you can't visit the customer at site. Some of these things might touch a supply chain or maybe you're trying to build a relationship with a customer. Is that any different doing that virtually? I guess what are you seeing in the last month in terms of how you've adjusted the go-to-market and the delivery of the product portfolio?

Sure. Are you talking specifically about us? Or are you talking about just what we see from customers in general and how they're selling and marketing?

From you guys, specifically.

Yes. No, I think the biggest difference for us is we're not doing live events, which anyone that knows Salesforce knows that we love live events because it's a great way to bring customers together. And we really think when we bring customer -- what -- one of the things that makes Salesforce really special is our ecosystem, who we call Trailblazers, but the people who are changing their companies, changing their careers, changing their industries even through novel usage of technology. And we love to be able to bring those people together, whether it's small events like dinners, larger events like our city tours or, of course, Dreamforce, which is our largest event in San Francisco, and really, I think the largest software conference in the world. So obviously, live events are put on hold. And we've really made -- we, ourselves, have really made the shift to digital. The first time we did that was our Sydney World Tour, which seems like a long time ago, but it was actually at the beginning of March. We made the decision with about a week's notice or 2 weeks' notice to turn it into a digital event, and it came off early without missing a beat. The community, we're still incredibly passionate. We still have a huge, huge, huge viewership. And so it's moved to virtual. We're getting better and better at it, but there's the thirst from our ecosystem for it, which has been great. Last night, I attended a virtual happy hour with Marketing Cloud customers, and there were 100 marketers just -- they had their kind of beverages. But there were people from Japan on it, London on it, San Francisco on it. Depending on the time zone you were on, you might have just had coffee instead of an adult beverage. But the fact that you can still bring together these passionate Trailblazers in this crazy time and still view the same type of event we normally would, but do it in a virtual way, was really great and a lot of fun. In terms of how we sell, you mentioned, obviously, we're not meeting in person. Everything is virtual, so that's a change. But again, having the ability to sell from home, to be mobile-first, to market from home, we're eating our own dog food in that respect and we're moving along.

Awesome. All of it, it's great. And yes, we've been trying to have some more virtual happy hours at Cleveland Research as well just to, yes, keep spirits up and connect to people digitally. So that's awesome. Shifting gears a little bit. You mentioned your experience at Salesforce, working on Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. Now it's come full circle back into the marketing side and also commerce and community. Could you just provide an update on Customer 360? Is there any kind of recent examples of customers deploying it that come to mind? And kind of how your portfolio of marketing and commerce and community kind of fit into the broader C360 strategy?

Sure, so the Customer 3 -- so Salesforce, I'd say, has always been a very customer-centric company, both in the way we operate, right, where we put the customer at the center of everything we do. And it's built into our business model of being a subscription service that we have to make the customers successful. And if we do, they continue to renew with us, and it becomes this annuity, but it really works both ways, and it keeps business interest really well aligned. We want all of our customers to be as customer-centric as we are. And so to do that, they have to provide an incredible customer experience across the whole value chain, across the entire customer life cycle. So that's not just a sales relationship. It's not just a service relationship. It's a marketing relationship, a commerce relationship. It's connecting with them in communities. It might be integrating with all the back-office systems, it's analyzing all the data around that to make those interactions better. It's really our Customer 360. And for us, of course, our first 3 products were all built on the same platform or really, our first 4 products, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, our platform offering for customers to build their own apps and then our communities offering. Those are all built on the same platform. Of course, after that, we've started to get fairly acquisitive with sort of our first large acquisition in 2013 of Marketing Cloud, which really brought one of our really key leaders into the company. I'm kidding, that's me. But then after that, we've continued to bring in some anchored tenants, I would say. We did a large acquisition of Demandware. That became our Commerce Cloud. More recently, we've acquired MuleSoft, and we've acquired Tableau. And so Customer 360 is this division, right, connecting all of these different touch points around the customer, and it's also technology and a set of technologies. So you might have a version, for example, of me, that lives in your Service Cloud, lives in your Marketing Cloud, lives in your Commerce Cloud. These were formerly 3 separate systems. They still sort of operate in a way of 3 separate systems. There's different data about me in each of those systems. And what Customer 360 Data Manager does is it allows you to sort of get to the single view of me, of Adam Blitzer, in Salesforce, and it gives you a federated view of me. So it brings all of the data you need about me regardless of what system it was in and lets you see it all in one place, so that if you're a service manager, if you're a customer service agent, you know exactly what kind of sales interaction the company has had with me. Maybe there's an open deal with my company. You might treat me differently. You know if I have a pending commerce order or maybe some B2B commerce. You can basically see every touch point that has happened with me regardless of what system it's in. And not only that, you can -- even if there are multiple versions of me in all these different systems, with this data manager, you can get to sort of the truth. You can figure out how do you compile all these records into what we call a golden record or what we think of as a golden record. So this is a Customer 360 truth profile. This is the single source of truth. It's really what CRM has probably been going after for, I don't know, 30, 40 years. We've been talking about Customer 360 for a long time. We're now delivering it. Another piece of Customer 360 that we are launching -- or that we've already announced that we're launching this year, we announced it at Dreamforce last year, is Customer 360 Audiences. And this is coming from our Marketing Cloud. This is what's called a CDP or a customer data platform, which is really the right guys doing marketing right now. Marketing has never had a single source of truth. The truth has always lived in the different channels. It's always lived in the e-mail marketing platform, maybe that's been the biggest tenant. Or it lives in the marketing automation platform. But there's never been one place for all of your marketing data as it was. And that's always been sort of a large custom IT project at companies. Some companies call it like a customer master or something like that. IT would build this massive project. Marketing would ask for a segment to be built. IT would give it to them. And in like a day later, they will send out an e-mail. There's this cumbersome kind of project to manage and expensive, no agility at all. You factor it to today, the technology now exists to productize that. And so that is what I think of as the biggest battleground in marketing today, this idea of a customer data platform. And so we're bringing that to the Customer 360 as well, a place to put all of your sales and marketing and commerce data, to be able to build rich segments, rich personalizations and then activate them across any marketing channel.

