How Salesforce built the world's most successful B2B brand - Colin Fleming

0:06Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. Now, one of the questions I get asked regularly is when am I going to do a proper B2B episode? It turns out a lot of you out there want to find out how B2B works and how you can be more successful in B2B. This has to be the episode for you because I'm catching up with Colin Fleming, who is the EVP for brand marketing at Salesforce. If you didn't know, Salesforce are the third biggest tech company in the world, turning over an incredible$40 billion a year. So if anyone can tell us about how B2B marketing works, it must be the people that make the software that drive most people's B2B.

0:44Colin, if you didn't know, was a former racing driver and is now heading up brand marketing and has been for the last 13 years at Salesforce. Now, he has got some incredible stories and some amazing experience to share. This episode is packed with B2B gold. I know you're going to love it. Now, I'm joined by Colin Fleming, who runs the brand for Salesforce. And we are in Salesforce Tower in San Francisco with some pretty amazing views. How many floors have we got here? 61. 61. And you got to go to the 64th. I did. And I can confirm the views are spectacular. We rolled out the red carpet. San Francisco has a beautiful day.

1:20Is there something about Salesforce like towers? Is there something in the tower idea? It's a bit in our DNA. We have Salesforce Towers in about six cities around the world, yes. And yeah. It's a thing. It's a thing. Well, it's very impressive as well. Well, we're going to get into Salesforce. So let's talk about it and marketing and all that sort of thing. But let's start at the beginning because you've got a rather unusual entry into your career because you started live as a racing driver. It's a nonlinear career journey, that's for sure. Definitely. I mean, you talk about squiggly career. That's quite a squiggle from the pit stop to the marketing suite.

1:52But tell us a little bit about your career and how you got into motorsport. And what are the highs and lows of doing something as extreme as that? Yeah. From a very young age, I was hooked on Formula One. And that's as a born and raised in California, instead of driving around in circles like we do in the U.S. here, I wanted to go not drive around in circles. So about 13, I moved to Europe racing go karts. Turned out I was quite good at it. I was picked up by Red Bull at a young age and got a chance to be Red Bull's Formula One test driver. I raced in Formula Three, Formula Two, Formula Renault and things like that.

2:25And yeah, it was a wonderful experience. I mean, got to do what I had always searched at for doing. This kid called Sebastian Vettel came along, though, and they picked him over me. Oh, no. It's a bit rough in hindsight. Four world championships later, they probably made the right call. But, you know, I took everything that I had learned in motorsports, which, of course, yeah, the fast driving, which is always the thing that people think about. But as an athlete, in that sense, you're spending so much time, more time, actually, raising personal sponsorship. I was in front of CMOs at the age of 13.

2:55Really? Raising over$15 million in personal sponsorship. So for me, like the idea of the shift to marketing was sort of a very familiar one. And so 2008, I sort of made the kind of shift away from motorsports and said, look, give it a good go, decided I was going to go try something else and took the skills that I had learned into what is now a pretty successful marketing career. Wow. Now, from the outside, it looks like all glamour, right? Because I guess what you see, you see the champagne, you see the, you know, you see the action. Presumably, it's quite hard work to get to that kind of, you know.

3:25Oh, I mean, massive. Of course, it's hard work. I think, you know, anytime you're operating at that, such a small percentage of people that get access to something you're up against, of course, the world's best. The hard work, the dedication, the attention to detail, those things are so, so, so important. Of course, there's a lot of luck involved, too, as with anything, right? And that's, like, not discussed much when it comes to athletes. I so much of just being in the right place at the right time. I was so fortunate to be involved with BetBull and some of the awesome opportunities I had. But you learn a lot along the way, and so much of those skills have been, I mean, directly translatable into a career.

3:57And I think that when people see my career path, they're like, those are wildly different worlds. But to me, there's so many similarities. And that's where I was really trying to focus my energy. So tell me what would be the biggest things you've taken from that world of motorsport into your day job today? I mean, dealing in a high stress environment at Salesforce is a good skill to have. But no, all kidding aside, I mean, resilience is super important. You know, you want to be able to pick yourself off of the ground and continue to focus. you know a characteristic of any athlete is attention to detail and dedication and anybody that's operated at that finite amount of that last one percent knows what dedication and hard work looks like and i think you know not only have i've been able to channel that from my career in the in prior but also we have several uh former athletes in the company it's just amazing not that we seek it out necessarily but um you know i think uh you know another individual you should have on your podcast, Nick Drake, uh, with at Google, uh, former professional rugby player.

