Many Salesforce users may already be familiar with Demandware, but if you aren’t you will be now! Demandware is the global leader in a very crowded multi-billion dollar digital commerce market. Its cloud-based commerce technology allows customers to provide 1:1 experiences to consumers across web, mobile, social and brick and mortar stores. Demandware can routinely be found at the top of industry analyst reports, including Forrester’s Wave and Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for both e-commerce and digital experience platforms. 
While Salesforce users have had a 360-degree view of customer data needed to manage sales, service and marketing (with the acquisition of ExactTarget in 2013) for quite some time now, up until this time, commerce has been the missing link for organizations using Salesforce. Why bring digital commerce and CRM together?
Uniting Commerce and CRM in the Cloud
While I won’t go into the details about how Salesforce itself benefits from the Demandware acquisition since Diginomica did such a great job of doing that for readers, I will take this opportunity to highlight how this move can help Salesforce customers. Here’s a hint: It can be summed up in three words – The Salesforce Advantage. What is the Salesforce Advantage exactly? CRM.
It’s pretty plain and simple, the addition of a Commerce Cloud to its CRM cloud portfolio was much-needed for Salesforce and its customer base. Digital commerce continues to be a very hot topic in the tech space as companies explore new ways to connect with customers and grow their business. In fact, Gartner estimates that worldwide spending on digital commerce platforms is expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2020, according to stats provided by Salesforce in a TechCrunch article. Up until this point, Salesforce has lacked a truly integrated commerce capability for its Customer Success Platform. Last year’s announcement of some embedded commerce plug-in’s or “buy buttons” for Community Cloud was a step in the right direct, but nothing to the scale of a complete digital commerce platform like Demandware.
According to Salesforce’s chief product officer, Alex Dayon, “Digital commerce is one of the four pillars of CRM”. I couldn’t agree with this statement more (and obviously Marc Benioff did too). It’s truly the missing link for opening up new customer experience doors at every stage in the buying cycle, and why users leverage the Salesforce platform across the business. Marketing departments are able to create personalized customer journeys using Marketing Cloud designed to move prospects down the sales funnel by increasing engagement. Sales organizations can leverage Sales Cloud to manage accounts, contacts and opportunities. Leading service organizations can deliver fast, intelligent customer service with Service Cloud. And as mentioned before, you can bring customers together with an online community to share ideas, ask questions, engage with other members, and now buy products all on the Community Cloud platform. Throw in Analytics Cloud and IoT Cloud to drive smarter decisions and new services, and you have all the right ingredients for customer success with Salesforce!
The connection between commerce and CRM is indeed an important one. Commerce and CRM are both powered by data, and the signals that can be derived from browsing products to purchasing history are important pieces in the puzzle for a customer experience platform. Some may argue that the only missing piece for Salesforce from a customer experience management perspective now is a web content management system (CMS). Any guesses what Marc has up his sleeve there?
Why are We So Excited About the Demandware Acquisition?
Yesterday’s news is both exciting for Perficient and our clients. As the Salesforce cloud ecosystem continues to grow and new synergies emerge with other solutions, Perficient is well-positioned to capitalize on the opportunity with our Salesforce customers using Demandware today, or those that are looking to add e-commerce capabilities to their repertoire.
From our rapidly growing Salesforce partnership, our Demandforce Digital Commerce capabilities, to the creative firepower we have with Perficient Digital and cross-platform content management expertise – we can wrap all these things up together with a pretty little bow and deliver an end-to-end solution powered by Salesforce. We like to call this the Perficient Advantage.
Good analytic at “Digital commerce is one of the four pillars of CRM” . I agree with You.
Salesforce is realy awesome CRM for any business. I totally Agree……Thanks