That's great. Now it seems like there's been a proliferation of digital apps and systems over the last decade, and data is all over the place...

Yes. I think there's a secular trend, right? They're only getting more systems. There's only more complexity, there's not less. And so -- and basically, you can bet on a CIO's portfolio getting more complicated, not less complicated. So for us, that's really driven our integration imperative. And you saw us put that big first stake in the ground with MuleSoft, right, the leader in integration, which has been just an absolutely phenomenal product for us because we basically said, "Hey, if the CIO's world is only going to get more complicated, rather than sort of play whack-a-mole and have every possible system they're ever going to have, how do we become the center of that, right? How do we empower the CIO to wrangle all of that?" So as MuleSoft is getting at that integration, Customer 360 getting at a single view of a customer, a single source of truth, doing the same thing for marketing, right, with our CDP, and then lastly, analyzing your data regardless of what system it comes from, and that really inspired our acquisition of Tableau. So this secular trend of a proliferation of apps and systems, we think it's really important to get to a single source of truth, whether that's analytics, integration or just reconciling a record down to a golden record.

Right. Great. On that vein, another topic I was curious on and seems a bit more top of mind recently. We've seen that our discussions with advertisers, marketers, there have been some recent changes from the likes of Facebook and Google around tracking third-party cookies. And then also, you've got California launching their own Privacy Act similar to GDPR in Europe. What is your guys' view on some of these recent changes? How are you seeing customers react to that? There's a school of thoughts, I think, that maybe thinks that first-party data becomes more important with these kinds of dynamics. I think when GDPR came out, some of your business segments saw a boost near term. So just kind of curious if you could speak to these changes, if they're coming up in customer discussions at all and if your technology helps, in any way, address those concerns.

