‘Angry religious fights’: Salesforce global President and CMO Ariel Kelman on re-engineering attribution from last touch to ‘deep learning’ model; why B2B market will follow and an AI-powered rebound is coming

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A year ago Ariel Kelman boomeranged back to Salesforce after a decade helming global marketing for the likes of Amazon Web Services and Oracle. As global President and CMO of the $200bn+ customer tech giant, he’s wasted little time shaking things up – and Kelman’s view that Salesforce had “lost our focus on sales pipeline and on marketing really being a vehicle for driving business results” now appears prescient. Last week Salesforce’s stock price crashed circa 20 per cent after missing revenue guidance for the first time in decades. Ironically, most analysts still have a ‘buy rating’ on the stock – citing a “very healthy” pipeline and backing its new AI tools to power renewed growth.

Kelman has driven a forensic effort unpacking marketing’s contribution to sales – from a brand investment perspective and more tactical, performance-based campaigns. He’s also reset KPIs and marketing metrics and re-engineered the firm’s attribution model – not for the fainthearted, given “you can provoke very angry religious fights” amongst attribution’s fractured tribes. Either way, Salesforce has ditched last touch for a “deep learning” model that blends and weights sales’ and marketing’s contribution to pipeline growth and revenue.

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