“We’re making email marketing even smarter with a set of new AI capabilities getting released into Salesforce Marketing Cloud,” says Salesforce VP Armita Peymandoust. “One of them is Einstein Engagement Frequency. The other one is Einstein Send Time Optimization. We also have Einstein Content Tagging out and available today to our customers. Email is definitely not dead. Even the Millennials say that.”
AI-Powered Email Capabilities Released Into Salesforce Marketing Cloud
As we know email is still a really important channel. Over 64 percent of customers are still saying that they prefer email channels to all the others. What we’re doing is we’re making email marketing even smarter with a set of new AI capabilities getting released into Salesforce Marketing Cloud. One of them is Einstein Engagement Frequency. The other one is Einstein Send Time Optimization. We also have Einstein Content Tagging out and available today to our customers. Email is definitely not dead. Even the Millennials say that.
Einstein Engagement Frequency
With Einstein Engagement Frequency we’re trying to tell the marketer what’s the sweet range that they should keep on engaging with their customers. As marketers, we want to keep on engaging with our customers but we just don’t want to get to a point that we’re potentially annoying them. So we are telling them that this is the range that you should stay in.
Einstein Send Time Optimization
Now that the marketer knows what the frequency of engagement should be, with Einstein Send Time Optimization we’re also telling them what is the right time to send those messages. It’s really easy with a drag and drop of an activity into Journey Builder we make every message go out at the right time for the customers.
Einstein Content Tagging
Then with Einstein Content Tagging, we’re basically bringing image recognition the same set of AI capabilities that you’re familiar with for your customer based or consumer based products. This is where you upload photos and then they automatically get tagged. We are bringing that same technology to the hand of the marketer. Every image that’s getting uploaded into Content Builder gets automatically tagged so they can find it later and use it when they’re building their messages.
Transactional Messaging
We’re also releasing Transactional API’s for Emails and SMS. There are different types of emails out there. There’s the commercial one and there’s the transactional one. It allows the marketer to bring both of those two in an inter-marketing cloud and take advantage of Marketing Cloud to send those emails to have the same voice, the same brand voice, and also be able to see how those are performing all in one place.
Indiana Pacers Improved Customer Engagements By 20 Percent
These features are all relatively new. So we have pilot customers that have been taking advantage of them. We have one retailer that talked about Einstein Engagement Frequency. They had a hunch that they were over messaging customers but they couldn’t really put their finger on it. With Einstein Engagement Frequency we could show them visually exactly where they’re over engaging with their customers and let them take action on it. The platform automatically created lists so that they would not send messages to the ones that are getting too many email messages.
We’ve had a set of AI features in Marketing Cloud, specifically Einstein Engagement Scores, was one that the NBA’s Indiana Pacers is taking advantage of, to increase the engagement rate that they’re having with their fans. They got a 20 percent increase in engagements with their fans using that.
Customer Engagement Getting Even More Granular
We have a jam-packed roadmap for the next of the rest of the year as well. One of the things that I’m really excited about is Content Selection that’s coming out. Content Selection lets each of those messages that we’re creating be dynamically optimized for every customer that’s receiving them. Think of your email as a template that has different aspects or different selections in it that gets automatically replaced with what your customer cares about most and also what they have engaged with most and historically. It’s very engaging for every one of your customers.
The other one that I’m interested in (that is coming later) is bringing natural language processing to understanding your subject lines. What types of subject lines are resonating? Why is it that they’re resonating with your customers? It will give you an insight on them first and then also give you recommendations on how to improve your subject lines.
https://youtu.be/oaH_OrquEcE
New AI-Powered Email Capabilities Released Into Salesforce Marketing Cloud
The four pillars of measuring marketing ROI are key to improving sales says Jonathan Rowe, Chief Marketing Officer at nCino. “It’s really understanding your costs specific to the activities you are doing in marketing, tying those activities to your sales opportunities, and then measuring results.”
Rowe says that taking in data on sales prospects and making it available to salespeople can drive results: “When you are bringing all of the data into one real-time place, then you can start empowering salespeople to use the data. You can track your customer journeys in real-time.”
There are four variables that we use to measure ROI that have proven very successful for us. It starts with your costs. Whether it’s headcount costs where you are investing in people, whether it’s the cost of investing in PR, whether you are doing webinars or podcasts, whether you are advertising, etc., it’s really making sure that you have a good understanding of here’s where I’m actually spending my money and how much. So it starts with your costs.
Identifying Marketing Activities
The next step from there is here are all the different activities that we are spending money on. It’s advertising, attending conferences, or doing podcasts. Here are the activities. You have your costs and you have your activities.
Connecting Activities to Sales Opportunities
Then the next big step is connecting those activities to actual sales opportunities. As a B2B marketing organization at nCino, we are selling and marketing to banks. Whenever we initiate a conversation with a financial institution it often takes us 9-12 months from that initial interaction to hopefully when they become a nCino customer.
Over that 12 months, there are hopefully going to be a lot of different marketing activities where that bank and different individuals at the bank interact with nCino. We want to be able to capture that information. So we take the activities that we are doing and we actually connect them to a specific sales opportunity at the financial institution and the individual at the financial institution.
ROI: Measuring Results
The fourth pillar is the results, where we actually turn that prospect into a nCino customer. Then we can say that marketing played this role. At the end of the day, we are in a business where it’s more than marketing. We have sales groups and others involved.
When we sign a financial institution to become a nCino customer I’m always very proud to say here are all the different marketing activities (that led to the sale). Whether it’s white papers and thought leadership or press releases or attending a conference in a booth, how all those activities played an influential role.
It’s really understanding your costs specific to the activities you are doing in marketing, tying those activities to your sales opportunities, and then measuring results.
You Have to Be Committed to Data Analytics
One, you have to really be committed to data analytics. You want to have that marketing driven organization knowing it’s going to take time and costs to get there. Then two, you want to make smart decisions around the technology you use because connecting all of the dots around your data is probably the most important thing. I want to be able to go onto two or three systems which are what we have at nCino and be able to look and see all that data together.
