Going downhill with Salesforce

Experiencing the Salesforce Basecamp, Johannesburg. 24 May 2018.

The day didn’t start well. Technologically.

Let me tell you the story. In response to an emailed invitation from Salesforce, I’d registered for Basecamp many days earlier, had promptly received a thank you confirmation and was mailed a personal coffee-and-chat invite by a Salesforce account manager the day before the event. I replied saying that would be great and got a let’s-do-it answer.

These may be straight forward digital comms but they were nicely executed and timed. I’m thinking, well, Salesforce should be good at this stuff, I hear they’re the emperors of CRM, aren’t they?

I’m also interested to hear what’s changed since the days of Siebel, PeopleSoft and the hyper-hype of Peppers & Rogers. Okay, maybe I’d got a bit out of touch with what I used to refer to as Customers Rarely Matter. Truth be told, I was looking forward to Basecamp.

The morning of the event: it’s downhill from the get go

At the registration desk - a neatly laid out row of laptops and ample Salesforce staff in supportive attendance - the ‘system’ had no record of me once I’d tapped in and submitted my name. ‘Try your email address’ was the helpful suggestion from one of the staffers. Nope. ‘Ah... Sorry. Would you mind re-registering?’ Once that was very easily done I moved on down the line to the badge-collection desk.

Several other (clearly successfully) registered guests arrived after me at the desk and with a momentary wait were smilingly handed their badges. Not me.

More apologies now from a helpful, but rather flustered, collection-desk staffer who had a bit of trouble tapping my surname - again - into the ‘system’.

My reverting to ‘Echo, Alpha, Romeo, Delta, Lima, Echo, Yankee’ may have furrowed his eyebrows and raised some discreet millennial giggles from his busily-bustling colleagues swarming around the badge-printer, but it seemed to do the trick. Maturely, I refrained from asking why they were wearing such alarmingly-bad hats.

Third time lucky with my surname. I’d been digitally-accepted and within maybe 30 secs was proudly sporting my hard-earned badge, suspended round my neck on its colour-coded lanyard. Red: ‘prospective customer’. Hmmm. Steady, Tiger.

I was also handed an A6-sized agenda card that listed in 2-point font the topics for the days’ multiple presentations. Almost illegible and without the names or positions of the speakers. No matter. I had been identified, ratified and badged. At last, I was in.

Promo events, hey? Tricky things...

First impressions, customer experiences, UI – you name it, events can be tricky. Even for a self-accredited CRM tech giant like Salesforce. Putting my enrollment surprises aside, I’m moving onwards now into the event’s reception area.

They might not have been so sharp on the tech side of all that UI / CX stuff, but here’s the good thing: they are jacked when it comes to serving their guests with decent coffee and nicely-filled mini croissants.

It occurs to me at this point - by now I’m sitting outside in the sun with my coffee, a Marlboro and awaiting commencement - that Salesforce at least understands the established protocols associated with the word ‘guest’. As in somebody you invite to something. Somebody towards whom you behave in the spirit of, for example, ‘Aloha’, the Hawaiian word which embraces such qualities as unity, respect, tolerance, honesty and humility.

Back on the downhill slide

Having taken maybe five minutes to get into the auditorium and then another five to be smilingly-encouraged to all shunt sideways to gap-close the spaces between seats, the expected, but perfectly-acceptable, rah-rah-intro begins.

It’s slick, it’s on the mark and it’s well done. As a warm-up act for the day’s opening keynote, it was also short and genuine in thanking guests for attending and customers for being, well, customers. (Hats off to Robin Fisher, Salesforce’s Regional Vice President of Emerging Markets.)

After that - from a veteran B2B marketer’s perspective - Basecamp totally imploded.

Following a eulogy of introduction - what we’d call ‘praise-singing’ in South Africa - Ms Tiffani Bova was welcomed onstage to deliver the keynote. Ms Bova’s title at Salesforce is Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist. I’d never encountered one of them before so I’m reckoning this could be enlightening.

