Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the call with Salesforce Management hosted by Cleveland Research. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Ari Trishanian. Sir, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Matthew. Thank you, everybody, for joining in this morning or afternoon, depending on where you are. Today, we're delighted to have Salesforce's Head of Marketing and Commerce Cloud, Adam Blitzer. Great time as we're all sitting at home, to dive into the latest and the greatest, what's going on with Salesforce and trends in marketing and commerce. We were just talking about how we're adjusting to working at home and teaching kids. Adam, thank you so much for joining today on the call.
Absolutely, Ari. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be with everyone.
Awesome. Well, a lot of our clients have fallen Salesforce familiar with the story. For those that are newer to the company, can you spend a moment talking a little bit about your role, your day-to-day, and just remind investors what are the major components of the business group that you're heading up?
Sure, absolutely. Just by way of introduction, I came to the company through an acquisition. I started a marketing automation company in Atlanta called Pardot. You may be wondering why I called it Pardot. Pardot is the kind of name you get for a company when you have $8 to spend on a domain name. Pardot is actually the Latvian word for to market or to sell. We had no connection to Latvia, but it was available, so we took it. We ran that business for five years and then sold it to a B2C-focused digital marketing company called ExactTarget. Roughly 10 months later, we sold ExactTarget to Salesforce. Close to close was about 10 months. I joined Salesforce through the ExactTarget acquisition in the summer of 2013. After that, I ran Pardot as a business unit at Salesforce for two years.
I took over Sales Cloud, which is our sort of franchise business that sells in Salesforce. That's what most people think of when they think of the original product at Salesforce. I ran that for four years. I also had Service Cloud, our call center software offering, for about a year in there. About eight months ago, I really moved to the digital side. I took over our Marketing Cloud, and then most recently, also our Commerce Cloud and Community Cloud. Really, our Marketing Cloud is all of our marketing-focused products, both B2B, business to business, and B2C, business to consumer. That's the business to consumer offerings are things you would think of as email marketing, a very sort of tried and true market, in terms of MarTech. It's DMP or Data Management Platform, that came to us through our acquisition of Krux.
That's for doing advertising on third-party sites. It's also social media marketing. That was through our acquisitions of Radian6 and Buddy Media. We call that product Social Studio. It's our marketing analytics offering, which came to us through our acquisition of Datorama. It's also Pardot, which again, is a company I started, and that's a very B2B-focused marketing offering. Pretty much, we've run the gamut across a lot of different areas of MarTech. In the commerce world, the areas that I look after are B2C commerce, so what you would think of as a shopping experience on any retail site, any commerce experience. Then also B2B commerce. How do stores work with their suppliers to fulfill orders for more supplies, for more merchandise, et cetera? Then lastly, our communities products.
Those could be partner portals, customer communities, employee communities, ways that users or partners or employees connect with one another. My day-to-day is spent focused on the roadmap for all these different product areas. What are we going to build? What are we not going to build? It's doing build, partner, or buy analysis on new markets that we think about. It's also working with the field and working with some of our most strategic customers, to help them get value out of the platform, get up and running quickly. Then also working on the narrative, the marketing, the storytelling about how these all come together. I sort of split between those areas, but largely focused on product and roadmap.
Got it. Thanks for that.
Absolutely.
Yeah, it sounds like you've had a taste of all the different pockets of Salesforce's portfolio and probably have the good insight on Customer 360, which I'll get into. I guess, did you want to address kind of the topic of the day, how you guys are thinking about messaging, and talking to customers around COVID-19, how you're advising them they should go about their marketing? I'm just kind of curious, like, have you seen any changes in terms of how clients are thinking about advertising and e-commerce projects? How is Salesforce kind of adjusting, which products they prioritize, which projects they can deliver on kind of in this new world we're living in?
Sure. This is certainly top of mind for everybody, every marketer. We're all figuring out, if we weren't already working at home, we're all figuring out how to work from home. Certainly, you'll see a lot of messaging from us around sell at home, market at home, service at home, and really pivoting your enterprise to be able to operate from wherever you happen to be. What you're seeing in the world that I work on, all these products actually see a surge in usage. If you think about how sales are still happening, it's really digital, right? If stores are shut down, if retail locations are shut down in various jurisdictions, the things that are still open, the places where transactions are still happening are storefronts. Certainly, we see a surge with e-commerce customers, you see usage.