Yes, absolutely. So first off, having things like GDPR or having things like California's Privacy Act are great because they provide some structure to what was once sort of the Wild West, right? Just in that every country had its own set of rules and regulations. And for -- especially for a marketer, that was really complicated to keep up with. Things are changing all the time. They can use some techniques in one country and not in another. But if you're a multinational, it's quite, quite complicated. So what's great about GDPR is it sort of creates a global standard because even if you're in a country that is kind of a less strict jurisdiction, we really think you should just adopt the strictest jurisdiction's standard, and then you'll be in great shape, right? You won't have to sort of react. And so we see with California's act, the vast majority of large companies have already adopted GDPR as their global standard. So they didn't miss a beat, right, when the U.S. -- or at least California started to introduce its own regulations. And exactly as you said, the vendors that take this really seriously do see a boost, right, because they enable their customers to be able to comply and in a non-onerous way. At Salesforce, certainly, I'm sure, in our investor deck, but in many of our presentations, you see us present our values. We talk about our values because we think -- and we really lead with that because that gets at the psyche of our company, and it plays out in the way our products are built. And our -- a little inside baseball for you on how to interpret product slides, and really any slides, everything is in priority order, every word and every bullet point. That's how to sort of interpret a Salesforce slide. And actually, I'm looking at a Salesforce slide about acquired entrepreneurs, and I noticed that Bret Taylor and Adam Selipsky are ahead of me, so maybe I should rethink what I just said. But for our values, trust is listed first. And the reason for that is without trust, we don't have a business. When we started the company, I guess 21 years ago at this point, putting the data in the cloud was a really new idea. In fact, cloud wasn't even a phrase then. And fast forward to today, they are very different. That is sort of table stakes. For most companies, there are different trust issues that are top of mind. And so we think if we don't have our customers' trust in terms of our systems, the way they operate, et cetera, and we don't help them deliver a trusting relationship, we don't have a business. After that, we have customer success, then finally, innovation and then equality. But because trust is our #1 value, we just build this into all of our products. And we spend a significant amount of time in R&D in making sure that we build all the right mechanisms into the product to help our customers comply. The other part of your question related to cookies, specifically in places like Facebook and Google, Google has been in an interesting position in that they control a lot of the advertising budgets of companies out there. But on the flip side of it, they also control 60% of the browser market, roughly with Chrome. So you sort of almost have 2 sides of that advertising market in some ways. And obviously, Facebook is another large player on the advertising side, not the browser side. So when Chrome announces significant changes to the way of thinking about cookies, that has an outsized impact on advertising, and advertisers have to respond. And I think your thesis is exactly right, that third-party -- certainly, third-party anonymous data will become much less important. And first-party data becomes -- is already critically important but becomes even more important. And so that's why we're really working hard and investing heavily in CDP, in customer data platform, which is largely a first-party data platform. We really see CDP as an evolution of many markets, particularly ad tech markets. And it's really this rise of this super agile, first-party data management platform. That's really a customer management platform.

Got it. On that front, I know CDP is early. Just any sense like what kind of adoption you've seen to date and kind of where you see adoption going over the next couple of years for CDP platforms?

Yes. So like I said, I think this is the key battleground in marketing. I think if you talk to most large enterprises, they're all thinking about their data strategy. Whether they use the term CDP or not, they're all talking about the data strategy. Many of them are talking specifically about CDP. And so we're working with some of the best brands in the world right now. We have them in a pilot with us. And so we're co-innovating, we're building it together with many great brands. I think you're going to see quite a bit of adoption from customers. I think they're probably going to start with use cases that are related to marketing. So they're going to think about ingesting all of their customer data, segmenting it and activating it across all their different marketing channels. But I think we're going to see this next wave of adoption where they say, "Hey, we have this implemented for marketing. Let's start to surface these insights up in service, in our call centers. Let's start thinking about how can we use this to personalize the next step factions, things like that." But I think the adoption just within marketing is going to be massive over the next couple of years. And again, that's -- it's no secret, we're not the only ones investing in this. Our -- I would say the big market vendors are also investing. And then there's a lot of venture capital money that has been put into capturing this market because it's a -- it's sort of a burning need in the marketplace. I mentioned the secular kind of trend around CIO stacks getting more and more complicated. Mar-Tech stacks are more and more complicated. When I started Pardot in 2007, there's this great infographic by a guy named Scott Brinker. Yes, they put all the Mar-Tech logos that you can find on one slide. And in 2007, there were like 150 logos on it, and today, there are over 7,000. And so we can't predict every possible channel that would -- 5 years ago, I didn't think there would be something called TikTok with dance videos being shared, at least to explain things. But you can certainly bet that, that trend will continue. And so if that trend is going to continue, you want to be at the center of it, both as a vendor like us, right? You want to be the data platform that's powering all of that. And as a CMO, you want to have an amazingly flexible data platform in the middle because as you swap in and out these different Mar-Tech pieces, what's really solid is going to be a data platform. So it's going to be hugely strategic.

All right. For sure. For sure. That's a -- yes, a lot of -- I've seen a lot of those diagrams in tech, be it cybersecurity land space or now, I guess, the Mar-Tech marketing platform diagram as well. But yes, it's a ton of different channels to manage. You mentioned it's a big market, a lot of vendors vying for it. Just kind of any more color on your guys' view of the competitive landscape and what your guys' unique selling proposition is in the market? And just kind of how the business is going versus the competition in the space?

