Stuck. Tangled. Locked in. If that’s how your team describes your martech stack, you’re not alone.
In this session, we get candid about what’s driving brands to migrate off Salesforce Marketing Cloud — the real misconceptions about migration, what life looks like on the other side, and how to build the internal case for change.
We cover:
- Why brands feel stuck (and why it’s more common than you think)
- What’s happening inside the Salesforce ecosystem
- The biggest misconceptions about migrating
- How to get the rest of your org onboard with making a move
- What life actually looks like after moving to a modern platform like Braze
- The steps to take now to set yourself up for migration success
This fireside chat is a candid look at what’s driving the shift to modern platforms like Braze, and what it actually takes to make the move.
Transcript:
All right, let’s go ahead and get started. Thank you all for being here. We’re excited that you’re choosing to spend your lunch hour, or whatever hour it may be, wherever you are, chatting about what’s going on in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud ecosystem and why some marketing leaders are choosing to make the move. So I’m here with Michael Burton and Bobby Tichy, who will start by giving you a little bit about their background and why they are the best people in the business to talk about this topic today. So Michael, I’m going to start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about your background with Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Yeah. I think it’s been almost 13 years since I originally started in the Salesforce ecosystem. I joined ExactTarget just before they were acquired by Salesforce. So I was on the services side and working closely with customers, that were doing ExactTarget and the Marketing Cloud work. And then post that, Bobby and I were working with one of the top Salesforce Marketing Cloud consultancies in the world that we built called Lev. And so we’ve got a lot of experience inside of Salesforce, and then actually inside the Salesforce ecosystem, which I would argue we probably almost had more insights being at Lev in the ecosystem than being inside of Salesforce. And now on this side at Stitch, which Bobby and I launched in September of ’22, seeing customers come from Salesforce. So we’ve got kind of a full circle picture about what this ecosystem has been like and what the product’s been doing over the last decade.
Yeah, and a similar background and experience to Michael. I was an architect at ExactTarget, and then through Salesforce in the acquisition and the partner ecosystem. And I think the biggest thing that stood out kind of throughout that time was I was a huge Marketing Cloud fanboy, throughout that time, right? You couldn’t talk to me about any other platform or anything like that. And so especially kind of growing up in a way on that platform and now being on the other side of it, it’s like, oh, man, it’s like my eyes have been opened. So, excited for today.
Awesome. And I think that’s a good message, sorry, Jessica, too. I think Bobby and I would both say we’re appreciative of Salesforce. We’re here because of our background in Salesforce. So this is not meant to be a, “Hey, Salesforce is awful.” This is meant to be a real picture of what we’re seeing and how we’re helping marketers today. We’ve got just tons of appreciation and thankfulness for how we got to this point. But now, times have changed, and so we’ll talk about what things look like today.
Yeah, I appreciate that note, Michael. Thank you for adding that. And as we kind of get into our questions today, I did want to just say you’re welcome to use the chat if you have questions throughout. Michael and Bobby love answering questions in real time. Don’t feel like you have to wait until the end. Just pop them in the chat at any point.
So first question, Michael, I’m going to point this one at you. So what was the moment that you realized that the brands that you were working with within the Marketing Cloud ecosystem needed something a little bit more modern?
I think with everything that we see, it’s gradual, and then all of a sudden. I felt like we started seeing this inside of the Salesforce ecosystem with customers, this has been maybe 2017, who had been sold this vision of a broad platform. And really, as we know, marketing at Salesforce is just a lot of different acquisitions and different experiences and different integrations. And so customers were starting to understand that maybe Salesforce was a little bit more limited in what they originally thought. You started hearing these question marks, and then over the years, as maybe Salesforce was doing less investment in marketing and commerce, those voices got louder and louder and louder. And then you started hearing even Salesforce changing their sales structure. The sales teams were not just selling Salesforce marketing. They became digital salespeople, and it was much more broad. And so there were all these signals that were happening that customers were saying about their experience, and then also what Salesforce was doing as well to kind of potentially kind of talk about, hey, that’s less of a prioritization for Salesforce. And so that kind of built up over the years. And I would say over the last three years, that’s just accelerated to customers saying, “Hey, what else is out there? Now is the time to think about that.” So that’s been happening for quite a good number of years.
Yeah. Mine is a specific client I remember. I’ll keep it short, but I remember a specific entertainment company, we were helping them with launching their streaming service, and they were on Salesforce Marketing Cloud for email. And when it came time to launch their mobile app, we just assumed that they would be leveraging MobilePush and MobileConnect on the Salesforce side. And they said, “Oh, no, we’re going to leverage this other platform called Braze.” And we’re like, “Oh, well, we’ve heard of Braze before,” but it was validation of, oh, this is where the market is going. First it was mobile, and then ultimately that entertainment company moved away from Marketing Cloud for email in favor of Braze as well. So it was kind of an initial, kind of like what Michael was saying, gradually you hear about Appboy, then they rebranded to Braze, and all of a sudden, our clients started realizing, oh, they start to do these omni-channel things a little bit better than Salesforce does.
