What you need to know:

• Since Covid blew up its wildly evangelical events model, Salesforce has been overhauling everything. It has permanently slashed its content output by 30 per cent - with vast improvements in results - and is raiding B2C marketing talent successfully via a switch in focus to brand and "emotion" over more immediate and rational demand generation prevalent in B2B marketing.
• Disney-type characters are now everywhere representing Salesforce cloud products as the $146bn company - and inventor of Software as a Service (SaaS) - embraces the modern textbooks in B2C marketing.         
• Salesforce and LinkedIn have both declared war on "vanity metrics" and conventional digital measurement, including last-click and last-touch attribution - Colin Fleming signaled a Salesforce funeral for the waywardly ubiquitious metric was planned within 12-24 months. LinkedIn's Jim Habig has similar ambitions.       
• Habig is also overhauling account-based marketing – or ABM – by linking up in an experiment with one of the world’s most successful restaurateurs, Will Guidara, behind New York's acclaimed Eleven Madison Park and numerous NoMad nosheries.  
• Amid market turmoil, both marketers are adamant that brand investment will continue as they seek to shore-up future B2B demand for their services.
• To get the full nuance and flavour, listen to the MI3 doubleheader podcast here with Salesforce and LinkedIn.

The nightmare before Dreamforce

Colin Fleming had recurring nightmares that Dreamforce might turn out to be a busted flush, that aversion to crowds and fear of catching Covid may curb enthusiasm for mass events.

"We did Dreamforce last year, it was 1,000 people. The year before that was Marc [Benioff] and Bret [Taylor] in a tree in the park. And so this was an opportunity for us to really reset the community. But I have to be honest, I was anxious going into this, not knowing what demand would look like after three years. Has the Dreamforce magic gone away? Never on my watch would I be comfortable with that," says Fleming. "I was scared." 

He needn't have sweated. Some 40,000 paying pilgrims flocked to San Fran and Fleming claims more business has already been written off the back of the event than ever. "It just shows the value of a brand", suggests Fleming, and pushing somewhat beyond your average B2B approach: With Dreamforce morphing into a multilayered theme park for branding and product – complete with the masses happily queueing for attractions, fluffy characters and full-on sets – Disneyland is probably its closest equivalent. Fleming makes no apology for plagiarising the consumer playbook, and says he’d rather emulate Disney than less creative rivals.

“It's not our primary objective, but we look to Disney and consumer brands for inspiration. I don't look to SAP or Microsoft or Adobe for what I should be doing – I purposely avoid it,” says Fleming. “Right, wrong, or otherwise, I think that's really created a layer of differentiation for us that a lot of companies would aspire to have.”

Now Fleming is trying to figure out a way to measure the value of that differentiation – and put a number on community-led and word of mouth marketing. Such metrics will take some time, but if each of those 40,000 attendees go forth and spread the word according to Salesforce, the value will ultimately be in the billions in the long-term.

In the immediate-term, the proprietary tech that Salesforce has developed to better map its marketing output to business results is already paying dividend, according to Fleming, and driving “fundamental” changes in approach.

Brand lights staying on

Amid global economic turmoil, Fleming is adamant that Salesforce will not pull brand investment. But it is, essentially, cutting the crap.

“Our brand investment has not changed in terms of our strategy, our approach. For Dreamforce, this is the year we've put together our largest brand marketing efforts in the history of the company. We know that these periods of economic downturn or scrutiny are going to be relatively short-term – we don't know the duration of them, but we look at this as a five-year investment for Salesforce,” says Fleming.

“We know that buyers in the market are looking long-term; we know the 95:5 rule (a brand versus demand marketing investment theory developed by Ehrenberg-Bass and LinkedIn’s B2B Institute that states that only five per cent of customers are in market at any one time, so brands should focus on the 95 per cent of future customers in order to grow). Of course we're being measured about [brand marketing investment], but we're not stopping,” he says. “And that's the most important part.”

Bonfire of the vanities

Fleming says Salesforce has culled around 30 per cent of its content output – because it was failing to deliver business outcomes. Vanity metrics are dead, he says. “Achievement over activity” is the new mantra.

