M+E Daily

With Salesforce’s “renewed focus on” the business-to-consumer (B2C) segment, it has seen increased “momentum and interest” in that space, according to Tyler Prince, its EVP of industries, innovation and partners.

“B2C and digital market and focus on the consumer has become incredibly important and there’s a whole world of important partners in the agency world,” he said June 26 at a New York investor event called “Salesforce 360: An Afternoon with Salesforce, Its Ecosystem Partners & Customers.”

Prince “came on board five years ago to really set the path for the next evolution of our partner strategy” at Salesforce, he told attendees. That includes consulting partners “big and small,” including “several thousands” of companies globally, as well as digital agencies, he said.

Salesforce is also “seeing collaboration and migration from traditional consulting system integrators into the world of digital as well,” he said.

The last part of Salesforce’s partner business that Prince is responsible for is its reseller strategy, he said, adding: “There’s certainly markets around the world where we don’t have a large direct presence” now, such as in emerging countries including Indonesia and the Philippines, “where we’ve chosen to align very closely with local partners in that market to really help us accelerate” its presence in that space.

Prince also focuses on Salesforce’s industries strategy that was announced in 2014, he noted.

While announcing that strategy in April 2014, Salesforce said it was “aimed at accelerating the company’s growth and transforming the way companies across key industries connect with their customers.” The company set up an Industries Business Unit that it said at the time was “delivering social, mobile and connected cloud solutions for six global industries – financial services/insurance, health care/life sciences, retail/consumer products, communications/media, public sector and automotive/manufacturing.”

Its strategy included “growing a team of industry experts, developing an ecosystem of preferred partners and creating transformational solutions that leverage the power” of the Salesforce 1 Platform “to address the major challenges for each sector,” it said.

Also speaking at the investor event June 26, Polly Sumner, Salesforce chief adoption officer, noted she joined the company about 10 years ago. At that point, she recalled: “We were less than a billion-dollar company. We were predominantly North American, predominantly mid-market, [had] no industry focus” and had “pretty much a single product portfolio.” It also had just a small group of partners at that point, she said.

Despite growing significantly since then, Salesforce still sees plenty of room for additional growth, she went on to say, pointing out: “Most of our customers do not use all of our products” at this time. For example, many customers in international markets are not yet using the Salesforce automation cloud yet, she noted. Therefore, she said: “We have a big opportunity to grow that footprint in almost every company, regardless of size, regardless of industry, regardless of location.”