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

Hi, everyone. I want to welcome you all to our webinar on The Tech Tactics and Channels, B2B marketing Leaders are Investing in to Drive Growth. My name is Ruth Bolster, and I work on the product marketing team at Salesforce. Before we begin, I would like to cover a few quick notes about our webinar platform. So today's webinar will be available on demand after we wrap up, and it will be accessible through the URL that you are on now. Please note that the slides will advance automatically through the presentation. And if you need to enlarge the slides, you can click the enlarged slide button located on the right-hand corner of your presentation window. If you need any technical assistance, click on the help widget located on the bottom left corner of your console. We've also added some additional resources, which are available through the resources window to the right of the slides. So there you can find additional related content that we referenced throughout the presentation. Last, we encourage you to submit questions at any time throughout the presentation using the ask a question at the bottom of your console. We will then answer as many questions as we can at the end of the presentation. So as I mentioned, my name is Ruth, and I am a Product Marketing Manager for Pardot at Salesforce. A little bit about me. Before joining Salesforce, I spent the last 5 years in the publishing industry as both a sales representative and a lead generation marketer, during which time I was a Salesforce customer, and I ultimately became a Salesforce-certified Pardot specialist. Over the last 2 years, in particular, I experienced firsthand the shifts that marketing and sales made during the pandemic. We transitioned fully to remote selling, and the marketing shifted their priorities to go fully digital. So this is all to say that I have been in the trenches, just like you, and understand firsthand the types of challenges that we faced as marketers over the last 2 years. So today, I will be synthesizing 5 key B2B marketing insights from our most recent state of marketing research report. In this report, we surveyed 8,200 respondents from around the world to understand things like how marketing priorities shifted during the pandemic, the current state and trajectory of marketing digital transformation, trends in marketing data management and how collaboration is changing as many teams continue to operate remotely. So now it's important to note a few details about the survey demographics before we dive into some of the key takeaways. We surveyed marketers across 6 continents with respondents checking in from 37 countries. Roles from the CMO to the marketing manager were represented, and the data reflects 18 different industries, including both B2C and B2B perspectives. Respondents are all third-party panelists, which means that the data is not limited to Salesforce customers. Our research team contacted everyone. So this survey is particularly exciting because it's such a comprehensive view of the state of the marketing industry and it gives us a global lens, which is helpful for so many of us with global and distributed teams. Taking a global perspective also helps remind us that we're all in the same boat. The challenges that you might be facing are the same challenges marketing teams are facing around the world. So it really reminds us that we're all in this together, can be quite humbling in that regard. So from our research, we identified 5 key trends impacting B2B marketers, which we are going to dive into today. First, marketers have pivoted drastically over the last 2 years, and now they face new challenges. The pandemic has changed everything from the way we work to the way we interact with our customers. As a result, marketers are more focused on innovation and improving customer journeys than ever before. And despite it being challenging to pivot, 66% of marketers expect revenue growth over the next 12 to 18 months because of the changes they made over the last 2 years. Second, as customers go digital, marketing steps up. We know that the pandemic spurred years' worth of changes in customer behavior over the course of only a few months. And as a result, marketers are accelerating their digital transformations and strategies. 90% of B2B marketers say that their digital engagement strategy has changed since the pandemic began. The third point we're going to discuss is that collaboration drives the market from anywhere era. Another big change that we are all familiar with is that people are no longer tied to their offices. As you can see, I'm presenting from home, and many of you are probably tuning in from home. So -- and even if people are not working from home, companies are returning to the office. When they're returning to the office, they often are embracing flexible schedules. So there is this new sense that people can work from anywhere. And this distributed workforce is reevaluating how they engage not only with customers, but with each other. 77% of B2B marketers say that the pandemic has permanently shifted how they collaborate and communicate at work, which as we're going to explore, has consequences for the customer journey. Next, data is at the forefront for marketing leaders. Data empowers marketers to deliver the trusted personalized engagement that customers expect, but managing it has only become more and more complex. The fact that marketers love data is not necessarily a new insight, but the pandemic has changed the way that we approach data and the number of data sources that marketers have. Ultimately, marketers expect a 40% increase in the number of data sources that they use between 2021 and 2022. And of course, our fifth insight that we learned from the report is that metrics and KPIs are continuing to evolve at an unprecedented rate. As their work becomes more strategic and valuable for the business is at large, marketers are reevaluating what successful marketing looks like. In fact, 78% of marketing organizations have changed or reprioritized metrics due to the pandemic. This brings about new challenges and it forces marketers