Sure. The major market vendors all have a play here. So the 2 big, big ones without some ability, who don't have a say in CDP, I would say, not as major in marketing but a big company. Oracle has a play in CDP. But then you have a lot of start-ups. What's been interesting is some of the start-ups have started to be acquired already, which is really, really early in their life cycles. So there is a start-up called Treasure Data attacking this. They were acquired by Arm, which is sort of an odd or an interesting pairing. There's a start-up called AgilOne. They were acquired by a private equity. I think the payer was Acquia maybe. So there have been a couple of quick acquisitions. Then there are probably like 5 really well-funded start-ups attacking this. And then there are 75 other start-ups just using the name CDP, which often happens when there's a hot market. But when you have a -- when you have like 5 legit start-ups attacking a space that is well funded, and you have 3 kind of I'd say big market vendors attacking it, there's a bear there, right? It's really a space. Our unique value proposition, so when I think of a company like Adobe, for example, Adobe and Salesforce compete and often partner. When you're this size, you're everybody's vendor, competitor, partner, et cetera. But we have different assets from one another in a lot of cases. And so there are a lot of cases where a customer would be using some products from Adobe that there's no Salesforce equivalent, some products from Salesforce where there's no Adobe equivalent. And then we might battle it out for what's in the middle. Our unique value proposition for CDP -- the C in CDP is customer, right, customer data platform. We know a thing or two about customers in that our stock ticker is CRM. And so being natively connected to your CRM, having a super flexible data model that's automatically pulling in all of your CRM data so that your single source of truth is like really your single source of truth, we think that is our unique differentiator. The other thing is we're building this platform first. One of the secret sauces of Salesforce, I mentioned our ecosystem of people, who we call Trailblazers. That's our ecosystem of ISVs or independent software vendors. And that ecosystem is called the AppExchange. I was a really early AppExchange partner in 2007. There were probably like 100 partners back then. And today, there are thousands. And I remember thinking when I was just a one-way partner -- when I was a Salesforce customer, I remember thinking, "Wow, even if someone offered me a CRM for free that have the same functionality as Salesforce, I wouldn't move to it because everything plugs into Salesforce, right?" Everything I was using plugged into Salesforce. That's really not true anywhere in marketing today. There isn't a platform ecosystem like that. We're building our CDP in such a manner that we can unlock an AppExchange for Mar-Tech. We can use our roots in AppExchange, learn from all those lessons and do it in Mar-Tech. So now the 7,000 vendors don't have to build bespoke integrations into us, where there'll be package solutions just like the AppExchange does. So I think that platform approach, too, will be another big differentiator.

Got it. Got it. That's a great strategy. The whole Trailblazer community and the AppExchange is certainly a source of durable competitive advantage for you guys across the portfolio. It's good to see that you can leverage it in that regard as well and address some of the fragmentation among the tech vendors in the Mar-Tech space.

Yes. There's not a lot of network effect traditionally in B2B. And I think the AppExchange and I think the Trailblazer community is one of the few examples of like real network effect in the enterprise. And so absolutely, any product I build in Marketing Cloud, I want to take advantage of that.

Yes. Yes. Speaking of one of your fellow acquired entrepreneurs and acquired company sets, curious -- any update on how you've been partnering with Tableau since the acquisition has closed, both in terms of integrating into marketing and commerce products as well as co-selling? Any update you could provide on kind of how that's been going in the last couple of months?

Sure. So it's still quite early with Tableau. So you may remember, it took a while to close. So we had to operate as independent companies for quite a while. The first time I met my counterpart from Tableau, we refused to make eye contact, just to be extra safe. That was great. But it is fantastic to bring them into the company. They just really democratized the world of analytics. You may remember that we launched an analytics cloud several years ago, and that was really what we think as best-in-class analytics for CRM. So it's embedded analytics. It's right in the workflow of using CRM. Not everyone uses CRM all the time, and certainly, not all of your data would be in CRM. And so we think Tableau is the best analytics for everything, the best visualization for everything. It really makes everyone at your company a data expert, data steward. But because we have that heritage of having an analytics cloud that is growing quite quickly for us, we know how to talk about analytics. We know we've tapped into the great customer need for it. And so I think this is kind of an easier lift for us than had we not had, call it, 5 years or 4 or 5 years of selling analytics into our end service. It really just kind of boosts that tremendously. So I'd say it's very early, early days with Tableau, but I would just say it's an incredibly broadly applicable product. Every one of our customers is creating ways to analyze their data. And it's something that's not out of our wheelhouse in terms of being able to talk about, in terms of being able to sell. And it just fits in beautifully with our whole product portfolio. What's also interesting for me, it's been a big change in the past few months. Our customer has always thought of us as a CRM company. And again, like it's our stock ticker, right? It would be easy to think of us as a CRM company. But since we've acquired both MuleSoft and Tableau, our customers have increasingly thought of us as a data company and a company to come see for their data strategy, whether that's integration or analysis. And these aren't necessarily at kind of the most strategic levels of the company. That isn't necessarily the exact conversation, I would say, we've always had in the past. So it's been really interesting to see how those 2 acquisitions together have kind of pushed us, in a good way, into a different place than where we've traditionally operated.

