The Cloud GTM Journey of Salesforce
Come learn how Salesforce started its journey in selling through the cloud marketplace. Learn how they pursued this strategy, implemented incremental phases, and helped sellers worldwide. We’ll discuss what they learned while on this business transformation journey and hear a few tips and tricks they’d recommend to drive this business transformation.
Hey, everybody.
Hey, looks like we're all here.
Excellent.
Well, hey, everyone.
Welcome to our session with Salesforce.
We have a very exciting session today.
We've got -- we're going to learn about Salesforce and their
journey in selling through cloud marketplaces and learn how
they decided to pursue this strategy, what kind of iterations
and phases they implemented, and how Robert and his team,
you know, enabled the gang of sellers in many countries
around the world, and just kind of learn what is that business
transformation like, and maybe at the end we can hear a few
tips and tricks.
So with that, I'd like to introduce myself.
My name's Adam Boyle.
I'm the head of product and engineering here at tackle.
We also have Jillian McNierney, who's one of our product
managers who's been working very closely with Robert on our
journey, and of course Robert Carbum, our guest of honor
here, the director of marketplace strategy and business
operations at Salesforce.
Robert, why don't you start us off, tell us a little bit about
you and your journey here at Salesforce.
Absolutely.
Thank you very much for having me.
First and foremost, I would be remiss if I didn't start by
giving a big shout out and a big thank you to all the amazing
people behind the scenes at Salesforce that has made this
amazing accomplishment possible.
There has been over 200 people that have worked on this
initiative more than are tirelessly working right now to
help us scale and grow.
And also equally important are our wonderful partners at tackle
and AWS who have been instrumental in every step of this
journey.
So my name is Robert Carbum.
I lead marketplace operations at strategy at Salesforce.
I'm working within our global tech partnerships organization
and I have over 17 last night checked, years experience
building, launching, scaling, B2B and B2C marketplaces within
a variety of verticals and industries.
Fun fact, the first marketplace that I worked on was in 2006 and
we were the first ethical online B2C marketplace of natural
hemp products and vegan food items.
And one of our customers was Woody Erelson and the suits that
he wears in the movie Seven Pounds were exclusively bought
through me.
So I was selling suits to Woody Erelson in 2006 through the
marketplace.
And they were horrible suits.
If you watch that movie, it was a period piece, but we sold it
in 2006.
So I digress.
Last but not least, I like Adam.
I'm living in the Frosty White maple serving north of Canada.
I'm in Toronto.
Adam is closer to Ottawa.
And for the record, it is currently not snowing.
But we shall see what the forecast is later.
That's great.
Hey, Robert, let's start with our first question really around
scale.
So, you know, what is the marketplace reach here for
potential for Salesforce?
What countries are covered?
How many?
And tell us more about how you've been thinking about rolling
this out to such a large global sales team.
Absolutely.
Okay.
So we've launched the ability to purchase Salesforce products
through the AWS marketplace in 10 countries since the artificial
launch at the beginning of December of last year.
The latest country, we just launched Portugal at the end of
April.
So we are now live in USA, Great Britain, Ireland, Germany,
France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands and Australia.
So our goal is to expand our geo footprint to meet the customer
demand as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
And we're also working to enable the entire field so that any
Salesforce AE can speak to the customer about buying through
the marketplace.
And yes, that's a bit of a boil the ocean task because we have
quite a few AEs.
But when you combine the tremendous customer value that buying
through the marketplace provides, the support from great partners
like Tacklan, AWS and the truly tremendous internal Salesforce
teams that are working together, we've built up a tremendous
amount of inertia to go after that ocean with the speed and
ferociousness that we've had.
And you know, one of the key things of getting the field ready
for things like this is being really prominent with internal
communications of winning deals.
And that's a great way to get the field excited.
If they start seeing all these deals come in, it's a question of
hey, wait a second, how do I get on board on this?
And they start coming to you, which is so much easier than
going to every single one of them.
That honestly sounds like one of our, like that is a big, big
undertaking that just the sheer size of Salesforce and rolling
out this change.
Yeah.