I mean, not only ours, just e-commerce in general, you're seeing huge surges. What's also interesting is you're seeing many companies who are not traditional e-commerce companies getting into the e-commerce game. These might be consumer packaged goods companies who traditionally sell to supermarkets or they sell through big box retailers. They're now saying, "Hey, those channels are either slower than they used to be. They're disrupted in some way. Customers don't want to go to those places, even if they're open. We need to have a direct line to our customer, a direct relationship to their customers." We're seeing kind of these more traditional CPG companies asking for e-commerce that can be stood up incredibly quickly so that they can have that direct relationship with their customers. That's interesting is we're sort of seeing new avenues of retail outside of traditional retail.
The other thing is digital marketing sees a surge, right? As live events, and traditional channels like that are sort of off the table, we're seeing everything move to digital. It's only accelerating the move to digital, and we're certainly seeing bursts of digital. That is critically important. We see that there across pretty much all aspects of the Marketing Cloud as well. Lastly, communities. We've seen really nice adoption and roll-out of new community sites, both for companies, addressing their employee concerns, so ways to bring all of their employees together since they no longer work together in offices. They're doing it in a more virtual environment where they can post information related to COVID-19, related to what their employees need to know about benefits they may have, how to work from home, et cetera.
We're also seeing plenty of governments adopting communities, to get information out to their customers, or sorry, to get information out to their constituents, to let their constituents know, "Hey, what's coming? What are the new rules and regulations? How can they get financial relief?" Things like that. This is really an era where you see all these digital products that were already quite important, really become even more important. What's interesting, I think, when we come out of this, there was already a secular shift for more and more of commerce to move to digital, more and more of marketing to move to digital. I think this just continues to accelerate that because companies are making these pushes harder and harder into it now. I don't think you're going to see that let up at all, once we come out of this.
No, makes a ton of sense. Yeah, really helpful and validates some of what we've seen out there as well, in terms of touching customers and citizens digitally. One question we've gotten a lot from investors, just kind of want to double click on. Any change in terms of how delivery is done or how you're selling to customers in this environment? Again, just being, can't visit the customer at site. Some of these things might touch a supply chain or maybe you're trying to build a relationship with a customer. Is that any different doing that virtually? I guess what have you seen in the last month in terms of how you've adjusted the go-to market and the delivery of the product portfolio?
Sure. Are you talking specifically about us, or are you talking about just what we see from customers in general and how they're selling and marketing?
From you guys specifically.
I think the biggest difference for us is, we're not doing live events, which anyone that knows Salesforce knows that we love live events because it's a great way to bring customers together. We really think one of the things that makes Salesforce really special is our ecosystem of who we call Trailblazers. They're just people who are changing their companies, changing their careers, changing their industries even, through novel uses of technology. We love to be able to bring those people together, whether it's small events like dinners, larger events like our city tours, or of course, Dreamforce, which is our largest event in San Francisco, and really, I think the largest software conference in the world. Obviously live events are put on hold, and we ourselves have really made the shift to digital.
The first time we did that was our Sydney World Tour, which seems like a long time ago, but it was actually at the beginning of March. We made the decision with about a week's notice or two weeks' notice to turn it into a digital event, and it came off really without missing a beat. The community was still incredibly passionate. We still had huge viewership. As we've moved to virtual, we're getting better and better at it. There's this thirst from our ecosystem for it, which has been great. Last night, I attended a virtual happy hour with Marketing Cloud customers, and there were 100 marketers, they had their kind of beverages, but there were people from Japan on it, London on it, San Francisco on it.
Depending on the time zone you were on, you might have just had coffee instead of an adult beverage. The fact that we could still bring together these passionate Trailblazers in this crazy time, and still do the same type of event we normally would, but do it in a virtual way, was really great and a lot of fun. In terms of how we sell, you mentioned obviously we're not meeting in person. Everything is virtual, so that's a change. Again, having the ability to sell from home, to email the first, to market from home, we're eating our own dog food in that respect. We're moving along.