You know what? That’s kind of surprising, too, right? That was a great experience for us, getting exposure to Braze. And some of those relationships that we had then, we kind of still have those same relationships today on the Braze side. But wasn’t it interesting, Bobby, I’m thinking back to our time at Salesforce, when we would talk about how Braze didn’t do email. That was the argument. Mm-hmm. And then now you get into Braze, and you’re realizing, well, they’ve actually been doing that for, I don’t know, 12, 13 years. And most of the customers that we talk to that are on Salesforce are primarily using email. And so this reality of customers wanting to go do more and more, beyond just email, email continues to be an important channel, and we believe in it, it’s kind of been funny. What you’ve been told and then what the reality is, I think we’ve been able to see that kind of full circle over the past few years.
Well, and it’s one of Bill’s favorite anecdotes, the co-founder and CEO of Braze, is that when they launched Appboy, email was a feature. Like, it’s not like email came later. I think everyone thinks of like it was mobile first, but it absolutely wasn’t.
So I think one thing that we hear constantly, especially with these large Salesforce Marketing Cloud email customers, is that they feel stuck. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Like, where do these feelings of being stuck come from?
Yeah, I can start. I think the biggest thing is, most Salesforce Marketing Cloud customers don’t just use Marketing Cloud, right? They’re leveraging Sales Cloud, Service Cloud. The thing we’ve heard recently is that they’re also embedded into Data Cloud, and they want to try to figure out a way to get out of it. I think the reality of that is, it is a little bit scary because when you’re in a contract with Salesforce, if you pull one cloud out, well, like any other business in the world, Salesforce is there to make money, and so they’re not going to just take that attrition from that one cloud and say, “Okay, the price for everything else is the same.” They’re going to try to make up for it on that side. I think that’s one side of it, is the contractual and the financial part of it. I think the other part is, is that a lot of people have been on Salesforce Marketing Cloud since the ExactTarget days, so you’re talking 10, 12, 15. Some folks have been on for 20 years when we think about the first initial customers. And what they ended up doing was, Snowflake and Databricks, these all came later. So they built their data warehouse essentially in Salesforce Marketing Cloud because of the relational database model. And so now you’ve got all of this kind of legacy tech debt that’s there. And to try to unwind that and then try to migrate it somewhere else can seem like a huge undertaking. We’re working with a large retailer right now that has three distinct brands underneath it. They’ve been on Salesforce Marketing Cloud since 2008, and they were terrified. They told us in one of our first discovery sessions with them, they’re like, “We don’t know what’s here.” And I mean, the great thing about that is that with the… One great thing about Salesforce is the openness of the API and Marketing Cloud, so we’re able to pull all that down and use an LLM like Claude to kind of cipher through it and figure out, okay, you’ve got 347 automations running, but actually only 24 of them are running right now and are actually providing some kind of value to the business. So I think those two main elements, the financial side and then kind of undoing all of the tangled web that’s just been there year over year, just trying to get things done.
And to Salesforce’s credit, they do a great job at relationships with the executives of those customers. So there is a pressure for a customer when maybe the marketer is not making a decision. And we know plenty of instances where Mark Benioff is calling the CEO of another company and convincing them to stay, and that’s a superpower. Like kudos on Salesforce to do that. Incredible marketing engine of how they go do that. But there is real pressure when you have those executive relationships. That does, I think, and in some instances, outside the contractual piece that Bobby brings up, is real. So then a marketer is like, well, is it worth the risk? Is it worth the risk of upsetting the relationship we have? Do we get to be in a worse position? And we’re not even talking about the technology. We’re not even talking about actually even outcomes or business outcomes. It’s more about the relationships that have happened over the prior years. Now, I think that to the earlier question, Jessica, is what we’ve kind of seen as more and more customers have felt that and experienced it. But you get to a point where if the product just isn’t driving the measurable, meaningful outcomes that you need, then that’s kind of that breaking point where it’s like, okay, well, this isn’t working. It’s great that we have this relationship, but it really is time to go. I do think that is a real factor that we see when we talk to customers that are on Salesforce who have been on it for a really long time.
Yeah. The other thing I’ll mention too is… Oh, sorry, Jess. I was going to mention the personal aspect to it as well, is that a lot of folks, again, to Salesforce’s credit, with things like Trailhead and how embedded they’ve become with people at their job level, right? So, like, being Salesforce certified is a huge badge of honor, and especially like there are people out there that have 10, 15, 20 certifications, and that’s a huge value add to their career, and especially internally. Like, we know of organizations where if you got certain Salesforce certifications, that was part of your performance plan. So that was how you got promoted or how you got the next band of salary. And I’ve talked to consultants on the Salesforce side as well as customers on the Salesforce side who are thinking about making the switch of, I want to leave the Salesforce consultancy and go to another digital consultancy or go to a Braze consultancy. And that’s a real thing there, because you’ve got all this historical knowledge, and you almost kind of feel like you’re throwing it away. But I think that’s another misnomer is that there’s so much going, especially on the Braze side, that’s attributable of what you learn on the Salesforce side that can help you so much in that path, too. But I think that’s another area, too, that Salesforce has done a great job.
And to extend that a little bit more, like even just look at Stitch. Stitch has a tremendous amount of Salesforce Marketing Cloud experts. I would argue maybe we still have some of the largest consolidation in one team, but we’ve been able to show that people can come over. They can make that move from Salesforce to Braze, even building their new expertise and new skill set. There’s a lot that does transfer over that benefits a customer or a consultant or an employee that makes that move. Like, we’ve seen that and felt it firsthand.
So I know it’s going to be a little uncomfortable, but I do want to address the elephant in the room. Can we, Michael, specifically, can we start with you? Can you talk a little bit about what’s going on in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud ecosystem and what we’re hearing?
