Salesforce – Concepting and launching a new digital product
Type
Professional
Organization
Salesforce
Services
go-to-market strategy, product launch, user research, program development
Website
Project Summary
When Salesforce announced its intent to acquire Slack in December 2020, we (the Marketing Cloud team) were tasked with developing an integration and go-to-market strategy to launch upon the acquisition’s completion in July 2021. The final output included microsites on Slack. com and Salesforce.com, as well as three comprehensive product demos. These were showcased at Salesforce-hosted conferences Dreamforce 2021 and Connections 2022.
Brief
In February 2021, my team was tasked with translating existing product features from Marketing Cloud into Slack, an emerging channel. The desired outcome was to increase ‘stickiness’ and adoption of Salesforce Marketing Cloud products.
I partnered with our product leads to develop the product strategy, a multi-year product roadmap, and owned the development of the go-to-market plan.
Filming for Dreamforce 2021 Product Demos
Screengrab from the finished Dreamforce 2021 Product Demo: Marketing Cloud Integration in Slack
Caburé Housing, Source: FICA
Screengrab from the finished Dreamforce 2021 Product Demo: Marketing Cloud Integration in Slack
The Dreamforce 2021 Product Demo team (Marketing Cloud Product Marketing)
To determine the product strategy, we explored two potential approaches: an integration that combined functionality across all Marketing Cloud’s subproducts, tailored to the type of user or a separate integration for each product. We analyzed owned customer data and gathered insights through customer interviews, surveys, competitive research, analyst reviews, user journey mapping and prototypes.
We determined the best path forward would be product-specific integrations, and designed three separate product roadmaps: one for email marketing (Email Studio & Journey Builder), one for data & analytics (Datorama), and one for lead generation (Pardot). To define a go-to-market plan, I mapped the user journey for each app and identified each persona’s key use cases for each persona, which we would include in our messaging.
Approach
Understand
Stakeholder Map
User Interviews
Survey
Competitive Research
Data Analysis
Define
Personas
Synthesis
Design
Journey Mapping
Product Roadmap
Source: FICA
Test & Refine
Prototype
Focus Groups
Summary of Process
Design and Testing
In partnership with my Salesforce product marketing counterpart and my Slack solution marketing counterpart, I developed a unified story that positioned Slack for the marketer.
To test our positioning, we worked with Quadrant Strategies to run three separate focus groups. Each group comprised a mixture of customers and non-customers, and was divided by region so we could identify potential cultural nuances in messaging. Feedback from the focus groups led us to rework our messaging to include more common language, and fewer marketing buzzwords; we highlighted concrete use cases instead of high-level benefits, which felt more vague to the (potential) users.
Result
The final output included microsites on Slack. com and Salesforce.com, as well as three comprehensive product demos. These were showcased at Salesforce-hosted conferences Dreamforce 2021 and Connections 2022. The launch also resulted in waitlisted beta programs for two out of three Marketing Cloud Slack apps. Feedback from focus groups and beta programs revealed strong interest in more integrations between Marketing Cloud products, resulting in reprioritization of roadmaps and engineering resources to invest in a unified infrastructure across the Marketing Cloud portfolio.