Awesome. I love it. That's great. Yeah, we've been trying to have some more virtual happy hours at Cleveland Research as well.
Yeah
keep spirits up and connect with people digitally. That's awesome. Shifting gears a little bit, you mentioned your experience at Salesforce, working on Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, now coming full circle back into the marketing side and also commerce and community. Could you just provide an update on Customer 360? Are there any kind of recent examples of customers deploying it that come to mind, and kind of how your portfolio of marketing and commerce and community kind of fit into the broader C360 strategy?
Salesforce, I would say, has always been a very customer-centric company, built in the way we operate, right? We put the customer at the center of everything we do. It's built into our business model of being a subscription service, that we have to make the customer successful. If we do, they continue to renew with us, and it becomes this annuity. It really works both ways, and it keeps business interests really well aligned. We want all of our customers to be as customer-centric as we are. To do that, they have to provide an incredible customer experience across the whole value chain, across the entire customer life cycle. That's not just a sales relationship, it's not just a service relationship, it's a marketing relationship, a commerce relationship. It's connecting with them in Communities.
It might be integrating with other back office systems. It's analyzing all the data around that to make those interactions better. It's really our Customer 360. For us, of course our first three products were all built on the same platform. Really our first four products, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, our platform offering for customers to build their own apps, and then our communities offering, they were all built on the same platform. After that, we started to get fairly acquisitive, with sort of our first large acquisition in 2013 of Marketing Cloud, which really brought one of our really key leaders into the company. I'm kidding, that's me. After that, we continued to bring in some anchor tenants, I would say. We did a large acquisition of Demandware, that became our Commerce Cloud. More recently we've acquired MuleSoft and we've acquired Tableau.
Customer 360 is both a vision, right, connecting all of these different touch points around the customer, and it's also technology and a set of technologies. You might have a version, for example of me, that lives in your Service Cloud, lives in your Marketing Cloud, lives in your Commerce Cloud. These were formerly three separate systems. They still sort of operate in a way of three separate systems. There's different data about me in each of those systems, and what Customer 360 Data Manager does is it allows you to sort of get to the single view of me, of Adam Blitzer, in Salesforce, and it gives you a federated view of me. It brings all of the data you need about me, regardless of what system it lives in, and lets you see it all in one place.
If you're a service manager, if you're a customer service agent, you know exactly what kind of sales interaction the company has had with me. Maybe there's an open deal with my company, you might treat me differently. You know if I have a pending commerce order, so maybe some B2B commerce. You can basically see every touch point that has happened with me, regardless of what system it's in. Not only that, you can, even if there are multiple versions of me in all these different systems, with this Data Manager, you can get to sort of the truth. You can figure out how do you compile all these records into what we call a golden record, or what we think of as a golden record. This is a Customer 360 Truth profile. This is the single source of truth.
It's really what CRM has probably been going after for, I don't know, 30, 40 years. We've been talking about Customer 360 for a long time. We are now delivering it. Another piece of Customer 360, that we are launching, or that we've already announced that we're launching this year, we announced it at Dreamforce last year, is Customer 360 Audiences. This is coming from our Marketing Cloud. This is what's called a CDP or a customer data platform, which is really the zeitgeist in marketing right now. Marketing has never had a single source of truth. The truth has always lived in the different channels. It's always lived in the email marketing platform, maybe that's been the biggest tenant, or it's lived in the marketing automation platform.
There's never been one place for all of your marketing data to live, and that's always been sort of a large custom IT project at companies. Some companies call it a customer master or something like that. IT would build this massive project. Marketing would ask for a segment to be built. IT would give it to them, and it was like a day later, they would send out an email. It was this cumbersome kind of project to manage and expensive, no agility at all. Fast-forward to today, the technology now exists to productize that. That is what I think of as the biggest battleground in marketing today, this idea of a customer data platform.
We're bringing that to the Customer 360 as well, a place to put all of your sales and marketing, and commerce data to be able to build rich segments, rich personalization, and then activate them across any marketing channel.
