Phew! What a challenging year we have been through together. 2020 totally rattled us and changed the way we could go about our business and life. However, the pandemonium that followed, forced many business executives to change their strategy and innovate.
Salesforce is one such case study of a fast-moving industry that brought a lot of innovative solutions, made a few calculated acquisitions, like Slack, that blew our mind, and posted its highest growth levels with record-breaking earnings. Who could’ve even predicted any of it?
Learning from 2020, businesses are expected to make cautious decisions in 2021 and gradually, return to strategies that would require high social engagement but still be able to focus on customer relationship management. Who better than Salesforce to deliver the best experience and value on this front?
Digital transformation has accelerated at an unprecedented rate in 2020 and will continue to do so in 2021. Long-term planning has suddenly become a lower priority for businesses as the work ecosystem can change at such short notice.
Another powerful trend is the continued possibility and adaptability of business to remote-working environments. Salesforce Anywhere, Meetings, Quip, Slack acquisition, and other developments in Work.com, indicate that Salesforce is ready for the challenge. The perception that an employee has to be physically available to indicate productivity has disappeared and become validated. With everyone working remotely and being an active part of the digital-first community, the field has been leveled across organizations and it has brought a sense of inclusiveness to the bond between customers and their business-touchpoint.
Let’s make a few more predictions for Salesforce 2021, based on these trends, acquisitions, and recent news:
1. The rise of Hyperforce:
Post-Slack-acquisition, Salesforce has announced re-architecting themselves by building a foundation platform in the form of Hyperforce on which lies the single source of truth comprising the Customer 360 platform and App ecosystem to connect with customers and deliver excellence from anywhere across the public cloud.
This vision of the future is completely going to disrupt the way we work at the moment and never return to the way we worked pre-pandemic, creating a historical change in the form of Cloud 3.0.
2. Rebranding Community Cloud as Experience Cloud:
In an attempt to showcase that Community Cloud does not restrict itself to connecting employees, partners, or customers through user portals, Salesforce has upped the ante by including marketing experiences, digital experiences, content management systems (CMS), etc. The inclusion of Salesforce Knowledge and Mobile Publisher will help enrich the CMS and engagement experience.
Integrated with the best CRM, the aforementioned features would highly mitigate the burden on the support team that needs to be available 24×7 to ensure success across customer journeys and makes it very easy to administrate. This cloud would enable easier reach and improve your profits through lead generation, online events, accepting payments via the community, and help you build a space to meet all your needs to drive growth on a massive scale.
3. The importance of Slack acquisition:
What is it about Slack that makes it worth investing $27.7 bn for Salesforce? Marc Benioff describes it as something that would “transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world.”
The future of work will adapt to employee-centric ways enabling them to balance their time at home and office as best fitting their needs. This will highly increase employee communication happening in an official capacity through digital channels. Slack would become the primary system of engagement for Salesforce employees, customers and partners, collaborating and communicating across the globe. Then there is Slack Connect, which is one of the high-value offerings responsible for such a high price of the acquisition. It enables cross-company connections used by millions of people on a daily basis, driving engagement. Thwarting the competition from Microsoft would just be a cherry on top.
4. Investment in Salesforce Talent:
The rise and adoption of the Salesforce Talent Alliance by over 100 partner companies, Algoworks being one of them, within a few months of the launch clearly reflects the importance of a single pool creation to cater to talent needs at various organizations. With Salesforce growing as an industry leader, it wanted its workforce to grow as well, in order to sustain this growth. With organizations demanding only experienced professionals, there was a huge pool of new talent left outside. Salesforce invested in creating this program which would benefit the entire Salesforce ecosystem.
5. Transforming the buying experience with Revenue Cloud:
Revenue Cloud will turn out to be a true hero in improving the customer experiences while bringing higher control and visibility into the revenue potential for B2B organizations. It would automate revenue, quote configurations, margins, and pricing, enabling higher efficiency for sales and revenue leaders. This would also make good use of Tableau acquisition to drive real-time insights and improve decision-making using intuitive dashboards. With new digital business models being created at the back of the pandemic, pricing the subscriptions and optimizing the revenue across digital channels would be potentially achievable.
Pratyush Kumar