“A few years ago, when we would report on the success or failure of marketing, it would be ‘I did 30 of this and 45 of the other thing’, and that was the entirety of how we measured success in marketing. It required a pretty material shift to ‘what is the value of that?’. So achievement over activity is really important,” says Fleming.

To determine business gains resulting from marketing activity, Salesforce created its own software to analyse “what we call our content engagement scores”, he adds. “What is that content doing? Is it moving traffic down the funnel? Are people spending time? Are they scrolling down the page? What's a total view of time percentage? So we built an algorithm that's been pretty fantastic in helping us view achievement over activity – and that's been a fundamental shift for us inside the company.”

Algorithmic attitude adjuster

The pandemic became a reset button for quality, “an opportunity to say, what if we blew all of this up?” says Fleming. As well as killing off almost a third of its content, that approach and bespoke measurement has had a material effect on content Salesforce now produces and pushes. Fleming admits the data has opened his eyes – and changed his view.

“What we have found is that things we thought were awesome before weren’t that awesome – and the things that we rolled our eyes at have been some of the highest performing content we have ever created.”

He sites the ‘Salesforce on Salesforce’ series on Salesforce+, the content streaming service launched 12 months ago, as one example.

“Salesforce on Salesforce to me sounded myopic, something I cringed at. But it was a runaway success,” says Fleming. “That content is around how a $31bn company with 80,000 employees is solving the problems that every other company is having. We’re just shining a light in a very transparent, humble – and frankly not very highly-produced – way around how we are doing it, giving templates and ‘how to’ content to help others go on a similar journey,” he adds.

“I turned my nose up initially, ‘that sounds terrible’. But it’s been unbelievably successful – so much so that a massive part of our expo hall this year [at Dreamforce] has been around exactly the same content. I was totally wrong – and the ability to measure those things has provided the opportunity to spotlight that.”

Last click’s last legs?

Last click is attribution also appears to be on its last legs: “We are actively preparing a funeral” per Fleming.

“It’s one of those ugly truths of marketing organisations – this is where a lot of us operate right now. But one of the things that we've shifted to and why we created something like Salesforce+ is really focusing on audience over last touch and form completes.

“Now we are thinking about ‘what is the value of a subscriber’ and instead of filling out a form for any book, what happens if we can get our customer or prospects to subscribe [to Salesforce+]? That can mean high fidelity content that's helpful for them, that can mean community, that can mean questions and answers. Helpful content that can help them grow their career, inspire them. We are really fascinated with that and there's no multi-touch attribution model that will show me the ultimate value – but with the deployment of our CDP, we're seeing that we’re drawing behaviour and a broader audience than Salesforce has ever had,” says Fleming.

“And you better believe that a piece of content we put in front of them will eventually get them to convert.  That's the 95 per cent of the people who are out of the market that we know, at some point, are going to move into that 5 per cent. We want to be there when they're ready to do so – and that's where marketing to an audience over a dashboard can really be the most important part.”

Last click may survive a year or two, admits Fleming, but he thinks the current crunch may hasten its demise within Salesforce at least.

“With a 23 year company history, there’s a lot of business process built around that exact model – and that’s the hard part. We’re peeling back that onion very aggressively and as I said, planning the last click funeral. But I’d give it 12-24 months before that happens – we’re modifying how we attribute, but we’re not able to eliminate it quite yet,” says Fleming.

“We need a forcing function. Much like the pandemic was a clean sheet of paper [for content marketing], perhaps this economic environment is the clean sheet of paper for how we think about measuring business outcomes.”

LinkedIn: Brand or bust, overhauling ABM

LinkedIn’s Global VP, Marketing Solutions, Jim Habig, a former Google exec, says he will happily “attend the last click wake”, with the firm also working to re-engineer measurement. Like Salesforce, he says LinkedIn won’t pull back on brand investment despite global market auguries making increasingly grim reading. The platform is also working on major overhauls of its own – specifically around account-based marketing, considered by some as the Holy Grail of B2B enterprise marketing.

In terms of maintaining brand investment amid global turmoil, Habig says Salesforce and LinkedIn are aligned.

