Salesforce: The company everybody’s heard of, but nobody knows what they actually do

Imagine that you own a company which has operated for 20 years, you’re in the top 10 B2B brands in the world, worth over $130 billion and people still have no idea what you do. It would get you down, wouldn’t it?

This is (probably the only) problem of one of the most talked about companies lately.

Just to make it clear, they certainly know how marketing is done. Everyone in need of such a service knows about it and is even ready to pay a substantial amount of money for it (since they aren’t cheap at all), but an average internet user has no idea who they are.

It seems that this started to bother their charismatic owner (who really does an amazing job when it comes to self-branding), so the company, which is officially the fourth fastest-growing brand in the world, decided to change that.

But how?

By popping up anywhere you can think of – on TV, in radio, digital, printed ads… They wanted everything they could get. Some extra brand exposure can’t hurt, right?

The message Salesforce wanted to get across is that they are the ones who bring companies and customers together.

As you can read on the internet, the company’s CEO was a good friend of Steve Jobs, so it comes as no surprise their TVC is reminiscent of one of Apple’s campaigns #MeLikeIt. Although they are the company with perhaps the best CRM platform in the world, that won’t be the topic of this post.

The goal of the campaign was to show what their solution can do for their customers and their customer’s customers. To put it simply – a life with no stress.

It seems there has never been a better time than today to be a customer. Anywhere you turn, companies are competing to provide the best possible customer experience. One gets the impression customer experience is even more important than the product or service they offer.

Do you want to buy new shoes directly on your cell phone while commuting to work? No problem. Or at least it shouldn’t be - in theory. In practice, each department within a company has its own processes or uses different platforms. But, how could they be connected? If you ask the Salesforce team, it’s a piece of cake.

What does Salesforce actually do?

If we take a better look at what Salesforce and their competitors communicate in their marketing campaigns, I’d say that all other CRM solutions try to make lives easier for companies, while Salesforce does that respecting customers’ wishes as well. This is exactly what they are trying to underline as the main message in their B2B campaigns.

They realized that customers don’t want to speak with your sales, marketing or logistics department. What customers want is for their problem to be solved immediately (be it via social media, phone, mail or website). At once. They don’t want their call to be transferred from one line to another, or wait for Tom, Dick and Harry from the warehouse to call them back and confirm the trainers are in stock and could be dropped at the city center store by Monday so you could pick them up, going through an exhausting process just because you couldn’t provide the information straight away.

Therefore, Salesforce helps companies to break down data silos and allow all employees to have a 360-degree view of every customer. The final goal is better customer experience and personalization of the offer as much as possible.

So, was the campaign successful?

Although Kameleon Solutions has recently become the first official Salesforce partner in Serbia and Nigeria, the campaign in question didn’t make our job any easier.

Salesforce’s recognition in Serbia and the ex-Yugoslav region is considerably smaller than it is in other parts of the world. In Serbia, the name Salesforce is frequently associated with sales and the needs of sales-oriented companies, which is unfortunately a big misconception. As the best-known CRM platform in the world, Salesforce is so much more than a tool intended for salespeople. It offers a completely different view of doing business in various fields, such as client support, sales, marketing, finances, health, and process industries, as well as all types of production.

The Salesforce platform provides complete freedom in managing and connecting all business processes within a company. What’s more, it offers great possibilities for communication with other software which the company uses, providing customers with unique and simple management to achieve better results.

In Serbia and ex-Yu countries, this has been recognized mostly by global companies that have their local representatives there, and Salesforce was chosen by their parent companies.

How popular Salesforce is in Serbia is best illustrated by the fact that our first big project was set up with one of the largest betting companies in Africa, which is the reason Salesforce recognized us as a partner for Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on Nigeria.

For this reason, we believe it was worth creating the campaign, which will probably be the first of many more to come.