Salesforce’s ‘Netflix for Business’ is seeing success

Salesforce launched an ambitious video streaming destination called Salesforce+ in 2021 which it described as a "Netflix for business". Nearly three years later, the company says it’s seeing great success with the initiative and plans to double down on it. “We’ve pivoted, grown and learned. The playbook has some promise, so we’re going to keep going,” Colin Fleming, evp worldwide marketing, Salesforce, said at the Goldenhour marketing conference in New York on Wednesday. The idea behind Salesforce+ was a broad publishing and content platform that produces original series and shows, and streams Salesforce events. It also works with external partners: For example, Vox Media’s podcast, Pivot, hosted by Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway is also available in video form on the platform. Here are four things the company has learned from building Salesforce+: Events are a strong hook for content operations As the pandemic began, Fleming said that it became obvious that there wasn’t a lot of business content on Netflix. The question to him was how Salesforce+ would respond to a new, online-first world. “We wanted to take the Netflix side and the Peloton side and the business side and combine it.” Internally, the project was first called PeloFlixForce. The company took a cue from Disney+, which launched with the filmed version of a live performance of Hamilton. It decided to do the same with streaming Dreamforce, its massive event, online, at a time when live events had shut down. Even now, when events are taking place, it continues to stream almost all of its 500 annual events on the platform. “Salesforce is an events company that sells software on the side. It’s an area of focus and expertise for us,” said Fleming. “The hook to events has been really powerful for us. There’s a naturally built-in audience and we use events as a forcing function for the company at large.” The events make up a major part of the content on Salesforce+: The average watch time for someone watching a livestream of Dreamforce is 155 minutes, said Fleming. Nobody cares if you fail Event content is bookended by original series on Salesforce+, including shows like The Ecopreneurs, about entrepreneurs working to solve climate change, or “How I Solved It,” about Salesforce Admins solving common business problems. Original content is of course challenging, but Fleming says what helps is to operate on a “pilot scenario.” “We learned to experiment. We produce something: If it has promise, we’ll double down and build it. If it fails we move on. As career marketers, we get emotionally attached, but nobody cares.” Keeping things short helps: The average piece of original content on the platform is 6.5 minutes. Content can help companies grow globally One of the benefits of publishing content is that it enables marketers to speak to a broader audience than they could normally. Salesforce witnessed this firsthand. One of the priorities for the company is global growth and international expansion. Dreamforce used to have 20 countries represented before the pandemic. Last year, audience members from 154 countries watched. “When you reduce friction of access, you see growth,” said Fleming. Connecting content to the sales pipeline is essential Marketers must use content to learn more about their audiences in meaningful ways beyond what Fleming calls “form completes”: Getting people to fill out a form to access content. Instead, the company prioritizes trying to build fuller pictures of the humans engaging with and watching its content. “It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s important for us as B2B marketers.” That intent data can then be shared with sales and business teams to help them close or grow business. For example, if someone from a major customer is watching a Dreamforce livestream or an original show, the marketing group will let the account executive responsible for that customer know. Every month, account teams receive monthly summaries showing what people from the biggest and most important customers are watching so they can tailor their conversations appropriately.

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