In a recent announcement, Salesforce unveiled its new all-in-one CRM solution, “Starter”, designed with the needs of small and growing businesses in mind. Starter combines the functionalities of sales, service, and marketing in a single solution and is the next iteration of Salesforce Easy, which was launched last year as Salesforce’s first product led growth (PLG) offering. By bringing these capabilities together in a simpler package, Salesforce believes that it can provide important capabilities to these businesses for managing customer relationships, centralizing critical data, and fostering efficient growth. The solution provides an easy-to-use user interface (UI) featuring guided onboarding, reporting templates, unified customer data, built-in AI, and pre-built dashboards.

Here’s an announcement from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that may have slipped by you this week. The SEC adopted new rules requiring public companies to disclose material cybersecurity incidents and provide annual information on their cybersecurity risk management, strategy, and governance; and includes foreign private issuers as well. The goal is to provide investors with consistent, comparable, and useful cybersecurity information in a timely manner.

The digital landscape has rapidly evolved over the years, with technology like Artificial Intelligence (AI) finding itself at the forefront of innovation. However, these advancements aren't solely beneficial. The dark underbelly of this progress is that malicious entities are leveraging these tools to conduct highly sophisticated cyberattacks. The increasing risk of security hacks, data breaches, and other forms of cybercrime is an escalating concern for businesses and organizations worldwide. By harnessing the power of AI, hackers can automate their attacks, resulting in more frequent, rapid, and complex cyber threats. It's not just the scale but also the severity of these attacks that have increased, with high-value targets like financial institutions and government agencies bearing the brunt.

Meta announced a new version of Llama (Large Language Model Meta AI), Llama 2, and made it open source. Meta believes an open source approach fosters collaboration, iteration and transparency, which is important for new technologies like large language models. Providing access to tools and computing power can create opportunities for businesses, startups, and researchers. Llama 2 was trained on 40% more data than the original Llama model. In addition the announcement included two important partnerships with Microsoft and Qualcomm.

When it comes to interacting with your customers’ for sales, marketing and customer service consumers are clear, they want what they want, when and how they choose. That’s not a new concept, but is a map to improved customer experiences. Offering the channel that a prospect or customers trusts and prefers is much more likely to lead to a positive outcome for the interaction.

Yesterday Salesforce announced a broad price increase for Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Industries and Tableau of on average 9%, starting Aug 1st, 2023. This is the first broad price increase since 2016, although a lot has changed over that 7 years; particularly in the addition of several high profile acquisitions to the product portfolio, and in product packaging, which has changed fairly often over that time period.

Customer journey mapping is dead. Okay, a little blunt, I suppose I should say it as “the exercise of building static journeys for prospects and customers is no longer the best approach to understand and interact with customers”. All the research I’ve done on buyer behavior shines a light on how ineffective the process and concept is today. Maybe it never was the most useful exercise, but at least in a pre-smartphone world it was reasonable to assume that your company was an important source of information on your products and services, and how a purchaser could use them to their benefit. Once the prospects had access to the entirety of the Internet’s information in their pockets, the buying process changed. Gone is the need for the vendor to be the only source of information on their products and services. Buyers can research, read reviews online for almost anything they want to purchase; connect with others that have experience with the potential solutions, in their industry, and with similar challenges; and generally eliminate the need to interact with a vendor until the decision to purchase is nearly decided, or is already made.

If you told me 20 years ago that I’d be writing an article that had the phrase “artificial empathy” in the title I’d probably have hurt myself laughing…yet here we are. The use of chatbots, particularly in customer service and support (call center) activities continues to increase rapidly. Customer expectations for “good” digital experiences are high, and the past 3+ years has seen record numbers of people online and using digital channels. In addition to the consumer behavioral changes businesses have faced several challenges including difficulty hiring and retaining qualified employees, friction with employees over working from home or returning to the office, and very difficult economic pressures, all of which created a resource constrained work environment. This is a considerable challenge for many businesses that has resulted in wider deployment of automation, specifically chatbots to reduce the burden on employees.

Today IBM announced the intent to purchase Apptio, a cloud-based financial and operational IT management and optimization solution (FinOps) for $4.6 billion from Vista Equity Partners. Vista paid $1.94B to take Apptio private in 2018. This move signifies IBM’s strategic push to bolster its cloud and enterprise offerings, as it integrates Apptio's unique expertise and portfolio into its ecosystem.

As technology evolves at an exponential pace, businesses must adapt to stay competitive. One of the most exciting developments in recent years is Generative AI, which can generate new data that is similar to the data it has been trained on. There is a lot of “hype” around AI and generative AI recently but let’s look beyond the hype at how Generative AI can be a competitive advantage for sales and marketing teams looking to enhance their strategies and drive more revenue.

Everywhere you look (or listen) lately you will see some new article on AI, large language models like ChatGTP, robotics and automation in general. Don’t misunderstand me though, it is exciting and there are lot’s of new use cases that offer some real world business value. AI isn’t new of course, its history goes back decades to the early 1950’s. What has changed the evolution of the technology though is a combination of the Internet’s impact on the creation, collection and distribution of data and a massively scaleable compute infrastructure. The other shift that fuels this “hype” is the openness of businesses and institutions to choose to invest in automation and AI. There are a number of reasons for that, including the business disruption and changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath including labor shortages, broad shifts to remote work, the subsequent noise of “return to office”, inflation and the rapid increase of interest rates, threats of a recession, and the threat of the US debt default (mischief managed, at least for now). In other words, businesses are feeling pressured from many fronts to change and adapt in order to stay competitive and healthy.

