Dave Gerhardt, VP of Marketing at Drift, was recently interviewed on the B2B Growth podcast by John Rougeux who is VP of Marketing at Skyfii. Gerhardt discusses conversational marketing as a new B2B product category and how it is changing marketing from reaching out to you later to a conversation that is happening now:

Conversational Marketing is About Connecting You Now

Conversational marketing is a whole new way of thinking about marketing and sales. The traditional way of doing marketing and sales is all about later. Come to my website and fill out this form and somebody is going to reach out to you later, when it’s convenient for them. The big shift that is happening in marketing and business over the last five to ten years is customers have all the power today. You can’t make people wait. Information is free now.

I can find anything I want to know about a company without ever having to go to your website. It’s crazy to think that you are going to force people to go to your website, fill out a form, wait three days to hear back from your sales team, and then get a demo. Conversational is all about connecting you now with the people who are ready to buy now while they are live on your website.

B2P – Marketing to People

It’s not about buyers. It’s not about sellers. It’s not about sales. It’s not about marketing. It’s about people. That’s how people all communicate online today. I pressed one button in my car and I got a list. I ordered something from Amazon while I was here this morning to send back to my house and it’s going to be there tomorrow when I get home. There are countless examples of that. That is how we all behave online in our real lives today.

But then something happens weird happens. We go to our jobs in B2B and none of the tools that we use match how we actually buy as real people. That’s the most exciting thing to me about conversational marketing. It’s really closing the gap between B2C and B2B. We just call it B2P, marketing to people.

What Ties Our Products Together is Conversation

We have an email product and we have a landing page product. Black and white versions of those people would say everybody has email, everybody has landing pages. The thing that ties those together is conversation. That forces us to think about what is conversational email? What is conversational landing pages? What is conversational whatever? That one word forces our product team to think about how can we change this? If our fundamental stance as a company is that the internet should be one conversation, then how does that weave into everything that we build?

Ultimately what we care about is that email becomes a conversation. Meaning, the way that marketers have had to use email the last decade is a one-way channel. Email is meant to be a two-way channel. Marketers have been using it as, “John come to my webinar.” What happens if you actually respond to that email? Most of the time you can’t because it’s donotreply@ or it just goes to some inbox where nobody is answering it. That is a terrible experience. Our belief is that if you reply, “Hey actually I can’t make it. Can you reregister my colleague?” That should get handled. We are thinking of that from an evolution standpoint.

The same thing with landing pages. Most landing pages today are static. You go to the landing page, put a bunch of info in and you are gone. What if that was a real-time conversation on the page? That one topic has to weave itself into everything we do from a product perspective.

>> Listen to the complete interview with Drift Marketing VP Dave Gerhardt on the B2B Growth podcast.

Avishai Sharon, Co-founder & CEO of TrenDemon, discussed their software on ILTV:

How Do You Connect Content Marketing to Sales?

My personal background was heading a marketing agency for many years and one of my biggest struggles was how do I prove our value and our effort to our customers and how do you connect the impact of what we call content marketing to business goals and to sales? When we couldn’t find an easy way to show that correlation three and a half years ago we went ahead and founded TrenDemon to help companies do just that.

We connect their marketing efforts, which today rely mostly on content, you want your audience to consume valuable content, as opposed to just advertising. The big challenge is how do you attribute those efforts to sales? There’s actually a prior problem, how do you actually map the customer journey? How do you track those different touch points into one picture?

Reverse Engineering Successful Customer Journeys

The first thing we do is look at all the different touchpoints that a customer has had over his lifecycle. We ask the question, not just where do they come from, but how deep was their engagement? Did they actually watch the video? Did they actually read the article? Then you can start reverse engineering those successful journeys and say what’s common about all of these successful journeys.

What we found, and this is the interesting thing, we’re working with over 90 companies today worldwide and the vast majority of content the companies produce, over 90 percent, is ineffective at driving business goals. As you guys know it’s very expensive to create quality content and it takes a lot of effort.

If People Read the Right Content They Will Covert to a Sale

The second interesting thing is that if you do manage to find those 10 percent and you find a way to get it in front of the right people you’re actually able to improve dramatically your results. So there’s not just a correlation between what buyers did beforehand, there’s also a causation, a causal relationship, that if people read the right content at the right time they’re more likely to follow a path. We’re not probably as sophisticated as we believe that we are.

We’re a SaaS company, a cloud-based solution. We’re working a lot in the US and one of our biggest markets and growing markets is Japan. They’re investing a lot of content and a lot on technology. Essentially, because we look at the customer journey and not necessarily specific languages we can operate in any environment which allows us to grow pretty much anywhere. As long as they have content, which means that they’re producing something other than just advertising, they want people and audiences to actually engage with what they’re producing and they do have some business outcomes that they’re looking to measure.

About TrenDemon:

Founded in 2013, TrenDemon is the world’s leading content marketing attribution and optimization solution, helping marketers prove and improve their content’s impact.

TrenDemon insights can help you uncover your content marketing ROI, impact on business goals, and engagement to help guide the content strategy. Our optimization units will help you increase conversions and shorten time to convert on your owned assets.

TrenDemon proudly serves a wide range of customers, from Fortune 500s and brands to SaaS, B2B, and financial companies and is backed by leading VCs.