“It’s our job as marketers right now to have iron stomachs amongst the leadership team and really take that long view … So we're holding firm with our brand investment and we think this is a time to go further and really solidify our place in the market – because this is the time when other folks are maybe taking their eyes off the ball.”

There will be broader adjustments within its marketing strategy – says Habig – but that is business as usual.

“We're continually de-fragging our budgets to make sure we're testing, iterating, ensuring that we're getting the most juice for the squeeze. But brand is one of those things that I'm trying to cordon off and not touch, just let it run. Because if you get too short-term, you risk pulling your money out of the market at the exact wrong time.”

Culling content, building ‘metric mosaics’

LinkedIn is in lockstep with Salesforce on the need for content that delivers – with better measures of success or failure.

“We’re in a similar situation – we want to do fewer things, much better. We're trying a lot of things, but we have to be very candid with ourselves on the things that aren't working. It comes down to measurement, but we have to be willing to kill our darlings… and let the cream rise to the top,” he says. “So that’s really important for our organisation and is something that we're thinking a lot about with LinkedIn Collective and our new content franchise: How do we actually go to folks who are canonical voices in the space and solicit opinions from them, leverage the wisdom of the crowd and let those pieces float to the top?”

LinkedIn is moving away from a single ‘North Star’ metric or KPI towards “a measurement mosaic”, says Habig, though like Salesforce remains reliant on last touch attribution.

“We’re not proud of it … but we are still using it because we have built heuristics around it and have some muscle memory that we can’t let go of. But [last click] alone is not enough. We need other metrics, more market mix modelling (MMM) to get a fuller picture.”

Habig says the first step is to acknowledge the problem, “but now we’ve got to take the next step … So we are moving towards more of a multi-touch attribution model … I’m not going to tell you this has been an easy thing. It’s a process and it has taken about a year, but now we’re on the precipice of getting better signals out of our efforts.”

B2C talent raids intensify

LinkedIn’s Habig and Salesforce’s Fleming are similarly aligned on talent. Both are raiding the B2C sector – and both expect the market to remain hot, despite layoffs crunching tech globally. “I’ve seen no indication that the air is going out of that balloon,” says Habig, with Fleming in agreement.

Hence both firms casting recruitment lines across more varied talent pools. An apt approach, given Habig is an English literature graduate who majored in modernist poetry and semiotics, and Fleming a former Red Bull racing driver – not your average marketers.

“There’s a tremendous opportunity for us to broaden our aperture on the types of folks we hire,” says Habig. “I like to hire journalists into product marketing roles because… you airdrop into a world, understand it implicitly, you distil that in the simplest ways to the folks on the other side of that equation – and that’s a great way in.”

Fleming says the pandemic slate wipe has enabled Salesforce to also hire more laterally.

“LinkedIn, Salesforce, all these Silicon Valley companies have been fighting for the same talent for so long. But that game is now over. The entire world has opened up, and that is a new ball game.” As a result, he says Salesforce is “now writing job descriptions based on time zone, not on city or location”.

It is also “hiring B2C marketers like we’ve never done before” and Fleming sees a direct correlation to the push by Salesforce to break out of rational, staid B2B marketing.

“The creative talent that we’ve been able to hire recently has been astonishing, because we’re showing investment in the brand and because we’ve brought some emotion and personality back into it – and that has opened up our recruiting, the halo effect continues into hiring … It’s the value of a brand: they might not go to most B2B companies, but they will come to Salesforce,” he suggests.

Telling procurement where to stick spreadsheets

LinkedIn’s global CEO Ryan Roslansky used his Cannes keynote to woo more B2C creatives into B2B, touting much faster growth and broader opportunity. If Salesforce represents a bellwether, more talent could soon cross the divide. Fleming thinks the sector stands to gain if buyers can be convinced to look beyond spreadsheets, PowerPoint and per LinkedIn's latest research, ineffective ads by numbers as a result.

“There’s a lot of ‘Bs’ in B2B, but none of them stand for boring,” says Fleming, and decision-makers need to be engaged on an emotional level.

“I was making a purchasing decision yesterday, and the procurement team came to me saying ‘here’s the 17-step spreadsheet’. But the company that was third [on the list] was the company that I wanted to do business with – because I trusted them, there was emotion there, they had innovation and they had gravitas as a company,” says Fleming.

