Salesforce Broadens Its Vertical Strategy With Dedicated Manufacturing and Consumer Goods Clouds

In mid-September, Salesforce announced it was adding two new solutions to its growing portfolio of vertical-centric offerings. Manufacturing Cloud and Consumer Goods Cloud provide tailored capabilities for manufacturers and CPGs, based off Salesforce’s industry-leading sales, marketing, and customer service solutions. Salesforce had previously rolled out tailored versions of its applications for other specialized verticals, such as Healthcare and Financial Services.

Manufacturing Cloud focuses on enabling account-based forecasting, sales agreement management, and MuleSoft integration, while Consumer Goods Cloud focuses on optimizing store visits for CPG representatives. The feature sets of both products are a step in the right direction and will help speed up time-to-value for Salesforce implementations in their respective industries.

The announcement is part of a broader push that Salesforce is making to position its products more attractively for verticals that have unique requirements for CRM. Salesforce’s vertical-centric strategy gives it an edge over competing vendors such as Microsoft Dynamics. It also opens up avenues for it to steal market share from niche, vertical-only competitors. Our view is that adopting vertical-specific flavors of Salesforce will help mitigate an all-too-common implementation challenge that plagues many of our members: costly (and often unnecessary) product customization based on industry-specific needs.

Source: SoftwareReviews Salesforce Sales Cloud, Accessed October 7, 2019

Our Take

• Salesforce, an industry leader in CRM applications, recently introduced specialized versions of its products for Manufacturing and Consumer Goods.
• The step signals that Salesforce is doubling down on its vertical-centric approach to CRM.
• The move is competitively wise; our members in these verticals can also limit customizations by taking advantage of more out-of-the-box features and functionality.

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