Scott Heimes, Chief Marketing Officer at Zipwhip, discusses how two-way text messaging can be an extremely effective way to communicate with your customers in an interview on the B2B Growth Podcast:

76% of Consumers Have Received Text From Businesses

Over 76 percent of consumers have received some kind of text from a business. The most common are appointment reminders or bank alerts. This really just scratches the surface. Texting has so many applications beyond just alerts and reminders. There are sales and marketing, discount coupons and giveaways, customer support and service, recruiting and staffing, and internal communications at places like educational institutions. It’s so new and businesses are continuing to innovate in this medium. There are a lot of powerful use cases for businesses.

We have over 30,000 businesses using our software today. They range from very small businesses like yoga studios or lawn care services all the way up to multi-billion dollar insurance companies that are using our solution in their claim call centers. Industries include financial services, staffing and recruiting, healthcare, legal, and more. We have 156 professional sports teams that use our solution. They use it for ticket sales and customer service. There are lots of fitness gyms, radio and TV stations that use our text solution as well. It really does run the gamut of anybody that wants to communicate with their customers via this preferred medium.

Report Shows Increasing Use of Texting by Businesses

I just talked to the Director of Communications for the Sound Transit Authority, the public transit authority in Seattle, who uses our solution. They publish an 800 number to text or call when people see problems on the trains. Rather than get on the phone and calling, more and more people are texting those alerts. It’s really an interesting use case. Another one is during a recent hurricane down in Houston we had an insurance agent that was using our software to communicate with all of his customers in the area because the phone lines were largely down. Texting was working well to create engagement and communication during those tough times.

We recently created a report called the State of Texting which is a deep research study that highlights the adoption curve of text messaging as a business communication tool. It identifies how many consumers are already being texted by businesses as well as many other key insights and trends. One of the things we saw was that there are a lot of one-way texting tools where you get an alert from your doctor’s office, for instance, but you can’t respond to it. It was actually fired off by a CRM using an API that was just one way.

Text is a Great Way to Increase Engagement

Increasingly, consumers would prefer to be able to respond to those texts and have an actual interaction with a human on the other side to either reschedual that appointment or alert them that they are going to be five minutes late or something like that. We are seeing a trend where people want to be able to respond to texts and have an interaction as opposed to continuing to be one way.

For businesses, the communication channels of email and phone are just becoming less and less effective. Text is a great way to increase your engagement and responsiveness with consumers. They’ll actually respond to a text. One of the things we are doing as a company is everything we can to maintain the purity of the texting medium to make sure that spam doesn’t leak its way into this channel.

>> Listen to the complete interview with Zipwhip CMO Scott Heimes on the B2B Growth podcast.

LeanIX specializes in helping companies fully understand their IT application landscape and identify components that are on the verge of becoming obsolete, as well as plan out migration paths and road maps. The company has recently been rolling out AI features to further augment its abilities.

SAP sees an opportunity to integrate LeanIX with its existing offers to boost its ability to help customers with their business transformations.

“Systems and processes go hand in hand,” said Christian Klein, CEO and MemAndré Christber of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “Together with LeanIX, we want to offer a first-of-its-kind transformation suite to provide holistic support to our customers on their business transformation journeys. Building on our decades of expertise, we’ll embed generative AI to offer self-optimizing applications and processes that can help businesses achieve key goals such as maximizing cash flow while minimizing their environmental impact.”

“For more than a decade, we have pursued a relentless customer-centric approach, a commitment to superior usability and seamless ecosystem integration and have become a leader in the enterprise architecture management category,” said André Christ, CEO and co-founder, LeanIX. “Our strategy is to empower organizations to continuously transform in a rapidly changing business environment. With an integrated, comprehensive view of IT applications and business processes we speed up modernization and reduce transformation risks for our customers, and also secure their ability to adapt to technology shifts such as cloud and AI.”

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2023, pending regulatory approval. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Rob Locascio, CEO of LivePerson, predicts that the AI-driven conversational space will ultimately have as much impact and be as big an industry as ecommerce, search, or social. Locascio was interviewed by Jim Cramer on CNBC:

Ecommerce, Search, Social… and Conversational Space?

When I look at the conversational space I think it’s going to have as much impact as ecommerce or search or social. The ability to talk to a machine and have a natural conversation, it’s in the collective consciousness of people. We all believe the Alexa type situation should happen with every company. 

We do that with Delta and T-Mobile and all these big brands. What we’re looking at now is how do we take that to the world? LiveIntent is proprietary technology to look at the intent that a consumer is having with the brand. In terms of I want to buy something, we have a way to analyze that and then use machine learning algorithms to then scale those conversations. That’s what this is about. 

Healthcare Companies Defending Themselves From Amazon Via AI

In Q4 we signed a couple healthcare companies. They want to talk about defending themselves from Amazon because Amazon said they want to go into healthcare. The way they think they can do that is scaling the conversations they are having with their customers and creating a totally different experience. You go to a doctor, you have an experience with them, you capture that on a messaging platform and an AI will help you with whatever is wrong with you. You want to process a bill instead of calling and being put on hold, you do that through a conversational experience. 

They want to game change it. The only way they’re going to defend themselves is to get into the conversational space. That’s what they see and we’re the company they’re trusting to scale their operations with the conversational platform.

