What I Learned Building Salesforce+
Colin Fleming is the EVP of Global Marketing at Salesforce and the mind behind Salesforce+. In this fireside chat with Anthony Kennada he talks about his learnings from building the first B2B streaming platform that also happened to generate $600 million in pipeline for Salesforce.
Colin Fleming is EVP worldwide marketing at Salesforce, where he leads a 600-
plus person
global marketing team responsible for brand, events, campaigns, and advertising
, content,
creative, and so much more. And in addition to his many award-winning accolades
, Colin and his team
are responsible for launching Salesforce Plus, a streaming service that
includes both live,
experiences, original series, podcasts, and some other programming as well. I
think about Salesforce
Plus as the initial shot that started the own media revolution. And so I'm so
excited to talk
to him today. So please welcome to the stage Colin Fleming.
[Applause]
[Music]
So thank you so much for being here.
Will. Will Hotline.
Everybody else got Beastie Boys.
I know. That was the walkout music. I kind of, I don't know, feel left out.
Well, we can do a quick edit for a walkoff.
Nice song. How's that work?
Sounds good.
But on those, on that note, what I love hearing about is marketer origin
stories. And for folks
who don't have a traditional marketing background, kind of how they got into
the practice,
and I believe, Colin, you're a race car driver for Red Bull Racing.
Yeah, it's a natural career progression for.
So keep talking a little bit more about that and just how that experience kind
of shaped you into
the marketer. Yeah, happy to. Yeah, age of eight years old.
I turned on a Formula One race in Monaco, I believe it was, and I was just
hooked.
Absolutely hooked. So I was born and raised in California.
It's not a whole lot of Formula One racing happening in California.
So long story short, ended up moving to Europe at a very young age.
13 years old. You know, started racing go-karts professionally,
which was a crazy, crazy leap. And it turns out that racing is a very expensive
sport.
And I ended up spending more time with CMOs at 13, 15, 17 than I did driving
race cars.
And so I learned very quickly what mattered and more importantly, what didn't
matter to CMOs.
And so yeah, I raised almost $40 million in personal sponsorship.
Was a test driver for Red Bull Formula One team, racing Formula Three and
Formula Two.
Had an unbelievable run, got right on the cusp of Formula One.
And this kid called Sebastian Vettel came along and heard of a punk.
They ended up picking him over me. You know what?
He, you can't argue, they did a damn good job. He went on to win four world
championships.
And I turned to Salesforce. It was a natural transition as you do.
No, I decided to take all of the lessons I had learned, raising money,
figuring out what CMOs cared about, and turn it into what's been a pretty fun
ride.
And 13 years of Salesforce, it's been a really fun journey.
That's awesome. Again, the road led you to Salesforce, SPP of worldwide
marketing.
You need to celebrate 25 years, I think since the founding of Salesforce.
Obviously an iconic and generational brand.
Now, one of the big initiatives at Salesforce that you were
responsible for was Salesforce Plus. So take us back to those internal meetings
for Salesforce Plus came about. What were some of the trends that you were
seeing that led to it?
Yeah, I mean, you touched on it in your presentation earlier, 2020. We're all,
I've got two young kids that during the pandemic, my son was one and my
daughter was four.
It's been every morning like we all did on my Peloton bike. I dialed into Zoom
for eight
hours, 10 hours a day. And then I turned on Netflix. Maybe drank a little
alcohol at the same time.
Not on the Peloton. Not on the Peloton.
Yeah, sometimes. And we would try to figure out stuff that was interesting to
watch on Netflix.
And I was like, what was really interesting is, you know, we quickly burned
through all of the
sitcoms and all the content that wasn't being produced at that point. And one
of the things that
sort of became obvious to me was there's not a lot of business content on here.
There's nothing that really is inspiring that I can truly learn from or how to
deal with
this unprecedented situation we found ourselves in. And so we kind of went to
work the next day
and asked ourselves what would happen if the community development of Peloton
and the
incredible on-demand part of Peloton met the Netflix side. And what would that
look like in
business? And literally we call it Pelo Flix Force. Initially it was like the
code made,
Pelo Flix Force. And started to build it. Did not ask for permission. Just went
build it. And
there's many people that said it couldn't be done. Many people that said it was
a bad idea.