Yeah. If you follow me on LinkedIn, I’m really public about talking about this because I focus on what does the data say. Like, we clearly see it from our perspective, the amount of customers moving off of Salesforce, we see that directly. But if you look at what Salesforce even talks about, there’s reality in that that business is dying. And so over the last several years, they report marketing and commerce together, so you don’t get a full picture. My educated guess is probably marketing is roughly 80% of that number. It’s just my educated guess. But that number has gone from growing year over year in the 20 percentile to went to single digits, and then the most recently reported earnings went negative. So the business is declining right now. So we’ve seen that trend. We’re seeing that show up in the Salesforce numbers. And if you even hear what Salesforce says themselves, they talk about specifically weakness in marketing and commerce impacting their current quarter and expecting that to continue. So there’s a reality that even Salesforce is saying customers are leaving marketing and commerce. Now, I’ll say this to Salesforce’s credit, if I’m in their shoes, I think they’re doing the right things. They’re determining it’s a giant business. They’ve successfully grown this across many different products. They have to prioritize. They can’t lean into every one of their products with the same intensity, investment, and effort. It’s just not realistic. So what Salesforce is choosing is to focus more on data and AI, and that will then support more Salesforce and commerce. I’m sure they’re hoping that will have a long tail and impact marketing and commerce. But if you ask a Marketing Cloud customer today, are you seeing a lot of innovation, the reality is no, because Salesforce is making this, again, I think the right decision, but to the negative impact of customers that are on Salesforce Marketing Cloud right now who feel like that lack of focus, investment, and energy, and you would hear this directly from Salesforce themselves. So that’s what’s happening. You see Salesforce is showing that customers are moving off and they’re making a particular focus on Agentforce. If you notice, everything is Agentforce. And the only thing I’ll say is that in the most recent quarter, which gives us a lot of insight about how they think about marketing and commerce, is that I think moving forward, they’ll probably not even report specific cloud revenue. They’ll just talk about high-level numbers. And when you typically talk about high-level numbers, you’re not wanting to talk about the things where they’re not as strong. So that is real, and that’s what’s happening today at kind of macro level.
Anything to add, Bobby?
I think you hit it really well. The one thing that I always like thinking about, and you mentioned at the beginning, Michael, is that when you’re a partner of a technology provider, you understand that provider or that business better than you do when you actually work there. Because you have to start to understand exactly, what’s the go-to-market motion? Where is investment going on the product roadmap? What does the marketing strategy look like? And so where I like to go is, I’ve got some friends who are a part of the GSI group, so like Accenture, Deloitte, Capgemini, et cetera. And talking to them is always really eye-opening because they can kind of see the forest through the trees when it comes to Salesforce. And it’s exactly what Michael mentioned, right? Their entire focus right now is back office, supply chain, leveraging Agentforce to find revenue where they couldn’t before. So for example, if we have $90 million in contracts that we’re not taking advantage of, or if we can take advantage of 10% of that, that’s an additional $9 million in revenue or $18 million in revenue, whatever that might look like. So I think that’s where, I think, Michael, you said it well, of they’re positioning that or they’re changing their positioning, and it’s probably the right strategy, but unfortunately on the marketing side, it leaves people kind of out on their own.
So Bobby, I know this is something that you’re really passionate about. I would love to hear from you some of the biggest misconceptions that you hear from executives when you start to have the conversation about migrating off of Salesforce.
Yeah, I think we’ve already mentioned one of them, which is it’s going to be an enormous lift and a huge amount of time. I think that’s the biggest one that we hear all the time is like, “Well, we don’t know if we can afford it, and we don’t know if we have enough time to be able to do it.” And I think that, first of all, I think that’s a really bad reason not to even evaluate or go down this path, right? So you’re sitting on a platform right now that we know the business is not focusing on, and we know R&D is not putting a lot of innovation into it. And so the other thing I like to think about is the opportunity cost, right? So okay, you’re going to decide not to migrate, just because you have this preconceived notion it’s going to take a long time or it’s going to take a lot of money, but instead you’re going to stay on a platform that is stagnant. So staying on that platform for another two to three years, what does that ultimately look like when that point is you ultimately have to shift? We don’t know ultimately what the product roadmap will look like for Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Could we see a similar trajectory as other Salesforce products where there’s an end of life? We certainly could. We don’t know. Or will people be forced to move on to Marketing Cloud Next, kind of like the next iteration of Marketing Cloud built on Core. And there’s a lot of unknowns there. But what we’ve found is that a lot of times when we have a first discussion with someone, we ask them, “How long do you think this migration from Marketing Cloud to Braze is going to take?” I mentioned the large retailer earlier. They said they thought it was going to take 18 months, and our timeline is nine months. And so it’s a lot of times just kind of building this up in your own head. I think the other piece that’s much different that folks sometimes realize, but sometimes don’t, is the data model piece. And I think now is such an interesting time where data warehouses are becoming so prevalent. And so what folks are doing is they’ve got all their data sitting in Snowflake or Databricks or Redshift or BigQuery, and that allows the migration to be that much easier as well, because you’re not just migrating all of your data from Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you’re leveraging the data where it lives rather than having this huge element to it. I think the third thing I’ll mention is people don’t think that Braze integrates well with Salesforce, which is completely wrong. We’ve integrated Braze with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Community Cloud. You name the cloud, we’ve integrated it with Salesforce. Again, one of the great things about Salesforce is how open the APIs are. Same thing with Braze. So we can make those things interoperable if you’re leveraging sales and service cloud for CRM and customer service.
