When Salesforce announced its new business video streaming service called Salesforce+ this week, everyone had a reaction. While not all of it was positive, some company watchers also wondered if there was more to this announcement than meets the eye.
If you look closely, the new initiative suggests that Salesforce wants to take a bite out of LinkedIn and other SaaS content platforms and publishers. The video streaming service could be a launch point for a broader content platform, where its partners are producing their own content and using Salesforce+ infrastructure to help them advertise to and cultivate their own customers.
The company has, after all, done exactly this sort of thing with its online marketplaces and industry events to great success. Salesforce generated almost $6 billion in its most recent quarterly earnings report. That mostly comes from selling its sales, marketing and service software, not any kind of content production, but it has lots of experience putting on Dreamforce, its massive annual customer event, as well as smaller events throughout the year around the world.
On its face, Salesforce+ is a giant, ambitious and quite expensive content marketing play. The company reportedly has hired a large professional staff to produce and manage the content, and built a broadcasting and production studio designed to produce quality shows in-house. It believes that by launching with content from Dreamforce, its highly successful customer conference, attended by tens of thousands people every year pre-pandemic, it can prime the viewing pump and build audience momentum that way, perhaps even using celebrities as it often does at its events to drive audience. It is less clear about the long-term business goals.
We spoke to several industry experts to get their take, and while not everyone was enthusiastic about the project, there was a general feeling that perhaps there is another monetizing scheme, above and beyond delivering Salesforce content at play here — at least down the road.
Is there an audience for this?
While some people expressed excitement and optimism about the product, Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategies wasn’t one of them. He wondered what the company was trying to accomplish with this streaming content project. “I don’t know of any market segment who is asking for content like this. It strikes me as an offering from a company with a lot of time and money on its hands and possibly a lack of focus,” Moorhead told TechCrunch.
Laurie McCabe, who is co-founder and partner at SMB Group and has been watching Salesforce since its earliest days, says it’s certainly an interesting move. “They want to tap into the growing on-demand video service opportunity — [like] TikTok for business. The pitch is to provide more relevant, useful business and technology content of course, but they also hope to create a halo effect for Salesforce — making it relevant for more people more often (as LinkedIn is doing with LinkedIn Live),” she said. And let’s not forget that Salesforce also made a failed bid for LinkedIn when Microsoft bought the business social network for over $26 billion in 2016.
McCabe sees more potential here than Moorhead, but she does caution that there is a lot of competition out there for our attention and it won’t be easy for Salesforce to get a piece of that with Salesforce+. “Every time I think we are totally saturated with business and technology content, a new platform or site springs up. There are only so many hours in the day, and as more companies compete, the audience has more choices, just like in the consumer world with Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Apple, Disney and on an on. So Salesforce will need to offer very compelling, differentiated content to pull in the volume that I think it would want to attain [to be successful],” she said.
But others saw more potential, especially if the company expanded beyond the pure content delivery space and moved into areas like digital advertising and more sponsored content.
Brent Leary sees possibilities in these areas, and points out that HubSpot, which is also in the same CRM space, recently launched a podcast network, so the move isn’t without precedent.”So, I actually see this as a pretty interesting move. HubSpot created their podcast network, but this move is a bigger move in that same direction. So, Salesforce can offer customers the CRM platform integrated into a digital ad network,” he said.
As he told TechCrunch this week at the product announcement, this could take a variety of forms. “A customer could sponsor a show, advertise a show, or possibly collaborate on a show. And have leads generated from the show [which could be] directly tied to the activity from those options and track ROI. And it’s all done on one platform. And the content lives on with ads living on with them,” he told TechCrunch on the day of the announcement.
Salesforce wants Salesforce+ to be the Netflix of biz content
Paul Greenberg, principal analyst at The 56 Group and author of the seminal book on CRM, “CRM at the Speed of Light,” says Salesforce+ could be more than just content from Salesforce, that it could be something packaged and delivered as a service to customers to create and deliver their own content.
“While I think this is in its infancy, I think that it’s more than a video service if I read the press release accurately. It’s really a combination of a platform for the enterprise for content creation, distribution and consumption [with a focus on video production, at least at first]. The question remains is this going to be a platform service — meaning you can create and distribute non-Salesforce-related content and that it will be sold as such? Or will it be strictly for the Salesforce ecosystem,” Greenberg wondered.
How does Salesforce see it?
It’s a good question. Colin Fleming, Salesforce’s senior vice president of global brand marketing was coy when asked if there were such plans in the works. “Though there is not a short-term plan to sell this as a service, we are excited to share in the future how we have used [the] Salesforce [platform] to build Salesforce+ as an intelligent streaming service,” he said.
As for Leary’s idea of sponsored content, he would only say that there would be guests on the platform, and it wouldn’t be just focused on content delivered by Salesforce employees. The idea for this venture was driven in large part by content the company produced to stay in touch with customers during the pandemic over the last 16 months, and that involved outside people too.
“Partner and ISV sponsorships have been part of our content series to date, and we are excited to continue bringing this diverse perspective to the Salesforce+ service. We are focused on partnering together to create relevant and timely conversations that cover the entire Salesforce ecosystem, and the Dreamforce experience and our future franchise content series are no exception to this,” he said.
He also indicated that this would be delivered in both an entertaining and informative way, while pulling various pieces of content such as Trailblazer training that existed in its own silo from across the company into a single broadcasting platform. It would probably make more sense for Salesforce to find ways to monetize this idea beyond purely building thought leadership. It’s already a market leader, and has recognized brand, yet it clearly wants to build on that and drive more business through this venture.
As with many things Salesforce does on the product side, they are floating this idea and starting with a narrowly focused vision, but that doesn’t mean that if the market clamors for something more and the content proves popular, it won’t expand that vision. On the other hand, if it doesn’t work out, they can always shut it down, move on and chalk it up as an expensive mistake. But, they see this kind of media play as a big part of the future of marketing enterprise software and are making a significant investment to try and make sure that doesn’t happen.
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