Conversational Space Is Going To Be As Big As Search and Social

The conversational space is going to be as big as search and social. I think you’ll see one day that there will be a trillion dollar company in this space and I want it to be us. The things we’re investing in right now and setting up for will allow us to do that. That’s what’s important. The Amazon’s and the Facebook’s and Apple’s, they’re in the space. Jeff Bezos made a big bet obviously in Alexa to say this is the way it’s going to be. 

It can’t just be Amazon and Alexa. It has to be other companies getting access to that technology and that’s what we are providing. Who else is providing it? We’re one of the largest companies in the world to do this. Even though we’re not big tech, we are large enough to go ahead and go after them. We are large enough to go ahead and define a space and win it.

Dave Gerhardt, VP of Marketing at Drift, was recently interviewed on the B2B Growth podcast by John Rougeux who is VP of Marketing at Skyfii. Gerhardt discusses conversational marketing as a new B2B product category and how it is changing marketing from reaching out to you later to a conversation that is happening now:

Conversational Marketing is About Connecting You Now

Conversational marketing is a whole new way of thinking about marketing and sales. The traditional way of doing marketing and sales is all about later. Come to my website and fill out this form and somebody is going to reach out to you later, when it’s convenient for them. The big shift that is happening in marketing and business over the last five to ten years is customers have all the power today. You can’t make people wait. Information is free now.

I can find anything I want to know about a company without ever having to go to your website. It’s crazy to think that you are going to force people to go to your website, fill out a form, wait three days to hear back from your sales team, and then get a demo. Conversational is all about connecting you now with the people who are ready to buy now while they are live on your website.

B2P – Marketing to People

It’s not about buyers. It’s not about sellers. It’s not about sales. It’s not about marketing. It’s about people. That’s how people all communicate online today. I pressed one button in my car and I got a list. I ordered something from Amazon while I was here this morning to send back to my house and it’s going to be there tomorrow when I get home. There are countless examples of that. That is how we all behave online in our real lives today.

But then something happens weird happens. We go to our jobs in B2B and none of the tools that we use match how we actually buy as real people. That’s the most exciting thing to me about conversational marketing. It’s really closing the gap between B2C and B2B. We just call it B2P, marketing to people.

What Ties Our Products Together is Conversation

We have an email product and we have a landing page product. Black and white versions of those people would say everybody has email, everybody has landing pages. The thing that ties those together is conversation. That forces us to think about what is conversational email? What is conversational landing pages? What is conversational whatever? That one word forces our product team to think about how can we change this? If our fundamental stance as a company is that the internet should be one conversation, then how does that weave into everything that we build?

Ultimately what we care about is that email becomes a conversation. Meaning, the way that marketers have had to use email the last decade is a one-way channel. Email is meant to be a two-way channel. Marketers have been using it as, “John come to my webinar.” What happens if you actually respond to that email? Most of the time you can’t because it’s donotreply@ or it just goes to some inbox where nobody is answering it. That is a terrible experience. Our belief is that if you reply, “Hey actually I can’t make it. Can you reregister my colleague?” That should get handled. We are thinking of that from an evolution standpoint.

The same thing with landing pages. Most landing pages today are static. You go to the landing page, put a bunch of info in and you are gone. What if that was a real-time conversation on the page? That one topic has to weave itself into everything we do from a product perspective.

>> Listen to the complete interview with Drift Marketing VP Dave Gerhardt on the B2B Growth podcast.

Rob Locascio, CEO of LivePerson, predicts that the AI-driven conversational space will ultimately have as much impact and be as big an industry as ecommerce, search, or social. Locascio was interviewed by Jim Cramer on CNBC:

Ecommerce, Search, Social… and Conversational Space?

When I look at the conversational space I think it’s going to have as much impact as ecommerce or search or social. The ability to talk to a machine and have a natural conversation, it’s in the collective consciousness of people. We all believe the Alexa type situation should happen with every company. 

We do that with Delta and T-Mobile and all these big brands. What we’re looking at now is how do we take that to the world? LiveIntent is proprietary technology to look at the intent that a consumer is having with the brand. In terms of I want to buy something, we have a way to analyze that and then use machine learning algorithms to then scale those conversations. That’s what this is about. 

Healthcare Companies Defending Themselves From Amazon Via AI

In Q4 we signed a couple healthcare companies. They want to talk about defending themselves from Amazon because Amazon said they want to go into healthcare. The way they think they can do that is scaling the conversations they are having with their customers and creating a totally different experience. You go to a doctor, you have an experience with them, you capture that on a messaging platform and an AI will help you with whatever is wrong with you. You want to process a bill instead of calling and being put on hold, you do that through a conversational experience. 

They want to game change it. The only way they’re going to defend themselves is to get into the conversational space. That’s what they see and we’re the company they’re trusting to scale their operations with the conversational platform.

Conversational Space Is Going To Be As Big As Search and Social

The conversational space is going to be as big as search and social. I think you’ll see one day that there will be a trillion dollar company in this space and I want it to be us. The things we’re investing in right now and setting up for will allow us to do that. That’s what’s important. The Amazon’s and the Facebook’s and Apple’s, they’re in the space. Jeff Bezos made a big bet obviously in Alexa to say this is the way it’s going to be. 

