Deliver Profitable Growth in Consumer Goods - World Tour Atlanta | Salesforce

We know that the consumer goods industry has been through a lot over the past few years. Our industry was rocked in more ways than one. But through it all you have persevered, growing, expanding, doing what consumer goods companies do best. But where we are now is really exciting. The industry expects a 3% CAGR through 2028, bringing us back to a place of growth. But while consumer goods companies may be willing to purchase again, their expectations are also higher. And willingness to pay remains a challenge. The majority of consumers don't want to spend more for goods and services and actually over half are trading down to lower cost options. So that makes your pricing strategy and protecting margins even more important. We're also at an inflection point when it comes to consumer experiences. Consumers these days want truly immersive experiences. How many of us saw the Barbie movie this summer? So that wasn't just about advertising on television or with programmatic ads to get people into the theaters to watch the film. It was probably one of the best examples of 360 degree marketing that I have ever seen. From capsule collections to brand partnerships to influencer activations. As a former CPG marketer myself, it literally was what launch dreams are made of. But that wasn't without cost. It's estimated that the team at Mattel spent $150 million on the advertising that went behind that film, more than the $130 million production budget. That's huge. And the topic of the year, which may be the topic of the decade, is AI. Anyone heard anything about AI this morning? ChatGPT sparked a global interest in AI. And now every executive is forced with trying to figure out how they can use AI to make their teams even more efficient. In fact, in a recent Salesforce research report, we found that 64% of executives believe that AI was will increase the effectiveness in their organization. And the exciting part about that is this is the group that gets to decide how we're going to use AI to shape the future of consumer goods. Now, while it's exciting, it won't always be easy. AI can be super powerful, but it also needs to be trusted. And the majority of consumers already don't trust companies with their data. And when you bring AI into the mix, we have bias, toxicity, all these things in this AI model that is learning how consumers behave. And consumers will leave your brand after just three bad experiences with the brand. Which makes it critical to get your AI strategy right from the beginning. Your AI strategy has to enhance the experience that you're consuming are having with your brand. And with this Increased focus in AI data becomes even more important. Yet the majority of CPG execs feel like they don't have the right level of data visible across their organization. But once you do have your data in place and you have your AI strategy in place, you also need to empower your teams with trusted modern tools. Yet we know that that is easier said than done. Yet all of these pieces work together in one continuous loop to help you unlock this step change and incredible transformation ahead of you. You may have heard this formula a few times at World Tour, but the future of consumer goods is data plus AI plus CRM plus trust. It starts with data which you may be sensing a trend here. Data is current, critical and with this it's important for every consumer goods company to have customer and consumer data available so that you can make decisions with the most relevant information which unlocks embedded AI. Because our AI is natively embedded within the platform which allows you to scale your AI strategy at scale across the organization. And all of this built on the world's number one AI CRM. This is where our customer 360 comes in. We have best in class apps across sales, marketing, commerce and service all working together and purpose built for the consumer goods industry, which I'll talk more about later. Data plus AI plus CRM plus trust. You can't think about these things in a silo and you can't think about them as separate investments. All of them are really working together in one continuous loop to help you unlock profitable growth. So now we're going to talk a little bit more about how this comes to life for the consumer goods industry. In specific, our vision for consumer goods is to bring the B2B side or the customer together with the B2C side or the consumer together and planning and execution together on one integrated platform. On the B2B side or sorry, we first start with data which allows us to again have visibility to all of your customer and consumer data so that you're able to deliver the most relevant experiences to your consumer. Then looking at the B2C side, we're able to deliver seamless experiences across marketing, sales and service to make sure that you're delivering the right message to the right consumer at the right time. And then on the B2B side. So this is where consumer goods cloud comes in. So we have a purpose built consumer goods cloud which brings together your planning and your execution on one platform so that your key account managers and trade managers can make sure that they're optimizing in the field to deliver that Profitable growth and at the center of everything is trust. Trust, as you may have heard, is our number one value. And it's really at the core of everything that we do. So let's look at consumer goods cloud in a little bit more detail. Consumer goods cloud enables a continuous loop between planning and execution on one platform. It starts on the planning side so your key account managers are able to deliver the best account plans with key retailers by making sure their forecasting is as accurate as possible. And they're doing that with also planning their trade calendars and trade budgets together on one platform. This allows finance managers and key account managers to have one single source of truth and and one consolidated view of everything that they're planning for the account that then feeds in to the execution. Because once you plan all of those amazing trade promotions on those in store activations, they're only as powerful as how they're activated in the store. So that flows into your omnichannel execution which allows your field reps to be activated in the store with the relevant information that they need to sell in the right products at the store level. All of this is supercharged with data and AI is built into the flow of work so that you can optimize your trade activities and drive even more efficiency in the field. We have had some incredible momentum in consumer goods and because of the amount of value that we've been able to deliver for consumer goods companies, we've been continuously innovating for this industry. We started, as you can see in 2019 with consumer goods cloud retail execution which unlocked the ability for field reps to have efficiency and more data in the field as they were going to stores. We then launched consumer goods cloud for sales and through organic as well as inorganic innovation launched trade promotion management as well as consumer goods cloud for service. We also have purpose built intelligent solutions which drive even more efficiency with data built into the flow of your work with consumer goods cloud trade promotion effectiveness as well as trade promotion optimization. So you can see here that there's quite a bit that we're continuing to innovate in this space. We also have mulesoft accelerators pre pre built for consumer goods cloud because we know how important getting the right data into your system is. So with that I want to take a look at in a little bit more detail at the actual tool. I'm going to bring up one of my colleagues to walk you through our data cloud innovation which as you may have sensed a trend data is huge and important. So I'd like to welcome to the Stage my colleague, marketing manager Mickey Horner.