to think on their feet as they're redefining what makes a successful campaign. So the overall theme that we can take away is that B2B marketers, like businesses more generally, are experiencing change at an unprecedented scale and speed. The pandemic has changed customer expectations and behaviors. And as a result, marketers are rethinking everything from the channels that they use to how they define success. So when we ask marketers to tell us how the pandemic impacted different aspects of their business, they told us that across the board, every aspect has somewhat or completely changed. And while this view reflects global data, when we drilled down, we saw the same trends in individual regions and countries. So where do we go from here? Well, 78% of respondents told us that they expect companies to use the pandemic as a catalyst for improvement. So marketers who want to be successful in the next year and beyond will need to frame these changes as an opportunity to create better customer experiences. We want to go from reactive to proactive. As part of being more proactive, we asked marketing leaders to identify their top priorities and their top challenges. Their responses reflect the pivots that they had to make during the pandemic. So from the survey, we know that marketers' top 2 challenges are innovation and customer engagement. And these are pretty much evergreen. All of us have wanted to try new things and have worried about customer engagement at some point in our careers. However, the definition of what it means to be innovative and to engage customers in real time has changed significantly during the pandemic. Marketers had to learn how to create digital first experiences that engaged customers when they were all stuck at home. So for example, one thing that I'm sure you all experienced is having your trade shows canceled or having them move online only. And when this happens to me, I had to get really creative in how I reached out to my customers in order to not lose out on that crucial touch point. If our conferences were canceled outright, I often threw my own online events and used giveaways and other incentives to help drive attendance. I also did things like host virtual coffee chats, just help build that community and brand awareness, while our customers and prospects were Zooming in and just stuck at home. We did see a few new line items on the priorities and challenges list for this year. Priority-wise, creating a cohesive customer journey across channels and devices comes in #1. And this is likely driven by the number of channels and devices that marketers are using to reach out to people when the pandemic forced plans to change. Sharing a unified view of customer data across business units came in at #4 in terms of top priorities. And interestingly enough, it came in at #5 in terms of top challenges. Especially with people working from anywhere, Marketers realized over the past 2 years that they need to do more to share data and work across teams to get a holistic view of customer. So we know that if organizations do not have this level of collaboration, you can risk alienating the customer or sending them mix messages, which could really damage that relationship. Because marketers have to pivot B2B marketing budget allocations adjusted as well and as you can see on this chart here, almost 70% of budget allocations went towards digital marketing, content, account-based marketing and new technology geared towards digital outreach and engagement. So these new budget allocations indicate that the customers who migrated to digital channels during the pandemic plan to use them long after in-person touch points ramp up again, which brings us to our second insight. The reason why our priorities shifted is because our customers' behaviors shifted. In other words, as customers went digital, B2B marketing has to step up. An overwhelming majority of marketers say that their digital engagement strategy changed since the start of the pandemic. As you can see here, top channels with increased value over the past year include digital ads, digital content and video. So this being said, the use and value of digital channels themselves is only part of the story. Just as critical is the extent to which marketers can leverage those channels together to deliver the right message at the right time. Over 2/3 of marketers now describe their cross-channel coordination as dynamic, meaning that the messages evolve in a hyper personalized manner based on customer actions. That compares to fewer than 1/3 of marketers who reported cross-channel coordination in 2019. So as you can see, you can now -- as you can see, the pandemic really accelerated existing trends. So here's a quick look at all the key B2B marketing channels that marketers adopted during the pandemic. As we mentioned before, video content boomed over the last 2 years with notable increases in everything from YouTube to Twitch. And this makes sense because the potential for video is really endless, and there's a lot of advantages to it. It's on demand, you can get great engagement statistics from it. You can even put it behind a form and collect information. And marketers have a huge opportunity to think creatively about how to engage consumers with video across a multitude of platforms and devices. Another stat to note is digital events and sponsorships, which 85% of marketers said that they adopted. And this is a great example of how all encompassing the shift to digital is because one can argue that events and sponsorships is really the most analog channel of all. With uncertainty around the pandemic, marketers expect the trend towards virtual and hybrid event formats to carry on throughout 2022. And in my experience, there's a lot of opportunity here to extend your reach to new audiences, especially since people can log into your virtual event from anywhere. You can also extend the life of these events by recording them and making them available on demand. So this is a great example of how the shift to digital has advantages that marketers will probably embrace for years to come. This brings us to our third insight. Just as the way we interact with customers has gone increasingly digital, the way we interact with our colleagues has as well. The pandemic has ushered in a new market-from-anywhere model where employees are no longer bound to offices. And this market from anywhere era relies on technology that facilitates collaboration. Overall, 78% of marketers say that their companies have adopted new work collaboration technology due to the pandemic, and 77% of B2B marketers say that the pandemic has permanently shifted how they collaborate and communicate at work. Of course, adjusting to a work from anywhere environment hasn't been without its challenges. 