Salesforce: The time for digital transformation is now

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When it comes to growing your business through improved ecommerce options, Salesforce is often a popular choice for companies of all sizes.

With Salesforce set to support two trillion B2B and B2C transactions across its platforms, covering 150,000 customers worldwide, the company is well placed to offer a range of tools and services to help facilitate growth for businesses in many sectors.

Thanks to strong continued growth, Salesforce's UK and Ireland business has become a market in its own region, and recently secured £1.9 billion in funding from the business to spend on local initiatives to fuel its own growth. 

TechRadar Pro spoke to Helen Kelisky, VP of Cloud Sales for Salesforce UK and Ireland at the company's recent Dreamforce 2019 event in San Francisco to find out just how the UK is faring on its digital transformation quest.

Journey

“Every client is on a digital transformation journey," Kelisky said, "they might be at the start, they might be somewhere in the middle, but they’re at a unique spot in their journey, and I think most of them wish they could go faster and want to go faster, because they recognise that is what's needed in order to survive, or in order to capture the opportunity that exists there."

"Customers are beginning to realise that if they if they are going to be withdrawn, it's not going to help them compete in the market and actually survive. So more and more customers that you wouldn't have thought would embark on a digital transformation are having to have those discussions."

But Kelisky says that many customers feel they are being held back by a lack of internal skills, which is where Salesforce, with its wide-ranging Trailhead platform steps in. 

Trailhead currently boasts over 1.7 million users, offering a huge amount of resources that can teach employees at all levels useful skills that allows them to take their businesses further.

(Image credit: Image credit: Salesforce)

This all helps to grow the worldwide Salesforce ecosystem, with recent figures from IDC claim that the global Salesforce economy is expected to add $71 billion in new business revenues to the UK economy, with the use of cloud computing by Salesforce customers will add $1.18 trillion worldwide in new business revenues to their local economies.

This will enable the creation of 4.2 million jobs worldwide within its customer base during the six years from the end of 2018 and the end of 2024, including 143,000 new jobs in the UK over the next five years, showing the huge influence the company has.

This includes fitness retailer SweatyBetty, which implemented Salesforce Commerce Cloud at the end of 2018 and has seen double digit growth on its website. 

Kelisky also highlights MoneySuperMarket.com, which uses Marketing Cloud to again improve its customer communications, which has led to a slimmed-down approach that saw it sending 297 million less emails, but achieving a 20 percent increase in click through rate due to a more personalised customer experience.

"It's quite incredible the amount of pull (Salesforce has) in the market," she adds, "our customers want to talk to us, they want to understand what we do for customers. They want to understand what other customers have been doing with us, and they want to learn from us."

"Our customer success is our success."

Mike Moore
Deputy Editor, TechRadar Pro

Mike Moore is Deputy Editor at TechRadar Pro. He has worked as a B2B and B2C tech journalist for nearly a decade, including at one of the UK's leading national newspapers and fellow Future title ITProPortal, and when he's not keeping track of all the latest enterprise and workplace trends, can most likely be found watching, following or taking part in some kind of sport.