New organizational habit for everyone is just wild.
It's just, it's been really exciting to watch.
So maybe we could start kind of at the beginning, like how did
all of this get triggered?
What were the signals in the market that kind of triggered,
hey, maybe we should really look at doing something like this.
And so why has this been undertaken?
So we started at Salesforce.
We, this journey quite a while ago, I personally got involved at
the end of 2021, but Salesforce was putting pieces together a
little earlier than that, well before my time.
And in that entirety of the time, you know, before I arrived and
especially increasingly now, we've seen many buyer driven
triggers of the value that customers can obtain by purchasing
through cloud marketplaces.
And that's why we're going after this.
And, you know, the number one is being able to provide our
customers with a route to use their, their pre-committed
budget to purchase Salesforce products.
Because that's the number one buyer dominant value trigger
right there, right?
They have, they have budget that's pre-committed and now they can
use that budget towards the purchase of Salesforce products.
And it's a no brainer.
When you have, I think it's the last I heard was 156 billion
that AWS announced in unused spend across 300,000 AWS customers.
That's a huge value proposition we can now connect with.
And then layer on the other value proposition.
So, you know, we were seeing that the benefits of streamlining
your procurement, integrated billing, and the reduction of friction
in the buying process.
And that, that reminds me of a tackle event.
One of the first times I ever interacted with tackle, and I was
just a viewer at the time, but tackle at a webinar, they had a
bunch of experts, one of them was CrowdStrike.
And I remember the CrowdStrike story that they told where they had
a major US bank that had an incident and they needed to get
CrowdStrike, you know, up and running ASAP.
And it went from first phone call to CrowdStrike through marketplace
purchase and deployment same day.
And that speed is just completely unheard of.
And that was two years ago.
I can't imagine how quickly CrowdStrike is doing that stuff now.
But, you know, you tie all of these pieces together and it's
a win-win-win for every person and company involved.
No, that's great.
All right, so you had the trigger event.
You guys decide you're going into marketplace.
You guys are spread out across the globe.
How did you go about deciding what products you were going to sell?
Because you have a few that you sell.
And just what that was like to sort of spin up that motion to make
those decisions.
Absolutely.
So, right now, and I say right now, because we're trying to move as
quickly as possible to keep adding products, you know, as quickly
as possible.
And right now, products that we have available for purchase through
the EDVAS marketplace include data cloud, service cloud, sales
cloud, industry clouds, tableau, meal soft platform, signature
success, Slack, which was a recent addition and Heroku.
And all of this is making it easier for our customers to
subscribe and manage their Salesforce offerings.
And, you know, not everything in the Salesforce ecosystem is
available today, but we're absolutely working on it.
And, you know, structurally, we had to get creative on how to
offer such a wide variety of products without creating a
million different listings, right?
Because if you have one, two, three, four, five thousand SKUs,
you can't just make them all available.
That would be a nightmare.
So, you know, we want to make sure that our customers have an
easy purchasing experience, but at the same time, we want to
make sure that our operations are efficient as possible.
And both tackle and AWS have been terrific in assisting us in
finding really creative solutions to execute at the speed that
we're scaling and at the breadth of the products that we're
allowed.
We have available.
And then, you know, from a geo perspective, like most large
local corporations, we have multiple legal entities throughout
the globe.
And that is specifically to have the best experience for our
customers to buy in the way that has the least amount of
friction.
And we've structured our marketplace operations to match that.
And it has means -- sorry, means -- has meant that we had to do
a little bit more work up front.
We had to kind of duplicate some efforts because it's not all
operating under under one, you know, tackle account, so to
speak.
But it does set us up for success in all the different regions
that we operate.
Cool.
That's neat.
So, you know, we see a lot of infrastructure ISPs -- sorry,
cloud infrastructure ISPs that go to complement infrastructures
or services.
And, you know, Salesforce really is a business app that gets
deployed in, we'll say, critical business infrastructure for
revenue teams, obviously, right?
It's stuff that needs to be on 24/7.
So why a business app?
Why do you think business apps are taking off in terms of this
tectonic shift where buyers now want to buy their business apps
through cloud marketplace?