Thanks, Naja. All right, give me a wave if you can hear me. Just to double check. Amazing. All right, I've got some good news and I've got some bad news for y'.

All.

The good news is consumer goods companies have a wealth of data at their fingertips. Now, the bad news is the majority of that data is still sitting in silos, which makes it really hard to unlock and utilize. You could have your data sitting in ERP systems, of course, you could have it sitting in third party data sources even. You could even still have it in offline Excel spreadsheets, which makes it really challenging to make sense of it all. However, we believe there is a world where planners and field reps can use consumer segmentation data in their product and customer segmentation. Well, I've actually got some more good news for y'. All. That world is available today with Data Cloud. You get access to open, integrated and intelligent data that can drive profitable growth across multiple different functions and operations for your business. Now, everything you're going to see today is available today with Data Cloud. In fact, There are over 2 trillion profiles in Data Cloud already. Just to give you a sense of the scale we're working with here now, for the first time ever, we are bringing together B2B and B2C data to drive even more benefits for your business as well. In fact, in February 2024, we are launching the Consumer Goods Cloud data model in Data Cloud, which is going to unlock incredible benefits for your business. And that's going to be specifically designed for the consumer goods industry. Now let's take a look at the product. But before we do, so, quick, shout out to our demo drivers, Tim and Ivan. So today I'm a marketer at Alpine Foods and I'm looking to launch new flavors in my kids health snacks product line. Now, in order to ensure a successful launch, I want to build a profitable campaign, which ultimately means I need to create the right consumer and customer segments and then activate them. Luckily for me, Data Cloud allows me to analyze, synthesize and activate data from all different sources. As you can see here, I have a quick roll up of all of my active data streams, my campaigns, segments and analytics. Let's start by creating some smarter segments. In order to do that, I need to first pull in data streams from consumer sources like marketing, service and commerce. But I also need to pull in some customer sources. Right? That's going to be consumer goods Cloud as well as third party data. And because I work with Mulesoft, I can use MuleSoft connectors to speed up the process. Now I can harmonize data quickly pull in individual data streams into one single unified data model with Einstein AI. Now I can visualize thousands of attributes onto a single individual as you see here. If I double click into that individual I can actually see a unified profile in detail. It's a 360 view of our consumer that I can choose to engage with either directly via traditional means, B2C connections, perhaps marketing cloud, but I can also leverage it in my B2B customer engagement as well. Now that I've mapped my data appropriately, let's start by making those segments. Einstein Studio for Data Cloud allows me to leverage on platform as well as off platform data models. Things like Amazon SageMaker or Google Vertex. Einstein AI is then able to look across these various data attributes like sku assortment, historical sales and cross reference them with first party consumer data to actually provide the right retail store segments and stores within those segments I should be targeting for my launch. I can even get recommendations for which retail stores I should launch targeted ads at on their retail media network. This presents itself in an easy to modify, drag and drop view of my segments that I want to use in my campaign. And now why don't we go ahead and use them right? I can use these segments and activate them via a cross channel campaign journey with marketing Cloud. I'm going to choose to target healthy snacking households to ensure effectiveness. However, I can also use it in consumer goods cloud targeting the Southeast with my new launch. In addition to that I can make sure that key account managers are able to plan and run highly targeted promotions while field reps have same access to those promotions. All of that data we just covered as they conduct their in store visits. That's the power of bringing B2B and B2C data together. Finally, with segment intelligence I'm able to monitor my program effectively. I get a clear view of all of my segments, campaigns, costs and revenue and that makes me able to make smarter decisions about which channels I invest in, what target audiences I want to build and ultimately how I activate in my route to market. All from one trusted cloud. Now what we just saw was data mapping from complex data streams all into one single data model. A unified profile which provide us a very clear view of our end consumer segmentation. Making sure that we are as relevant as we can be with all of our tactics and analytics to make sure that our program is as effective as it needs to be. Now the good news is consumer goods companies are already using this today. To help drive growth for their business. In fact, General Mills has been doing so for quite some time with our data solutions. Let's take a look at General Mills to hear about their story. Using data. If the film will roll. There we go.