I may have been some of those people at some point. And we built something we
found a little
success with. And we're really happy about it. I think one of the things that
we quickly built
at two and a half months, it was duct tape and chewing gum as most things are
at launch.
And we were talking the other day. When we launched it, it broke within the
first three weeks. And
we took a page at a Disney Plus actually. Salesforce was founded on this whole
idea of it.
It should be as easy to use as is to buy a book on Amazon. Very consumer
oriented. And so we
turned to the consumer world for inspiration. And what we took a lot of
inspiration from is
whenever we launched Disney Plus, they launched with Hamilton as like the main
launch thing. And
so we picked Dreamforce. Dreamforce is our user. It's our golden hour. Slightly
larger than this one.
For now, Dreamforce is a couple hundred thousand person software conference in
terms of the largest
technology conference in the world. And we use that as our launch moment. And
built an audience,
felt really good. And then broke. We had no pipeline for the first year because
it broke
authentication broke during Dreamforce. And so we had a pill battle for it. But
it was a lot of fun.
We fed a lot of fun, Jordan. >> To double click on it, you were talking in the
prep about just the
connection to events and just the level of global scale that introduced. Is
this a couple words
about that? >> It's been said that Salesforce is an events company that might
just sell software
on the side. We do 500 plus events per year. It is a huge part of my life. It's
what I think
about all day long. And so it might be the first piece of advice I would give
to this team is just
think about what is your company's special area of focus and expertise. For
Salesforce's events,
for some of you, maybe something else. Maybe Dementia or content orientation or
whatever it may be.
And so we just picked the natural place to hook it to, if you will. There was
already built-in momentum.
There was a built-in brand that made for an easy transition for us. >> That
makes a lot of sense.
>> And you did mention there was no buy-in internal. There was no approval
process. There was no
committee. This happened. In your mind, or as you guys were just maybe as it
launched or coming off
of the launch, was there a connection to the revenue pipeline side of it as the
true north
for this one at the beginning? Or was brand the driver? >> You mentioned Sales
force is 25 years old,
which I guess makes this adult company, let's say. I'm not going to go old, but
an adult company.
We suffer from the same thing you articulated in your presentation earlier. We
've got forms in front
of content for days. All of our leads go to an SCR to be followed up until they
get nurtured to
the point where they get to a BDR, an account executive, and three months later
, things get
into play. That happened. It's a real thing at a large $200 billion company.
And we saw a small window of opportunity to kind of break that. There was a
little moment
during the pandemic where we couldn't rely on that anymore. Events had shut
down and were like,
now's the time. Now's the time you mentioned. There's a new playbook. Why don't
we write the new
playbook? I didn't tell my CMO. We just went and built Salesforce Plus. I
showed her the prototype
about two weeks before launch and she's like, go, this is awesome. You didn't
have to shut it down
anyway, so just go. It was a lot of fun. I hope we built a little momentum
along the way.
We talked about the playbook. There's a lot of playbooks that live and then
dive very quickly.
I thought that might be the case, but we thought we'd give it the old college
try. We built something
really special. It did $600 million in pipeline last year. So the playbook's
got some future,
folks. And so we're really excited about what we've been able to do with it.
And now we've pivoted,
we've grown, we've learned, and I'll share some of those lessons as well. But
the playbook has
got some promise. And so we're going to keep building it. Well, let's talk
about the learnings,
because I think what's pretty cool is for most of us in this room, we're on
like step one or two.
And you have two and a half years of having this out into the world and two and
a half years of
learnings and curious kind of what, if there's anything you would be willing to
share, what you
guys are learning so far to two and a half years in. You know, it's been really
funny.
The hook to events has been really powerful for us, because you mentioned it's
this gold mine
of incredible content. There was a natural built-in audience for us. And one of
the best things
that Salesforce has done, which I can see you doing with Golden Hour, is using
events as a forcing
function for not just the content, or not just the marketing organization, but
for the company at
large. So in Salesforce, all of our product development, our sales functions,
all of our
marketing organization revolves around Dreamforce. Everything. I can get
anything done in the company
if I just say the word Dreamforce. And so that's really interesting. So we use
events as a really
strong wedge into it as well. But you know, that's a moment in time. We want to
build a subscriber
base that we can nurture and keep coming back. And so we've dabbled with
original series,
original programming. We've done almost 100 awards from that original program
we've put together.
