The business software market is on course for some significant ripples in the coming months, following a recent announcement that two high-profile brands, Salesforce and Google, will now be joining forces.
The partnership was announced early in November 2017, just over a year after Salesforce committed to a similar partnership with Amazon Web Services in May 2016. The new deal with Google suggests that the digital platform will be moving a portion of its business into the Google framework in the coming months, supporting their “multi-cloud” strategy for development.
As per the partnership, both Google and Salesforce have committed to using each other’s products going forward. While Salesforce adopts the Google cloud infrastructure as a way of expanding its core sales services for online marketers, Google will be tapping into the popular Salesforce platform for future projects.
Experts suggest that access to the insights available from Google Analytics could provide a considerable boost to Salesforce’s already competitive marketing products.
An Industry-First Integration
According to the Executive Vice President for Strategic Accounts and Business Development at Salesforce, Ryan Aytay, the integration represents a one-of-a-kind partnership in the software market. While the collaboration with Amazon in 2016 might have had a similar theme, this new collaboration is much more in-depth, bringing Google and Salesforce together towards a shared goal.
Aytay noted that together, both brands would be focusing on making their customers, smarter, and more productive with a suite of newly-combined tools. Thanks to Google Analytics 360, companies using the Salesforce Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Google network will be able to connect their sales, marketing, and advertising data more seamlessly than ever.
The agreement dictates that Salesforce will continue to use Google G Suite as it’s “preferred partner” for productivity and email software. Subsequently, Google will carry on using Salesforce as its primary source for “CRM” or Customer Relationship Management software.
What Does the Partnership Mean for Customers?
Chairman and CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, announced that the partnership with Google represents an opportunity to give their clients the “best of both worlds” when it comes to cloud computing and marketing resources.
Both Google and Salesforce agree that their customers have been requesting the partnership for some time now. Though Google has previously offered its customers a range of open APIs that allow them to build their own solutions on top of the Google Analytics framework, it’s never been able to open the product up to such a significant integration before now.
The combination of Salesforce and Google tools will mean that marketers in the online world will have the opportunity to combine the data they receive from information like visitor traffic and behaviour, with customer profiles in their Salesforce platform. This will make it easier for businesses to personalise their ads for diverse customer segments.
Salesforce CEO for “Marketing Cloud”, Bob Stutz says that while customers have tried to use Google Analytics alongside Salesforce in the past, the integration was too problematic to make the process worthwhile, until now.
Simplified, Customised Marketing
With the collaboration between Google and Salesforce in place, marketers will be able to create their own custom audience in their Analytics 360 panel, before pushing those personas into their marketing cloud, where they can be activated across a range of channels like email, and mobile.
Additionally, the partnership ensures that Analytics 360 data can be accessed directly from within the Salesforce marketing cloud. This means that marketers can log into a single holistic dashboard for customer engagement information, instead of jumping between disparate platforms.
The idea is that this new connection will give marketers the opportunity to improve visibility into the sales cycle, and potentially create better customer experiences through ad optimisation and smarter audience segments.
Google is hoping that their partnership with Salesforce will also help to boost user adoption for their G Suite platform of office software, which is currently competing with tools like Dropbox, Box, and Microsoft Office 365. As a result, Google is promoting a chance for any Salesforce customer not using G Suite to get the service free-of-charge for a year.
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