No, that's great. No, it seems like there's just been a proliferation of digital apps and systems over the last decade, and data's all over the place.
Yeah. I think there's this secular trend, right? There are only going to be more systems, right? There's only more complexity. There's not less.
No.
Basically, you can bet on a CIO's portfolio, it's getting more complicated, not less complicated. For us, that's really driven our integration imperative, and you saw us put that big first stake in the ground with MuleSoft, right? The leader in integration, which has been just an absolutely phenomenal product for us because we basically said, "Hey, if the CIO's world is only going to get more complicated, rather than sort of play Whac-A-Mole and have every possible system they're ever going to have, how do we become the center of that, right?
How do we empower the CIO to run the role with that? With MuleSoft, getting rid of that integration, Customer 360, getting at a single view of a customer, a single source of truth, doing the same thing for marketing, right, with our CDP, and then lastly, analyzing the data regardless of what system it comes from. That really inspired our acquisition of Tableau. This secular trend of a proliferation of apps and systems, we think it's really important to get to a single source of truth, whether that's analytics, integration, whether it's reconciling a record down to a golden record.
Right. On that vein, another topic I was curious on and seems a bit more top of mind recently, we've seen that in our discussions with advertisers, marketers, there's been some recent changes from the likes of Facebook and Google around tracking third-party cookies. Also you've got California launching their own privacy act similar to GDPR in Europe. What is your guys view on some of these recent changes? How are you seeing customers react to that? There's a school of thought that I think that maybe thinks that first-party data becomes more important with these kinds of dynamics. I think, when GDPR came out, some of your business segments saw a boost near term. Just kind of curious if you could speak to these changes, if they're coming up in customer discussions at all, and if your technology helps in any way address those concerns.
Yeah, absolutely. First off, having things like GDPR or having things like California's data privacy act are great, because they provide some structure to what was once sort of the Wild West, right? Just in that every country had its own set of rules and regulations. Especially for a marketer, that was really complicated to keep up with. Things are changing all the time. They can use some techniques in one country and not in another, but if you're a multinational, it's quite complicated. What's great about GDPR is it sort of creates a global standard because even if you're in a country that is kind of a less strict jurisdiction, we always think you should just adopt the strictest jurisdiction's standard, and then you'll be in great shape, right? You won't have to sort of react.
We're seeing, with California's act, the vast majority of large companies had already adopted GDPR as their global standard, so they didn't miss a beat, right, when the U.S. or at least California started to introduce their own regulations. Exactly as you said, the vendors that take this really seriously do see a boost, right? Because they enable their customers to be able to comply and in a non-onerous way. At Salesforce, certainly I'm sure in our investor deck, but in many of our presentations, you see us present our values. We talk about our values because we really lead with that because that gets at the psyche of our company, and it plays out in the way our products are built.
A little inside baseball for you on how to interpret product slides, or really any slides, everything is in priority order, every word and every bullet point. That's how to sort of interpret a Salesforce slide. Actually, I'm looking at this Salesforce slide about acquired entrepreneurs, and I noticed that Bret Taylor and Adam Selipsky are ahead of me, so maybe I should rethink what I just said.
No
Our values, trust is listed first, and the reason for that is without trust, you don't have a business. We started the company, I guess, 21 years ago at this point. Putting the data in the cloud was a really new idea. In fact, cloud wasn't even a phrase then. Fast-forward to today, we're very different. That is sort of table stakes for most companies, but there are different trust issues that are top of mind. We think if we don't have our customers' trust, in terms of our systems, the way we operate, et cetera, and we don't help them deliver a trusted relationship, we don't have a business. After that, we have customer success, then finally innovation, and then equality.
Because trust is our number one value, we just build this into all of our products, and we spend a significant amount of time in R&D in making sure that we build all the right mechanisms into the product to help our customers comply. The other part of your question related to cookies specifically and places like Facebook and Google. Google's in an interesting position in that they control a lot of the advertising budgets of companies out there. On the flip side of it, they also control 60% of the browser market, roughly, with Chrome. We sort of almost have two sides of that advertising market in some ways. Obviously Facebook is another large player on the advertising side, not the browser side.
