2 Ways Salesforce Can Beat Microsoft
In late September, Salesforce revealed that it would try to stop the acquisition of LinkedIn by competitor Microsoft. Salesforce claims that the acquisition would allow Microsoft to block the competitions access to LinkedIn’s valuable business data.
This comes as the competition among the leading cloud customer relationship software companies (CRMs) continues to heat up. Microsoft recently asserted that it is ready to bring a price war to the CRM market, looking directly at Salesforce.
As the leading CRMs try to woo business customers and edge out the competition, how will they expand their product offerings?
Better integration between marketing and sales tools
In the last decade, the line between sales and marketing has become blurry.
In the B2B environment, buyers don’t need the hand-holding of a salesperson like they did years past. Rather, they rely on their own due-diligence by digging through marketing content like case studies, whitepapers, and other thought-leadership pieces (Dive deeper into content marketing strategy in Content Engine).
Given the blurriness between sales and marketing, CRMs have been pushed to integrate marketing solutions into their existing suite of sales tools. The integration between marketing and sales tools allows prospect data to be shared seamlessly creating a more comprehensive system to engage with prospects and to close deals faster.
Despite the need for a seamless integration between marketing and sales tools, the integrations are still cumbersome.
The integrations, especially for companies with high volume of prospects and large sales teams, can be difficult to set up. It is challenging to make sure all the wires are connected properly to pass clean data between the marketing and sales systems.
Further, the marketing systems still seem an afterthought to the big CRM providers. The marketing tools themselves are cumbersome, and not nearly as slick or user-friendly as other marketing stand-alone solutions like Intercom.
As marketers continue to become more integral and influential in the sales process, CRMs will have to provide a more seamless connection between marketing and sales solutions, while making the marketing solutions more robust.
The CRM provider that solves this challenge for the new marketing-sales hybrid will gain an impressive advantage over the competition.
Expand into augmented commerce
In 2015, retail e-commerce sales amounted to $342.96 billion, growing nearly 15% from 2014, and expected to reach $600 billion by 2019. This growing market presents a tremendous opportunity for CRMs to expand their offerings to facilitate online and offline retail sales.
CRMs like Salesforce have already begun to venture into the space. Just months after acquiring web-based eCommerce platform Demandware in June 2016, Salesforce unveiled its Commerce Cloud. The Commerce Cloud includes Einstein, an artificial intelligence-powered tool for product recommendations. With the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, retailers can deliver a more personalized shopping experience across any channel whether it be in-store, mobile, or online.
CRMs can take personalization and product visualization even further by integrating augmented reality into the online shopping experience. With augmented reality solutions like Augment, customers can visualize any product in their homes in real time from their connected devices. Augmented reality removes the guesswork while shopping online and facilitates the path to purchase. Augmented commerce is the next evolution in eCommerce. By integrating data from augmented reality simulations into a retailer’s CRM, retailers can unlock valuable insights and benefit tremendously by sharing data across cloud systems like Sales, Marketing, and Service.
As the competition continues to intensify among Microsoft, Salesforce, and all of the big CRM players, users will not only benefit from seeing prices drop. CRMs will be pushed to elevate their offerings through more seamless integrations, and more innovative offerings like augmented commerce.
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