4:54There's amazing. And how those translatable skills, uh, really, really apply. And, um, I think at this point we're just having fun with it. Yeah. It's true though. Cause when we think about business, we think about the sort of technical skills and how smart you are and that sort of thing, but actually sheer hard work is a huge component, isn't it? You know, it doesn't matter how talented you are unless you apply it and work really hard. It's not, I will take hard work and dedication over Ivy League education every single time. I mean, it's just unbelievable to see. And, you know, ideally you have both, don't you?

5:25But I think that passion that comes with motorsports or any type of special scenario there, passion, it's my number one personal core value. It's really important to really be able to kind of pour yourself into something. And, you know, for the last nearly 13 years, I've poured my heart and soul into Salesforce. And, you know, I think that that's been a really fun experience. Now, we're going to come back to Formula One, aren't we, in a little while, because the circle has been closed rather neatly, isn't it, in your career, which is a fascinating kind of turn of events. But let's start at the beginning of your journey 13 years ago.

5:57So what was Salesforce like when you started compared to today? Because, you know, I mean, I think I'm right in saying you're the third biggest software company in the world now, which is incredible to think. We weren't at the end of 2010 now. What was it like 13 years ago? Well, I think similarities in terms of what it is today, in terms of the values we exhibit and things that you'll see. But at that point in time, we were not a global leader in software. We were a scrappy, probably past the startup phase. We were something like 3 ,000 employees. But it had a point of view, it had a personality, and that's what really drew me to the company.

6:30It was different. And I think that that's really what drew me to it. Coming from Red Bull, which is obviously a very unique company in and of itself, it really drew me the personality of the organization. And so I joined in product marketing. It was a really easy thing to do because it was a world-class product marketing company already. And God, it's amazing to think 13 years later in the journey we've built, we're now nearly an 80 ,000 person company, nearly 40 billion in revenue. And so it's been amazing to see that journey while still staying true. I think that's really important. And if you look at our brand today, one of the things that I'm most proud of is that personality, that spirit, that passion, that uniqueness, the differentiation that exhibits from the company you can draw a direct parallel to back when I joined and before then.

7:11And I think that's something that we hold ourselves accountable to, I think. You know, we're a big believer in tell the story that only you can tell and big believer in we don't want to become the Oracle, the Microsoft or the SAP. We want to be our own selves. And I think that that's something we can be proud of. Well, those places are taken, so you might as well. Exactly. Why not be Salesforce? Yeah, exactly. That makes a lot of sense. Now, if I were to pick the number one request I get on this podcast, by far, is to talk about B2B. Because, yeah, I mean, it's funny actually, but we and I were chatting earlier as well.

7:41Why does B2B feel like a second class kind of role to B2C? Because everyone wants to scramble to B2C roles, but actually B2B in terms of the influence and the investment and, you know, it can be just as exciting. So why does B2B have this sort of slightly apologetic feel to it? It's not even from the outside in. It's also from the inside. You see, like, for some reason, B2B marketers in their heads have decided, that our bar can be lower than a B2C company. Like, frankly, we've just called BS on that. Like, why? And, you know, the same principles when you're buying a software product or a B2B scenario are the same when you buy a new pair of shoes, right?

8:20You're thinking about, is the quality there? Can I trust this brand? Is the personality, are the values aligned? Is the service appropriate? Like, all those things are directly relatable on either end, B2B and B2C. But for some reason, we've decided that B2B has to be about data sheets and white papers and boring forms in front of everything. I think we're just, we're at this new kind of renaissance of B2C or B2B now that is unapologetic about it. And just saying, we can compete, you know, in Can Lion, we can have work that operates at that altitude and that quality. We can, we can do Superbowl spots.

8:53We can do big brand activations that have personality forward and a point of view. And I think that's what I love about this kind of like renaissance we find ourselves in is that apology is no longer accepted or at least we don't accept it and i think that's uh that's really unleashed a ton of creativity the amount of creatives that we've been able to attract from b2c talent b2c organizations is unbelievable and so i think it's we're starting to see this really take off in effect and i think that that's um hopefully we're just getting started because i think it's a ton of fun i I totally agree.