I can see, for example, that Mary who works at a financial institution that we are talking to was on our website yesterday, that she looked at all of these different pages, that she spent seven or eight minutes on each page, and she actually downloaded one of our whitepapers. Then I find out that we are going to see Mary at a banking conference that we are going to in a few weeks.
With all of that automation, I know that the salesperson will log in and see all of that information on the financial institution and Mary.
Track You Customer Journeys in Real-Time
That sales rep will have literally on their phone before they have that face to face conversation at the conference all of Mary’s interactions. Some things you probably don’t want to tell Mary, which is hey, by the way, we’ve been tracking all of your website activity on the nCino website. But what you can have is a conversation around the fact that she downloaded our artificial intelligence whitepaper around banking and you can talk about that.
When you have fewer systems and you’ve made the commitment and you’ve gotten to the place where you are bringing all of the data into one real-time place, then you can start empowering people to use the data. You can track your customer journeys in real-time.
Yesware Founder Matthew Bellows says that it’s important that the relationship between the salesperson and the prospect is authentic, genuine, and honest. That’s why Bellows advocates a sales prospecting concept he calls ‘Authentic at Scale’ which uses Yesware technology to have genuine authentic communications with customers and prospects.
Matthew Bellows, Founder & Chairman Of The Board at Yesware, recently talked at Web Summit about salespeople being ‘Authentic at Scale’ and how Yesware can help companies and their sales teams more effectively drive lead generation:
Important for Salespeople to be Authentic
There’s not only just the business model which is changing the relationship between the salesperson and the prospect but also the fact that information is freely available, that your reputation sticks with you much longer now, and all pushes towards more power to the customer. Therefore, it is more important for a salesperson to be authentic and genuine and honest and a long-term partner for success as opposed to a transactional sort of guy.
Whether we’re working with a brand new startup who’s just implementing Yesware for there one or two or three person sales team or the CRO of a publicly held company like Twitter or Yelp, salespeople are always changing stuff. They’re always trying to find out a new angle, they’re always moving territories, always changing a training program or changing their comp structure.
For those of you who have read all the blog post about how you just got to get a repeatable scalable model then pour money on top of it, that is not true. You need to actually continue to iterate and make up stuff and try different experiments with your sales program. That’s the kind of thing that our software tries to enable, basically getting the data from your activities and seeing what works and doing more of that.
Authentic at Scale is What We Advocate For
For those of you who are just starting your businesses and getting going, you are faced with a dilemma which is I want to grow really fast. One approach to that is what we call spray-and-pray. Buy a big list, blast out a ton of emails, and hopefully some people respond. If they don’t keep blasting them out. That is a short-term successful strategy with a medium-term disaster. It burns your brand. As a sales person who’s in that organization you’re ruining your reputation potentially for the rest of your life, and obviously in Europe it’s illegal.
What we advocate for our customers is something we call authentic at scale. Use technology to have genuine authentic communications with customers and prospects in a way that shows that you’re actually paying attention to who they are. You’re recognizing what they need and what they’re interested in and what you can offer or not. But do it at a scale that actually helps you build a business. That’s the binary choice that I think most startups are faced with. You can go either way but authentic at scale is what we advocate for.
When Building Your Team Incrementally Hire
In the very early stages, one one of the mistakes I made early very early on was when I got the board approval to hire our first sales team. I was the first sales person for Yesware and then I hired this kid straight out of college who blew up and was amazing. He closed Box on his own and it was sort of like, oh this is great, this is ready to go. I went out and hired eight other sales reps and it was way too many.
So the big thing I I coach people who are just building their team for the first time is really go two by two by two by two and incrementally hire. Even though you never know if it is the market or the person, at least with that sort of slower incremental sales build you get more feedback and have more time to correct as opposed to going in and hiring a big team all at once.
We Make Software that Helps Salespeople Make Money
Yesware is software for sales people. We help sales people communicate better with customers and prospects and we’ve been doing this for about eight years. I started as a SaaS business and still are.
In the early days, there was very little competition for what we were doing. We were getting a lot of inbound interest from companies that just heard about Yesware. They were like, I gotta try this thing. There was a lot of good word of mouth from the very early adopter kind of companies. Now the market is more mature. We’ve probably crossed the chasm in terms of technology adoption curve and we’re into the early majority and those companies think about things differently and they have a different buying process.
At the end of the day what it turns out to be is if the end users like your product and if we’re helping the salespeople make more money then we’ve got a business. So my first business plan for Yesware as I explained to our early stage investors was we make software that helps salespeople make more money and they’ll give us some of it and that is sort of still what we’re doing.
It’s Hard to Know What Makes a Good Lead
For folks out there who are reading blog posts and just getting your company started it’s harder than it looks. When you read the thing about Arg or whatever, it’s hard to know what makes a good lead. You have to keep revising it. We just did a big data science project to try to figure out of the 2,000 leads that closed in the last 18 months, which were good leads? We had a data scientist work on this problem for three months to figure it out because it’s not obvious what a good lead is actually. You’re going to be frustrated but know that everyone else is frustrated with you.
I think the most important thing is just to get your motivations right. Be clear about why you’re doing this because it’s a long slog and the clearer you can be about why you’re doing this project the more effective you can be when you’re talking to other people about why they should do it too.
AI startup Celonis has announced that President of Salesforce International, Miguel Milano, is joining the company as co-owner and Chief Revenue Officer.
Milano “led Salesforce’s international businesses across Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.” His departure comes during a difficult week for Salesforce. Co-CEO Keith Block abruptly resigned from his role. The move caught the industry off guard, leading CEO Marc Benioff to take measures to reassure investors that it was business-as-usual for the company.
Now Salesforce is losing another top executive, one who has an outstanding reputation in the industry. Milano joins a company that touts itself as “the market leader in AI-enhanced Process Mining and Process Excellence software,” with Siemens, 3M, Airbus and Vodafone among its list of clients.
“Miguel is an outstanding leader with a phenomenal track record of building winning teams that deliver value for customers,” said Alexander Rinke, Co-Founder and Co-CEO. “We are honored that he chose Celonis as his next endeavor and that he is investing in the company as an owner. He shares our values and ambition to delight our customers and make a positive impact on our stakeholders. We are thrilled to have him on board.”