71% of B2B marketers say it's actually harder to collaborate across departments now than before the pandemic, which could have consequences for the cohesive customer experience. Some of the top tools that marketers are using to tackle these challenges include videoconferencing, instant messaging platforms and e-mails. All these trends point to the fact that marketers need quick and easy ways to align and collaborate across campaigns and share results with colleagues no matter where they are in the world. Further, the fact that IM and e-mail are in the top 3 also tells a bigger story about our preference for a synchronous communication and an increased emphasis on how easily specific channels can be integrated into our lives. It's not just about virtual collaboration, but easy communication on our own schedules. Now for our fourth insight. Our research uncovered a very clear trend. B2B marketers need data and lots of it to be effective. But as we all know, we're only as good as the data that we have. Over the last 2 years, marketers continue to increase the number of data sources from 10 to 15, which in other words, it's a 50% increase. It's pretty big. However, only 36% of B2B marketers said that they were completely satisfied with their ability to use data to create more relevant customer experiences, and this is an ongoing challenge. More data does not necessarily mean richer insights or even good data, and that data can cause tension between the customer journey with marketing, sales and service. This leads to frustrated customers and potentially lost opportunities. With so much emphasis being placed on customer data and its implications for marketing, reasonable then to assume that organizations would pull out all the stops to ensure its overall quality. However, unfortunately, the majority of marketers are pretty unhappy with their data with less than half of all marketers citing satisfaction across aspects like data hygiene, completeness and accessibility, among other aspects. If the trends continue, the number of data sources that marketers are going to be using is only going to increase, which means that the issues that we're seeing around data quality and hygiene are going to get more and more complex. Ultimately, the marketers who will succeed must prioritize becoming data champions and creating and maintaining standards for data governance across the company. While that can be a bit more of a time investment, the marketing leaders who actually set aside the time and resources to make this a priority will be strategically set up for the future. For our final takeaway, I want to talk about metrics. So the definition of marketing success was already evolving prior to the onset of the pandemic. But the radical shift in customer expectations and behaviors not to mention business objectives, put that evolution into overdrive. 78% of marketing organizations have changed or reprioritized their metrics due to the pandemic. So, 1 real-life example of how the metrics of successive change during the pandemic include webinar attendance rates. In my experience before the pandemic, you had to get really creative in order to get the sign up rates you needed for webinars, and even then we maybe got a 30% to 40% attendance rate on average. And in many ways, this made sense since at the time, we were competing with offline meetings and other distractions that took people away from their computers. Throughout 2020, however, those numbers jumped and we had to recalibrate our standards for success. Depending on the webinar topic, we could see up to a 200% increase in sign-up rates, and the average tenancy rate could be anywhere between 60% and 70%. And this also made sense. As everything shifted online, we had more of a captive audience and fewer in real-life distractions to compete with. As we rolled into 2021 and that fabled Zoom fatigue started to settle in, we saw yet another shift. We were still getting the high sign-up rates, but attendance rate started dropping off to about 40% again. So we started looking at how many people clicked through to the recording to get a more complete sense of how people were engaging with the content. And this meant that we didn't know how a webinar performed until about 2 or so days after the fact when the reporting went out. So as you can see, our definition of what constituted a successful webinar was constantly shifting over the last 2 years, and it will probably continue to shift as workplace dynamics continue to evolve. So in addition to the definition of success changing, marketers are now tracking success metrics year-over-year, more than they have in previous years. Revenue and funnel performance remain the forefront metrics for today's marketers. However, marketers have also become more KPI conscious across the board with customer referral rates, customer acquisition costs and content engagement seeing the biggest boost in popularity. Customer satisfaction metrics, like Net Promoter Scores, remain marketers' most helpful measure of success, outranking even revenue and marketing sales model metrics. So we know metrics are evolving and the definition of success is changing. This also means that marketers need to ensure that they have the skills required to be successful. There's still a bit of a disconnect when it comes to the type of training marketers want and what their companies offer. Only 47% of marketers strongly agree that the training they received from their company sets them up for success. There's also a disconnect with a number of