It can’t just be Amazon and Alexa. It has to be other companies getting access to that technology and that’s what we are providing. Who else is providing it? We’re one of the largest companies in the world to do this. Even though we’re not big tech, we are large enough to go ahead and go after them. We are large enough to go ahead and define a space and win it.

Avishai Sharon, Co-founder & CEO of TrenDemon, discussed their software on ILTV:

How Do You Connect Content Marketing to Sales?

My personal background was heading a marketing agency for many years and one of my biggest struggles was how do I prove our value and our effort to our customers and how do you connect the impact of what we call content marketing to business goals and to sales? When we couldn’t find an easy way to show that correlation three and a half years ago we went ahead and founded TrenDemon to help companies do just that.

We connect their marketing efforts, which today rely mostly on content, you want your audience to consume valuable content, as opposed to just advertising. The big challenge is how do you attribute those efforts to sales? There’s actually a prior problem, how do you actually map the customer journey? How do you track those different touch points into one picture?

Reverse Engineering Successful Customer Journeys

The first thing we do is look at all the different touchpoints that a customer has had over his lifecycle. We ask the question, not just where do they come from, but how deep was their engagement? Did they actually watch the video? Did they actually read the article? Then you can start reverse engineering those successful journeys and say what’s common about all of these successful journeys.

What we found, and this is the interesting thing, we’re working with over 90 companies today worldwide and the vast majority of content the companies produce, over 90 percent, is ineffective at driving business goals. As you guys know it’s very expensive to create quality content and it takes a lot of effort.

If People Read the Right Content They Will Covert to a Sale

The second interesting thing is that if you do manage to find those 10 percent and you find a way to get it in front of the right people you’re actually able to improve dramatically your results. So there’s not just a correlation between what buyers did beforehand, there’s also a causation, a causal relationship, that if people read the right content at the right time they’re more likely to follow a path. We’re not probably as sophisticated as we believe that we are.

We’re a SaaS company, a cloud-based solution. We’re working a lot in the US and one of our biggest markets and growing markets is Japan. They’re investing a lot of content and a lot on technology. Essentially, because we look at the customer journey and not necessarily specific languages we can operate in any environment which allows us to grow pretty much anywhere. As long as they have content, which means that they’re producing something other than just advertising, they want people and audiences to actually engage with what they’re producing and they do have some business outcomes that they’re looking to measure.

About TrenDemon:

Founded in 2013, TrenDemon is the world’s leading content marketing attribution and optimization solution, helping marketers prove and improve their content’s impact.

TrenDemon insights can help you uncover your content marketing ROI, impact on business goals, and engagement to help guide the content strategy. Our optimization units will help you increase conversions and shorten time to convert on your owned assets.

TrenDemon proudly serves a wide range of customers, from Fortune 500s and brands to SaaS, B2B, and financial companies and is backed by leading VCs.

Shantanu Narayen, Chairman and CEO of Adobe, discusses how the pandemic has created another “inflection point” in the move toward digital transformation:

Digital Transformation Is A $120 Billion Opportunity

It was a good quarter all around. All of our businesses performed exceedingly well. On the Creative Cloud and the Document Cloud, not only did we have a great acquisition. in other words, new customers adopting the platform, but we really focused on engagement and demonstrating the value of our products to our customers. Even our retention levels came back to pre-COVID levels which we believe is a really good sign.

What’s happening in the world is the businesses that we’re in, namely creativity and enabling people to tell their story, what’s happening with documents and accelerating document productivity, and what’s happening associated with every single enterprise needing to engage with their customers digitally, when you add all of this up we think it’s over a $120 billion of an addressable market opportunity for Adobe.

Pandemic Was Inflection Point For Everything Being Digital

What the pandemic and the current health situation has done is that it has created yet another inflection point for everything being digital. What we will have to continue to monitor is what happens in the spending environment. But as it relates to the overall need for the kinds of solutions that Adobe provides as well as the importance of digital in the marketplace I think that’s going to be sustainable for decades. You’re not going to put the genie back in the bottle as it relates to engaging digitally and creating content digitally.

We believe that we’re in this third phase of what is happening in the enterprise. Traditionally, businesses first focused on automating the back office, and then they focused on automating the front office for knowledge workers. It’s absolutely clear that the biggest imperative that exists in the enterprise today is how do you engage with customers? This is a category that we call Customer Experience Management.

Customer Insight Is Key To Your Digital Transformation

If you’re an enterprise today and you’re thinking about digital transformation, what’s top of that stack in terms of where you have to invest is to make sure that you have insight into what your customers are doing. How are they engaging with you? What’s the profile? How do you deliver the personalized experience?

We really believe that what you’re seeing in the enterprise spend environment is that the companies that are focused on this next generation of delivering customer engagement, the customer experiences, and the insight associated with how to take the most advantage of that data, they’re going to be the secular winners moving forward.

Dan Springer, CEO of DocuSign, discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation and he says that businesses are not going back to a manual world:

COVID Pandemic Accelerated Digital Transformation

We’ve been really pleased with the growth we’ve had since going public a few years. We have also seen significant acceleration since the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s obviously a horrible pandemic and our number one priority has been the health and wellbeing of our employees so we can take good care of our customers. As you can see in our Q1 earnings we did see an acceleration of our bookings to 59 percent.

