Should Salesforce.com Be On Your Marketing Automation Shortlist?

I was recently contacted by Lauren Carlson, a CRM analyst at Marketing Automation Software Guide who asked me to give my two cents on this issue. Lauren recently posted her analysis of Salesforce as a marketing automation tool over at the Marketing Automation Software Guide.

In general, Lauren give’s Salesforce very poor marks for it’s marketing automation capabilities. However, I feel Salesforce should always be on your marketing automation short list – but never on its own. Here’s why …

Salesforce is not a marketing automation system (yet)

Looking at Salesforce in isolation misses one fundamental issue. Salesforce currently has no public intention of becoming a marketing automation system. Two of it’s most well known limitations should make this obvious.

1. Salesforce will not allow an account to send more than 1000 emails within a 24 hour period. Salesforce will explicitly tell you to use one of their many appexchange applications to support these requirements. This is one of the few limitations where you can’t buy an increase.
2. Secondly, any form of marketing automation has data heavy requirements. Salesforce’s data storage limits causes even small contact lists to exceed these limites, with even moderate marketing activity.

In my view, Salesforce is focusing on three core areas, it’s core SFA functionality in the Sales Cloud (chatter, content, DimDim, Jigsaw, etc.), platform functionality with the Custom Cloud (governer limits, VMforce, Heroku, etc.) , and customer service with the Service Cloud (Cases, Ideas, Portal, Twitter, etc.). Note, I’m putting native applications like Remedyforce in the custom cloud bucket.

How Salesforce supports supports marketing automation

I feel Laurin’s review errors by assessing Salesforce in isolation. Through it’s API, Marketing automation seamlessly fits into Salesforce’s application architecture. (keep in mind that some MA vendors have better integrations)

Sales Cloud – integration with the Sales Cloud allows the marketing user to:

• Get a complete end-to-end view: from new lead, to closed deal
• Solicit sophisticated feedback from Sales by implementing a sales accepted lead process
• Manage named accounts, and ensure leads are routed to quick and effectively
• Track the purchase activity of all contacts

Custom Cloud – salesforce is generally the database of record for contact information. Salesforce’s powerful developer tools allow the marketer to:

• Perform advanced data transactions to clean and update records. Including sophisticated custom de-duplication triggers
• Expose Salesforce data to any external system
• Support a custom post-sales support process
• Create custom coded email templates based on the Salesforce object model
• Website integration, including the ability to integrate with payment gateways

Service Cloud – Salesforce allows you to keep tabs on current customers, allowing marketers to

• Intelligently communicate with their current customer base
• Quickly learn if a customer has logged support tickets
• Determine who happy customers are

Conclusion

In my view, unless you’re a very small business, Salesforce fits into the marketing automation picture by being a central cog in a best of breed application architecture. Typically Salesforce integrated with a single marketing automation vendor. See my post on the 4 ways to extend salesforce to the marketing department.