9:25And also the other thing people forget is the transaction values in B2B are huge as well, right? So, you know, we're not selling trainers, you know, on the high street. We're selling some complicated, high-end, you know, highly involved, highly engaged purchase decisions, aren't they? So make a big difference. Not only are they more complicated, but longer in duration too. So, you know, average deal cycle in the enterprise in a company like Salesforce is more than a year. And so think about the touch points you have with a purchaser or with a buying committee. and how those all have to be connected and thoughtful and has to be journey laid out.

9:58And so, you know, the principles are the same, but you could argue more complex than maybe a set of trainers, let's say. I think that's fascinating. And that's where technology comes into play and thoughtful differentiation comes into play. And I think that that's really why B2B really strikes me so nicely. Now, I thought, you know, here in Salesforce, you know, probably the most successful B2B, you know, business on earth at the moment, right? Right. So you must have a few secrets to how B2B works. So I thought I'd try and extract as much insight into how the world of B2B works as possible. But let's start with the data, because I think there's some really interesting data points, aren't there, about how B2B makes decisions get made, right?

10:38And I know we were chatting about the 95-5 rule. So talk to me a bit about that, because that has quite a profound impact, doesn't it, on how you might look at where you spend your money, you know what kind of activity you do and the balance between you know long and short as as we say it's the it's one of the most fundamental like perplexing things i see in marketing and i see so many of my peers or other b2b organizations spend an inordinate amount of their budget on the final step of the funnel like i've got to convert i've got to convert and i've got to get my last touch attribution on this final data sheet that mattered people don't buy products on data sheets that does not work and in fact there's this amazing uh research from i think it's Ehrenberg Bass Institute as well as the LinkedIn B2B Institute that says something to the effect of more than 80 % of a purchasing journey happens on that first thought.

11:23If you're not part of that initial consideration set, you're not going to get bought. It doesn't matter how much money you throw in SEM ads or data sheets or anything like that. And so for me, that's been this unbelievable eyeopening experience. And, you know, we were talking earlier, I'm the only brand marketing leader that Salesforce has ever had, not because I'm a dinosaur and I've been here forever, because we didn't think about brand marketing. That wasn't a facet of our marketing organization. We did a lot of down funnel product marketing and made a big business off of it. But we've started to open our eyes towards that 95.5 rule that there's a whole world that we weren't considering.

11:55And so how do we think about doing longer term or thoughtful marketing that wins the hearts and minds, that makes sure that our situational awareness is theirs, that when somebody thinks about Salesforce or the 33 category entry points we were discussing And when people think about our types of technology, we're the first company that comes to mind. That is my ultimate KPI. And that is where I spend the majority of my budget is making sure that when they think of those 33 points, we're the company. And so we do more than most. I would always want it to be a bigger percentage of our overall budget.

12:25But we do more than most on a top funnel, winning the hearts and minds, thinking about that 95-5 rule. And, you know, I think we've been broadly regarded for that and awarded for that work. And yet I still feel like we're just getting started. No, definitely. Definitely. I mean, if I look at the system on database and look at the kind of advertising that B2B does, it's quite shocking. So B2C, we would say about half of all ads that we measure have no impact on the long term health of the brand, right? Which is the old adage, you know. In B2B, that's 80%. So four in every five B2B ads that get made, we measure, have no response on the audience at all, and don't change the long term fortunes of the brand.

13:01And yet the attribution model says that that final 20 % is worth investing X percent of your budget. But that's marketing to an attribution model. And I think that's the biggest flaw I see people in large B2B organizations is their focus on marketing to a 90-day attribution model. That's not how people buy. Attribution models do not buy products. Humans do. And why not market to them? It's much better. You're right. You made a good point there about 90 days because the window within which you measure your performance makes an incredible difference, doesn't it? Yeah. But you just said about you might take a year to get an enterprise client.

13:36It's about 465 days if you look at our insurance business as the average deals. And would that be from the first engagement to signing up, presumably? And the engagements are probably later than - That's late, about 80 % make a decision before. That's probably a much longer cycle. It's just amazing. And when you look at that, it becomes so obvious. And yet when I speak to my peers or speak to others in B2B, it's just a heightened sense of consciousness. And I think there's so many companies that just think about that, got to make the quarter, got to make the month mentality. And I live in that too.