Milano struck an optimistic tone about his move to Celonis, saying: “I look forward to driving exponential growth at Celonis, focused on supporting customers become more efficient and sustainable in its operations and supply chains, and more customer-centric in its front-end processes. Process Mining is the foundation for a new, frictionless way of working which delivers significant business value to organizations in all industries. Salesforce is a once-in-a-generation company and I am convinced Celonis is well on its way to becoming one too. It’s incredibly exciting to join a hyper-growth company that is so innovative and groundbreaking and at the same time remains humble, customer-oriented and focused on making the world more sustainable.”
In a move that has surprised many, Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block has resigned.
Many insiders viewed Block as a potential successor to company co-founder Marc Benioff, who will continue as Chair and CEO. Despite resigning, Block will remain with the company in the role of Advisor to the CEO
“It’s been my greatest honor to lead the team with Marc that has more than quadrupled Salesforce from $4 billion of revenue when I joined in 2013 to over $17 billion last year,” said Block. “We are now a global enterprise company, focused on industries, and have an ecosystem that is the envy of the industry, and I’m so grateful to our employees, customers, and partners. After a fantastic run I am ready for my next chapter and will stay close to the company as an advisor. Being side-by-side with Marc has been amazing and I’m forever grateful for our friendship and proud of the trajectory the company is on.”
According to The Street, Benioff used the company’s fourth-quarter report to reassure investors it was business-as-usual.
“When you look at our total management team that Keith and I have built …I think it is the finest management team in the software industry and maybe any industry,” said Benioff.
Google is doubling down on its efforts to make inroads in the retail market, with its latest planned acquisition aimed at helping brick and mortar businesses list their inventory online.
Pointy is a Dublin, Ireland-based tech startup that specializes in helping businesses easily list and manage their inventory online. The company works with retailers throughout Ireland, as well as in nearly every town and city in the U.S.
“With Pointy, merchants simply plug a small box into their barcode scanner or install the Pointy app on their point of sale system, which surfaces the products that they sell directly into the ‘See what’s in store’ section of their business profile on Google Search,” according to Google’s announcement. “Since we introduced this functionality a few years ago, Pointy has been one of our key partners, helping thousands of local merchants display this data within Google. We’re looking forward to working with Pointy to help even more local retailers bring their product inventory online.”
Pointy already has close ties with Google, having partnered with the search giant over the years, and sees the deal as the next logical step.
“When we started Pointy, our mission was to make things better for local retailers,” reads a blog post on Pointy’s site. “That remains our mission today. All of our services continue to operate as usual. We look forward to building even better services in the future, with the backing of Google’s resources and reach.”
“Today is a big step forward for Pointy, but there is still a very long way to go. We’re as excited about the future as when we first started.”
The terms of the deal were not disclosed but, pending the standard approval process, the deal is expected to close in the coming weeks.
According to Business Insider (BI), Piper Sandler analyst Brent Bracelin is predicting Microsoft could buy Salesforce if it became available.
Earlier reports by RBC Capital Markets predicted that Google may buy Salesforce in an effort to leapfrog Microsoft in the cloud market. Google is a distant third among U.S. cloud providers, and RBC did not see an organic way for the company to meet CEO Thomas Kurian’s goal of becoming the No. 2 provider within five years.
Bracelin, however, believes Microsoft would be the buyer, not Google. Specifically, the purchase could help Microsoft gain market share in the front-office application space, “the market term for software that helps salespeople and service reps keep track of their customers, which is an area where Salesforce specializes,” according to BI.
At this time, there is no evidence Salesforce is interested in selling. Even if it were, RBC believes a Salesforce acquisition could be valued as high as $250 billion, almost 10 times what Microsoft paid for LinkedIn, its largest acquisition to date.
One thing is certain: If Salesforce ever does go up for sale, there could be a major bidding war for the company.
Following assurances from Foxconn that the coronavirus would not impact its production, it appears factory shutdowns are on the verge of doing just that and impacting iPhone output in the process, according to Reuters.
The Chinese government has told companies to shut down production until at least February 10, and Foxconn has stopped “almost all” production as a result. According to Reuters, a “source told Reuters on Monday that Foxconn has so far seen a ‘fairly small impact’ from the outbreak as it was utilizing factories in countries including Vietnam, India and Mexico to fill the gap, adding that the company will be able to make up for the delay if factories work overtime after the ban.”
The real concern is if production is stopped beyond February 10. If manufacturing remains stopped for weeks, a month or more, the impact to Foxconn’s output, and the iPhone specifically, would be “big.”
This is just the latest indication that the coronavirus could have severe implications across various industries as governments and agencies around the world struggle to deal with the outbreak.
Direct to consumer brands are doing incredible numbers on Shopify, says Shopify COO Harley Finkelstein. He says that Kylie Jenner has generated almost a billion dollars in sales on the platform and many other influencers such as Kanye West, Drake, and most recently Tom Brady are also doing very well.
“Even if you go beyond just Kylie, you look at companies like Bombas and Allbirds and Tommy John and Fashion Nova, these are brands that didn’t exist five or ten years ago and they’re absolutely doing incredible numbers on Shopify with no slowing down in mind,” says Finklestein. “Shopify was built to help anyone that has an idea start a great business and sell to a global audience.”
Harley Finkelstein, COO of Shopify, talks about the incredible numbers DTC brands are doing on Shopify, the huge success of Shopify Capital, and their quick acceptance of cannabis stores in Canada and potentially the rest of the world, in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:
DTC Brands Doing Incredible Numbers on Shopify
We’re really happy with how we ended the year and certainly, the quarter was great and we’re really excited about our future. We’ve been at this now for almost 14 years. We’ve grown to 820,000 merchants up from 600,000 merchants a year ago. We have a big top of funnel with brand new entrepreneurs getting started on Shopify for the very first time. We also have some very large brands like the big CPGs and some big direct to consumer (DTC) companies all using Shopify to scale their businesses. We’ve got a really great business model and we’re having a lot of fun.