Yeah, it's evident in the amount of committed spend that these
businesses have.
And it really is a no-brainer when you're buying everything else
through marketplace that this was the next evolutionary step.
And I think a lot of this is coming through procurement teams,
right?
Procurement is now the new star of the show.
And that's kind of new for a lot of AEs in the field because
procurement normally is the last step and it's, you know, the end
boss before you get that contract signed.
And instead now procurement is kind of your ally because a lot of
the times that procurement team owns that committed number and
they now need to make sure that everything is flowing through
the marketplace so they can maximize the benefit of that
committed spend.
So, you know, one story, we did a deal last quarter and we were
working directly with the head of procurement and they really
became like the superhero involved in the deal.
They were able to bridge, you know, all the way up on their
side of the company and with us to showcase the value and
really maximize the total value of the deal and bring ahead
some things that weren't even planned until a future year.
So it was a really terrific opportunity for us and for them.
And then at the same time, you know, we really going forward,
we want to focus on those procurement individuals.
We want to, you know, get them into round tables and we want to
have these conversations because a lot of the time when you're
first interacting with the company and you're, you know,
building the value of selling through the marketplace, you don't
always get the right person right into the game.
So the person that you're speaking to may not even know or,
right, and they may not have the pressure of pushing everything
through the marketplace.
They don't know, but they're committed spend.
So we're trying to really focus on, you know, procurement as one
of the primary members of the entire deal transaction and getting
them in early so that we can, you know, build that relationship
because they're going to be an ally in this entire transaction.
Right.
That's fascinating.
The head of procurement being one of the key stakeholders
slash business decision makers for purchasing through the cloud.
That's great.
Thank you so much.
So how, you know, sales force has runs on sales force and how
important was it in your journey in implementing this integration
to get it right in terms of getting the ability to, to
get it right in terms of how you can transact in your sales force.
That's critical business infrastructure.
So sales forces, number one value is trust and it runs through our
entire DNA.
And that is one of the proudest things about, you know,
working for sales forces that I don't have any fears of waking up
in the morning and being in the news.
And it's really because trust is paramount in everything that we
do.
And trust is to ensure all of our infrastructure and our processes
are deeply integrated, tested, protected.
There's no shortcuts and we're trying to, you know, minimize
any manual work whatsoever.
It's trying to get everything automated as quickly as possible
so that everything is, you know, perfect because there's no room
for error when you were dealing with the trust of your customers.
And for us, we needed to make sure that end to end, everything
was airtight and scalable before we even opened the doors for
business.
And, you know, as a result of that, there was some more up front
work.
And I remember our, you know, initial conversations with Jillian
and team and we expressed, you know, what we needed up front.
And there was some nervous laughter in the room because it was
a different way of doing things.
I know that a lot of other companies have, you know, started in
an iterative process or they've been more flexible.
And that just really wasn't an option for us.
But, you know, Tacko was fantastic at adapting to our specific needs.
And together we did a lot of really amazing things differently
that made us possible for where we are today in our journey.
Yeah.
So I love that you said that because we talked to a lot of
customers about what the cultural transformation is to really take
on marketplace.
It's just not one small project.
It's sort of this enduring marathon that's now a new tool in
your kit for selling.
Can you talk about how you approach that shift amongst your
entire sales force, if you will?
And so I think it just a story from me.
When I was presented this opportunity to take on this project,
I, and this is, you know, absolutely true.
I told many people at the time that it felt like I had won the
lottery.
It was an absolute no-brainer to be able to, you know, be a part of a
project that was going to allow sales force to sell their
products through the marketplace and really deliver all this value
to our customers.
And it was clear to me on day one on how valuable that
opportunity was.
And that made it easy for me to advocate to others to sell
internally the value.
Because, you know, we are really doing huge earth changing
things.
And, you know, we're seeing the effects of that everywhere we go.
It wasn't always an easy ride.
There have been plenty of uphill battles.
But, you know, as soon as we had executive support aligned, it
was all gas and no brakes.
And I remember the exact day that, you know, everything flipped
and it went into high gear.