It’s quickly obvious that Ms Bova is a highly accomplished presenter. She’s also a self-confessed non-marketer (but, boy, is she a seller) and this strikes me as odd because she’s talking about... marketing.

Marketing? This is something that deep-down you just know she has never respected. As she tells you about her decades of determined, driven, done-deal sales success, you know that her achievements have reinforced the fact that she don’t think much of marketers.

Now, that’s an attitude that I respect because so much B2B marketing deserves no respect.

BUT: Ms Bova made an increasingly common, dumb-ass error. She tried to stick her moniker and her company’s moniker on the essential rules of marketing. She tried to assert that Salesforce were proposing ‘original thinking’ in marketing.

Let me assure you, they are not. Their automation of marketing and sales processes, metrics and reporting might be highly original and astonishingly effective. That doesn’t alter the fact that there’s nothing new in their thinking about marketing as a business discipline or the purpose it must serve.

For anyone who might be a bit hazy on this one, that purpose could not be simpler: attract and retain profitable customers.

By now, the downhill slide is so bad it’s embarrassing

It’s always horribly discomfiting when anyone tries to bullishly position, say, customer-focus as thought-leadership. Or when they imply they’re pioneering the notion that ‘customer-experience is the product’. It’s even worse when they boldly display such an age-old truism in quotation marks and brand it with their personal by-line.

In terms of impact on the guests, maybe her presentation achieved its goals. By adding some Salesforce-branded tinsel and glitter to gussie-up Marketing 1.01, Ms Bova expertly delivered a message that went a bit like this:

“We’ve got a sparkly new wheel that puts the customer front-and-centre. It is not dull like all them old wheels were. First off the bat, you can all see that it’s clearly real glittery. Right? Ok, great. Second, and I know some of you smart folks have already spotted this, yep, you’re right: this new wheel's not round, it’s circular. We’re calling it Customer Success in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

As the Salesforce storyline goes, the preceding revolutions began with steam-power, then electricity, followed by computing which spawned the fourth revolutionary installment: Intelligence.

It’s an already-arriving epoch where laces will tie themselves and take your trainers out for a jog while the fridge mixes martinis and orders the hoover to serve them. At this point, I’m like Disney’s bear, Baloo, in The Jungle Book. I am solid-gone on this!

Er, hang on a sec. It could be that I nodded-off there for a while and didn’t quite get this ‘Intelligence’ thing?

Getting real again: button-holing Ms Bova

Towards the end of the morning’s coffee-break, as she walked passed past me in the reception area, a rather-affronted Ms Bova swivelled around in response to my trio of increasingly-loud appellations: ‘Hello. Hello! Hello!!’

For a split-second, her reaction was pure Taxi Driver: ‘You talkin' to me?’ My swiftly-offered, genuine congratulations on her superbly presented presentation thankfully refreshed her smile.

That quickly vanished when I queried why she was re-purposing Peter Drucker’s 1950’s seminal thinking on marketing and not even acknowledging him?

In the momentary think-pause before she could answer, I asked her why she thought so many B2B companies had lost touch with guiding principles like Drucker’s, and why they’d allowed their marketing to have such little commercial impact.

Her paraphrased reply was that they had gotten distracted by shiny new things and lost focus on what matters.

Amen, Sister Bova! Ain’t that just the gospel truth!

But I’ll bet anything you like that Ms Bova won’t be evangelising about it in her next presentation.

With that in mind, I decided I’d had enough of Basecamp and after one more cup of coffee for the road, I drove away under Jo’burg’s immensely blue, mid-day winter sky. Happy to be back in the real world.

Links:

Salesforce Why they claim to be the world’s leading CRM platform

Tiffani Bova Why she admires Salesforce and still loves Hawaii

Taxi Driver 'You talkin' to me?'

Peter Drucker Why his original, incisive wisdom still guides marketing

Talking Heads 'Burning Down the House'

Mark Eardley Why there are just two cardinal rules in B2B marketing