It’s amazing. I think the Kylie story ($1 billion in sales) was surprising to a lot of people, not for us because we see so many stories like that all the time. Whether it’s Kanye West launching his Yeezy store on Shopify or Drake’s store or Tom Brady’s new store, we see all of these major brands and huge influencers using Shopify to create authentic products and sell it to the audience. I always sort of think back to if DTC and direct-to-consumer were around when Michael Jordan was creating the Jordan brand with Nike I think Nike would be a supplier and Michael Jordan would be the brand. He would own the entirety of his business as opposed to getting a licensing fee.
We’re really excited about this. But even if you go beyond just Kylie, you look at companies like Bombas and Allbirds and Tommy John and Fashion Nova, these are brands that didn’t exist five or ten years ago and they’re absolutely doing incredible numbers on Shopify with no slowing down in mind. Shopify was built to help anyone that has an idea start a great business and sell to a global audience. We really do bend the learning curve to make it really easy to get started.
Shopify Helping Democratize the Entire Business Process
The ones that succeed, not all of them do, but the ones that do succeed they grow really large with us and over time we want to provide them with more services and more solutions. For example, we launched Shopify Payments a couple of years ago. We went to the payments companies and negotiated rates on their behalf. We launched Shopify Shipping and went to the shipping company and negotiated shipping costs on their behalf. We always are trying to find economies of scale to help democratize the entire business process for these small businesses.
More recently we realized that a lot of these small businesses also need capital. Because we have so much information on them we’re able to make really quick and very effective underwriting decisions so we were able to go and offer them capital cash advances. We’ve given out hundreds of millions of dollars of cash advances to a lot of these small businesses who if it wasn’t for Shopify would not be able to get this money on their own.
Entrepreneurs Want to Own Their Audience
Etsy fundamentally is a marketplace. Etsy is a place where someone who makes a product can go to find an audience. But our feeling is that you know for an entrepreneur they don’t always want to rent the audience. They want to own the audience. They want to have a direct relationship with their customers. They want to own the entire to profit margin. They want to be able to sell and have long-term relations with the people that are buying their products.
So companies like Etsy do a really good job of curating a bunch of products and renting those customers to those makers. We think the marketplaces are really great but we think ultimately makers and entrepreneurs and merchants want to have a direct relationship with the people buying their products. One of the things that is not well known about Shopify but one way to think about what we do is really this retail operating system. Merchants can start a store with us very easily and they can build a beautiful online store but they can also cross-sell to different marketplaces like eBay or Amazon.
The idea is that it feeds all feeds back in one centralized back office which is Shopify. That’s where they can run the entirety of their business. Really the idea is let’s become the most important piece of software they use on a daily basis. The first thing they open every morning, the last thing they close every night. So obviously marketplace will play a role there but ultimately merchants want to find customers wherever those customers exist and more and more they want to sell direct to those customers.
Shopify Facilitating Cannabis Sales in Canada
The reason we started with Canada was there was clarity in Canada. The Canadian government, the legislature, they were very clear with how they were going to roll out the commercialization and the legalization of cannabis sales on the consumer side. We felt it was really important for us to act quickly and effectively to not only win as much of the Canadian market as we possibly could but also to show the rest of the world as they begin to think about cannabis sales that we are the first phone call that they should be making.
Whether it’s the province of Ontario or British Columbia or most of the largest licensed producers like Canopy in Canada, Shopify is what’s powering those retail sales. We think that we can do a great job helping other countries and other regions do the same thing.
“Over 50% of everything that gets sold on Amazon actually comes from small and medium-sized businesses.,” says Amazon’s VP of Small Business, Nick Denissen. “Their success is our success so we’re definitely focused on doubling down on that. We have over 1.9 million small and medium-sized businesses in the US who work together with Amazon to conduct their business. Those include our sellers, authors, and skilled developers. They’re just a very important part of the customer experience we serve up.”
Nick Denissen, vice president of small business at Amazon, discusses the huge impact that small businesses have on Amazon sales in an interview on CNBC:
Over 50% of Everything Sold On Amazon Is From Small Businesses
Over 50% of everything that gets sold on Amazon actually comes from small and medium-sized businesses. Their success is our success so we’re definitely focused on doubling down on that. We have over 1.9 million small and medium-sized businesses in the US who work together with Amazon to conduct their business. Those include our sellers, authors, and skilled developers. They’re just a very important part of the customer experience we serve up.
The 58 percent I just culled out they are actually the part of the business that is growing faster than our first-party business. We definitely have our interests aligned with small businesses on all fronts. As I pointed out, 58 percent of everything that gets bought is from small and medium-sized businesses. Many customers don’t realize that.
Amazon Storefronts Shed a Little Bit More Light On Small Businesses
Last year, we launched Amazon Storefronts to shed a little bit more of a light on small businesses. Amazon Storefronts is essentially a curated shopping experience where customers can dedicatedly shop from local small businesses. They’re all US-based small businesses. When we opened that Storefront last year a little bit over a year ago we had 20,000 sellers. To date, we’re excited to announce that we actually have 30,000 sellers.
We’ve also developed special technology for them to share more content. They can actually share their story. Those sellers have reached 70 million customers in the last year and sold over 250 million products. I think those numbers speak for themselves that we really are helping and that small businesses can get discovered on Amazon.
Amazon Announces Small Business Spotlight Awards
Today, we’re super excited to announce our Small Business Spotlight Awards. We’re continuing to shine a spotlight on many of these exciting small businesses where they can share their stories. We’re announcing 18 finalists across three categories. There’s Small Business Woman of the Year Award, Entrepreneur Under 30, and Small Business of the Year Award. When we asked our sellers to nominate themselves for this process we actually had over 1300 nominations. Since it’s the first time we did it we really didn’t know what to expect.
Starting today our customers can vote until November 8th for their favorite small business in this category. One thing that we’ve learned is that customers do like to learn more about these small businesses, about their stories, and also other small businesses get a lot of inspiration from small businesses. We’re pretty excited to have these sellers on this journey with us.
Small Business Winner Will Get $80,000
We’re also conducting two live seller events in the US today where we’re enabling small businesses to meet customers and to actually conduct a sale. I just want to call out that one of the nominees, one of the finalists in the Small Business of the Year award, is Damhorst Toys and Puzzles. They are a multi-generational company. They’ve been in business for 48 years. They hand manufacture their wooden toys in Missouri and now they found their way online with Amazon. They’re growing and it’s great to see those types of companies.
