Salesforce & Exact Target: Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow

At the last Dreamforce 2012, I mocked the so-called "Marketing Cloud" because all they had was a strong social media monitoring platform (Radian6) and a Facebook advertising platform (BuddyMedia).

Where is the Marketing automation?

How do you manage campaigns?  SEO? SEM? Paid campaigns, both Facebook AND Google Adsense?

I was also reminded that Salesforce “doesn’t do emails”. “WE are not in the white-listing business”. As a Salesforce user, I am sure you’ve been frustrated with the sending limits in emails.  Hence it is only natural to explore 3rd party applications like iContact.

To me, there wasn’t a Marketing Cloud. 

“We’ll see tomorrow”…

But Tomorrow is always on the horizon, and you knew a major acquisition had to happen.  Everyone thought Marketo or Hubspot, which makes sense since it’s tightly integrated with Salesforce.

Social.com had a lot of potential, but it’s still too early to see where that fits in the corporate enterprise.

So when Salesforce.com announced the acquisition for Exact Target at a price tag of $2.5 billion, that was the warning signs that the "Marketing Cloud" is here.

In all fairness, in order to get a true appreciation of Exact Target, take a look at this article from pandodaily.com (also mentions Eloqua, Workday and Marketo.. if you are into startups, and especially enterprise companies, you’ll love the artcile) and the following charts:

After reading this article, I got a true sense of appreciation for the acquisition and how Salesforce is primed for the future of the Marketing Cloud.

So don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.. it’s already here. (yesterday’s gone)