So I'm really proud of the studios team that we've developed. And we hired
people from outside
of enterprise software. I hired a producer from the David Axelrod podcast from
ABC News.
We just went out and just did the consumer world analogy. And so really
thinking about what types
of content really resonates. We've seen a really interesting learning and
attention spans.
I mean, it was short before, but it's like crazy now. The average piece of
content we have on
Salesforce Plus is six and a half minutes. Think about our events. 30 minutes
scheduled by 30
minutes, maybe an hour long session. Six minutes. And that's for the original
programming. But here's
an interesting learning. You're like, okay, now everything's got to be shorter.
But what we've
learned is long form really works too. Interesting. The average watch time
during Dreamforce,
I had to check the three times because it didn't make sense to me.
154 minutes of average watch time on Salesforce Plus during Dreamforce.
So it just shows that when you put rigor and intent on high quality content,
people will hang on. That's why we all binge on shows on Netflix or whatever.
So those consumer world analogies do hold true. And this is where one of the
things that we've
learned a lot is there is literally no separation between B2B and B2C. The
humans,
this business is human, isn't it? And that same person that's buying or filling
out that RFP is
the same person buying all these Nike's you all seem to be walking around in.
And I think those
consumers exhibit the same behavior as business decision makers. And so why not
produce content
that resonates to both of them? I totally agree. And it's so awesome to hear
you kind of about
how validate that. I'm curious where you're going with it. Like where you're
headed. Like what's
a peek into the future kind of for Salesforce Plus? You know, we're continuing
to experiment,
learn lessons, some of the original programming has worked and we're really
proud of it. Some of
it hasn't. And so we try to operate in it very much like a pilot-like scenario.
We call it
tactics dictate strategy at Salesforce, but you see it in Hollywood or just pop
pilots and
we'll produce something. And if it's got promised, we'll double down and build
it. And if it fails,
we just move on. And that's really hard for all of us. And as a career marketer
myself,
you get emotionally attached to something. You're like, oh, I got to do this
thing.
Because I started it. Nobody cares. Nobody cares if it's not working move on
and do something else.
And I think that that's something that we've tried to exhibit. It's kind of
just fail fast
type of mentality. We've seen a huge growth in our international audience with
Salesforce Plus,
so the owned media environment. We mentioned Dreamforce before. We've a couple
hundred
thousand people registered for Dreamforce. Before the pandemic, we'll get
roughly 20 countries
represented, which we're really proud of. This is a global event. Amazing. Last
year,
we had 154 countries represented watching Dreamforce. And so you just start to
see the
unprecedented global reach that you can really, when you reduce the friction
and you make it so
that people don't have to pop on planes or find the big expense to travel to
San Francisco,
or wherever your event may be, that's fascinating. And so we've learned a lot
around flattening the
world. Really learned a lot around duration of content. And we've also doing a
lot more virtual
events. So today we're launching a big, big virtual event. We've got almost 20,
000 people
registered for a truly virtual event launching our data cloud product. And so
we'll continue to do
little things like that. It's better than a webinar, not quite a produced event
like this,
and a lot of efficiencies in that for sure. That's awesome. You know, one thing
I'm thinking is
for the folks on the AV team, we had a mic that we can pass around. We'd love
to see if the audience
has any questions as well for Colin. But Colin, one of the things to ask, we
didn't hear this,
sales. Like, how does the sales team, how do you work with sales? Yeah. When
you work at a company
called Salesforce, that's pretty important. We have 15,000 accounting
executives.
A lot of mouths to feed. And so, yeah, of course, we could not have launched a
product like this
without, or a platform like this, without thinking about sales. And so one of
the more
interesting things we do that you and I were talking about is, of course, we
host Dreamforce,
and it's a huge, a huge ROI driver for us. We spent a lot of money on it, but
we
retrieve a lot of money back in terms of pipeline and interest for sure, is we
find a lot of
intense data on our platform as well. And if somebody's watching a piece of
original programming or a
specific session at Dreamforce, we send a Slack message to the A.E. Like, hey,
your account,
or your lead is on watching the Stata Cloud broadcast or attending this event,
right in their Slack
profile. And oh my gosh, you wouldn't believe the kind of behavior that that
drives. And so,
just little things like that, if you're on the pricing page, boom, you got a
Slack message.