I also always think about customers who, when you start asking them questions, coming from Salesforce, we know so many of them are heavily using it, primarily using it for email, right, Bobby? And you start talking to them, “Well, hey, what are you currently using for mobile? What are you currently using for SMS?” So you start asking all these other questions, and you realize they’re investing in four or five different pieces just related to owned channel. So I think that sometimes that gets lost until you start asking the questions. It can lead to a misconception, because if you’re moving to a player like Braze where it’s like, hey, no, all that’s happening inside of Braze. So there’s a question about ROI. Customers who are typically spending across multiple platforms are consolidating that, and that’s what’s driving an even higher ROI. They’re getting more value, but they’re already paying for these other solutions where Salesforce wasn’t hitting what they really needed. And that’s why they, again, go out to an Attentive as an example, or in the case of the streaming service company that we worked with, decided to split between Braze and Salesforce. By the way, that customer ultimately migrated their email over to Braze, and Stitch helped them. So I think that can be a part of the misconception and actually drives a much higher ROI when customers are understanding that it’s all happening inside of Braze. And I do think, to your point, Bobby, everyone gets lost on this fact that we can integrate Braze with sales and service as well, if not better, than what Marketing Cloud does. I think that does get lost in a lot of people’s minds, and people fear that, but it’s just not a reality. We can close that gap if we need to close that gap. And I also think about it, too, is I talk about when, what happens when you move to a new house? Do you just carry everything forward? I think that’s a mistake. None of us really want to just move to a new house and carry all the baggage. And so being more thoughtful to Bobby, how you kind of called that out, I think is it does relieve people’s minds saying, “Hey, this is actually an opportunity to evaluate what do you really need? What’s going to drive? What are the outcomes you think you need today?” And then with the rate of change that’s happening now with innovation and technology, what do you think you’re going to need in the next three to four years? And does Salesforce need that? When you start laying it out like that, customers start to understand, like, “Oh, we see this path. We see this path beyond Salesforce.”
Yeah. And Omid, I hope I’m saying your name correctly, in the questions asked, how about Commerce Cloud? Absolutely. You can think about Commerce Cloud like any other e-commerce engine, right? So think about it very much like BigCommerce or Magento or any other commerce platform. All of those integrate incredibly well with Braze and the web SDK that’s leveraged to integrate those two platforms together.
Another thing that Michael said that hits home, and I think we all realize this, but sometimes we forget it, is that a lot of times when we think of productized integrations, those are almost handcuffs to integrations between platforms, and especially when you think about Salesforce, right? So Sales and Service Cloud are built on the core platform. Marketing Cloud was an acquisition through ExactTarget. Those are completely different infrastructures, completely different data models. And so, yes, they have a productized integration, but it’s all done through the API. So what we’ve been able to do with Braze is exactly that, and to Michael’s point, sometimes even better, because some of the data we can push back to Salesforce from Braze is more detailed than what we had before in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
We got a couple other questions that came through. First is, do you have data for the ROI? What is the cost difference? I’ll start with this, and then Michael, would love to hear your point of view, too. I think that there are kind of three elements to the ROI that folks see when they move from Salesforce to Braze. Number one is time to market. So just being able to leverage and build campaigns much faster, especially across channels. Michael mentioned it. Every single Marketing Cloud customer that we’ve migrated to Braze has more than one messaging platform. So they have Attentive for SMS, they have Airship for mobile, they have Bluecore for retail triggers, all of these different elements. There’s never just Marketing Cloud, and so you basically just save so much time by leveraging all of that inside of a single platform like Braze. The second one is very similarly is the reduction of tech spend. So because I’m not paying for five different platforms anymore, and I’m leveraging Braze for all of those different things, I’m reducing the amount of time that I’m spending on just configuring the campaign across platforms, but also the amount of money I’m paying to these various platforms. We recently migrated a large software company who had Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Campaign, Selligent, and Airship, and MoEngage, and they were using them all for different reasons across the business, and they were paying different consultancies or partners for every single platform. So again, that’s more spend that comes down because then you’re only having a single partner for a single platform. The third one is interoperability across your tech stack, because Braze works so well with data warehouses, because of the zero data copy capabilities where I can trigger a journey or a campaign based off of data I have in Snowflake, and it never has to serve up to Braze. It never has to be replicated. So those are the three main areas where folks see the most amount of ROI.
And I think even moving forward, Bobby, I think it’s interesting, Braze always gets asked questions about their experience in AI and ML. Well, they’ve been doing it for a decade. I mean, they really have had a head start. But what we see is customers kind of leaning into what Braze has built. And if you follow Braze in the past year, they’ve been leaning even more into agents, more and more with machine learning when it comes to decisioning. They are doing a fantastic job, I think, building tools that empower marketers to be even more efficient and effective. So if you think about how you’re going to go scale your marketing team as well, and doing that with more of a smaller teams, not hiring as many people as you want, that is a reality with ROI on a platform like Braze that is giving a whole lot more empowerment, enablement back to a marketer.
Mark, you asked the question, did you experience also how not to break Service Cloud? I’m not sure what you mean. So if you could provide some more context there, that would be great. Because we’ve never experienced breaking Service Cloud before. So if you have more context about that question, that’d be awesome.