Traditionally, if you look at the billings-type metric they have been in the mid-30s’. A significant portion of that (increase) was due to increased use cases from customers driving that digital transformation faster with services like DocuSign.

Companies To Stay In This Digitally Transformed World

One of the things we’ve seen with the pandemic impact is that it has really accelerated the path that companies were already on to drive that digital transformation. We don’t see companies after the pandemic settles down going back and saying they want more paper and more manual processes.

Once they’ve got the benefits from that efficiency in their business, the better customer experience, and the better employee experience, they’re going to stay in a digitally transformed world. They are going to use DocuSign and other fantastic services to do that.

The Future Is Going To Have eSignature At The Center

We really think that the future is going to have eSignature at the center of what we call the overall Agreement Cloud. Companies want to be more agreeable. They want to be easier to do business with and be easier to do business for. They’re going to not just use DocuSign for signature but all of the other components of preparing agreements and managing those agreements digitally once they’ve been created. That’s why we’re excited about our very robust future.

We just past a billion dollars in revenue (for DocuSign eSignature). We are only four percent penetrated today and we’re six times larger than the next biggest player in the space. There’s not a lot of penetration yet in that core business. Notary is still predominantly done manually. We are making investments there. We believe we can bring the same ease of use that we brought to eSignature we can bring to notary.

AI To Power The DocuSign Agreement Cloud

Much bigger than that, even expanding upon the opportunity of eSignature is that broader Agreement Cloud opportunity. We think this is the next big cloud opportunity. You are going to see companies increasingly say I don’t just want to do the workflow and signature. I also want to drive the creations of those agreements. I want to think about artificial intelligence and search capability to manage my agreements. This would enable me to actually manage my business and make my company more agreeable.

Those are some of the investments we’re making. That’s why we just finished the acquisition of Seal Software last month so we can bring additional artificial intelligence and analytic capability to help people run their businesses better.

According to Bloomberg, IBM and BMC had an agreement that governed how they would operate, especially when it came to mutual clients. The agreement forbade IBM from trying to poach those clients, but BMC accused IBM of doing just that. In particular, BMC accused IBM of swapping out its software when servicing AT&T, their mutual customer. A judge agreed, fining IBM $1.6 billion.

IBM tried to claim that AT&T voluntarily dropped BMC and switched to its software on its own accord. If that were true, IBM claimed it would be allowed under the terms of the agreement. The judge didn’t buy IBM’s argument, saying its actions “smacked of intentional wrongdoing.”

US District Judge Gray Miller had harsh words for IBM, saying the company “believed — especially in light of BMC’s reluctance to engage in litigation — that it could ‘always settle for a small percentage of the claim’ or for ‘pennies on the dollar.’” The judge continued, saying “IBM’s conduct vis-à-vis BMC offends the sense of justice and propriety the public expects from American business.”

Oracle’s cloud ERP business has been gaining traction, building on the company’s wide portfolio of products and services. The company recently released its quarterly results Thursday, handily beating analysts’ expectations, thanks in no small part to the performance of its cloud business.

Speaking to investors following the repot, co-founder Larry Ellison said he believes Oracle’s cloud ERP business will be worth far more than current projections and growth rate would indicate, according to ZDNet.

“I think it’s going to be a lot bigger than that,” Ellison said. Ellison then went on say that the company’s plans revolved around partnerships with other companies, especially in the financial services and and logistics industries, partnerships that will help it accelerate its growth beyond the $20 billion mark.

Oracle has increasingly been making waves in the cloud industry, poaching major customers from competitors and, most recently, pointing out the reliability of its platform compared to market leading AWS.

If Ellison’s predictions are correct, Oracle could be poised to make serious headway against the top three cloud companies.

Not only has Salesforce transformed the way they work with Slack but so are the customers of Salesforce. The company sees Slack as a core platform for powering digital transformation.

“Customer 360 and Slack are powering this transformation for companies in every industry in every region of the world,” said Taylor in yesterday’s earnings call. “Slack outperformed our expectations in the first full quarter as a part of the Salesforce family. The number of customers on Slack who spent over $100,000 was up 44% year-over-year. The adoption of Slack Connect was up an astonishing 176% year-over-year. Slack is not just a product, Slack is a network, and it’s just incredible to see that growth.”

The company seemed pleasantly surprised about how transformative Slack is to the operations of large enterprises. As Slack brought on millions of new users during the pandemic they focused on innovation that has made Slack much more than a simple communications platform.

“Slack also continues to innovate at an unbelievable pace,” notes Taylor. “Slack Huddles, which is Slack’s new real-time audio capability, is already used weekly by over 1/3 of Slack users. And Slack Clips, the new asynchronous video capability, are being played nearly 1 million times a week. And this month at Slack Frontiers, which I hope all of you have watched; and if you haven’t, you can watch it online. Stewart and the team are now the next generation of Slack’s platform, and it’s going to truly transform the way companies think about workflows and automation.”

Customer 360 and Slack are powering this transformation for companies in every industry in every region of the world, according to Taylor.

Slack outperformed our expectations in the first full quarter as a part of the Salesforce family. The number of customers on Slack who spent over $100,000 was up 44% year-over-year. Adoption of Slack Connect was up an astonishing 176% year-over-year. Slack is not just a product, Slack is a network, and it’s just incredible to see that growth.

