A short multi-speaker testimonial describing how The Financial Times transformed into a digital business by centralizing customer relationships on Salesforce. Speakers report that digital subscribers have overtaken print, that FT.com customers are consolidated inside Salesforce, and that custom apps surface relevant FT content to salespeople—supporting mobility, collaboration, and measurable customer-service value.
We are genuinely thrilled by the disruption that technology brings because, yes, on the one hand, it's a threat and it destabilizes and disrupts the classic economics of how our business used to work. But our purpose hasn't changed. All that's changing is the way we fulfil that purpose.
It all comes back to putting the customer at the heart of what previously.
It's not just about the articles that we write anymore. It's actually about how we are making them available to our customers.
In the last few years, we really have begun to transform into a digital business. For the first time, our digital subscribers have overtaken print. Before we moved to the Salesforce platform, we used to have siloed relationships with the customer. So we had lots of different systems, whether it's for the newspaper or whether it's from digital.
We didn't know who our customers were. And the essence of our digital strategy is to find out. We thought that was vital for our survival.
Salesforce is a solution that we use for our business end to end. All our FD.com customers, whether they are registered users or subscribers, are currently inside Salesforce and we service them from a.
Single place, bringing all the customers onto one platform. We can really start to share information about them.
If I'm going to sell effectively, I have to understand what's going on for my customer when I'm looking in Salesforce. That's my goal.
To make people productive. You have to allow them to be mobile. You have to allow them to be able to access things 24 7.
So Salesforce for us isn't simply a sales tool where salespeople talk to each other. What we've got is a way of ensuring that we are more collaborative across the business and equally with prospects and customers.
There's so many different devices, there's so many different ways to connect with customers. Salesforce has given us the ability to listen to our customer, to respond to our customer in the most appropriate way. And actually within our customer service performance, you can actually see genuine business value has been driven.
Getting customers is becoming increasingly harder and they expect great service now. If they don't like your service, then they're going to move elsewhere. If you're not hearing what customers are saying, I don't know how on earth you're going to be developing products and services in the future to meet your customer needs.
Following on from what we learned from our customers, it was an easy step from there to go and build an app to work in Salesforce. When you are using Salesforce and You're looking at information on a prospect or an account, then an FT story about that company literally comes and finds you. If there is a story that matters to that prospect or that client, you will see it. And then when you go and have your meeting, you've got a conversation starting.
It's days to develop and roll out applications and our developers can actually just target the business problem and get deploying the apps as quickly as possible. We roll an app out and if somebody says, can I use this on my iPad? The moment we just say, of course you can just log in.
The newspaper industry has been tough. You hear all the time about a lot of doom and gloom in the industry and I think the FT stands out as being successful because we stick to what we do best and we also engage our customers and make sure that our customers continue to be to pay for us.
We don't have to predict the future. We don't have to say mobile is going to be bigger than desktop, desktop is going to be bigger than newsprint, and there will or won't be newsprint, or there will and won't be desktop. It doesn't matter because we now have that fundamental relationship with the customer and we have a business model that is adaptive. Salesforce will continue to be a catalyst in the system, but now instead of treating our audience as passive recipients of what we do, we can include them.
Sam.