I was in Denver at a partnership conference.
It was August.
And I remember I had to leave the conference, like immediately.
I went to the Denver office.
I had never been to the Denver office before.
And I just immediately got locked into rooms and just, it was
zero to 60 doesn't do it justice.
It was like the rocket launch of zero to 17,500 miles an
hour.
Like, just absolutely crazy and how rapid everything scaled.
And, you know, Joe, you were long for the ride as well.
And tackle was right there ready to help us.
So that excitement then reverberated through, you know,
this giant team of people that we've been working with for this
long period of time.
And, you know, we did everything we could to move as fast as we
could.
And, you know, shout out to the amazing internal cross functional
teams at Salesforce to that we're able to, you know, pivot and
change and adapt.
And work and handle the craziness and also my bad jokes.
So, you know, shout it to them.
But we were able to accomplish some really amazing things in a
short period of time.
So the culture on the back end and the building and getting
everything ready.
I think we've always had a very terrific group of people that
understood and bought into the vision from day one.
Now, when you're talking about the field, that's an entirely
different situation, right?
So any time you're working with sales, the number one priorities
to ensure that you are showcasing and communicating the
value, what's in it for them, right?
How can they make more money faster and easier?
And I think thankfully the value proposition of purchasing through
the marketplace for the customer is just so tremendous that it
really wasn't a very hard sell.
A lot of the times we would go through and explain the benefits
to an A or enable session or something like that.
And a lot of the times the response that I would get was
what's the catch?
Like this is too good to be true.
And still, like it wasn't immediate because we do have a very
large field, we had to make sure that the value was
consistently showcased.
And we got some help along the way where the customer walked
up and said, "Hey, I want to immediately transfer and start
buying through the marketplace."
And that's fantastic.
But we really needed to get everyone excited and comfortable
about the value proposition.
And we've just done a whole tremendous amount of enablement
to make that happen.
Yeah.
Let's dig in a little deeper on that enablement.
I know there's a lot of tactics folks take to get sellers ready
to get the entire team ready.
Can you just go a layer deeper on how you approached your sellers
to get them spun up?
Absolutely.
So one of the benefits of launching this channel that we did,
the demand was established from day one.
We came in when the early adoption had kind of come and gone
and now we're into mass adoption territory.
That said, our partner marketing, product marketing,
and events teams, they have done an outstanding job at working
tirelessly to engage and enable our customers at every possible
interaction point.
So just some of the events that we've done recently,
we did TDX this year.
We just had a Tableau Conference in San Diego,
World Tour in New York, AWS Summit London,
and all of these events we've had enablement booths,
keynotes, break-out sessions, fireside chats,
just everything.
And then even still, in the immediate future,
we have connections coming up in May.
We have World Tour in June.
We have Cans Lions and AWS Summit in June as well.
So all of these opportunities have been fantastic at using the
events that Salesforce has been a part of to really focus on the
value of the marketplace.
And just a fun fact, as part of one of the booths,
there was a match game and I currently hold the world lowest
score at like 20 seconds.
So if you're at one of these upcoming events,
try to be my score.
First time too.
On the internal side, we're focusing on ramping up our sales
teams.
And one of the best ways that that's happening is through Slack.
So Slack is part of Salesforce.
And I'm a true user through and through.
I can't imagine a world in which we weren't using Slack.
It just seems so foreign to me now.
And one of the things we have, we have a dedicated marketplace
that we have to do is we have a platform where anyone in the
company can come in, they can ask questions.
And since December, we now have 2500 active users.
They've asked over a thousand questions.
And like it's not a channel where they jump in and jump out.
They jump in and they stay and they see the value.
And then another great thing about Slack is that when we have a
deal, right, something that's in flight, we open up a specific
platform where we have a customer engagement and everybody
jumps in.
The AEs, the sales teams, the back end people, the go to market
teams.
So everyone swarms together to collaborate on that.
And Slack is just absolutely fantastic for that.
So that's one area.
And then at the same time, for enabling the field, we've hosted
countless large scale and intimate enablement sessions with
the customer.
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We are like, "Okay, great.
