MARK3082 Strategic Marketing
Task:
The Strategy & Innovation team at Salesforce is looking to expand Salesforce presence in India by putting together a plan that can accelerate growth over the next 5 years. Achieving growth means building scale at different levels - people, product, market, solutions, business models, customer success, partners, just to name a few. The goal is to reach an ARR growth target of 10x in 5 years time, by uniformly increasing Salesforce footprint across Enterprise, Mid-Market and ESMB segments across geographies and across all solution offerings. Salesforce is uniquely positioned to address the challenge many of the organisations face today to get on a digital journey, especially after the pandemic.
The go-to-market strategy for different segments has to be aligned with the newer technological developments in the market and also keeping in mind the local and global competition they face. Customers from different segments are handled by focused sales teams, who have monthly targets to be achieved. Salesforce sells multiple cloud products (both native and acquired), and there is a focus on multi-cloud engagements with customers. Most of these projects are implemented and executed by the Salesforce partners, making the partner ecosystem a valuable part of the growth strategy. Furthermore, since Salesforce works on a subscription model, customer retention is of prime importance. Salesforce has a large CSG business unit which ensures customer satisfaction across parameters like adoption, usage, renewals, etc.
Salesforce has entered the Indian market back in 2006 by selling predominantly through the online-only channel, but has accelerated the growth in the market from 2012 by hiring direct sales teams and onboarding resellers for penetration into tertiary markets.
The company started focusing simultaneously on Enterprise, Commercial and ESMB segments to begin with and has seen tremendous growth across the board. Enterprise segment in Salesforce is defined as the Top 10% businesses in India, the Commercial segment as businesses with more than 150 employees, and the ESMB segment as businesses with less than 150 employees.
Enterprise and Commercial segments primarily focus on building and increasing the revenue for the organization while the ESMB segment focuses on acquiring as many new customers as possible for Salesforce. The ESMB charter also focuses on bringing in future unicorns to the business.
The attrition of existing customer business is a concern among all the three segments, and low penetration of the Premier customer support package, along with the customer adoption challenges are estimated to contribute towards this challenge.
The team also wants to strengthen the Partner ecosystem along with bringing in Salesforce expertise to support the business.
[1] ARR - Annual Recurring Revenue: A key metric used by SaaS or subscription businesses that have term subscription agreements, meaning there is a defined contract length
[2] ESMB - Emerging, Small And Medium Business: In Salesforce India, defined as businesses with less than 150 employees
[3] CSG - Customer Success Group: A separate business unit with a mandate to ensure success amongst the customers who choose to implement and adopt any Salesforce product as part of their technology stack
[4] Premier Support - Paid packages provided to consumers to gain access to additional customer support like 24/7 technical support, expert coaching, etc.