14:04We got to make the month. We were a public company. We've got to be thinking about that all the time. But we have to realize that the job to be done can happen earlier. It can happen at a different altitude. And I think once we started to kind of internalize that, that data has helped me win arguments with the board about where to invest with our CEO. And I think those are really, really important things, kind of freeing environments that I think hopefully through folks like the B2B Institute and maybe from people, listeners of this podcast, we can start to open our eyes a little bit. Yeah, definitely.

14:31I mean, I've learned this massively in my role. So I've been doing B2B role for four years now. before all B2C. And I've been blown away by the power of doing the brand building work because it doesn't necessarily pay off straight away, but it has this cumulative effect that the return just gets better and better and better. So your activation just works harder and harder and harder because you've got this halo. But you have to commit to it and you have to be consistent and keep on delivering it, but the payback's enormous. We did a cohort analysis looking at people that were exposed to brand and demand advertisements versus just demand.

15:04and the brand ad, the dual, was 6x higher than just solely activation ads. So, I mean, again, that might not show up in an attribution model because the demand ad is going to get all the last click value, but it starts to show there's a bigger story than these attribution models and we have our own attribution model, we're building it, we're learning it. But there's a human capacity that I think we all need to be reminded of occasionally and that's important. 100%. Now, one of the other things that stands out about what you do at Salesforce is your investment in kind of distinctive brand assets, going back to another Ereberg Bass sort of staple.

15:39And you've done it very, very well. And it's quite rare in B2B to see kind of an investment in your logo and the cloud and the font and the characters that you've evolved over time and kind of introduced. Was that conscious? Has that always been the case? Or is it something you've discovered on your journey? It's been a journey, I would say. We started there. We started with a very, our first advertisement was a jet fighter shooting down a biplane, that Bioplane being Oracle or Siebel at the time. And so we've always had a personality and a spirit to the Salesforce. But about 10 years in, when we started selling to the large organizations and we started being more of an enterprise-focused company, we started to become those enterprise-focused companies.

16:17We lost the personality. We lost the spirit. We started to look like every other company. There was a, I remember a reckoning very vividly actually inside the company where we just kind of looked at ourselves and were like, you could put any B2B company's logo on that presentation or whatever it was, and it would hold up. And that was a moment in time for us where we have to rethink this. And so we kind of channeled ourselves, and I was fortunate to enter the creative team at that point in time. And the brief to me was bring back our soul. And you couldn't bring back what it was in 1999 because the world has moved on and things like this.

16:51And so we sort of turned to our community, actually, and we have a very robust community that has created this kind of environment that we find ourselves in we call Trailhead, an incredible character set we call Astro and Friends, Astro being our main character, mascot, if you will. And it's just been amazing to see the journey that we've been on with there from a, well, why the hell are they doing that? To now seeing study from, you know, LinkedIn B2B Institute and Aaron Baird Bagg saying that these distinctive assets are immensely valuable. And, you know, a great example of this, like what does the Geico Gecko have anything to do with insurance?

17:24It doesn't. It creates an association. It creates a playfulness. And, you know, that was a multi-year journey inside the organization to many people walking into Bank of America or these large organizations going, why are there goats and bears and astros on my thing to now being probably the most distinctive brand in B2B, I would argue. And you'd have to rip it from the cold dead hands of anybody in the company. We just love it. The culture has admired it, welcomed it. And I think that's really a positive. So it's not for everybody. Not everybody can adopt what we've been able to. We're fortunate to have a CEO who's a larger than life personality that exudes this and really challenges us.

18:01And I have to say, when I look back at it after, you know, the time we spent on it, it's been pretty amazing to see what we've accomplished and we'll keep building it. I genuinely think this is almost marketing's best kept secret, actually, in terms of characters. I mean, I think if I go back and put my client hat on again, I would have gone, why are we having these kind of cartoon, you know, childish characters sort of thing. now that i understand a bit more of the science behind how advertising and brands work i'm like i would start there if i was building a business tomorrow i'd start there because you know they they can shop everywhere you know they they immediately you know create positive associations they make you stand out from competition because of course in any business you're thinking about you but when you go out and realize then the sheer number of software companies out there all with the same blue logo all that say the same things you know yeah and you've got something that absolutely stands out i mean and the best part about it was it wasn't us sitting around a boardroom drawing these characters it came from our community we did not design most of these characters they came from the community and so it's really and each one of our characters has a role and they play a they play a role in there it's like each character represents a member or a group of our ecosystem within the business and so i think uh they're theirs they're not ours and it really has helped build like a connection to the organization and And so, yeah, advertising is there, but also the community side is there, and we see sort of benefits all around.