companies who actually offer the training that marketers need. Across the board, more than half of all companies don't offer the types of education their marketers are looking for to stay competitive. So when B2B marketing leaders look at these charts, they should think about a few important takeaways. First, data-driven marketing demands data-oriented skills and training for your marketing team. whether you choose to build that knowledge gap by bringing in external subject matter experts or upskilling internally. Not only can these data skills help us better serve our customers, but they can also help us better figure out measurement and ROI of our own cross-channel marketing activity. Additionally, in our new work-from-anywhere world where people are no longer bound by geography or time zones, employees are really in the driver seat. More than ever before, marketers have options and investing in your team's development is not only a good idea from a business perspective, but it's also a great way to retain talent. Lastly, marketing leaders have a big opportunity to build healthier thriving teams by investing in training on things like interpersonal skills, like emotional intelligence, adaptability and leadership. If this past year has taught us anything, it's that we could use a little bit more of these skill sets in our lives just to be successful as we continue to lead through change. So if you would like to learn more about the data we presented today, we have a few resources that we really encourage you to check out. The first is the state of marketing report, which synthesizes the data we discussed today. You can also explore the data for yourself in our state of marketing report, Tableau dashboard. And of course, we have a 360 blog post on the future of marketing as well. You can find all of these resources at the following links as well as in the panel on your screen. So it does look like we have time for a few questions from the audience before we wrap up. So let me take a look.

So one person asks, with this new work-from-anywhere culture that has sprung up during the pandemic, what are some specific ways marketing can improve collaboration and communication? Okay. This is a really good question and one that actually comes up quite a bit. At least from my experience and my perspective, there are actually two different yet related ways to think about improving communication. The first is improving communication within the marketing team itself. And there are a number of ways that you can do this, including using collaboration technology and whatnot, and just making sure that you're working from and have access to the same data sources. The other way to think about improving communication is adopting a more cross-functional view that focuses on aligning marketing with other teams like sales and service. We touched upon this in the presentation, but not having an alignment between marketing sales and service can ultimately be disastrous when interacting with customers. We really never want to be in a position where marketing sales and service are sending customers mixed messages or worse, the same message 20x. That's really where the lack of communication can get dangerous because it can make the customer feel like they are not valued. So one thing that Salesforce really believes in is taking a 360 view of a customer, where sales, marketing and service are all working together with the same data source. So if a customer is opening a marketing e-mail or attempt a webinar, sales can see that, and they're not -- and they won't send an e-mail with the same information. Or if a customer opens a help ticket, marketing might put a temporary pause on outreach until the issue is resolved. So this idea of the 360 view of the customer really takes this idea of collaboration and communication to the next level. It's a more sophisticated way of working together and ultimately puts the customer at the forefront giving the communication a very clear end goal. So if you're looking to scale up or if you want to take your communication to the next level, that might be an approach to think about. So I think we can do one more question. Another person asks, if we are thinking about improving our data, what tactics can we take to audit it and clean it up? So this is another great question. In my experience, making sure you have good data really is an all-hands-on-deck effort. And this means that you as a marketer, if you notice that an e-mail address is bad or if your sales team reports that someone left the company, everyone is accountable for cleaning that data up and moving that contact to inactive or fixing that e-mail address. So we know, though, that this can be a very long-term process, but consistent steps like this can make a really big difference year-over-year. This being said, one of the easiest things that you can do as a marketing team can be to ensure that all of your data is housed in one place. And we know that marketers can use up to 10 to 15 different applications when doing their marketing. And really, the worst thing that you can do is have your customer data in 10 to 15 different places. This not only prevents you from getting a whole picture of how your customer is interacting with your marketing, but it just makes it so easy to create, to look at contacts or just get piecemeal bits of contact information. No one ever gets fully nurtured. So being able to work with an extensible platform, a Salesforce or Pardot or even Datorama, can really help keep everything in one place, which can in turn help you keep your data cleaner. Okay. So that seems to be all the time that we have for today. I want to thank you all so much for taking the time to explore these data points with me. We will have additional presentations on B2B marketing trends. So stay on the lookout for additional invites from us throughout the year. And as a reminder, today's webinar will be available on demand and accessible through the URL that you are on now. So you can access it at any time or share it with any interested colleagues. So we hope to see you again in the future, and I hope you all have a great day. Thank you.