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Buying ExactTarget adds 6000 more prospects/customers that Salesforce can sell to. Assuming that it signs up a fraction of those to use Salesforce Service Clou

by jhull 13y ago

Buying ExactTarget adds 6000 more prospects/customers that Salesforce can sell to. Assuming that it signs up a fraction of those to use Salesforce Service Cloud or Data.com or any of the other Salesforce products, that's more money and helps justify the price. Oracle has been doing this for years (and probably where Benioff got his playbook) They buy up a company, fold in their customers and cross-sell their other products to them.

jeremymcanally 13y ago
Yeah but assuming that works out as profitable, those customers (assuming they all stay with them) would have to start spending 10x the money they're spending with ExactTarget now on Salesforce products. That's a big stretch and risk, but again, maybe it'll work out for them. :)
- meterplech 13y ago
  Well, the purchase is a onetime cost, and revenue is recurring. If they spend 2x what they are paying now they'd recoup the cost (in terms of revenue) in 5 years. Plus, that's not counting new customers for ExactTarget's services. If you are a heavy SFDC user and were previously deciding between Marketo, Hubspot, and ExactTarget, you may go with ExactTarget because you know it'll be fully supported by SFDC.
ergest 13y ago
It's funny, we currently use ExactTarget and are working to move to SalesForce in a year
hebegb 13y ago
I think it's sort of the opposite (of acquiring ET for their customers). As a company "born Cloud", Salesforce have had to make sure their integration capabilities have been up to snuff, and other vendors have been able to leverage those integrations to reach Salesforce customers via the AppExchange (similar to the App Store). So the capability of using Salesforce whilst using other apps with integration has been a capability for a while, and so customers could tailor their own solutions to their needs, budgets etc. Except that more and more, customers want the one-back-to-pat/one-neck-to-strangle, and the associated 'one-solution, no integration' benefits. Hence Salesforce have been parking their tanks on the lawns of service providers. When asked for features, Salesforce response is sometimes "There's an app for that", however sometimes the demand for them to provide certain functionality is so great, or the opportunity large enough, that they'll enter a market in this fashion. They're currently doing something similar with identity management. Ping Identity had a solution they could sell you, but soon they'll have to compete with Salesforce Identity. Competing with someone who hosts the platform you're working on is possible, but it's definitely a disadvantage. The other factor here is what the other players are up to - Oracle recently purchased Eloqua, and for those of us in the Salesforce line of work, an acquisition like this has been expected for the last few months. Email marketing is an area in which Salesforce has been weak for some time, they didn't want to do it because it's not their core focus, and hey, "there are apps for that". But once Oracle moved, Salesforce were going to follow suit to block that advantage.

by jhull 13y ago

jeremymcanally 13y ago

Yeah but assuming that works out as profitable, those customers (assuming they all stay with them) would have to start spending 10x the money they're spending with ExactTarget now on Salesforce products. That's a big stretch and risk, but again, maybe it'll work out for them. :)

meterplech 13y ago
Well, the purchase is a onetime cost, and revenue is recurring. If they spend 2x what they are paying now they'd recoup the cost (in terms of revenue) in 5 years. Plus, that's not counting new customers for ExactTarget's services. If you are a heavy SFDC user and were previously deciding between Marketo, Hubspot, and ExactTarget, you may go with ExactTarget because you know it'll be fully supported by SFDC.

ergest 13y ago

It's funny, we currently use ExactTarget and are working to move to SalesForce in a year

hebegb 13y ago

I think it's sort of the opposite (of acquiring ET for their customers). As a company "born Cloud", Salesforce have had to make sure their integration capabilities have been up to snuff, and other vendors have been able to leverage those integrations to reach Salesforce customers via the AppExchange (similar to the App Store). So the capability of using Salesforce whilst using other apps with integration has been a capability for a while, and so customers could tailor their own solutions to their needs, budgets etc. Except that more and more, customers want the one-back-to-pat/one-neck-to-strangle, and the associated 'one-solution, no integration' benefits. Hence Salesforce have been parking their tanks on the lawns of service providers. When asked for features, Salesforce response is sometimes "There's an app for that", however sometimes the demand for them to provide certain functionality is so great, or the opportunity large enough, that they'll enter a market in this fashion. They're currently doing something similar with identity management. Ping Identity had a solution they could sell you, but soon they'll have to compete with Salesforce Identity. Competing with someone who hosts the platform you're working on is possible, but it's definitely a disadvantage. The other factor here is what the other players are up to - Oracle recently purchased Eloqua, and for those of us in the Salesforce line of work, an acquisition like this has been expected for the last few months. Email marketing is an area in which Salesforce has been weak for some time, they didn't want to do it because it's not their core focus, and hey, "there are apps for that". But once Oracle moved, Salesforce were going to follow suit to block that advantage.