For sure. For sure. Yes. No, I mean I -- we personally think from our work, Salesforce is a fantastic general purpose platform for development, low code, low touch, more and more complex if need to be. And it's been cool to see the work that you guys have done with coronavirus and making some -- all those cool dashboards publicly available with Tableau. It's been awesome.

The message for Tableau. I mean Tableau, I guess, right now is off the charts, right, because of exactly what you said. So many of those publicly available dashboards and reports are just getting hammered right now. But it is a testament to show how quickly you can stand something up and then just how robust and visual things can be.

Right. Right. It's been fantastic, Adam. I guess just last here. You harped on this a little bit earlier, kind of how you'd expect digital marketing and commerce solutions to be of more importance as we get out of this coronavirus. I guess just how do you think -- I think maybe it's an interesting comparison point, like how do you view the opportunity for Mar-Tech and digital commerce today as we potentially enter a new wave of economic growth? It seems like similar to when you launched Pardot back in 2007, got it going, you were just about to enter a different economic environment. How would you kind of compare and contrast where we are today, heading to this new decade versus when you launched Pardot in 2007 and just the size of opportunity between then and now?

Yes. So we definitely were in a different economic time. We launched it in 2007, and then the end of 2007 happened. And then I was suddenly able to buy 110 Herman Miller Aeron chairs for $1, literally. The company couldn't get rid of them. And we had the 33rd floor of a 33-story office building in Atlanta for $4 a square foot. So that was a long ahead of time. But obviously, in a lot of ways, it led to the rise of business-to-business marketing automation because something that happened then was companies stopped traveling as much as they were. At that point, it was for economic reasons, but it coincided really nicely with the lives of virtual meetings. At that time, it was GoToMeeting. Obviously, now it's Zoom. But as the rise of GoToMeeting happened, what you saw was companies got more and more comfortable of doing larger and larger transactions without meeting in person, which wasn't -- before that, I would say the vast majority of deals had to happen in person. So that was a big shift, and it coincided nicely with the rise of marketing automation, of demand generation, of inside sales. So that was kind of a big B2B shift that happened back then. I think what you're going to see right now is a big B2C shift. You just -- you had -- I mentioned consumer packaged goods in manufacturing. One of the trends you were already seeing in those industries was disruption by nimble start-ups that were going direct-to-consumer. So if you think about the laser industry and the massive disruption that happens because you have things like Dollar Shave Club and Harry's razors. And you have to let -- lead like massive market share in a span of 4 years because they were going through their traditional channels where they've been so strong for so long but couldn't pivot quickly to these new competitors that were just going -- eliminating the middleman and going direct to the consumer. You're starting to see that play out across a ton of different products and just sort of be replicated, whether it is like glasses with Warby Parker, whether it -- I never thought you could get a mattress shipped to your house directly, and it's like packed up so tightly and it's like a foam snake that pops out when you open it up. And you have all these mattress companies spring up and mortgage companies spring up. And so the traditional players are now all rethinking their strategy, and they're saying, "Hey, I've got to also be able to go direct-to-consumer." So that trend was already happening just because of disruption. And I think now where the sort of traditional means of commerce is being disrupted by what's just happening, COVID-19, not by a competitor, that's the only thing to accelerate. And I don't think that genie is going back in the bottle, right? I think we're going to see you gain some tremendous efficiencies. And even if it's just an extra channel that you weren't already doing, you're probably going to continue to invest in it. So I think you're going to see the rise of commerce and more digital marketing outside of kind of the traditional strong spot, that you're going to see it move more into places like CPG, places like manufacturing that traditionally have an intermediary between themselves and the customer.

All of it. All of it, yes, I know it's amazing to see the velocity of new businesses and brands being formed just with an Instagram account and some good message and value to communicate with the customers. And definitely, your technology has been an enabler of that. Adam, I really appreciate the time here. Any final thoughts for investors you'd like to leave us with? Or anything else we should be thinking about as we head into the weekend?

I think I wouldn't say related to Salesforce. I would just do a PFA, and take care of yourself. If you don't take care of yourself, you can't take care of your family. Take care of your family, take care of your teammates and your coworkers. And only after you get through all that, then we get to focus on this other stuff. But we're all in this together. Everybody, be safe, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and we will get through this.

Amen. Great way to close on, Adam. Thank you so much for the time today. Thank you to all our participants for listening in, and I wish everybody a great weekend. Take care.

Great. Well, thanks so much for having me, Ari. All right. Bye-bye.

Bye.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's conference call. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time, and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.