Salesforce: The Burning Marketing Cloud

Salesforce have a marketing cloud problem. They have two marketing clouds and customers don't really want to use either. The overall marketing cloud business is shrinking. Former ExactTarget customers are defecting to more modern customer engagement platforms such as Braze and Iterable. Pardot customers are ignoring rumours of a planned sunset and sticking with their existing tools. Neither group is doing what Salesforce actually want, which is to migrate to the brand new Marketing Cloud Next platform built on top of data cloud.

A New B2C Marketing Cloud

As a result, Salesforce have taken drastic action to secure the future of their B2C marketing platform. In doing so, they called into question the planned migration path for their B2B customers. Buying Braze is a no brainer for them. A $5.66m deal for Salesforce to acquire the Braze platform was announced recently, stunning the markets amidst a relatively muted investor response. Braze customers were much more vocal. Many of them had migrated away from Salesforce Marketing Cloud in search of a newer platform with a more predictable roadmap.

Ironically, Braze customers and Pardot customers are pushing in different directions for the same reason. Neither want to be locked into Salesforce Data Cloud. The success of Braze is in large part because it integrates with all the leading CDPs. Consumer brands can use their existing data stack to build audiences for targeting through Braze’s excellent multi-channel capabilities using their enterprise-grade segmentation tools. The challenge will be adding the best features of Marketing Cloud into the Braze platform.

The Account Engagement Misstep

Pardot provides a classic example of how not to integrate two platforms together. For a long time, there was no real integration between Pardot and Sales Cloud. Marketo was the platform you went for if you wanted a deep CRM integration with Salesforce. Then, Salesforce launched Lightning and decided to use it as an opportunity to embed Pardot into Salesforce directly. That plan mostly worked until it was killed off, presumably by internal politics within Salesforce. There's no other sensible explanation for rebranding the platform to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.

The failed Account Engagement experiment is indicative of a flaw within Salesforce’s vision for the next generation of Marketing Cloud. No other leading vendor tries to combine B2B and B2C marketing into the same platform. Not even Adobe do, despite the shared CDP foundation. Marketing Cloud Next has failed because it offers a confused mix of B2B and B2C functionality. It doesn't really specialise in the needs of either. List building is too segmented for B2B, but the multi-channel capability is too basic for B2C. 

The Future of Marketing Cloud Next

Marketing Cloud Next will never replace ExactTarget, but after the Braze acquisition it doesn't need to. It could eventually replace Pardot given sufficient focus on improved lead routing and dynamic list building. Recent releases have introduced more flexible list creation, but there seems to be no sign of additional lead management capabilities. The lack of scoring is a real issue, and one that Salesforce may not consider a problem until too late. Within Salesforce, lead management is considered Sales Cloud functionality. That's not how it works elsewhere, a disconnect which could doom the product permanently. 

In the meantime, Pardot customers are stuck on a platform that has been very publicly declared as end of life. The Pardot certification program was shut down over the summer. Many customers are considering their options; some will stick with the platform until its long term fate becomes clear. A few are migrating to Marketing Cloud Next, but not as many as Salesforce would like. That introduces an opportunity for up-and-coming marketing automation platforms such as Paminga and Inflection. HubSpot is no longer the only other option for mid-market brands. The space is opening up for a new market leader in marketing automation, if anyone can deliver a platform able to bridge the gap. 

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