This is a company that's been around for a long time and for part of our history, just being big was a big part of our success. We wanted to tell everyone about our products, and often we wanted to tell everyone the same thing. Well, fast forward to today. People have an expectation of you speaking directly to them about the thing that matters most to them. And so now AI, data and CRM are ways that we can achieve that promise in a way that's actually manageable for the team.

One of the things that's really important to General Mills is to build a relationship with our consumer. Having data is great, but unless the consumer feels like what we're doing with their data means something to them, we're not doing our jobs right.

We collected a lot of data from our consumers, but our teams didn't have the capabilities to understand consumer trends.

Because we are a house of brands, we have a lot of different data sets for each brand. Those used to be very disconnected. We wouldn't understand that somebody was maybe a member of Box tops and engaging with our Betty Crocker platform and also loves tacos with Odo El Paso.

All of our products are sold through a retailer. We don't own that transactional data that can help us complete that loop. And so that was a major pain point. Salesforce has been an enormous help in closing that loop for us.

Data Cloud is very important for us because it's bringing our first party and our second party data together. Now we're able to understand who we're messaging and really refine these audiences in a very, very powerful way.

We used to think one to many was good enough. And what we're able to do with customer360 is get to one to one. And it truly is that personal at scale that we've all been wanting and dreaming of.

We're able to unlock moments of joy because we're able to deliver the right information, the right recipes to make those special moments in their lives happen.

We would love to leverage AI, especially generative AI, to help us unlock opportunities and be a lot more surgical in our pursuit of those opportunities.

Trust is more important than ever because our consumers are counting on us to protect their data, respect their privacy. It's about putting the consumer at the center of everything that we do. And we let our consumer Be our guide.

We are never thinking about one transaction. We are thinking about delivering an experience and bringing people back over and over and over again. So to the extent that we can understand more about the consumer through this single source of truth, that can increase our confidence that we're going to deliver the right product to them that they're going to love. And if you put the right product in front of them, they have a great experience, they're going to come back and really that's where we generate long term value.

Wow. What a great film. To help showcase the story, journey and implementation of Salesforce with General Mills. Now this is the vision of the customer360 for General Mills. It's an example of what it would look like if they used every piece of our Salesforce solution in consumer goods. However, they're actually already well on their way to achieving this. They use marketing cloud to personalize all their consumer touch points, resulting in triple engagement rates. A marketer's dream. They also use service cloud to provide all the context needed to serve every customer and consumer. They even use consumer goods cloud, giving all their field reps the tools they need to make sure that all the products and promotions are delivered as planned. Now this is an incredible example of what it looks like to use data to personalize all of the consumer touch points. But I'm sure you're thinking, what about the customer? To answer that, I'd like to welcome back up Naja Phillips.