The winner will get an $80,000 award so we’re pretty excited to have them continue to grow and prosper on Amazon. One of the things we hear from small businesses is it’s not easy to find the skill sets to help them drive an online business, in particular businesses who have started offline. That’s one of the areas we’re also looking at. How can we help small businesses on that front? So stay tuned on that.
Amazon VP Nick Denissen Says 58% of Sales Come From Small Businesses
In a press release issued today, the National Retail Federation (NRF) announced that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is scheduled to deliver the opening keynote at the federation’s 109th annual convention.
Microsoft has supported the NRF’s annual convention for over 20 years, leveraging their IoT, cloud, data, AI, modern workplace and mixed reality solutions to help retailers digitally transform and embrace intelligent retail.
“At NRF 2020, we’re bringing together the brightest and most influential leaders from around the world who have a clear vision for the retail industry’s future,” NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay said. “Satya Nadella will kick us off with an inspiring session on how Microsoft’s success is built around a purpose-led culture and business model.”
Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (2015-2019) Paul Ryan
Additional details for sessions and speakers at NRF 2020 Vision: Retail’s Big Show can be accessed here.
Complimentary registration is available to editorial members of the news media and discounted registration is available to accredited retail analysts. For more information, visit the NRF 2020: Retail’s Big Show media registration page.
About NRF
The National Retail Federation, the world’s largest retail trade association, passionately advocates for the people, brands, policies and ideas that help retail thrive. From its headquarters in Washington, D.C., NRF empowers the industry that powers the economy. Retail is the nation’s largest private-sector employer, contributing $2.6 trillion to annual GDP and supporting one in four U.S. jobs — 42 million working Americans. For over a century, NRF has been a voice for every retailer and every retail job, educating, inspiring and communicating the powerful impact retail has on local communities and global economies.
“The mall is more or less dead except in 279 great cases where we’ve got fabulous malls out there,” says legendary retail analyst Jan Kniffen. “But the 1,100 malls they’re struggling. It’s the levered retailers and the mall-based retailers that are struggling. We’re going to have 26 retail bankruptcies this year. But in a downturn, we could see 100 and we’re going to see 12,000 stores closed this year. It will be the highest number that’s ever closed in history. But we could see 50,000 close in a downturn. It’s because we don’t really need those retailers and we don’t need those stores because the business is moving online at a fierce pace.”
We’ve had really good retail reports. Think about it. Walmart was fabulous. Target was fabulous. Home Depot was good. Lowe’s was good. Just run down through the group that has already reported and, in general, if you weren’t mall-based full price you did great. Off-mall did great, online did great, and discount did great. The retail market and the consumer couldn’t be better. Levered mall-based retailers are dead. The mall is more or less dead except in 279 great cases where we’ve got fabulous malls out there. But the 1,100 malls they’re struggling. They’re running down comps. The mall is not the place to hang out anymore. Now you hang out in front of your computer and then you go with your friends to do something like go to restaurants and you don’t care about hanging in the mall.
But the people hanging in the mall were never the people that bought the stuff in them. All the people who bought the stuff in the mall were all the women in America who went to work for the first time in the 1980s and blasted them all to the ceiling. We pulled everything out of the mall except for women’s apparel for all practical purposes and that has now settled into this nice slow roll. People don’t dress for work anymore and the malls not any fun and there’s plenty of other alternatives. Just 20 years ago when the mall was really booming we didn’t have a strong T.J. Maxx and Ross stores and Burlington stores. The stuff across the street from the mall was very boring in those days. Those are really good retailers today.
Business Is Moving Online At a Fierce Pace
The two best retailers in the world right now are Costco and Walmart. They are big, strong, have super supply chains, and can handle the tariffs no problem. They’ll gain market share under tariffs. They can even handle a downturn in the economy because they’re both super well-capitalized. Even people like Macy’s that have been struggling, they can handle a downturn in the economy because they’re not levered. They’ve got plenty of cash flow. They pay a 10 percent dividend and they buy back stock.
It’s the levered retailers and the mall-based retailers that are struggling. I keep saying we’re going to have 26 retail bankruptcies this year. We just got two more to talk about. But in a downturn, we could see a hundred and we’re going to see 12,000 stores closed this year. It will be the highest number that’s ever closed in history. But we could see 50,000 close in a downturn. It’s because we don’t really need those retailers and we don’t need those stores because the business is moving online at a fierce pace.
We Know That Everybody’s Getting Out of China
We know that everybody’s getting out of China. They were getting out of China before the tariffs started. Now they’re just getting out of China faster. Yeah, the shoe guys are still getting 60 percent of their stuff out of China but it used to be 90 percent. The apparel guys are still getting 15 percent of their stuff out of China but it used to be 50 percent. So that’s already happening.
The tariffs have not been that big a deal. Tier four, the new tariffs that are about to kick in, if they kick in, would be a big deal for my world. But maybe they’re not going to kick in, which is the other thing that’s going on. We’re not really sure it’s going to happen but it’s still causing everybody to move faster out of China. So Trump has accomplished what he wanted to accomplish. He’s getting American business out of China.
The Mall Is More or Less Dead, Says Legendary Retail Analyst Jan Kniffen
“Every company is going through a massive digital customer transformation,” says SalesforceCEO Marc Benioff. “When you see this transformation happening it’s just incredible to watch. I mean this is as big as Y2K was for the tech industry. Every company is going through it. Every one of these major transformations is exactly that, it begins and ends with the customer.”
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, discusses their blowout earnings quarter and how the massive digital customer transformation is driving their growth in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:
Massive Digital Customer Transformation
Every customer is going through a massive digital customer transformation. When you see this transformation happening it’s just incredible to watch. I mean this is as big as Y2K was for the tech industry. Every company is going through it. Every one of these major transformations is exactly that, it begins and ends with the customer.