When Chrome announces significant changes to the way it's thinking about cookies, that has an outsized impact on advertising, and advertisers have to respond. I think your thesis is exactly right, that certainly third-party anonymous data will become much less important. First-party data is already critically important, but becomes even more important. That's why we're really working hard and investing heavily in CDP, in customer data platform, which is largely a first-party data platform. We really see CDP as an evolution of many markets, particularly ad tech markets. It's really this rise of this super agile first-party data management platform that's really a customer management platform.
Got it. On that front, I know CDP is early. Just any sense like, what kind of adoption you've seen to date and where you see adoption going over the next couple of years for CDP platforms?
Yeah. Like I said, I think this is the key battleground in marketing. I think, if you talk to most large enterprises, they're all thinking about their data strategy. Whether they use the term CDP or not, they're all talking about their data strategy. Many of them are talking specifically about CDP. We're working with some of the best brands in the world right now. We have them in a pilot with us. We're co-innovating. We're building it together, with many great brands. I think you're going to see quite a bit of adoption from customers. I think they're probably going to start with use cases that are related to marketing. They're going to think about ingesting all of their customer data, segmenting it, and activating it across all their different marketing channels.
I think you're going to see this next wave of adoption, where they say, "Hey, we have this implemented for marketing. Let's surface these insights up in service in our call centers. Let's start thinking about how can we use this to personalize the next best action, things like that." I think the adoption just within marketing is going to be massive over the next couple of years. Again, it's no secret, we're not the only ones investing in this. I would say the big market vendors are also investing, and then there's a lot of venture capital money that has been put into capturing this market, because it's sort of a burning need in the marketplace. I mentioned the secular kind of trend around CIO stacks getting more and more complicated. MarTech stacks are more and more complicated.
When I started Pardot in 2007, there was this great infographic by a guy named Scott Brinker, where he puts all of the MarTech logos that he can find on one slide. In 2007, there were like 150 logos on it. Today, there are over 7,000. We can't predict every possible channel that would five years ago, I didn't think there would be something called TikTok with dance videos being shared and used to explain things. You can certainly bet that that trend will continue. If that trend is going to continue, you want to be at the center of it, both as a vendor like us, that you want to be the data platform that's powering all of that.
As a CMO, you want to have an amazingly flexible data platform in the middle, because as you swap in and out those different MarTech pieces, what's really solid is going to be your data platform. It's going to be hugely strategic.
Right. For sure. I've seen a lot of those diagrams in tech, be it cybersecurity landscape. Now, I guess the MarTech marketing platform diagram as well. Yeah, it's a ton of different channels to manage. You mentioned, it's a big market, a lot of vendors vying for it. Just any more color on your guys' view of the competitive landscape and what your guys' unique selling proposition is in the market and just how the business is going versus the competition in the space?
Sure. The major MarTech vendors all have a play here. The two big ones, Salesforce and Adobe, they both have plays in CDP. I would say not as major in marketing, but a big company, Oracle, has a play in CDP. You have a lot of startups, and what's been interesting is some of the startups have started to be acquired already which is really early in their life cycles. There's a startup called Treasure Data attacking this. They were acquired by Arm, which is sort of an odd or interesting pairing. There's a startup called AgilOne. They were acquired by private equity, I think to pair with Acquia, maybe. There's been a couple of quick acquisitions.
There are probably five really well-funded startups attacking this, and then there are 75 other startups just using the name CDP, which often happens when there's a hot market. When you have five legit startups attacking a space that are well-funded, and you have three, I'd say, big MarTech vendors attacking it, there's a bear there, right? It's a real space. Our unique value proposition, so when I think of a company like Adobe, for example, Adobe and Salesforce compete and often partner. When you're this size, you're everybody's vendor, competitor, partner, et cetera. We have different assets from one another in a lot of cases.
