Sales Development Hackers: your Cloud won’t be Salesforce

In the last few weeks Salesforce has announced a storm of new clouds, including the Financial Services Cloud and the Healthcare Cloud.

Around the same time in Atlanta at the Rainmaker16 conference, Salesloft CEO  Kyle Porter outdid Marc Benioff in two significant ways.

First, Kyle’s sneakers kept flashing when he walked on stage. While Benioff’s suit was no doubt more expensive (and not only because of its size), his sneakers lacked that key feature.

Second, Kyle scored big on the Cloud scrabble board: he claimed the  Sales Development Cloud , catching Marc off guards while, as Bernie Sanders would say, he was catering to the cloud interests of Wall Street and Big Pharma.

Sales Development will have it own Cloud

The idea of specializing Sales teams between prospecting and closing has now become widely accepted - see David Skok’s interview of Aaron Ross for all the good reasons behind it. This specialization has given birth to a new professional community, Sales Development. Now it even has its own bible, Trish Bertuzzi’s Sales Development Playbook.

With its own objectives and its own methods come its own tools. According to Sales expert Jacco vanderKooij , Sales Development teams currently use up to 20 different software tools. These tools will keep getting more and more specialized, because the market is big enough and the needs specific enough.

SDRs will find themselves spending most of their time in an app designed for them – likely centered on emailing and phone dialing, like Salesloft Cadence and Outreach.io. The idea of opening up an API to integrate the other tools that SDRs need and love is a brilliant move and indeed has the potential to create a new Cloud category.

Salesforce will not dominate the Sales Development Cloud

The core entity in Salesforce is the opportunity pipeline. That’s what Account Executives and their managers watch all day. But opportunities are only the output of the SDR machine. The core entity of SDRs is prospect engagement around a conversation. Salesforce has so far suffered from a surprising blind spot to the requirements of Sales Developers.

Salesforce is referred to as Customer Relationship Management, but its most salient strength is in Customer Records Management. It provides all the custom objects and fields to describe the most important records, and all the triggers and workflows to keep them updated. Hence it is likely to maintain its role as System of Records, across all functional areas, from Marketing to Customer Success. But it lacks the features that matter most to Sales Development.

Salesloft is well positioned to Lead

Salesloft understood from the beginning that Sales Development is its own software category. At Rainmaker16, the category name got an upgrade from “Prospecting Software” to “Sales Development Cloud”, but the core vision remains the same.

ToutApp, Yesware and Cirrus Insight have added Cadence-like features, but they have kept their generalist approach.  On the other side, outreach.io started strong on Sales Development but now targets “Entire Sales Organizations”, which I view as misguided – when a few years ago I was negotiating a $500M deal with Google, I can tell you the last thing I would have wanted was to put Sundar Pichai on an automated cadence.

Salesloft’s lead investor, David Cummings, has seen the movie before as founder of Pardot, which he sold to ExactTarget, which became Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud. Given how things played out, Dave could not be blamed for a bit of seller's remorse.

Why not aim for the sky this time?