The federal government was one of the most exciting things that happened in the quarter. It wasn’t just the USDA. It was also the Department of Education and the Department of Interior. It was many departments actually. They’re going through a huge digital transformation in the U.S. federal government and Salesforce has been able to offer many of those agencies is the rapid successful digital transformation that they need. We even had a 10,000 person event in Washington, D.C. during the quarter. That continues to be a fantastic growth area for us.
We’re number one in CRM which is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. Every company in every industry and every government is recreating themselves with their customer. This is what’s driving our growth. It’s pure and simple.
Mark Benioff added these comments during the earnings call:
Every Digital Transformation Begins and Ends With the Customer
Just last month, IDC Worldwide Software Tracker ranked Salesforce the number one CRM for the sixth year in a row. And I’ll tell you that is more important than ever, especially so many of our customers are going through these tremendous digital transformations. We all know every digital transformation begins and ends with the customer. And when I’m with these CEOs all over the world, this is really front and center in their mind. It’s probably as exciting to them and it’s important to them as it was to CIOs, who are buying for Y2K, which is almost 20 years ago. I think the digital transformation remains just a huge growth opportunity for our entire industry.
Still In the Early Days of the Digital Transformation
Well, there are many, many companies in the very early days. In fact, if you talk to one of our largest consulting partners, they’ll tell you less than 20% of their strategic customers have been engaged in the digital transformation, but there’s a lot of room for them in the marketplace.
So, we have an opportunity here again around this digital transformation and one of the beauties of a product like Trailhead and My Trailhead is helping these companies through their transformation and scale them up with modern technology because the modern worker has to have modern skills. And that’s what Trailhead and My Trailhead really provide the customers. So we really are coming out with an amazing innovation at the right time to satisfy the needs of these customers
Every Digital Transformation Begins and Ends With the Customer, Says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff
When discussing Apple’s Q1 2020 results, CEO Tim Cook told CNBC the coronavirus is impacting the company’s operations in China.
According to Cook, the company is restricting employee travel in China and has already closed one store. Apple is also cutting back retail store hours as a precaution.
“We’re restricting travel to business critical travel,” Cook told CNBC’s Josh Lipton. “For employees that are in the Wuhan area, we are providing care kits and supplying them across our employee population in China as well.”
One of Apple’s main manufacturers, Foxconn, earlier stated it foresaw no impact to its manufacturing timetables as a result of the coronavirus. While that may have been some good news for Apple, it appears the overall effects of the outbreak will still impact the company.
In fact, in their quarterly earnings report, Apple issued a wider-than-normal guidance for Q2 largely because of the virus.
“The situation is, is emerging and we’re still gathering lots of data points and monitoring it very closely,” said Apple CFO Luca Maestri, according to Digital Trends. “We have a wider than usual revenue range for the second quarter, due to the greater uncertainty. We’re closely following the development of the coronavirus.”
The Verge is reporting that Taiwanese company Foxconn will not be adjusting manufacturing schedules or closing factories as China struggles with the coronavirus outbreak.
Foxconn manufactures electronics for numerous companies and is probably most well-known for manufacturing Apple’s iPhones. The company operates several factories on the Chinese mainland. In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, China has put as many as 15 cities in lockdown, with Wuhan—where the virus was initially identified—under virtual quarantine. Financial experts around the world are warning the virus could have serious consequences across industries.
In spite of the dire circumstances, however, Foxconn does not foresee any impact to its manufacturing.
“Foxconn is closely monitoring the current public health challenge linked to the coronavirus and we are applying all recommended health and hygiene practices to all aspects of our operations in the affected markets. Our facilities in China are following holiday schedules and will continue to do so until all businesses have resumed standard operating hours,” the company said in a statement, according to The Verge.
“As a matter of policy and for reasons of commercial sensitivity, we do not comment on our specific production practices,” the company continues, “but we can confirm that we have measures in place to ensure that we can continue to meet all global manufacturing obligations.”
It remains to be seen the impact the virus will have on business and world economies, but Foxconn’s statement should help reassure at least some sectors.
“We’ve got 4,700 stores within ten miles of 90 percent of the US population,” says Walmart Ecommerce CEO Marc Lore. “In those locations, we’ve got about 100,000 products including fresh and frozen. We’ve started doing pickup a couple of years back and now same-day delivery to the door. We decided to take it a step further and actually deliver it directly into customers fridges and so far so good.”
Marc Lore, CEO of Walmart Ecommerce U.S., discusses In-Home Delivery and Next Day Delivery in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:
Walmart Now Delivering Groceries Directly Into The Fridge
This (delivery to a customer’s fridge) is a great opportunity for Walmart to leverage this unique asset to do things that only Walmart can do. We’ve got 4,700 stores within ten miles of 90 percent of the US population. In those locations, we’ve got about 100,000 products including fresh and frozen. We’ve started doing pickup a couple of years back and now same-day delivery to the door. We decided to take it a step further and actually deliver it directly into customers fridges and so far so good.
I do think this is a great step change in the value proposition. Imagine going to work and coming home and having all the groceries stocked in your fridge. We just saw (in a previous trial using a third party) a really big opportunity to use our own Walmart associates to do the delivery. Their W-2 employees. They’ve been with Walmart for at least a year. We feel like that’s a big advantage.
Can Deliver All Purchases Into Your Home Without Packaging
We don’t actually need to have cameras in the home. The actual associate will have a camera on their vest. You could actually as a customer track on your app the associate going into your home, putting groceries into the fridge, and then leaving. You can look at it in real time or you can go back and look at it anytime you want. It’s very safe for customers as well.
There are lots of possibilities (that will stem from in-home deliver). For example, being able to do a return. Imagine just leaving something on your kitchen table. That’s it, going to work and coming home and we’ll just take it away from you. Also, being able to deliver general merchandise into your home without any packaging. I think there’re lots of opportunities for services and health and wellness and all sorts of opportunities. We’re thinking them through now. We have some ideas.
One Day Delivery Actually Costs Us Less Than Two Day
Next Day Delivery has been great so far. It’s down in the LA region right now. By the end of the year, we’ll have about 75 percent of the population will have access to Next Day Delivery. Typically, the cutoff time is around 3 p.m. If you order by 3 p.m. you will get it the next day in a single box. That’s the other great thing too. A lot of times now you might receive it in multiple packages. It’ll be overnight in one box. We are really excited about that.