Slack also continues to innovate at an unbelievable pace. Slack Huddles, which is Slack’s new real-time audio capability, is already used weekly by over 1/3 of Slack users. And Slack Clips, the new asynchronous video capability, are being played nearly 1 million times a week. And this month at Slack Frontiers, which I hope all of you have watched; and if you haven’t, you can watch it online. Stewart and the team are now the next generation of Slack’s platform, and it’s going to truly transform the way companies think about workflows and automation.

“That is definitely what I saw firsthand,” said Co-CEO Mark Benioff. “I was like, how could it be that an airline is basically front-ending their entire system with Slack? That’s a shock to me.”

“Slack is the system of engagement for every workflow, every application, every person on your enterprise,” added Taylor. “It’s really an amazing platform vision. And absolutely watch Slack Frontiers. If you haven’t seen it, I think it will blow your mind.”

“Every CEO and every Board I talk to is focused on how they can succeed in this era of flexible work,” says Taylor. “According to Slack’s research, 93% of workers are looking for flexibility when they work, and 76% are looking for flexibility where they work. Companies need to connect their employees, their partners, their customers from anywhere because we all know we’re not going to be in the office 5 days a week.”

“Our offices aren’t going away,” he said. “It’s just that your digital headquarters is going to be more important because it’s truly the infrastructure that connects all of it, and especially in this new normal. And Slack and Customer 360 together are really powering this transformation.”

Low-code development allows individuals and teams to develop and deploy applications with little or no programming knowledge. Low-code platforms have become a critical part of many organizations’ workflows, allowing multiple departments to contribute to the development of applications and services.

Mendix’s study shows just how important low-code has become, with “77% of enterprises in six countries have already adopted low-code, and 75% of IT leaders said it’s a trend they can’t afford to miss.”

A major factor in the sudden uptick of low-code adoption has been the COVID-19 pandemic. As companies and organizations have transitioned to digital-first workflows, many have used low-code development to enable non-IT personnel to relieve some of the pressure on the IT staff. In fact, 59% of low-code projects involve collaboration between business and IT.

Even among IT professionals, 64% say low-code is their go-to option.

“This study confirms what we’ve long believed,” said Derek Roos, co-founder and CEO of Mendix. “Low-code is the future of software development and Mendix is leading the way. It’s agile by design. It dramatically expands the pool of development talent. It’s built for collaboration and it’s built for rapid development. Low-code, and specifically low-code with Mendix, is fast becoming a core technology enterprises need to succeed in a digital-first world.”

Zoom has been rapidly improving its product and services, building on the success of its pandemic-fueled gains. Prior to the pandemic, the company’s platform was primarily used in the enterprise, but quickly became a household name, used by workers, schoolchildren, medical professionals, individuals and families around the world.

The company is continuing to build out its platform, as companies continue to grapple with a changed workforce in a post-pandemic reality. Zoom believes Five9 will be a valuable part of that improvement, giving Zoom users even more ways to interact with their customers.

“We are continuously looking for ways to enhance our platform, and the addition of Five9 is a natural fit that will deliver even more happiness and value to our customers,” said Eric S. Yuan, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Zoom. “Zoom is built on a core belief that robust and reliable communications technology enables interactions that build greater empathy and trust, and we believe that holds particularly true for customer engagement. Enterprises communicate with their customers primarily through the contact center, and we believe this acquisition creates a leading customer engagement platform that will help redefine how companies of all sizes connect with their customers. We are thrilled to join forces with the Five9 team, and I look forward to welcoming them to the Zoom family.”

The deal is an all-stock transaction, and is expected to close in the first half of 2022, subject to standard regulatory approvals.

Manny Medina, CEO of Outreach, discusses the “rise of the revenue innovator” in an interview today on CNBC:

The Rise of the Revenue Innovator

We’re seeing the rise of what we call the “revenue innovator.” The revenue innovator is a different job description that has changed since the pandemic. It’s a data-driven digital-first predictable long-building trusting relationship kind of seller. What we are seeing is this influx and this growth in the type of seller that knows how to drive a digital conversation but is complemented with a hybrid approach of visiting your customer. It’s a very predictable, very data-driven kind of job description.

The growth happening across our customer base is the growth of that kind of seller. This is a seller and a customer-facing rep who is going to be very data-driven and very innovator-led. If we are going to think of the Salesforce numbers that just came out these are incredible signs of growth for the cloud platform. That’s an incredible sign of growth for us as well because what we are seeing is the system of action is taking place on top of the system of record that Salesforce is providing.

Second Wave of Digital Transformation

All of the companies that used to be in the mainstream economy are accelerating into the second wave of digital transformation. The first wave of digital transformation is to move all of the data into the cloud and that is happening but it’s not what companies are talking about. Companies are talking about how do you make me smarter? How do you make my teams more efficient? How do you make my teams digital-first?

How do I live and thrive in this new hybrid environment post-Covid in which the buyer is not ready to see sellers until post transaction until you are expanding not selling? All of these “before-laggers” are becoming early innovators and early adopters with new technology such as Outreach which is AI-driven and digital-first.

