ISG Provider Lens™ Salesforce Ecosystem Partners - Implementation Services for Marketing Automation - Brazil 2024

M&A processes have improved the quality of service delivery and market competitiveness

Salesforce is growing at a fast pace in Brazil, with high market interest in its products and services. This has provoked a lot of curiosity from global companies that are service partners in other regions, with high demand for implementation and platform integration projects, leading to many M&A processes. Several global partners have identified interesting business opportunities in Brazil and have decided to acquire smaller local service companies to start or significantly increase their operations.

Local clients benefit from the improved service quality as these acquisitions significantly increase the number of specialized resources, breadth of offerings and depth of each service offered. Global companies acquiring partners promptly expanded operations, enabling quick strategic decisions based on business growth or increasing customer satisfaction levels, which was previously restricted to each initiative’s cost. The added delivery capacity, along with better technical support and diverse services, has encouraged Brazilian organizations to strengthen their Salesforce cloud implementation and integration projects with higher-quality services, increasing the potential for success.

The heightened service breadth and depth have been convenient as Salesforce increases its scope of  offerings, both through acquisitions, incorporating new complementary solutions into its portfolio, and the addition of new capabilities, such as AI incorporation, which is now used across all its platform’s clouds. At the Dreamforce 2023, Salesforce showcased its strength and speed in delivering solutions integrated with advanced technology through its partnership with OpenAI; its presentation captured the entire world’s interest at an overwhelming rate. Although the presentation needs substantial evolution and finalization, the swift action of Marc Benioff, Co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, was undeniably recognized, proving why he was named Innovator of the Decade by Forbes. This has made the company the world’s 10th most admired company by Fortune.

It is important to highlight the content presented at the Dreamforce 2023 event, as it influences all the  actions that Salesforce partners will have to deliver to customers in their operating regions and countries. The possibilities presented aim to boost productivity, transform CX through data, AI and CRM, and encourage millions of users worldwide to implement these alternatives in their corporate environments. Below are the main announcements on the platform:

• Einstein platform: Salesforce launched the Einstein 1 Platform, an AI platform powered by Einstein Copilot, a conversational AI assistant integrated into the user interface;
• Copilot Studio (Prompt Builder + Skills Builder + Model Builder): Einstein Copilot Studio gives administrators both the power and control to implement generative AI (GenAI) to support user productivity;
• Free Data Cloud and Tableau licenses: Salesforce has announced free Data Cloud and Tableau licenses for all customers using Sales and Service Cloud, Enterprise or Unlimited Edition.

The Data Cloud solution is the evolution of the Customer Data Platform (CDP), which aims to unify the customer’s vision and improve digital marketing strategies. It collates customer data from various systems and delivers requested information from any Salesforce Cloud in real time. Holistically, the Data Cloud  solution unifies information, meets market demands and shows the way for the evolution of the entire Salesforce platform.

In addition to opportunities based on the market’s increased interest in data and GenAI, Salesforce had also been exploring other fronts previously. One of them is industry clouds, a line of vertical solutions aimed at specific business areas, wherein the entire user environment meets the needs of each business vertical.  These are solutions from Vlocity, acquired in 2020, designed to help organizations accelerate their business through prebuilt applications with industry-specific data models and pre-defined business processes. The solutions help achieve the organizations’ expected ROI and rapid digital engagement. In Brazil, the  customized clouds of greatest interest have been in the areas of healthcare, financial services, energy and retail.

Another front that is gaining notoriety and increasing its share in the Brazilian market is the Marketing Cloud solution. In an unpretentious assessment, what used to be perceived as long development campaigns, with tedious segment construction, limited content for personalization and manual creation of journeys, are now fast campaigns, with intuitive segment construction, scalable content and automated journey creation, all due to the application of AI. Yearly, there has been an increase in new partners specializing in Marketing Cloud to meet the growth and high demand for digital marketing campaign development.

As the interest in deploying Salesforce clouds in local companies has grown, so has the demand for managed application services. As more implementation projects take place, more integrations with pre-existing environments are required, and fewer qualified professionals are available to meet the need to support Salesforce clouds, there is a greater need for service companies to support the environment. Application, data and user management services have proliferated in the country with a greater number of service  companies and Salesforce partners of different sizes and specialties.

Global system integrators have more experience and expertise and focus on large corporations, which are significantly complex and less diverse in demand. However, midsize and small organizations find smaller partners more suited to their needs, with less complexity but a lot of variety in demand. As the demand is growing and the market is still far from stabilizing, many service companies and Salesforce partners are composing proposals to meet the various needs of organizations.

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