“The procurement team looked at me like ‘you’ve got to be crazy’. But … I know that result will be stronger than what the spreadsheet told me to buy.”

He admits that was “an active discussion” with procurement, but points to Salesforce+ as a live precedent.

“There is no playbook for doing what we are doing. There is no spreadsheet that says ‘here is how you build a B2B streaming platform’. It does not exist. So a spreadsheet is not going to tell me what that outcome should look like.”

He caveats that stance: “If my procurement friends are listening, I often follow a spreadsheet. But in this case I didn’t. And when you are building something that’s never been done before, you have to take risks.”

Fleming says the same applies to Dreamforce: “Successful customers saying 'I fell in love and built my career on Salesforce', that’s going to weigh in on decision-making. I’ve never found the dashboard that will tell me that, but we know it to be true. And I think that’s something that B2B companies need to rely upon more than ever before.”

LinkedIn's Habig thinks the whole B2B category needs to wake up and start selling and marketing to people, not machines.

"I think that's the biggest canard in this industry, that B2B decision-makers are automatons making purely rational decisions in a bubble. That is simply just not true. They are real people with jobs to keep, bosses, teams, they are trying to keep everybody happy and they have got a mortgage to pay," says Habig.

"Once we recognise that, it actually opens up a whole creative canvas of how we talk to them. It doesn't need to be 'just hit them with the stat'. I can't tell you how many times I've had ideas – sort of crazy ideas, not necessarily LinkedIn, but in prior lives – shot down because they didn't have 'the concrete reason to believe' and [the prevailing mentality that] 'it's got to be 97 per cent'," adds Habig. "I think we need to get away from that. We need to realise there are other ways to influence."

B2B Cannes Lions: Business results required

All that said, better measurement and demonstration of hard business results – spreadsheet or otherwise – will be required if the inaugural B2B Lions at this year’s Cannes are to build credibility. Salesforce's Fleming points to Apple winning a B2B Lion by way of example.

“There wasn’t a whole lot of business achievement attached to that and [the B2B winners overall] was quite a sensitive thing inside Salesforce, because we can’t apply the same measurement criteria that you do to B2C. The principles can be consistent, the emotion can be consistent … but we have to measure ourselves a little differently – and I think we have some growth at Cannes to do exactly that.”

LinkedIn sponsored the B2B Cannes Lions, and Jim Habig accepts that as “fair criticism”.

“This year was about dropping a pin, getting started and having an industry-wide conversation about what good looks like in B2B – and I think we did answer that brief. We inspired, we set some lines of demarcation and I’m excited for what we will see because we are having this exact discussion – and that is going to bring more of the impact.”

ABM: Michelin-starred overhaul?

Seven months after joining from Pinterest, following seven years at Youtube, Habig now has plans to overhaul account-based marketing – or ABM – considered by some within B2B as the Holy Grail of enterprise marketing. In essence, ABM means treating each large customer or prospect as a market of one.

Habig’s plan is to tap the world’s best hospitality operators in a bid to harness ‘unreasonably good’ service models, which can then be lavished upon high value ABM clients to boost results.

The platform has just struck a partnership with legendary restaurateur Will Guidara, one of the driving forces behind three Michelin star Eleven Madison Park as well as NoMad New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, “to reimagine what ABM looks like,” per Habig.

“Can we borrow some of the conceptual architecture of the hospitality industry and bring it into account-based marketing? Maybe we can reinvent this whole disciple around that – and I think that is a very cool exploration,” says Habig. “We're thinking about other ways that we can borrow some of the conceptual territory from the art world, from the music business, from other disciplines, and just cross pollinate.”

In practice, applying a restaurateur perspective to ABM is about, “Breaking it all down to its most basic components: What is the [B2B] customer relationship but hospitality? It's anticipating the things that they need before they need them. And if we can – Will's got this great idea of 'unreasonable hospitality' – how do you dial that all the way up to eleven? Can we use that idea an ethos?

“Everybody does account-based marketing in some capacity … so we want to get into a room and kick some ideas around.”

Want the full B2B smorgasbord? Listen to the podcast here.