The new job description is the revenue innovators, the digital-first, and the digital native. They may not have them yet but they are coming online, they are getting these jobs. Those revenue innovators are the new revenue leaders. They are also hiring people of the same ilk that are looking to drive this innovation within their companies. That’s what you are seeing in this transformation. Transformations are always people first.

It’s this new wave of people that are coming into traditional companies that are driving this second digital transformation. They are forward thinkers and they are data-driven.

Outreach Doubling Headcount Again

Outreach is doubling its headcount again. We almost doubled from the beginning of the pandemic all the way to now and we expect to hit another double in terms of hiring. We expect another 600 to 700 people to come on board. Most importantly, what we are seeing is that our customers are growing as well. We sell seats ahead of sales demand and we are seeing sales seats being bought very quickly.

We are expecting our customers to be driving double-digit growth across the board. This is a great sign for the economy.

Jamf’s latest quarterly results are good news for the company and for Apple, indicating increased demand for Apple products in the enterprise.

Jamf is a device management firm that specializes in supporting Apple customers. The company was founded in 2002, with the goal to “help organizations succeed with Apple.”

In its latest Q4 results, the company’s revenue hit $76.4 million, growing 34% year-over-year. Yearly revenue was $269.5 million, up 32%.

“We finished 2020 with high growth across every product, geography, and the top 10 industries we serve, demonstrating the strength and diversity of our platform,” said Dean Hager, CEO of Jamf. “As we look to 2021, we’ll continue to expand the breadth and depth of our Apple Enterprise Management platform to enhance our value to customers and accelerate further penetration of Apple in the enterprise.”

Jamf’s results are the latest indication of the inroads Apple is making. Years ago, Apple was known as the computer of choice for creatives, while Windows had a firm stranglehold on the enterprise market. With the iPhone, iPad and modern Macs, Apple has increasingly been prying its way into the market.

Bill McDermott, CEO, and President of ServiceNow says that only one in four digital transformation projects actually deliver positive ROI due to lack of integration:

Most Digital Transformation Projects Don’t Deliver

We have a situation on our hands where digital transformation, cloud computing, and business model innovation, are all converging at once. ServiceNow is the platform, of all the enterprise platforms, that really makes business work. One of the big lessons that business has right now is trillions have been poured into digital transformation yet only one in four projects actually deliver positive ROI. The reason for that is lack of integration.

Our system integrates with all the existing systems as well as all the collaborative tools in the enterprise. From day one, the customer gets it up and running swiftly because it’s in the cloud. They begin to derive value from it because you automate the way the work is done and ultimately, you’re now in a position to serve your customers the way they want to be served. It’s a speed game and ServiceNow is at the top of its game.

Companies Have To Create New Business Models

We’re an example. If you’re going to grow your company you’re going to take advantage of digital transformation. This is the only way out and it’s the only way forward. In the 20th Century companies put in big heavy on-premise systems. The issue is now they can’t, in a frictionless economy, immediately pivot those business models because they haven’t digitally transformed their business.

About 25 percent of the opportunity of businesses out there today over the next three years will come from white space places they are not in today. They have to create new business models. They have to think about new partnerships and new routes to market. Without the baseline of a platform like ServiceNow they’re not going to get there. 

That’s The Whole Point Of Digital Transformation

I am very optimistic that the economies of the world not only are going to recover but actually going to do very well this year because people are going to be investing in digital transformation. We have seen that does not cost jobs. On the contrary, it frees people up to do things like go after new markets, derive new ideas, and so forth, because the AI revolution is also on.

We have built-in machine learning and AI into our platform. So 80 percent of the soul-crushing work people don’t want to do is done by the Now platform. The 20 percent that involves a human immediately gets initiated through a workflow order from the Now platform. 

Business is really simple, and people are more productive and they’re doing things that can lead to growth and opportunity. That’s the whole point of digital transformation. Right now, companies are hunkered down with systems that are absolutely wearing them out. It’s time to make the bold move, pivot to ServiceNow, and let’s get in there and fix the job.

Fastest-Growing Pure-Play SASS Silicon Valley Company

If you look at our actual earnings results, they were stunning and obviously achieved beyond expectations performance across the board. We also followed that through in the guide. We’ll continue to be the fastest-growing pure-play SASS Silicon Valley company. We will continue to have the best margin profile of all of them. Obviously, we’re going to continue to gain market share in industries around the world, in geographies around the world, particularly in Europe and Asia Pacific, and Japan. 

We will also gain market share on personas. Lots of people are getting the memo now that ServiceNow obviously dominated the IT automation market but the same backbone platform has enabled us to change the employee experience, the customer experience. In these tough times with COVID we can write low-code onto our platform in minutes and roll out new applications to hundreds of thousands of people so companies can move super fast.

We keep the guide consistent with the revenue that we generated in 2020. If there’s an upside to that… fantastic. That’s what good companies should do. They should go beyond expectations when they can but we stand by the guide and we’re looking forward to having a great year. 

ServiceNow Was Born In The Cloud

The whole idea of ServiceNow is so different than SAP which was a company that needed to pivot to the cloud in 2010. We did that and that was very successful. ServiceNow was born in the cloud. It’s a very young company with tremendous growth opportunity on the organic front. Having said that, (we would be in interested in an acquisition) if you have a situation where there is a partner out there that has a substantial TAM, that can be highly complementary and synergistic with ServiceNow on the revenue side. 