It actually costs us less than Two Day Delivery. The big reason is that we’re able to get it in a single box. All this inventory is now mirrored or replicated close to the customer. If it’s close to the customer and it costs us less to ship it. If it’s one box it costs us less to ship as well. So yes It’s actually cheaper. We’re just being very measured in how we roll it out. By the end of the year, three-quarters of the country will have it. It’s gonna be moving pretty fast. About 40 of the top 50 metro areas will have access to it. So it’s about four or five areas a month that we’re adding.
Dramatically Improved Contributed Profit Margins
Right now, we’re in a really good position (regarding online profitability). Over the last year, we’ve dramatically improved our contributed profit margins. We’re starting to drive more mix into the higher margin categories like fashion and home. So feeling really good about the momentum we have. We have some dates in mind that we’re not obviously sharing. But we feel good about where we are right now. We feel really good about where we are and where we’re going.
Walmart Now Delivering Groceries Directly Into The Fridge – Walmart Ecommerce CEO Marc Lore
Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block has come out in favor of a national privacy law, according to CNBC.
Privacy is becoming one of the biggest battlegrounds for companies, governments and individuals alike. The U.S., however, does not have a comprehensive privacy law to outline what companies can and cannot do with individual data, or what rights individuals have to protect their privacy.
In contrast, the European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in 2018 and provides comprehensive privacy protections and gives consumers rights over their own data. Similarly, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) went into effect January 1, and provides similar protections. Although companies, such as Microsoft and Mozilla, have expanded GDPR and CCPA protections to all of their customers, there are far more companies that have not, and have no intention of doing so.
At a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum (WEF), Keith Block said the U.S. needs its own version of the GDPR.
“You have to applaud, for example, the European Union for coming up with GDPR and hopefully there will be a GDPR 2.0,” said Block.
“There is no question there needs to be some sort of regulation in the United States. It would be terrific if we had a national data privacy law; instead we have privacy by zipcode, which is not a good outcome,” he said.
As the issue continues to impact individuals and organizations, it will be interesting to see if the U.S. follow’s the EU’s lead.
According to Business Insider, RBC Capital Markets believes Google may purchase Salesforce and use it to better take on Amazon and Microsoft.
Google is currently a distant third among U.S. cloud providers. As of 2019, Gartner estimates Amazon’s AWS has some 47.8% of the market, Microsoft Azure accounted for 15.5% and Google Cloud brought up the rear with a mere 4%.
Even worse, a recent report shows that 97 percent of companies polled are using Azure to some degree, and far more companies are planning to deploy Microsoft’s cloud platform than are planning to use AWS or Google. While Amazon has room to lose market share, Google Cloud does not.
According to Business Insider, a source said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has the goal of Google becoming “at least the No. 2 cloud.” For that to happen, however, the company will need to gain significant ground. RBC doesn’t see that happening without making a major move.
“We don’t see a viable organic way to get there,” said the RBC note.
If Google does purchase Salesforce, RBC estimates the deal could be worth as much as $250 billion. While expensive, it would catapult the company into the No. 2 spot.
“Better late than never” goes the old saying. Of course, well over a decade late may be pushing it a bit. Craigslist doesn’t appear to have gotten the memo, however, as they have finally released an official iOS app—a full 11 years after the App Store debuted.
Craigslist Categories
Despite being late to the game, the app is #5 in the Shopping category at the time of writing, providing a small demonstration of the staying power of the classifieds site. The app offers all the basic functionality one would expect, including the ability to view ads, search items, post items for sale and manage an account.
The app offers several main categories, such as Community, For Sale, Gigs, Housing, Jobs, Resumes and Services, with each one having additional subcategories.
The Android version has not been officially released yet, but there is a beta version available.
Lowe’s slogan is “do it right for less.” While that primarily applies to home repair and improvement, the company is also applying it to the world of software development.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Lowe’s is looking to retool its e-commerce solutions. The goal is to have 80% of the applications it uses be built internally by 2020. This will involve looking at their application portfolio and replacing commercial, off-the-shelf applications with custom replacements. This will involve hiring as many as 2,000 software engineers, data analysts and infrastructure specialists.
As Mark Driver, research vice president at Gartner, Inc. told the WSJ, “we’re in an age where people have their clothes custom fit. The same thing goes with software; it’s about gaining that advantage.”
This is just the latest move on the part of the home-improvement giant to modernize its IT infrastructure. Shortly after being hired as CIO, Seemantini Godbole told analysts and investors the retailer’s technology was “well behind leading retailers in terms of strategy, architecture, process maturity and capabilities.” Ms. Godbole helped unveiled a plan to invest $500 to $550 million per year through 2021, in an effort to modernize the retailer’s decade-old e-commerce system.
The announcement by Lowe’s is just the latest in a solid growth trend for the custom software development market, as companies increasingly turn to custom solutions to achieve tighter integration, better performance and lower cost.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says that Salesforce is now entering the fourth stage of computing, the pursuit of Single Source of Truth. The official name is Customer 360 Truth and it is a new set of capabilities that allow companies to connect, authenticate and govern customer data and identity across Salesforce. The goal is to provide a complete view and deeper understanding of every customer so that companies can deliver extremely personalized customer experiences.
Marc Benioff, co-CEO of Salesforce, discusses Customer 360 Truth at their annual Dreamforce conference with Jim Cramer of CNBC:
Single Source of Truth – A Computer Science Holy Grail
360 Truth is another amazing thing that we’re introducing here (at Dreamforce 2019) that has been the holy grail of computing. It’s what we call SSOT, the single source of truth. We’ve had three amazing waves of computing. They are stems of record, systems of engagement, and systems of intelligence including AI. We’re now entering the fourth stage of computing. It’s the pursuit of Single Source of Truth, and we’ve built that into our platform.
This is a computer science holy grail that we’ve been trying to put together for a long time. Now because we acquired MuleSoft and because we acquired Tableau we are closer to providing for our customers the Single Source of Truth for their customer information.
Enables Companies To Build a Single Source of Truth
The company describes Customer 360 Truth as a new set of data and identity services that enable companies to build a single source of truth across all of their customer relationships. They say it connects data from across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more to create a single, universal Salesforce ID for each customer.