And then we have an anonymous question. What are some key considerations when looking at alternatives like Stitch? One, for businesses who don’t want to lose established momentum, and two, for staff who are not certain how much of their built-up expertise is portable. Michael, do you want to go through that, especially since what you mentioned about a lot of our team being former Salesforce Marketing Cloud consultants?
Yeah. So I think this is a very straightforward one. Because of this reality, it’s allowed Stitch to scale so quickly. It’s been a long time since I’ve run the numbers, but I’d say a majority of our team comes from Salesforce, came from Salesforce Marketing Cloud work, had touched it a part of Salesforce or another agency. I talked to many of people who were worried that they would lose that momentum in moving into a platform like Braze. We just have not seen it. The same principles when we think about what it means to be effective in own channel marketing. What are the key KPIs? That does not change. I actually think that Braze is much more intuitive than what I would have ever experienced in Salesforce. So we’ve not seen customers or people making that move who have lost momentum and all the knowledge that they’ve gained. That knowledge carries forward. I think it gives people even a head start if they were not in the Salesforce space, moving to a platform like Braze has been highly effective, and it’s been an efficient transition for those people.
Great. So we kind of touched on this earlier, but I want to dig into it a little bit more because I know it’s kind of a buzzword in the ecosystem right now. So lots of conversations around composable MarTech versus traditional suites, but for those of you who are not in it every day, it can sound a little bit abstract. Could you give some real examples of what composable actually looks like when it shows up inside a marketing organization, and why does that matter for the teams that we’re working with who are actually building those campaigns every day?
Yeah. I think the biggest thing to think through is that composability is not a new term, right? This is always basically how we functioned, but I think just as marketers, we like to brand things, and sometimes in not the most efficient way, but it’s what we do. It’s why we love acronyms, like CDP and MAP and CEP. And composability is not a new term altogether anyway. If you think about the difference between something like a Salesforce Marketing Cloud and kind of what we call composability today, there’s really not much different. Folks who use Salesforce Marketing Cloud, they’re using a CDP. A lot of times, they’re using a segment or a Treasure Data or an mParticle in addition to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or they might be using Data Cloud. They also have a data warehouse. There’s a Snowflake, there’s a Databricks, there’s a Redshift somewhere in their stack that is housing all of their data. And it’s the same thing on the Braze side, right? I think the best way to describe the composability element of Braze is a little bit what we mentioned earlier, which is it fits well into your tech stack regardless of what your tech stack is. Because of how well it integrates with all of the major data warehouses, because of how well it puts data back to wherever you need it so you can do business intelligence or reporting or dashboards, all of those different things. And also for basically reaching out and grabbing data and bringing it back in. That was one thing that we always loved about Salesforce was the ability to leverage AMPscript to be able to pull in things at send time. Braze has the same type of functionality called Connected Content. So I think that this idea of composability, like we try to make it out to be this brand new shiny thing, it’s the same thing. And whether you’re on Salesforce, Oracle, Adobe, or Braze, at some point, all of it is composed together to make sure the marketer has everything that they need.
I think what we love about it with Braze is it is just so much more flexible than what we’ve experienced in the past. We love cloud data ingestion with Databricks or a Snowflake and being able to pull data in real time from a data source. I think that almost what we see is giving marketers more and more opportunity to experiment. And I think that’s one of the things that, composability is not always my favorite term because I think it’s not really as complicated as what it seems. But what it does is it allows people to put together these solutions and technologies much faster. We see our customers doing that, and iterating and experimenting at a much faster pace than they’ve ever done before. And we’re not even talking about like where real-time and AI fits into that. That just only accelerates these marketers’ ability to experiment.
Couple other questions we’ll head off on here. How do you overcome an IT department who are unwilling to allocate resources to assist with the switch? Michael, you want to take that one?
No, Bobby, I don’t want to take that one. I think the way that we coach marketing teams is kind of go back to… I think where we’ve seen teams make mistakes of just going and saying, “We want to migrate. We want to migrate off of Salesforce,” but there’s no real business case around it, where it’s, you can say all these great things like, “Hey, Salesforce is not investing in this. It has less attention towards… They’re behind when it comes to AI and ML.” But I think what you really have to start with is, what are you trying to accomplish? What are the key metrics that you’re focused on? Is the current technology limiting your ability to go do that? And if it is, I think when marketers take that process, it’s much more easier. It’s easier. I’m not saying it’s ever easy to be able to go back to a main decision-maker and say, “Here’s why we want to go make this investment. It’s not just because we want to be on a new technology. It’s, we think that there’s an opportunity for us to gain 5% more revenue over the next year. Here’s what the investment is, and here is the ROI.” That’s when marketers can get movement across a larger group of people to help rally around them within their own company to go do that. And I think we see too many companies that don’t go through that work, and it’s an important piece up front that has to happen, whether it’s Salesforce or Braze, whatever it is, that’s what works in getting a company behind making a move like this, is what it’s actually going to go drive from a revenue perspective. It could be from a cost perspective. I think it’s a much more compelling story when it’s about, “Here’s top-line revenue. We’re going to do this more efficiently than we’ve done before.” I think that is a way to get IT around. Of course, this is where Stitch, it’s not a big plug for Stitch, but that’s where we help marketers build that case. We help them show that this is a… We show customers how to make that move off of Salesforce to make it seem like, “Hey, this isn’t a standard. This is a much more straightforward process than the IT team is starting to do.” So whoever your partner is should be working with you to also outline that. They can help facilitate that move and show the rest of the team what needs to actually happen.
