Salesforce, which pioneered the concept of customer relationship management in the cloud, has been on an acquisition spree for a while and 2024 hasn’t been an exception by any standard.
Like every giant that dreams of being the fulcrum and the lone superpower, Salesforce has slowly but steadily risen above the rest by segregating the competition in more than just a way.
Let us have a close look at some of the recent acquisitions made by Salesforce that have cemented the position of the world’s most popular CRM organization in the highly competitive segment of customer relationship management solutions and capabilities.
Bonobo
Salesforce.com, Inc. acquired Israeli startup Bonobo AI for $45 million in May 2024. This acquisition is expected to help Salesforce provides glean insights to organizations across the world via text, support calls, and other methods of communication. Bonobo makes it easier for organizations to aggregate and analyze at scale the plethora of invaluable information that is made available to an organization in the form of customer voice calls and service texts.
The technology of Bonobo easily and seamlessly integrates into the platforms that are used by its clients for communicating (such as Twilio, Zendesk, and Gmail) and CRM platforms such as HubSpot and Salesforce. Bonobo then analyzes interactions and conversations for “event for interest in calls” and helps clients create and customize highly-targeted marketing campaigns. It is also used by organizations to increase conversation rates by forecasting critical issues like customer cancelations. Bonobo is regarded by analysts as a wonderful tool to analyze unstructured data, including conversational data, at scale.
Using the capabilities offered by Bonobo, organizations can easily turn customer conversations and interactions into meaningful insights to power sales along with enhancing the levels of customer retention and satisfaction. These insights can also be utilized by sales teams for identifying and exploring spot trends through the Conversational Intelligence revolution. According to industry analysts, this acquisition will assist Salesforce to stay at the cutting edge of developments in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and fintech.
Bonobo will significantly improve the power and potential of Salesforce Sales Cloud by helping organizations leverage conversational intelligence within the ever-evolving Salesforce Platform.
Tableau
In an all-stock deal valued at $15.7 billion that is likely to close in the third quarter of 2024, Salesforce acquired Seattle-based Tableau. The acquisition is seen by market analysts as a deal that will drastically improve the ability of Salesforce’s customers to see and understand data through Tableau-powered solutions and help people engage and understand customers with Salesforce. The acquisition combines San Francisco-based Salesforce, one of the world’s largest and most popular sales-focused software vendors, with one of the most prominent vendors of data visualization and analytics software.
The deal makes sense for the world’s number CRM giant as it gives it access to the fanatical user base of Tableau that is unrivaled in the segment of enterprise software. In other words, this means Salesforce now gets access to a group of customers and users who are loyal, ambitious, and innovative about the future of business intelligence.
Tableau was founded in 2003 by Pat Hanrahan, Chris Stolte, and Christian Chabot and its mission involved the development of methods to visualize structured data from databases. The organization was also involved with software building with data visualization at the core of its design.
Griddable
Griddable, which has a huge reputation for providing quality and seamless data integration across hybrid clouds, was acquired by Salesforce on January 31, 2024 for an undisclosed amount.
Through this acquisition, Salesforce now owns Griddable that is first smart-grid of the industry for enterprise data that enables digital transformation via a unified platform. This Software as a service (SaaS) platform simplifies database migration securely and quickly to the cloud for addressing the ever-evolving requirements of digital businesses across the globe. Using a scale-out grid architecture, it is designed specifically for synchronization of data integration across different databases.
Salesforce.org
Salesforce made a payment of $300 million April 2024 to acquire Salesforce.org, its own charitable foundation. A reseller of software and Salesforce services to the non-profit sector, Salesforce.org grants, hands over, and distribute software of the company to educational and non-profit organizations for free or at a discount. This acquisition will allow Salesforce to create and optimize efficiencies for its business requirements such as identifying and exploring different ways to access favorable revenue margins. With this integration, Salesforce will be acquiring non-profit entities and customers as part of the reformed vertical that will be led by Rob Acker, the current CEO of Salesforce.org.
MapAnything
MapAnything, a North Carolina-based provider of intelligence services and software, was recently acquired for an undisclosed amount by Salesforce. The organization is best known for providing location-intelligent solutions that have the potential of leveraging mapping as well as optimization technologies. MapAnything enables its customers to maximize the productivity of their service and sales resources and helps them become more efficient, effective, and profitable.
It allows users to easily perform tasks and activities from the map – update records, log calls, add thousands of contacts, create new events and tasks, and more with just one click. Using its capabilities, users can easily schedule and optimize the events of an entire week in MapAnything to spend more time selling and less time planning.
Salesforce users can now easily build and test territories without posing a negative effect on the existing plans to ensure that sales and service representatives are operating at full capacity. With MapAnything, Salesforce will be better positioned than ever to extend the power of Service Cloud and Sales Cloud to deliver top-notch intelligence solutions that can improve the productivity of sales and service professionals.
Undoubtedly, these acquisitions by Salesforce have enhanced its position in the market segment by delivering a series of knockout punches to its peers that have been left awestruck by them. They have also empowered the clients of Salesforce to get empowered and connect with their customers in innovative and new ways. The future appears even brighter for Salesforce, well this surely looks like a journey that will have great paths to walk upon for the CRM giant in the times to come.