Somebody's watching a series on Salesforce Plus, boom, Slack message. So there
's trying to
provide signals to the noise, but just one little piece of intent, they get a
monthly summary that
talks about where their accounts are at on the platform, what they seem to be
interested in,
and there's a lot of interest that, you know, intent data that gets surfaced as
part of that as
well. >> That's so powerful. And I think that's, you know, a big part of the
missing link that
we've seen historically, just publishing everything to like a YouTube channel
or something of the
like. So powerful, so you're activating the first party data. >> You know, too
much of this,
this is a word of caution, if I can. I think a lot of people that don't really
understand the 95.5
rule or don't understand the sort of content marketing push is like, okay, we
produced all
this content of this event, just put it on the YouTube graveyard to die, and we
'll move on with
our day. And like, that's not a strategy. It doesn't work. Don't do it. And so,
that's something
that you've got to build content specific or channel specific content. Like, we
take all of our
Dreamforce content, only a few percent of it goes on YouTube. Because it's not
built for the
platform, we take the time and effort to customize it, sometimes recapture it,
and put it in the
language of YouTube, if you will, because it performs a lot better. >> Any
folks have any questions? We
have some folks with the mics. Yeah, great. >> Where we at? Where's the mic? >>
Oh, we start here on the front.
>> What was the team composition when you first started Salesforce Plus, and
then how did it
evolve to today? >> The team composition was, I tapped people on the shoulder
as I walked around.
Actually, it wasn't walk around the office. I just slacked message people, I'm
like,
hey, what are you doing? No, pretty small. We didn't hire anybody to do Sales
force Plus.
We had already had a little bit of an event technology team in play, and we
just started with a vision.
And I think that's one thing that I've learned is, we didn't have the resources
, we didn't have
the team in place. I just sent a little video out to the team, and I said, I
want to do this.
And brought some people, we want to do something really different. And when you
put together an
inspiring vision, people just ran towards it. I was having to tell people to
back off,
because it was something new and something exciting. And so I'm very fortunate
to have a
large organization, Salesforce, that might not be always the case. But it
always starts with
having a crystal clear vision. And I think you'll drive people to go nights and
weekends and above
and beyond when that vision is there. But in terms of the team dynamic, we did
hire from some
consumer world environments, ABC News, podcast environments, CBS, ESPN, that
helped a lot.
We hired some consumer worlds. UI leads as well, because enterprise software
does some things well.
User interfaces and consumer technology is not one of them generally. And so we
hired it from
outside the industry a little bit to be able to do some interesting things. And
we just
filled fast, and we learned, and we put it in a small platform, build it to be
something powerful,
and we continue to develop it. And now it's been amazing to see companies that
are
sort of following suit with their own passion. And one of the things that I'm
anxious about now is we haven't done fast enough beyond video as well. We've
done the video thing
I think decently well, but the opportunity to do longer form content, different
types of content
is really the future. So we're kind of heading that direction now. Is he no
longer?
Mike? Oh, hi. Hi. Hi. So you talked a lot about eyeball, how tricky it is to
hold on to the
med staff, and as we develop this language of not just to be the C type of...
...that I'm walking with each other through video. What's holding on to your
program?
Oh, I have the attention span of an ant. TikTok. TikTok group. Yeah.
When I feel like I'm getting sufficient value from something, I will absolutely
spend the time.
I'm really inspired by LinkedIn, actually. It's been amazing. You know, outside
of our world,
people kind of turn their nose up at LinkedIn, like especially my leadership.
They're like,
what are you talking about? People with khaki pants all LinkedIn all day long.
Apologies for anybody as a khaki pants on today. But there's incredible value
of craters in this
room and beyond that are just doing really inspiring stuff. And so I get really
inspired by
consumer world brands. I don't turn to my competitors. I don't care about what
Microsoft is doing.
I don't care about what Oracle Air State P is doing. I really don't care. It
doesn't matter to me.
I want to know what you as consumers are doing, where you're spending your time
with
inspire you. And if I could provide a little bit of value to you, you're going
to join me in that 95%
of audience that will eventually at some point will want to buy some CRM. And I
think that just
providing value, it's not about putting a form complete in front of work. That
does have to happen
occasionally, but provide value and the rest kind of takes care of itself.
Want an eye over there?