There are a lot of cases where a customer will be using some products from Adobe that there's no Salesforce equivalent, some products from Salesforce where there's no Adobe equivalent, and then we might battle it out for what's in the middle. Our unique value proposition for CDP, the C in CDP is customer, right? Customer data platform. We know a thing or two about customers, in that our stock ticker is CRM. Being natively connected to your CRM, having a super flexible data model that's automatically pulling in all of your CRM data so that your single source of truth is really your single source of truth, we think that is our unique differentiator. The other thing is we're building this platform first.
One of the secret sauces of Salesforce, I mentioned our ecosystem of people who we call Trailblazers, but also our ecosystem of ISVs or independent software vendors, and that ecosystem is called the AppExchange. I was a really early AppExchange partner in 2007. There were probably 100 partners back then, and today there are thousands. I remember thinking when I was just an early partner, and I was a Salesforce customer, I remember thinking, wow, even if someone offered me a CRM for free that had the same functionality as Salesforce, I wouldn't move to it because everything plugs into Salesforce, right? Everything I was using plugged into Salesforce. That's really not true anywhere in marketing today. There isn't a platform or ecosystem like that. We're building our CDP in such a manner that we can unlock an AppExchange for MarTech.
We can use our roots in AppExchange, learn from all those lessons, and do it in MarTech. Now those 7,000 vendors don't have to build bespoke integrations into us. They build these packaged solutions, just like the AppExchange does. We think that platform approach to it will be another big differentiator.
Got it. That's a great strategy. The whole Trailblazer community and the AppExchange is certainly a source of durable competitive advantage for you guys across the portfolio. It's good to see that you can leverage it in that regard as well and address some of the fragmentation among the tech vendors in the MarTech space.
Yeah. There's not a lot of network effect traditionally in B2B, and I think the AppExchange, and I think the Trailblazer community is one of the few examples of real network effect in enterprise. Absolutely, any product I build in Marketing Cloud, I want to take advantage of that.
Yep. Speaking of one of your fellow acquired entrepreneurs and acquired companies, curious, any update on how you've been partnering with Tableau since the acquisition has closed, both in terms of integrating into marketing and commerce products, as well as co-selling? Any update you could provide on how that's been going in the last couple of months?
Sure. It's still quite early with Tableau. You may remember it took a while to close.
We had to operate as independent companies for quite a while. The first time I met my counterpart from Tableau, we refused to make eye contact just to be extra safe, that was great. It is fantastic to bring them into the company. They just really democratized the world of analytics. You may remember that we launched an Analytics Cloud several years ago, and that was really what we think of as best-in-class analytics for CRM. It's embedded analytics. It's writing your workflow using CRM. Not everyone uses CRM all the time, and certainly not all the data lives in CRM. We think Tableau is the best analytics for everything, the best visualization for everything, and it really makes everyone at your company a data expert, data steward.
Because we have that heritage of having an Analytics Cloud that was growing quite quickly for us, we know how to talk about analytics. We know we've tapped into the great customer need for it. I think, this is kind of an easier lift for us than had we not had, call it five years or four or five years of selling analytics into our install base. It really just kind of boosts that tremendously. I would say it's very early days with Tableau, I would just say it's an incredibly broadly applicable product. Every one of our customers is craving ways to analyze their data, it's something that's not out of our wheelhouse in terms of being able to talk about, in terms of being able to sell, it just fits in beautifully with our whole product portfolio.
What's also interesting for me, it's been a big change in the past few months. Our customers always thought of us as a CRM company. Again, our stock ticker, right? It would be easy to think of us as a CRM company. Since we've acquired both MuleSoft and Tableau, our customers have increasingly thought of us as a data company and a company to come to for their data strategy, whether that's integration or analysis. Those aren't necessarily at kind of the most strategic levels of the company, that isn't necessarily the exact conversation I would say we've always had in the past. It's been really interesting to see how those two acquisitions together have kind of pushed us, in a good way, into a different place than a traditional operator.
For sure. For sure. Yeah, no, we personally think from our work, Salesforce is a fantastic general-purpose platform for development, low code, low touch, more and more complex if need be. It's been cool to see the work that you guys have done with coronavirus and making some of those cool dashboards publicly available, with Tableau. It's been awesome.