Earlier this year I co-hosted an episode of In the Hot Seat looking at Generative AI in higher education. I was lucky to be joined by Dr. Ali Green from the University of West Florida and Keeley Meentze from The Keeley Company, along with my co-host Professor Stephen LeMay, also from the University of West Florida. Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, has sent shockwaves through various sectors including higher education. Along with a great deal of controversy, the discussion of generative AI in education, at least among a subset of educators, has shown a strong potential as a pivotal tool in reshaping and improving higher education. Built upon frameworks such as GPT-4 from OpenAI, generative AI can analyze vast amounts of data, learn patterns, and generate new content autonomously. This capability has far-reaching implications for higher education, offering transformative possibilities that promise to revolutionize teaching, learning, and administrative tasks.

The first week of May Zoho had its user conference at its US headquarters in Austin. They invited a number of analyst to attend an analyst program as well, and of course there were a number of interesting announcements. Hidden in those announcements is a set of new offerings currently in beta, designed to extend Zoho’s reach down to solopreneurs and also bridge the gap to startup creation and growth (and the rest of the Zoho solution portfolio). The proposition of engaging with a customer as they launch their solo business and providing a series of offerings to help them grow and scale along the way is a long view on gaining and retaining customers, something that is in character for Zoho.

Your customers’ want what they want, when and how they choose. That’s not a revolutionary concept, but needs repeating from time to time. It is easy, apparently, for you to project your desires on your prospect or customer. It doesn’t work now…maybe (with a few exceptions) it never worked. I’ve made these statements about sales, about how prospects buy, about your customer journey map, service and support and probably a few other topics. Let’s look at one of the most fundamental issues though, consumers care about how you interact with them, and on what channel for each specific online activity.

I’ve had numerous conversations recently, including a couple of web shows (CRM Playaz Roundtable, In the Hot Seat) about the biggest trends in 2023+ for CRM and customer experience (CX). I believe we’re approaching an inflection point that will create some radical departures from our current approach to CRM and CX solutions in the near future. I believe this in part because of these factors:

• The growing seller - buyer gap

• The potential for moving to real time streaming data.

• The rapid evolution of AI tools including the use of large language models like ChatGPT.

• Consumer fatigue with contextually irrelevant personalization.

• Lower engagement with several communication channels caused by overuse.

• Growing dissatisfaction with the poor experience created by outdated tiered support models.

And we went to India… Sometimes the only way to really understand a thing, is to see it in its most natural context. I’ve known Zoho and (at least part of) its unusual culture and business approach for many years. The narrative; Indian startup, no outside investments so completely bootstrapped, private, a wide variety of SaaS products that work across the whole business and are very attractively priced, employee focused and dedicated to giving back to the communities in which it operates. It’s an interesting story and just on its face, unique in a tech world that is funded by venture capital and private equity, obsessed with growth over anything else and with an ultimate goal of entering the public markets or another “big money” exit. As I would eventually learn, what I didn’t know (or maybe the word is “understand”) about Zoho was fairly significant. The event, Truly Zoho, is aptly named, and brought ~15 analysts who have covered Zoho for many years to its Chennai HQ, with a short visit to Tenkasi at the end of the week.

Automation is applied to all sorts of systems and business problems. RPA can provide a great deal of value relieving humans from the routine process actions and increasing productivity and outcomes by giving the humans the space to handle exception and higher level tasks. IA goes much further than simple RPA, and add the capabilities to work outside the program framework, inferring, predicting and taking actions based on the unstructured. It also learns and improves its performance over time. IA then, is essentially the next generation RPA, supercharged by applying AI technologies.

The tech industry has been enamoured with the subscription business model since the late 1990’s as Netsuite and Salesforce first began offering applications as a service over the Internet. The “Great Recession” of 2007-2009 accelerated the adoption of software as a service (SaaS) across a variety of businesses as capital investment dried up and companies that wanted to be competitive moved software acquisition to SaaS and subscription (and their operating budget versus capital budget). Since 2009 SaaS and cloud computing has rapidly expanded to include all types of technology from infrastructure (IaaS) to hardware and is the default business model for most tech companies. Over the past 10 years that expansion of the model has moved into a rapidly growing list of industries including consumer goods, automotive, manufacturing, media, entertainment, and many others.

At Dreamforce last week there were two announcements that overshadowed the rest in my opinion, Salesforce Genie, which I already covered here; and Slack Canvas. I guess I shouldn’t just discuss Slack Canvas though, there were several Slack enhancements of interest and also a tie back into the Genie announcement. Slack and Salesforce customers are clearly benefiting from the acquisition, the investment of resources and linkage to the overall strategy really show.

Salesforce Genie is a real-time data platform that enables the delivery of personalized and individualized experiences across sales, marketing, service and commerce. Genie, which runs on Hyperforce, leverages Salesforce Flow and Einstein AI to maximize the effective use of all your customer data in real-time or near real-time.