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- 💃 IBM's State of Salesforce 2023-24 🕺
💃 IBM's State of Salesforce 2023-24 🕺
The ChaCha Finds Needles in a Haystack of AI
Salesforce ChaCha
October 24, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! We read IBM’s State of Salesforce 2023-24 annual report.
It was….AI-heavy 🤖.
Really AI-heavy 🙄.
But, when a $125BB company, who is also a top Salesforce partner, opines on the state of the things, we’re pot-committed 😈.
So what did IBM have to say? Let’s dive in ⬇️
Agenda for today includes
IBM's State of Salesforce 2023-24
Daily Principle
All the Memes
IBM's State of Salesforce 2023-24
Today we will discuss-
💃 Segmentation 🕺
💃 Attributes 🕺
💃 Takeaways 🕺
SEGMENTATION
IBM segmented Salesforce customers into 4 buckets-
🧑🚀 The Pioneers
IBM claims that the Salesforce customers in this segment have 40% higher revenue per Salesforce license 😳.
These customers achieve this through AI, highly integrated tech stacks, and using industry solutions (like Industry Cloud).
👨🍳 The Prepared
IBM says The Prepared have defined an AI strategy, but have not implemented.
They are also less effective at change management and enterprise integrations, compared to The Pioneers.
💁 The Prudent
Per IBM, The Prudent have dabbled in AI, but have no strategy or plan for AI in their business.
They are inconsistent with change management, and have only a few key integrations, if any.
😟 The Pensive
If The Pensive customers have some cash to spend, then they’re probably IBM’s favorite kinda customers - tons of opportunity to improve everything 🤡.
And in 2023, you might wonder who is still keeping tech at an arm’s length. Examples of these are legacy industries that have fairly impenetrable moats, like railroads and .gov defense contracts.
ATTRIBUTES
Each of these attributes were briefly mentioned in the above section. Let’s dive a bit deeper-
🤖 AI
IBM managed to thread AI through every nook and cranny of the entire 28-page report…that’s all we really have to say about that 😇.
⚙️ Industry Cloud
This was interesting, and wish there was more detailed data to dive into.
Per IBM, 80% of the “Pioneers” are using an industry cloud, assuming one is available to their industry.
Is that 10’s of companies? Hundreds? Where’s the context 🤨.
Another interesting note - Industry Cloud was least impactful to Sales functions.
It was most meaningful to these business functions-
Customer Service
Customer Interaction
Marketing
Data Management
Partner Interaction
Readers, please reach out to us if you have Industry Cloud success stories, we’d love to hear about them!!
🪢 Integrations
No surprise here - Pioneers integrate their applications at a 24% higher rate than Pensives and are making enterprise level changes at 2x rate.
Pioneers are empowering the business while Pensives are being left behind.
Another nice metric IBM should’ve shared is the investment in integrations for Pioneers vs Pensives.
On another note, a line we really liked was "Keep in mind that integrating Salesforce clouds is not customizing Salesforce clouds.”
Agreed 💯. Integrations is the technological completion of a workflows 🙌.
♾️ Change Management
IBM didn’t leave us totally hanging on the investment metric for Change Management - they state that Pioneers invest 41% more than Pensives.
It would have been nice to see where that investment went. Consultants? More in-house leaders? Better (more expensive) leaders?
As well, Pioneers are a staggering 89% more likely to “adapt business modification efforts.” That is a win for “the business conforms to the software.”
ROI. Efficiency. Scale. These are all much more obtainable when the business conforms to the software.
TAKEAWAYS
Honestly, IBM should be ashamed for putting out such a drab and uninspired report that parroted many of the talking points of the Salesforce earnings call, like the story of the Service Cloud AI chatbot that managed 14,000 customer contacts.
ChatGPT would have produced a more interesting read than this 😮💨.
Especially with the relationships IBM has with Salesforce, customers, industry leaders, and their own internal professionals…better insights could be produced in a 30 minute convo that included a 12-pack 🍻 and a bag of Doritos 😋.
It was nice to have the callouts on Data Integrity, Change Management, and Salesforce as Enterprise tech. Although not original talking points, the more champions of these things, the better 🤷.
Stick with the good stuff…sorry IBM.
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