Yeah, I think it’s incredibly important to always have a leader that’s kind of leading this charge, right? So that way, especially when you think about the leaders of a marketing organization or an IT department, they should be working very closely together to accomplish the goals of the business. And if moving to Braze helps accomplish the goals of the business, then the IT team should 100% be on board.
Dave had a question here of, “If we’ve already made a decision that Salesforce or Salesforce Marketing Cloud isn’t the platform for us long term, lack of innovation, costly for individual product add-ons, lack of support, what questions should we be asking potential partners and platforms during early conversations, and how long should we expect a migration away from Salesforce to take?” We had a client, three years ago, who I thought approached this the right way of, instead of just doing a blanket RFP and getting inbound from five to seven different vendors and kind of seeing which one they wanted to pick, what they did, instead of listing out requirements, they listed out needs to have. And I thought that was a really interesting way of doing it. Of it was based– It wasn’t saying, like, “You need to be able to deploy email. You need to be able to deploy SMS.” Not things like that. It was more of, “We need someone that we can call, like a technical account manager, that is available to us and dedicated to us, so that way anytime we need something, if it’s a mission critical, if it’s Black Friday, whatever it might be, we can pick up the phone and call them.” Who would that person be? What role is that on that side? So basically, instead of kind of just a blanket RFP, think about what you need as a business, and also think about what your team needs on a day-to-day basis. If you don’t have a big need for a technical account manager or for hands-on support, then make sure you’re sharing that with whoever you’re going through this evaluation with. But kind of almost like a relationship, right? When you start dating somebody, I think it’s very easy for people to try to kind of like mold themselves to whoever they’re dating just to make them like them. Don’t do that. Don’t do that at all. Be very specific about what you need and what you want, and it’ll make a much easier process, and you’ll be able to disqualify people much faster. As far as how long it’ll take, I’m going to give you the consultant answer because it’s the right answer, and it completely depends. We’ve had migrations take three months, we’ve had migrations take 18 months. It completely depends on the business that you run, the complexity of that business, and the complexity of all of the interoperability platforms around it.
Mark clarified for us. So thank you, Mark. Apologies. I meant same as you mentioned with Commerce Cloud, move to Braze will impact on data shared from Marketing Cloud with Service Cloud, so I guess not impact at all since data can still be shared through the APIs in Braze. Yeah, you’re exactly right, Mark. There’s kind of two ways to think about this, is one, we can hit the same APIs that Marketing Cloud hits as part of their integration to Service Cloud, so you can still see the same engagement data, exactly like if you were using a Marketing Cloud, so the customer service agents don’t see a difference. Or we can do it kind of brand new. Our favorite way of doing it right now is through a Lightning component in Sales and Service Cloud, where we’re not just surfacing all of that data, so that way the storage isn’t there all the time. Instead, we’re having a Lightning component that’s refreshed when it’s needed, goes out to Braze or goes out to the warehouse, grabs the data at that time, and shows them exactly what they need to see.
Isaac had a question on for data-driven engagements, email, push, SMS, how does Braze function for ingress and egress of data from CDPs, Azure, Databricks, et cetera, large data and tech stacks? You’re speaking my love language, Isaac. If I could talk about this for an hour, I would. The great thing about Braze is they have what’s called cloud data ingestion. So every major cloud data provider, so Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, BigQuery, Microsoft Fabric, all of these have a native integration with Braze. What that means is you decide what data in your warehouse you want to surface up to Braze, and then you create a process or basically just a query inside of your warehouse, and it automatically updates into the Braze profile. You can determine the cadence. You can also determine if, we don’t want to send all this data to the Braze profile or to Braze in general. We just want to have trigger off of this data. You can use zero data copy triggers as well, so that way you’re not have to sharing all of that data. Braze also integrates phenomenally well with CDPs. Do you need a CDP? That’s another topic. That’s another webinar, but, that’s a good topic too.
Mark has a couple more questions. This is great, Mark. Thank you for the engagement here. Do you know how fast it is for Braze in adding new communication channels that arise, for example, TikTok? Braze spends, oh, I can’t remember the number. I used to know it, but it is hundreds of millions of dollars a year on R&D. So every single monthly product update that they have is a meaningful product update. So whether it’s a new channel, like TikTok or WhatsApp, or it’s a specific functionality like agent console, which allows you to embed agents into your canvas flows or into your data work, they innovate incredibly quickly. The other thing I’ll mention here too is that because all of the channels function off of a single profile, we’re kind of getting a little bit nerdy here, but as you guys know, on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud side, there’s a data model for email, there’s a data model for mobile connect, there’s a data model for mobile push. There’s a whole other platform for web. All of that sits on a single profile and a single infrastructure in Braze. So when those new communication channels come up, it is incredibly easy to stand those up and integrate into them.