Yeah. Do you only produce shows yourself or have you also considered acquiring
shows of creators
that are already putting a show out there and just basically paying them to
acquire the concept
and then have content be created for you? Yeah, we do a little bit of both. We
produce our own
content, but we've also done quite a bit of partnering. We did a series with
Fortune called
Eco-Preneurs, that one content marketing program of the year. This last two
years actually.
We do with the Pivot Podcast and the Vox Network with Cara Swisher and Scott
Galloway.
Lots of fun there. Scott's an HR nightmare. But he's really talented and
powerful. So I think
we do a little bit of both. It just depends where the subject matter expertise.
If we feel like we
have sufficient knowledge to provide that value as I was talking about before,
we'll produce it
internally because I think there's some cost efficiencies there occasionally.
But if we think
that the expertise is elsewhere, we'll do it there as well. One quick question
called to
recall from our prep. We were talking about this idea of identity as well as a
function of
own media because we so often think about the content itself as well, which is
of course a key
driver of that engagement. But solving the problem of identifying these real
humans who are engaging
with the content, whose relationship may one day end at their current employer.
But we still want
to continue to keep them within our broader audience. We can even philosoph
ically just
to this idea of identity and just how you think about the importance of it.
Yeah, identity is everything. For too long we've put form completes in replace
for identity.
It's two very different concepts. Form complete is there to generate a lead. So
the sales can
call down. Identity is to start to build a relationship. One of the things that
's really
interesting is we've lost a lot of really great interaction with people because
frankly
we just focused on form completes. So we started to do is really think about,
okay, how do we start to build a relationship video as an audience? We started
with, okay,
we'll just take our product identity. Whatever you use to log in. But guess
what happens when
should Anthony leave gain sight and come to create audience plus? Gone. And so
we started to think
about what does an identity look like to create that maybe persists. And so we
've created this
platform called Troubles ID that allows us to track with humans. No matter
where their career
takes them or whatever happens and I understand that when Anthony or somebody
else changes his
job, that might be a really great opportunity to surface them interesting
content or about,
you know, how to onboard what's your first 90 days look like. You know, what is
the skills you
might need to take to your new career. Those things are really fascinating. And
so identity is a
pain in the ass and it's really challenging. But if you've been on any retail
site in the last
20 years, what happens right when you log in? Give us your email address and we
'll give you 20%
off, right? They're trying to build a subscriber base. That's important for us
in B2B2. And so
we've got to focus there. Well, good time for one final question here. You know
what, I was sort
of reflecting on in the opening. It's been a trying few years for us just
broadly as a practice. I'm
curious if, you know, what you would say to somebody in the room today that
might be a content
marketer or a demand marketer carrying a pipeline target, a CMO. Who's watching
this and is sort of
encouraged by the future of marketing. They actually feel like there's
something here like,
what would you say to them just about, you know, the role of the marketer
moving forward in this
new world. I love what you said earlier and I'll just sort of reiterate it. It
's just like break the
playbook. We have to move on from the 25-year-old playbook. We have to. And
there's all kinds of
red tape in our way. But we've got to find ways to move on. And I think we've
got to speak the
language of the business and understand it's not just like, oh, we're going to
remove all forms
from everything we do and everything's going to work out. That doesn't work
that way. Companies
have to generate revenue. We have to connect what we do to revenue, but it
doesn't always have to be
in front of a phone complete. So I think that we just have to break them old a
little bit. I think
number one, number two is the thing that I'm really passionate about. And I've
been on a bit of a
rampage on this one last couple of years, which is stop apologizing for being a
B2B marketer.
For some reason in our heads, we've built it up. I assume most of your NB2B,
but I think it applies
to B2C as well. That in some reason B2B has accepted that we can operate at a
lower bar
than B2C. That's OK. Why? Why is that OK? We drive more than the economy than B
2C does.
So why not play there? And so I think it's really inspiring for me to just
think about there's a
whole new generation of B2B marketers that are going to start to think like
that and start to
really challenge the world in terms of really set this new status quo for what
B2C or B2B excellence
can look like. And so I really get inspired by what's ahead of us and what we
can all do together.
And I think events like this and communities like what we've built are really
powerful. And so
challenge status quo builds something really special. All right, well, let's
give it up for
Colin Fleming. Thank you so much Colin. Thank you.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
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