19:20Yeah. Well, it makes sense because, you know, you build software that help people talk to their customers, right? So it's good to hear that you're also doing that. What a concept, right? What a concept. There you go, not just selling it, but actually doing it. Now, another thing that might appear a little bit surprising as we're talking about B2B is doing a Super Bowl ad. How did that come about? Because was it a big sale? I know what, we're going to go on the biggest stage, you know, biggest advertising stage. with a B2B brand. Yeah. And it was a tough one internally because 2011 we did a Super Bowl ad.

19:52It did not go very well for us, let's just say. And so it's sort of a, it was like, oh, we'll never do that again. And so we had to overcome quite a lot. But I will tell you, we did not design said ad with the intent of being a Super Bowl ad. We built it because we felt the message was right. And then we were like, wow, this is a really powerful message. We should put it on the Super Bowl. Now just describe it for anyone who hasn't seen it. Just describe the act. It is quite powerful. It is. So this was 2020, right before the pandemic, which was a very different period of time, of course. And we had just hired Matthew McConaughey, who I'm sure we'll talk about at some point here, as our brand sort of advisor.

20:27And we were sort of thinking about what can differentiate Salesforce. And it was about values. And, you know, can we talk about how our CRM is better than Microsoft's or somebody else's? Sure, we can do that. That's not really a Super Bowl ad. And so we thought about what are the differentiating factors? And this was a moment in time when Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and everybody's going to space. That was the kind of thing, right? And yet we've got all these problems here in the US. Like we've got climate change. We've got all strife, economic or equality differences and whatnot. And we're like, why are we going up there instead of focusing on here?

21:00So we got down here. Yeah. And it was a very simple idea. And so we called it the new frontier. The new frontier isn't up there. It's down here. And so we really tried to just turn CEO and executives' attentions to the problems we have here and to focus our energy as businesses on being a platform for change. And that's one of our key values as a company is our business can be the ultimate platform for change. And so it's just a very simple idea that we came to life with a lot of fun. And, you know, we're broadly regarded for the ad and we're really proud of it. And now a lot of brands would say, oh, we've got this celebrity as our brand ambassador, right?

21:32And like, you know, you see a new car launch and it was in collaboration with, you know, somebody and you just think they didn't even touch the paintwork, you know, sort of thing. But actually Matthew McConaughey does have an involvement in the business, doesn't he? How does that work? Yeah, we're perfectly, he's not a brand ambassador, he's a brand advisor. And so he is a true advisor. He and I will sit down and talk about messaging direction and talk about the latest research with our brand, what's working, what's not, what's happening in the world. And so he and I, we just have a brand campaign we launched a couple months ago around artificial intelligence.

22:03And it was fascinating in its infancy to sit down with somebody of his stature and unbelievable connection to the consumer and to a personal individual to talk about what is happening in artificial intelligence. And it's so fascinating. I will bring the business perspective, and I'll bring the research, and I'll bring a lot of the work, and he'll go so much with instinct and his unbelievable ability to connect with humans. And it feels like it works so beautifully. And so I love the opportunity to collaborate with him. He's brilliant. He's as advertised, wicked creative, very smart, very in tune with the values of the company.

22:35The reason we chose Matthew is we have such a strong values alignment. So it's been a ton of fun. We're just getting started with him, though. I think we have our newest campaign, Ask More of AI Out. And it's been really, really fun. So we'll keep going. I've been listening to his green lights. And he's incredibly profound, isn't he? Very, very smart. But also his observation of the world is just fascinating. And that's not a book. That's just Matthew. That's who he is. Yeah. He just talks, doesn't he? And just all these profound thoughts and connections, the way he joins things together. It's just really.

23:06I can see why. He's a special one, for sure. You can see why it'd make you kind of think and challenge yourselves differently. He makes me uncomfortable, which I think is the point. I've been leading this brand organization coming on 10 years now. And so it helps me get outside the comfort zone a little bit. And challenges are to push our brain in another way. And I think that it would have been easy for us to go down the path of artificial intelligence where everybody else is, which is like bleeding innovation and things like this. But we chose to go the other way, which is about highlighting how trust is so important and really thinking about the questions we should be asking of AI.