Andy Wilson. Hey, Andy. Good to see you. How frequent are Braze releases? How far into the future are they open to sharing the product roadmap? How do the response time SLAs for things like send time and API compare to Salesforce Marketing Cloud? I just talked about the releases, so they are monthly. How far into the future do they share the product roadmap? It’s very similar, I would say, to just about any other publicly traded company. So they’ll have the forward-looking statements. They will absolutely share what’s coming in the next quarter and the following quarter. And then if there’s something really big that they’re working on, they’ll share that as well. They typically share those at their big tentpole events, so Forge in September and then City by City, which is typically in April. And then as far as SLAs are concerned, every single Marketing Cloud customer we’ve migrated, whether it’s for transactional communications across any of the channels or for marketing sends, rather, none of them have had any issues with send time, latency, or APIs at all. So uptime has been incredibly high, and no one has run into any issues as far as transactional feedback loops or timing.
And then last question in the queue from Mark again. Can you please correct me if I’m wrong when I say another benefit I will see with Braze is that you can encapsulate all communication channels in a single platform, so journeys with different channels is then available natively? 100%. I couldn’t say it any better. You’re spot on, Mark.
Awesome. So let’s go here next. So tactical for a second. Bobby, what advice would you offer a marketing leader who wants to make the move, but they think they’re stuck based on some of the organizational politics that we’ve already discussed? Tactically, what should they do to move that decision forward?
I think Michael said it great. The first thing is you got to align it to a business outcome, right? If we’re trying to increase revenue, if we’re trying to decrease spend, whatever that outcome is that the business can get behind, because that’s going to be the fastest way for the business to approve something like this.
Yeah, we could talk about how Salesforce Marketing Cloud is still integrating to things through an SFTP. Yeah, that’s dated, that’s old, but that’s not going to drive a business forward, right? We could talk about how Braze is natively built on top of a data warehouse, so it’s going to be easier for us to get data from Snowflake or Databricks into the platform. Yes, all that’s great. It’s going to save us time and save us effort, but it’s not going to be aligned to a business outcome. That’s got to be the number one thing that we’re looking at. I think the other thing that we’re seeing people successfully go through this process where they are a Salesforce Marketing Cloud customer, they want to move to Braze, and they’re kind of going through the process of doing that, is being very open and transparent with the rest of the organization about why we’re doing this, why it’s going to be better for the business, why it’s going to be better for every level. If you just think about change management, right? What’s in it for me? As an individual contributor, how is my job going to change? How is building a campaign going to be different? All the way up to a CMO. Okay, are we going to see increased revenue from this? Are we going to decrease our tech spend? Different things like that. Make sure that everyone is aware of what’s going on, so that way everyone’s kind of in it together, and it doesn’t feel like you’re trying to make this move just because you seem to like Braze better.
Bobby, you’re in a unique position where you’ve talked to a lot of prospects who are on Salesforce, and they are looking to make a move off. We don’t have 100% win rate. That’s just not realistic. So any kind of insights that you can give as far as why customers maybe decided to stay on Salesforce, and then does that inform our thoughts on the kind of guidance we would give to others?
Yeah, I think the number one reason why folks end up not moving over is because they kind of go down the path of moving over and then Salesforce comes in, like you mentioned earlier, Marc Benioff makes a phone call, or goes and plays golf with someone, and then it comes down that we’re not going to go through this process, or we’re going to stay with Salesforce. Candidly, there’s not a whole lot you can do about that. Right? If Marc Benioff is calling the CEO of your company and is like, “Hey, I can make you a better deal,” or, “How about we throw in Data Cloud for free or Agentforce for free or some consumption credits?” You can’t push back on that. No matter how good your business case is, it’s really hard to push back on that. I think the other one that is most common is they feel like the… Or not they, but the people who are leading the evaluation or the change are not doing a great job of communicating across the organization how it’s going to benefit other people. So then what happens is the person that’s responsible for technology in other places like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud, they don’t understand why we’re making this change, and they just hear it as, “Well, why would we switch our marketing platform to another platform when everything else we do is functioning on Salesforce?” So I think that’s the biggest area where it’s so hard to even get over those humps of, one, just executive presence and relationships, but two, communication across the organization.
And then we got another question. “Given all the channels are within the same platform, how do the analytics work for each channel? Is it consolidated? Will Braze be able to use AI to help drive recommendations or identify hotspots for us?” Great question. So analytics are all still separated by channel. So even though all of the channels function off of a single data model, the data that you get back or the engagement data flows back to you in something called Currents. So a lot of you today are probably leveraging the standard tracking extracts in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or you’ve probably created some custom tracking extracts or some custom reports over time that feed into your warehouse or feed into another BI tool or provide some reporting to you. Braze’s version of that is called Currents, and it flows directly down into your data warehouse. It could also flow into your CDP or into your BI tools, and all of the data is by channel, so that way you can see in a breakdown of what is being done on email, SMS, push, in-app, content cards, all of those different things.
Will Braze be able to use AI to help drive recommendations or identify hotspots for us? We have clients doing this already. So there’s two main ways they’re doing this. One, Braze released a feature called Operator about a month ago, and Operator is basically a chatbot inside of your Braze instance. So you can have a number of campaigns open, and you could ask Operator, “Hey, what would you recommend be the next campaign that I launch?” Or, “How would you recommend that I improve this journey?” The other thing that people have been doing is leveraging the Braze MCP server to connect it to LLMs like Claude. And so they’ll have conversations with their data and conversations with their campaigns to figure out what they should be doing next.
