“We Love Disruption”
Salesforce is perhaps the commercial world’s leading sales support and customer management software platform.
The company’s chief, Marc Benioff (hmmm, does The Agitator have a thing for ‘Marc’s’ this week?) knows a thing or two about managing customer relationships. You might think in terms of donor relationships.
Here are some observations he shared during a recent on-stage interview at the Consumer Electronics Show, as reported on Marketing Land …
You Have To Connect To The Cloud
Eight things companies need to consider: Social, Touch, Local, Analysis, Identity, Ecosystems, Community, Cloud.
Social Media More Than Stalking; It’s Your Dishwasher Asking For Help
Soon your dishwasher will be calling for help — it will be connected to the cloud, and when there’s a problem, it will automatically signal a service center, and you’ll get a call before you know you have the problem.
[How can you be more alert to donors signaling problems?]
Customer Service: “The New Marketing”
“You don’t want me on Twitter [saying] that Samsung, it didn’t work.” You want problems to be easily solved for you. Then someone gets on Twitter, and you’re going to say, I love Samsung, I love Toyota. “That’s marketing … that is the new marketing.”
Connecting Beyond Email & Token Efforts
Says Benioff: “How are you connected with your customer, your partners, your employees. Email? Those days are over.” He’s not knocking email; rather, saying it’s not nearly enough.
Trust As Number One Value
For companies, Benioff lists trust as value #1, followed by growth and innovation. He praises “disruption” — “…we love disruption. It’s the heart of what we do.”
Philanthropy: The Best Drug
Salesforce puts 1% of earnings into charity, and makes its platform available to nonprofits for free. Says Benioff: “You want to feel great every day … that grace that comes up inside you every day … philanthropy is the best drug you can take.”
Amen!
Tom
4 responses to ““We Love Disruption””
Behavioral Science Q & A
Integrating an individual giving appeal with other communications from a charity can have both positive and negative effects, and the outcome largely depends on how it’s executed. Advantages of Integration Brand Consistency: Maintaining a consistent appearance and messaging across all communications can reinforce the org’s brand identity and strengthen brand recognition and trust among your […]
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I’m not aware of any in-market tests specifically comparing recurring vs. gift frequency language. I suspect the answer might not be the same with all gift frequencies, nor with all people. It sounds like a great opportunity for you to test and find out what works for your audience. Based on the literature, here’s a couple […]
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Based on what we know from existing data, those renewal notices can actually be pretty effective in getting people to donate. They tap into our psychology – creating a sense of urgency, reminding us of past support, and using personalization to make the message hit home. They’re playing on our natural tendencies to feel obligated […]
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Interesting question. I had a quick look at the testing done on this topic. On the positive side, in all cases, over half of donors decide to cover the fee. In some cases, it goes as high as 65%. Not a negligible percentage at all. Here’s another test from iRaiser showing consistent results (see point […]
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There’s just one thing to consider when designing a supporter journey: the supporter. More specifically, you need to take into account: Who the supporter is i.e. their identity, which is the reason they support this cause, and their personality, which describes the way they “see” and process the world. These will determine the kind of […]
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I’m not an expert in this but a quick search surfaced this article on the effect of tax reforms on 2019’s charitable giving. The researchers didn’t find a reduction. Actually, they observed an “increase in charitable contributions in 2019, even with the lower tax rates and the dramatically smaller number of taxpayers who itemize their […]
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Maybe it is my old school relationship banking training from many moons ago, but customer service isn’t the new marketing – it is the first marketing and always has been. No?
BTW, did you ask Marc to keep working on that nonprofit platform? We have SF, and it is okay, but the reporting functions stink for our development needs.
Let me pick a minor nit on this. We were burned using the Cloud. Lost a lot of data when the service we were using was closed unexpectedly. So I’m not ready to convert to the Gospel of the Cloud is Great yet. As with any new technology, don’t put all your eggs in the cloud basket.
Commenting about the above two.
Cloud or having your IT team (if you have any) hosting your data — both needs to be well managed.
You start by choosing well the provider you plan to work with. Some key items in conducting your due-diligence are:
Check references, review audits and SAS-70 reports or similar, create a contingency plan to accommodate for potential loss of data, potential transfer to another hosting facility, once running make sure data backups are transferred periodically to different location, bottom line you need to manage it and be in control of your system.
Service is always the best marketing – have your clients sell you because they are happy. Kim – I’m fully with you, this is not innovation nor disruption, just good old common sense.
Dear Tom,
No bigger fan of The Agitator can be found, but I have to second an opinion.
Fair enough that you had the CEO of Blackbaud speaking last week, and this week you have Sales Force, who “gives it away for free.”
But I second all three comments above: a) none of what Marc is saying is really new; but even more important b) Sales Force’s “free” offer (and push for “cloud solutions”) has *disrupted* many offices that I work with from being willing to invest in software that is built with NGO’s in mind, not back-engineered from a program that is built for, well, a sales force. As Kim says, the reporting alone shows some of the problems we see.
If we agree that “customer relationships” are the most important thing in our business, then we recognize that those relationships are more and more going to be mediated and defined by data, the little (now digital) trail of information that is ‘left over’ after we actually interact with another human being, via a digital medium or anything else.
When my offices call and say they have free copies of SF for use, I tend to say “Be careful, you get what you pay for.” Our office in Poland wants to use it, but needs to spend 50K euros to get it “refined” well enough to work with the banks in their market, and have good monthly donor reporting. That’s far from free.
I’m happy to dialogue with Marc on this point – I speak with Blackbaud regularly.
If he wants to help charities, then help us: we want a “relationship”, not a “hand out”. That’s *old-fashioned* charity.
With all due respect,
Mitch Hinz
WWF