It also would have to do great things for the customer, because we have a precious platform and we jealously protect the integration power of that platform. A lot of things would have to be right but I can tell you as responsible business people we always look at it. We don’t need it to make our goals but you always have to look at it. We do want to be the defining enterprise software company the 21st century. That’s our plan.

Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, says that both Slack and Salesforce have no intention of making Slack free for enterprises:

Slack Connect Key To Value Unlock Of Salesforce Deal

The simple version of the back story is this is a really unique combination. We believe we can accomplish in the next five years what might have taken us 20 years to do otherwise. That’s the heart of it and it’s a pretty big milestone for us. We’re excited. It wasn’t expected by the outside world but we have a lot of momentum now. We came out of this quarter and we announced our results and Salesforce announced their results. Then we announced the acquisition all at the same time.

A little bit of this got lost but we added 12,000 new paying customers in that quarter. It’s up 140 percent from a year ago. It matches the crazy surge that we saw during the early days of the pandemic. That momentum is coming from product improvements and it’s coming from Slack Connect which allows two organizations to communicate across organizational boundaries. That’s actually going to be key to the value unlock over the next few years. Salesforce is all about CRM. It’s all about customers and Slack Connect is 95 percent customer-vendor relationships.

Engagement Layer: Everyone Will See It Later

This (acquisition) is 100% offense. There are some really unique aspects of this particular combination. We weren’t looking to sell the company. I have a great relationship with Brett Taylor, President, and COO of Salesforce. We’ve known each other for a couple of decades at this point. There’s a way in which we see the world that i think very few people see it today but everyone will see it later. One way to say that is to look at the engagement layer. That’s kind of a weird term but it is the place where the conversations are happening, the places where the decisions are being made, as the perfect place to bring together workflows across organizational boundaries.

Salesforce has a really broad suite. But of course, we have 2,400 apps in the app directory for Slack. We have 700 000 custom integrations that were developed by customers. These are like unique little integrations, some of them very small, just sending notifications into Slack, and some of them are sophisticated workflows that run entire businesses. That’s something that we will see an increasing degree of sophistication in the messaging environment and an increasing degree of work getting done directly where the decisions are made.

No Intention To Make Slack Free

When Brett and I were talking we talked about the opportunity for something that’s one plus one equals seven. If you think back to the 90s and Cisco acquiring small hardware startups and then plugging it into their network of 20,000 salespeople and just selling a lot more of that thing. That’s not it. We will do that as well. We obviously have incredible distribution and incredible reach and incredible relationships across all industries and across all geographies. So we’ll sell more Slack.

Salesforce recently announced their plan to get to $50 billion in revenue and we’ll play an important part in that. We’ll also be an accelerant for the adoption of Salesforce’s core products. There is definitely no intention to make Slack free. What we’ve seen in the last little while is the biggest telco in North America is wall-to-wall on Slack. The operator of the largest integrated health care system in the United States is on Slack. The single largest government contractor in the United States is wall-to-wall on Slack.

We win in media and technology, kind of famously, but we also win in retail and apparel and industries that people don’t imagine seeing us. We have 142,000 customers right now. There’s going to be a lot of overlap with Salesforce but there’s also going to be 100,000 plus of those customers which are SMBs and kind of outside of Salesforce’s purview so far. We think there’s the opportunity to bring them into the fold and to connect them all together with Slack Connect.

Under the terms of the agreement, Slack shareholders will receive $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 shares of Salesforce common stock for each Slack share, representing an enterprise value of approximately $27.7 billion based on the closing price of Salesforce’s common stock on November 30, 2020. 

The transaction is anticipated to close in the second quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2022, subject to approval by the Slack stockholders, the receipt of required regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told the Wall Street Journal that he is joining Salesforce and will continue to run Slack as a unit of Salesforce after the deal’s close.

“Stewart and his team have built one of the most beloved platforms in enterprise software history, with an incredible ecosystem around it,” said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce. “This is a match made in heaven. Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world. I’m thrilled to welcome Slack to the Salesforce Ohana once the transaction closes.”

“Salesforce started the cloud revolution, and two decades later, we are still tapping into all the possibilities it offers to transform the way we work. The opportunity we see together is massive,” said Stewart Butterfield, Slack CEO and Co-Founder. “As software plays a more and more critical role in the performance of every organization, we share a vision of reduced complexity, increased power and flexibility, and ultimately a greater degree of alignment and organizational agility. Personally, I believe this is the most strategic combination in the history of software, and I can’t wait to get going.”

Slack to Become the New Interface for Salesforce Customer 360

Salesforce:

Salesforce is the #1 CRM that enables companies to sell, service, market and conduct commerce, from anywhere. Slack brings people, data and tools together so teams can collaborate and get work done, from anywhere. Slack Connect extends the benefits of Slack to enable communication and collaboration between a company’s employees and all its external partners, from vendors to customers.

Slack will be deeply integrated into every Salesforce Cloud. As the new interface for Salesforce Customer 360, Slack will transform how people communicate, collaborate and take action on customer information across Salesforce as well as information from all of their other business apps and systems to be more productive, make smarter, faster decisions and create connected customer experiences.