Lisa asked, “Is there any downtime during this process for the team?” There cannot be downtime during a migration. Absolutely not. So, all of the campaigns that we’re driving, and when I say we, I mean, like the collective we, right? So whether you’re a retailer, financial services, or you’re insurance, there is either revenue impact or there’s compliance impact, so we cannot have downtime during the migration. And in all of the migrations that we’ve done, there is no downtime of actually sending the messages out. Now, there’s certainly a change management element to it, right? So you have to, at some point, stop building campaigns in Salesforce and start building them in Braze, but that’s why you kind of sit sidesaddle between them for a period of time, especially during IP warming, where you’re doing dual sending. You’re never in a situation where there’s a blackout period.
Some great questions. Thank you so much for the engagement. We are going to move into some rapid-fire questions, so I know you want to be verbose, but we’re going to cut you off on these questions. And then we’ll have a little bit more time at the end for more audience questions before we wrap up for the day. So first rapid-fire question, Michael, we’ll go to you first. One question every team should ask before renewing.
One question to ask before renewing would be… I think I would come back to, like, is what we have today driving the financial goals that we expect? That would be my number one question I would ask.
Bobby, what’s one sign you’ve outgrown your platform?
Oh man, one sign. There’s so many. I mean, it could be that you’re using multiple platforms to just deploy messaging, like we talked about earlier. It could be that you haven’t… I think the one thing that we identify too is, one of the biggest things we do is we go through the campaign process. So when you’re thinking about migrating or you’re going to migrate, one of the best things you can do is go through the end-to-end campaign process and actually time it out, and if it takes you longer than anywhere from three to five days to deploy a campaign from the time that you have creative, that is way too long. So I think just time to market, and kind of evaluating that over time is a really good sign.
The Braze roadmap has gotten a lot of love today from the audience questions, so I’ll let you both answer this one. What is one Braze feature that you’re the most excited about that’s been either publicly announced on the roadmap or recently released?
I love Agent Console, and I’ve loved it since they announced it at Forge last year. And it’s giving marketers the ability, a more approachable way to leverage AI agents and very targeted use cases that makes it becomes real. You could take an idea and it could be live within 30 minutes, 20 minutes. And I think they’re only going to continue to build out Agent Console to make it even more approachable and more effective for marketers. So that’s my go-to.
Yeah. I love Agent Console as well. We worked with one retailer that used it to deploy two-way SMS so that way they could actually have a conversation, or you could have a conversation with them through Braze, through Agent Console, which is really cool. My favorite is an OG. It is content cards. And the reason why I love content cards, and many of you probably haven’t even heard of content cards, the way you can think about content cards is it is just a way to surface content anywhere. So it is not channel specific. So what I love about this is, within a video game, you can personalize messaging through Braze because of content cards. On a kiosk at a Taco Bell, you could personalize that kiosk using content cards. On a hotel TV screen when you walk in, you can change what that looks like. When you walk into a bank, you can completely change the teller screen using content cards based off of the customer that’s in front of them. So it’s one of those kind of the underlying champion of the Braze platform that a lot of times people overlook just because they haven’t heard it before. Like coming from Salesforce, I’d never heard of content cards, but then you realize how powerful it is. It’s just serving up content wherever you need it. It’s phenomenal.
So Bobby cheated, so I get to add another one. He chose two. So I get to then comment too. He also gets a B- for rapid fire. That was not rapid. Can I also say, to me, what’s been really surprising to me is the use of in-app messages. To me, as someone that’s not clearly as technical as Bobby, the fact that we are building games, like real cool loyalty games, but we’re doing it through an in-app message, I would have never thought that was possible. And so that’s opening up a whole lot more, driving engagement and loyalty that’s through an in-app message that’s actually an app that I think is… I love that. I love that use case.
Last question before, we are happy to take more audience questions, would be, so if someone comes to you saying that they’re feeling stuck with Salesforce and it feels like it’s just me, what would you say to them?
It’s not you. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at the stats, but I think at one point, the net new logos for Stitch, again, we launched in September of ’22, I think it’s north of 60, 65% of customers were coming over from Salesforce. So, and that’s not even representative of all the customers that we talk to. So you’re not alone. The same feelings that you have about the platform are shared by many. And look at what Salesforce says. We mentioned what they talk about as far as how marketing and commerce are reporting or how they’re doing. You’re definitely not alone.
Yeah, and I would say, too, reach out to your network. Obviously, Salesforce’s network is large, and there’s probably someone that you know that’s made the switch to Braze or to a different platform. Leverage their expertise, leverage how they’ve gone through this process, because yeah, like Michael said, you’re definitely not alone. And a lot of people, if they haven’t made the switch already, are very interested in it. So reach out to your network on LinkedIn or on Slack or wherever it might be, just to pick people’s brains about how they’ve gone through that move and what they think about it on the other side.
Perfect. Well, with no further questions, thank you, Michael, thank you, Bobby, for your time. There’s two leave-behinds I want to leave you all with today. So the first, if you happen to be in London next week, Braze is having their big city-by-city event, which Bobby referenced earlier, and he will be on stage with one of our customers, Zygo, who recently migrated from Salesforce Marketing Cloud. And just two months into being on Braze, they have completely transformed their workflows using AI. It’s going to be a great conversation. So if you happen to be in London, we would love to meet you and see you there. And then next, all of the attendees from the session today will be receiving a follow-up, which is a deep dive technical guide around planning your migration from Salesforce to Braze. So keep an eye out for that. Would love for you to review that and let us know if you have any further questions, if we can guide you at all as you are going through your evaluation and migration process.
Thanks, everyone. Have a great rest of your day.
