As any good Badsender reader knows, a year and a half ago, Salesforce, the world leader in cloud-based customer relationship solutions, acquired ExactTarget. Since the acquisition, in a transition period, Salesforce has decided to keep the ExactTarget brand. The main focus has been on product evolution, the deployment of the Salesforce1 strategy, and the exchange between Salesforce and ExactTarget sales teams.
You may not have noticed, but a first name change had already been made a few months ago when "ExactTarget" became "ExactTarget Marketing Cloud" following the integration of other Salesforce marketing solutions, namely, mainly Radian6 and BuddyMedia.
Today, Salesforce is taking things to the next level and doing away with the ExactTarget name. Like other companies that have acquired marketing solutions (IBM and Adobe come to mind), Salesforce has simply added the words "Marketing Cloud" to distinguish it from the rest of its offering.
So speaking of the rest of the offering, here's how Salesforce's various cloud products fit together:
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- Salesforce Marketing Cloud;
- Salesforce Sales Cloud: CRM application for sales forces, Salesforce's original business;
- Salesforce Service Cloud and Salesforce Desk.com (for SMBs) for customer service solutions;
- Salesforce Community Cloud: Create enterprise communities;
- Salesforce Analytics Cloud: for dashboards;
- And finally Salesforce1 platform, which integrates Salesforce Lightning, Heroku and Force.com, ...
As a side note, Salesforce is keeping the Orange color inherited from Exactarget on the pages of its site dedicated to Marketing Cloud. Pardot, the B2B Marketing Automationis keeping its name for the time being. Finally, although it's nothing new, you can follow Salesforce Marketing Cloud activity on Twitter via the account ... @MarketingCloud (not bad eh?).
But in fact, what does it change?
Well, not much in the immediate future. For example, the French teams of Salesforce and the now-defunct ExactTarget will soon be in the same building, but there is no immediate revolution to report. I had the opportunity to talk for a few minutes with a member of the Salesforce marketing team a few days ago, and they confirmed that the name change does not mean any changes in the company's management or sales approach for the moment.
However, we can imagine that more and more bridges will be created between the different Salesforce solutions, which will imply other changes in their product structure in the coming months. I'm thinking of changes in Pardot and B2B marketing solutions, for example. More on that in the next episode.