Let's talk about it."
It was like, "No, we want to do it now."
That's the trend that we are starting to see more and more and more.
Going back to that procurement, once the right people figure out that this can
be done,
it's all of it.
Let's go.
That customer reaction has been truly fantastic.
Great.
Here's our final question for you.
There's been so much gold in this conversation.
You're definitely going to rewatch it and capture some of this.
If you were to summarize some of your advice on how to start and some tips and
tricks for other enterprises like Salesforce,
what would you say to them?
Before I answer, I will say, this is not a paid promotion whatsoever.
My first thing is, connect with tackle.
Tackle has been a fantastic partner for our journey.
I have no idea where we would be without them and specifically the likes of
Jill and Adam and the entire crew.
Definitely start there.
If you're looking for how to find tackle, there's events like this.
I've also heard many of them can be found at Buffalo related football events.
I was wondering when you were going to bring up the bill.
I will say that Tom Brady, his roast, definitely didn't.
I think the bills need to respond on some of his comments.
I digress.
No, in reality, tackle has been fantastic.
So definitely start there.
But in addition to reaching out to tackle, first and foremost, you need to get
top down executive support.
So you need leadership alignment to the long-term vision and realistic
expectations of activating this new sales channel.
And remember, it is a new sales channel.
It's not as simple as just launching a new SPF or like it's a long-term end-to-
end company-wide commitment.
It's going to take a bit of time.
And that's okay.
It's just that balance that you have to strike of getting executives excited
about something.
And getting that top down support and then getting the realization that this is
going to take some time and having the right resources in place to make sure
that you can hit the right speed.
So on the front end, you need to plan for resourcing, enablement, marketing,
comms, events, everything that you need to ensure the customer is aware of the
motion. Your teams are ready to engage and execute.
And then on the back end, this is where all the tough stuff happens.
And a lot of things people don't think about, you need to make sure everything
is working seamlessly together.
So product, tech programs, RevOps, RevRec, compliance, tax legal ethics, like
the list goes on and on and on.
And that can be tough to get that many people together, especially when it's
something completely new.
So the analogy that I used, there was a part of the company that we engaged
with late.
And we had to get them on board pretty quickly.
And the analogy I used was because we're new and refreshed and this is like the
thing.
It was the equivalent of a bunch of influencers dropping out of the helicopter
in a remote French villa and trying to burst down the doors and say, "Okay,
this is what we're doing.
Everyone needs to get on board and everyone in the French villa is like, excuse
me, slow down."
So upfront awareness is also key with all of the potential stakeholders because
you don't want to get caught needing to move quickly.
And then all of a sudden you hit some slower roadblocks and you have to educate
on what the marketplace is and what the value is.
So yeah, to summarize, bad analogies are great.
Top down executive support and general awareness, internal awareness are also
super fantastic.
And then at the same time, things are moving very quickly.
Tactical is releasing new features all the time.
The marketplaces are releasing new features all the time.
Your company may be releasing a whole bunch of stuff all the time.
So you need to be able to be adaptive and move with the changes, sometimes a
little bit faster than some people are used to.
And that's okay.
This is a very fast moving agile area of the business and it's definitely not a
set and forget experience.
But again, the way that I started this is it felt like I was winning the
lottery and I still, I feel that more and more each day that this is an amazing
opportunity.
And I have the privilege of working with such an amazing team within our own
walls and sales force and then also with great partners like tackle and AWS.
Thanks, Robert. That's just fantastic. This is Robert car bomb director of
marketplace strategy and business operations with myself and Jillian McNerney. One of our product managers has been leading the engagement with sales force.
Thank you so much today everyone.
I'd like to take a moment to thank you. Thank everyone for being part of the
cloud go to market XP event.
We hope you've found the past two days to be insightful and form of and
inspiring. I mean, there's so much goal in all of these events customer stories
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We've had the privilege of hosting engaging sessions and thought provoking key
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We really do believe we are the thought leaders here in the category creation
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and successful. This event would not be possible without your participation and
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Thank you all for making this event one to remember, which in you all the very
best.
Thank you.
Thank you.