The Download on Force.com & AppExchange

Salesforce Background

According to Salesforce.com’s website, “Salesforce is the world’s #1 customer relationship management (CRM) platform. We help your marketing, sales, commerce, service and IT teams work as one from anywhere — so you can keep your customers happy everywhere.” And quite frankly, that’s a pretty accurate description. One thing that Salesforce does very well out of the box is give users a secure platform with a solid data infrastructure and a generic, yet very usable, user interface. Seemingly knowing this, Salesforce created a very easy visual interface so that a business could customize the look, feel and functional areas of the application to be custom for their business (we’d advise a business to use a Salesforce partner to do this so they get best in class setup combined with more efficiency + speed). In terms of total cost of ownership of Salesforce (which we can cover more deeply in another article), customers should expect to spend 3x what their licensing cost is. (Implementation, Training, Innovation, Customization, Consulting, Administration, etc).

The Clouds of Salesforce

Each of the Salesforce products is branded as a “Cloud”. Simply put, we are talking about SaaS software here, so it makes sense to call them clouds (“cloud computing”). Most individuals in the Salesforce eco-system (employees, customers, partners, etc) refer to the main Salesforce Clouds as the Core clouds. The core Salesforce Clouds include: Sales, Services, Community and App (otherwise known as Platform).

Marketing Cloud is the most dominant cloud that is not in that core cloud group for Salesforce. In 2013, Salesforce acquired ExactTarget which would slowly be rebranded, re-engineered and become Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The key difference between core clouds and Marketing Cloud however is that they are built on totally different infrastructure / platforms. Aka, they don’t naturally connect to each other out of the box. Marketing Cloud has done a great job creating the Marketing Cloud Connector, but there is a need for implementation, customization and some performance degradation to achieve this connectivity with Marketing Cloud Connect. I bring up this difference for this article, because most apps on AppExchange currently work with Salesforce core, and don’t embrace Marketing Cloud at this time.

AppExchange Basics

Salesforce created AppExchange just like Google has the Google Play Store and Apple has the AppStore. Interesting note here, it was actually Marc Benioff, Co-Founder of Salesforce, who gifted his mentor Steve Jobs the domain AppStore.com. Quite the gift!

The biggest things to know about AppExchange out of the gate is that it is the way to build secure applications on top of Salesforce’s core platform that allow you to customize the platform, create new functionality and even create your own application utilizing the Salesforce platform without customers even knowing that they are using Salesforce. Apps are also a great way to integrate your data or functionality into Salesforce.

As we already mentioned, Marketing Cloud is not connected to Salesforce Core. Back in the ExactTarget days, they created HubExchange… similar to AppExchange. After the ExactTarget acquisition, Salesforce slowly started incorporating HubExchange into AppExchange so that today there are Marketing Cloud apps listed on the AppExchange website. At the time of this article, those Marketing apps aren’t fully “on AppExchange” and don’t have all the same functional tools behind the scenes (think LMA, COA, CMA, FMA). We do believe that Salesforce is in the process of more fully adopting Marketing Cloud apps with these tools, just like Core Cloud apps.

Why Marketing Cloud is special

Marketing Cloud truly is the engagement engine for Salesforce. It allows both B2B and B2C communication, engagement and journeys in a massively scalable fashion. I often get the question, “But can’t I just get Pardot to engage customers with?” My advice on this topic, Pardot is a great B2B funnel but as soon as you want to go B2C as well as B2B and go to greater scale, Marketing Cloud is the platform that allows the extensibility and scalability. Don’t get me wrong, Pardot is great.. but it needs to be used for the proper reasons to have the greatest impact.

Since Marketing Cloud is the customer engagement engine of Salesforce, it only makes sense to build engagement integrations off of Marketing Cloud. As soon as a company wants to engage in omni-channel journeys, segmented marketing, email/SMS/push/ads at scale and keep their Salesforce organized; Marketing Cloud is the clean integration direction for engagement. There are some integrations (and we’ve built them for customers) that make sense to have the customer engagement occur from Service Cloud (think customer service engagements on a 1 off basis). However, ensuring that customer data is then pushed properly into the marketing cloud to update customer preferences, segmentation and scoring allows a more robust marketing approach to the customer. This is an area that we’ve seen could be a huge opportunity for growth for a lot of the current AppExchange apps on the market. What if the core force.com AppExchange Apps went to the next level and augmented the data and engagement they provided to the Marketing Cloud as well as core Salesforce? If we want to achieve true Customer 360, which is a core tenant of Salesforce, then we need to think about all the different ways that we engage with customers. On the flip-side, we also urge any of our Marketing Cloud app customers to ensure they think about the integration back to core Salesforce as well.

In looking at AppExchange, there are both apps that embrace Marketing Cloud and allow you to drop their custom activity onto the Journey Builder canvas and there are those that wish for you to use their own workflow orchestration tool to communicate with customers. Our belief is that if Journey Builder is to be your omni-channel orchestration tool, then why not use it across the board as your omni-channel orchestration tool? That way you have the ability to A/B test, continually improve communication and ensure the customer experience is of the highest effectiveness.  

Next Steps?

Martek Ventures has a vast history of helping Salesforce customers achieve success through integrations and on AppExchange.  Starting back with ExactTarget, we helped create the HubExchange product, built the first products on HubExchange and helped drive some of the most custom and enterprise level integrations at ExactTarget.  Once Salesforce acquired ExactTarget, we built out our Force.com skillset to augment our excellent history of Marketing Cloud development and integration.  So as you can see, even though Martek is a little over a year old, we have decades of experience to the most intricate depths and we drive customer success to ensure fiscally responsible customer satisfaction. If you’d like to continue this conversation, feel free to reach out directly to me at aj@martekventures.com