What an amazing story from General Mills. Data is so crucial and I just love the way that General Mills has been able to bring that into the fold of how they do business and bring the box tops program from cutting the physical box tops into the digital age. But we also know that the B2B side of the house is critically important for CPG companies because the majority of transactions are still happening in the retail store. So I want to take a moment to just talk briefly about our innovation on the B2B side. So first on planning trade promotion management, we launched this and it really is one seamless platform that allows you to plan your promotions, manage your funds and budgets, and manage your claims all on one integrated platform. So no longer are your teams operating in silos, but your key account managers, your finance teams, your marketing teams can see everything that's planned for the account on that one single platform platform. We're really excited about the innovation that we've launched in this area. So if you saw our recent news, actually a few weeks ago we just launched Trade Promotion Optimization which is now generally available. So that allows you to bring in AI to predict your baseline and uplifts of those promotions, which is huge. So no longer are you going into Nielsen or other sources to manually calculate what your predicted uplifts are will be, but AI is actually consolidating all of that information and predicting it for you. We also just launched Account Scenario Planning, which allows key account managers to look holistically at their account plan and look at the optimal mix of all of the promotions and what would be best to drive revenue growth and drive their business forward. And then coming next summer, we're launching liability accruals. So all within the platform you'll be able to manage your liabilities and accruals right in your trade promotion management platform. We've talked about this a bit, but we know that your trade is only as powerful as how it's executed in store. Retail execution, as I've mentioned, brings that power to the field reps and allows them to increase their efficiency in the field by visiting stores and knowing exactly what they need to do when they get to each store. We've also launched some fantastic innovation around retail execution. We just launched our Visual Studio code based modeler. It's a bit of a tongue twister, but this allows you to make your installation and maintenance of our offline app even easier and faster. Then coming next summer, we'll be launching van sales which for our direct delivery customers, this is critically important because it allows your van sales, your van drivers to place orders and manage their business all from their van. And last, but certainly not least, because we're really excited about this innovation, we're also going to be piloting guided selling with consumer goods. Einstein. So you've heard, I'm sure a lot about Einstein over the course of your morning here, but this will allow Einstein to actually give recommendations to the field reps about the types of activities that they should be doing in store, how to staff sell in more in the store. So again, if you're sensing a trend here, we're building even more efficiency so that reps can make the most of their time with each of their retailers. All of this is built on the world's number one AI CRM. With data, AI CRM and trust, we're able to deliver innovation that will help our consumer goods companies grow and succeed not only now, but well into the the future. So we've covered a lot this morning in our brief 30 minutes together. But don't worry, it doesn't stop here. If you are as excited about the innovation that we have coming for consumer goods as I am. We have a roadmap and innovation session later this afternoon where I will be walking you through all of the innovation that we have coming in the next three releases across planning and execution for consumer Goods Cloud. We also have our demo station and the campground, so we have our amazing SCS who will be out there and can walk you through all of the intricacies of everything that McKee showed, as well as on the planning side and the execution side. And then lastly, we just launched a new consumer goods industry research report. So it has a lot of great figures about what we're seeing overall and some of the facts that I shared a little bit earlier in the presentation. So I'll pause here for a moment for anyone who wants to take out their phone to scan this QR code to download that research report. All right? Oh, sorry, do I need to go back? Okay. So I just want to again thank everyone for being here with us this afternoon. We know there's a lot of places that you could be. We've taken you away from your day job, but we hope this session was valuable for you. We really do appreciate you being here with us at Atlanta World Tour, and we want to make sure that we are continuing to get better and continuing to bring you the best. So please also leave us some feedback scanning this QR code or you can also find it in your event app. But thank you again for being here. And just a reminder to please drop off these headsets in the back of the room and we hope you have a fantastic rest of your world tour today. Thank you.