The usage for Tableau, I mean, sadly, I guess right now is off the charts, right? Because exactly what you said, so many of those publicly available dashboards and reports are just getting hammered right now.
Yeah.
It is a testament to show how quickly you can stand something up, and then just how robust and visual things can be.
Right. This has been fantastic, Adam. I guess just last here, you harped on this a little bit earlier, how you'd expect digital marketing and commerce solutions to be more important as we get out of this coronavirus. I guess just, how do you think, I think maybe it's an interesting comparison point, how do you view the opportunity for MarTech and digital Commerce today as we potentially enter a new wave of economic growth? It seems like similar when you launched Pardot back in 2007, got it going, you were just about to enter a different economic environment.
Yeah.
How would you kind of compare and contrast where we are today heading into this new decade versus when we launched Pardot in 2007 and just the size of opportunity between then and now?
Yeah. We definitely were in a different economic time. We launched into 2007, the end of 2007 happened. I was suddenly able to buy 110 Herman Miller Aeron chairs for $1, literally. A company couldn't get rid of them. We had the 33rd floor of a 33-story office building in Atlanta for $4 a square foot. That was a weird time.
Fantastic
In a lot of ways, it led to the rise of business-to-business marketing automation because something that happened then was companies stopped traveling as much as they were. At that point it was for economic reasons. It coincided really nicely with the rise of virtual meetings. At that time it was GoTo Meeting, obviously now it's Zoom. As the rise of GoTo Meeting happened, what you saw was companies got more and more comfortable doing larger and larger transactions without meeting in person. Before that, I would say the vast majority of deals had to happen in person. That was a big shift, and it coincided nicely with the rise of marketing automation, of demand generation, of inside sales. That was kind of a big B2B shift that happened back then. I think what you're going to see right now is a big B2C shift.
I mentioned consumer packaged goods and manufacturing. One of the trends we were already seeing in those industries was disruption by nimble startups that were going direct to consumer. If you think about the razor industry and the massive disruption that happened because you had things like Dollar Shave Club and Harry's Razors, and you had Gillette lose massive market share in a span of four years, because they were going through their traditional channels where they'd been so strong for so long, but couldn't pivot quickly, to these new competitors that were just eliminating the middleman and going direct to the consumer.
You're starting to see that play out across a ton of different products and just sort of be replicated, whether it is glasses with Warby Parker, whether it I never thought you could get a mattress shipped to your house directly, and it's like Packed up so tightly in a sort of foam snake that pops out when you open it up, and you had all these mattress companies spring up and luggage companies spring up. The traditional players are now all rethinking their strategies, and they're saying, "Hey, I've got to also be able to go direct to consumer." That trend was already happening just because of disruption. I think now where the sort of traditional means of commerce is being disrupted by what's just happening, COVID-19, not by a competitor, that trend is only going to accelerate.
I don't think that genie's going back in the bottle, right? I think we're going to see you gain some tremendous efficiencies, and even if it's just an extra channel that you weren't already doing, you're probably going to continue to invest in it. I think you're going to see the rise of commerce and more digital marketing outside of the traditional strong spots. I think you're going to see it move more into places like CPG, places like manufacturing, that traditionally had an intermediary between themselves and the customer.
I love it. I love it. Yeah, no, it's amazing to see the velocity of new businesses and brands being formed just with an Instagram account and some good message and value to communicate to customers. Definitely your technology has been an enabler of that. Well, Adam, I really appreciate the time here. Any final thoughts for investors you'd like to leave us with or anything else we should be thinking about as we head into the weekend?
I think I wouldn't say related to Salesforce, but I would just do a PSA, and take care of yourself. If you don't take care of yourself.
For sure.
You can't take care of your family. Take care of your family, take care of your teammates and your coworkers. Only after you get through all that, then we get to focus on this other stuff. We're all in this together. Everybody be safe, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and we will get through this.
Amen. Great words to close on, Adam. Thank you so much for the time today. Thank you to all our participants for listening in, and wish everybody a great weekend. Take care.
Great. You as well. Thanks so much for having me, Ari.
All right, bye-bye.
Bye.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's conference call. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time, and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.