All of a customer’s previous interactions and shared preferences are brought together to create a complete view so companies can better serve and even predict their needs, whether addressing a customer service problem, creating a personalized marketing journey, predicting the best sales opportunities or surfacing product recommendations.
Salesforce Launches Single Souce of Truth | Benioff: A Computer Science Holy Grail
From the Salesforce Press Release:
The Holy Grail of CRM: A Single Source of Truth
Nearly 70 percent of customers say they expect connected experiences in which their preferences are known across touchpoints. However, organizational and technical complexity often gets in the way of meeting these expectations. Companies have legacy infrastructure and data silos, leading to fragmented data and fragile integrations between systems. Inconsistent methods for accessing, reconciling and activating customer data make it challenging for companies to deliver connected experiences across these systems. As a result, companies often have multiple usernames, email addresses, or purchase histories for the very same customer across different systems, and managing a customer’s consent and contact preferences across the business becomes harder as new data regulations come into play.
Having a source of truth—a single, trusted place that brings together all the customer data needed to deliver amazing experiences—has been the holy grail of CRM. Today Salesforce is delivering it.
Deliver a Trusted, Personalized Customer Relationship With Customer 360 Truth
Customer 360 Truth enhances data management across Salesforce apps and other systems, and provides instant access to consistent, reconciled customer data. Services include:
Customer 360 Data Manager: Delivers the ability to access, connect and resolve a customer’s data across Salesforce and other systems, using a canonical data model and a universal Salesforce ID that represents each customer. With a click-based user interface for app and data management, admins can easily establish trusted connections between data sources to prepare, match, reconcile and update the customer profile. The reconciled profile across apps enables employees to pull up relevant data at the time of need from any connected system, such as when a service agent may need to pull a list of past purchases from an order system to better assist in solving a problem.
Salesforce Identity for Customers: Removes friction from the login experience and enables a single, authenticated and secure relationship between a customer and all of a company’s websites, e-commerce stores, mobile apps and connected products. Instead of having separate logins and profiles that lead to disconnected experiences, customers now have one login across all of a company’s digital properties. Identity for Customers also elevates trust and compliance with a simple to use two-factor authentication. And it allows companies to obtain valuable customer insights with the ability to analyze engagement and usage with identity reporting and analytics.
Customer 360 Audiences: Builds unified customer profiles across known data such as email addresses and first party IDs and unknown data such as website visits and device IDs. It then creates customer segments and marketing engagement journeys from those profiles and delivers AI-powered insights, like lifetime value and likelihood to churn. Customer 360 Audiences goes beyond traditional customer data platform (CDP) capabilities and extends the power of CRM to connect customer interactions across various touchpoints — for example, a customer who was redirected from an email campaign onto the website through a service interaction — and make the profile data available in real-time to optimize the experience.
Privacy and Data Governance: Enables companies to collect and respect customer data use and privacy preferences, as well as apply data classification labels to all data in Salesforce. Companies can easily understand what types of data they have, what uses of data customers have approved and how best to interact with them. These capabilities can help customers address obligations from regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), with respect to data governance and customer consent.
Introducing the Cloud Information Model
Salesforce Customer 360 Truth is powered by the Cloud Information Model (CIM), an open source data model that standardizes data interoperability across cloud applications. The publication of CIM is enabled by MuleSoft’s open source modeling technology, providing multiple file formats to make it easy to adopt CIM with varying applications. By easily integrating data in the cloud, developers can build new products that deliver connected and personalized customer experiences. CIM reduces the complexities of integrating data across cloud applications by providing standardized data interoperability guidelines to connect point-of-sale systems, digital marketing platforms, contact centers, CRM systems and more. Developers no longer need to spend months creating custom code. Instead, they can adopt and extend the CIM within days to create data lakes, generate analytics, train machine learning models, build a single view of the customer and more.
Unleash the Power of Customer 360 Truth with MuleSoft Anypoint Platform
Customer 360 Truth allows companies to connect siloed customer data sources to a single source of truth, across Salesforce apps or third-party data using MuleSoft. With MuleSoft Anypoint Platform™, organizations can easily build APIs that connect any application, data, or device to Customer 360 in an application network, creating a truly complete customer view.
At Dreamforce, MuleSoft also announced new innovations and learning modules, empowering anyone to become an Integration Trailblazer and create connected customer experiences.
Comments on the News
“Having a complete view of the customer is not a new idea, but it has been difficult to achieve. Companies have siloed data; disconnected apps; a complex, patchwork of sometimes incompatible services; and no way to connect it all,” said Patrick Stokes, EVP, Platform Shared Services, Salesforce. “Customer 360 Truth overcomes those challenges, creating a single source of truth that is the foundation for delivering smart, personalized customer experiences across every touchpoint.”
“In order to truly succeed with delivering a great customer experience, you have to adopt an agile platform that fosters growth and supports constant innovation,” said Rick Fuson, President and Chief Operating Officer, Pacers Sports & Entertainment. “With the Salesforce Customer 360 platform, Pacers Sports & Entertainment has real-time visibility into all aspects of our business and can operate more efficiently across channels, increase per customer loyalty and drive innovation across the organization.”
“Connecting customer data and managing consent is more important than ever in light of changing customer expectations and increasing regulations,” said Alan Webber, Program Vice President for Digital Strategy and Customer Experience, IDC. “As a result, companies are prioritizing data unification in ways that will lead to more loyal and valuable customer relationships. Salesforce Customer 360 Truth will help companies break down data silos and deliver the experiences customers expect.”
Salesforce Customer 360
Customer 360 Truth is part of the Salesforce Customer 360, which includes industry-leading apps spanning sales, service, marketing and commerce, and across every customer touchpoint. The Customer 360 Platform is an underlying set of services and APIs including AI, blockchain, mobile, security, voice and other capabilities that allow companies to connect every customer, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation. Salesforce will power more than two trillion B2B and B2C transactions this year for more than 150,000 companies and millions of Trailblazers—those individuals and their organizations who are using Salesforce to drive innovation, grow their careers and transform their businesses.
