In this Salesforce workshop, Bala Kothuvali (head of marketing technology) and Adrian Rosenkrantz (small business marketing) discuss the fundamentals of marketing, distinguishing between marketing strategy and tactics. They define marketing as a process of creating value for chosen customers and explain how value is captured through pricing and profit sustainability. The conversation introduces the classic marketing mix (the 5 Ps: product, price, promotion, placement, and people) and frames strategic analysis using the 5 C's framework—customers, competitors, collaborators, context, and (implicitly) company. They walk through how to analyze these elements, segment the market, and then apply the 5 Ps to develop a customer acquisition and retention plan that drives profit. Adrian then shifts to practical acquisition tactics for small and fast‑growing businesses, sharing observations from his two‑year experience working with startups, emphasizing the fluid nature of early customer acquisition, the importance of technology‑enabled processes, and the need to balance acquisition with retention. The session is interactive, with audience participation, and aims to equip attendees with a structured way to think about marketing strategy and execution.
Chapters
So Bala Kothuvali, I run the marketing technology team at Salesforce. You might wonder what marketing technology is, and I'm happy to share that once we're done here.
Yeah, and Adrian Rosenkrantz. Actually, that was really funny, the intern story. I forgot about that one. That was good. Yeah, so my name's Adrian Rosenkrantz. I run small business marketing at Salesforce, and really excited to be here. Really enjoy doing these types of things, and thank you guys for having us.
Yeah, so what we thought we'd do today is share our perspectives on sales and marketing. I would start off with marketing, and then Adrian will go— will take over— will go a little more deeper into marketing, and also will go over sales. We want to make this as conversational as possible, so feel free to stop us, ask questions, and We'll do it any way you want. So with that, I would like to start with a question. What is marketing? What is the role of marketing from your standpoint? Sell stuff we don't need. Sell stuff that you don't need. OK. Why would you do it? Because obviously people buy stuff. But if they don't need it, they won't buy it. Well, the market makes them need it. The market makes them need it, okay? Let people know the purpose of your product. Let people know the purpose of the product.
Okay, take it. Reach an audience in a creative way.
Reach an audience in a creative way, okay?
Expand your business.
Expand your business, okay. This side. Essentially make people believe that they need your product. Make people believe they need your product. Okay? Perception.
So it's product, place, price, promotion. So it's knowing who your customers are, where they are going to be, and how you can best serve them.
Very good. Awareness about the availability of your product in the market.
Okay.
Awesome. So it's a mixed bag. So if you can see, marketing has different meanings. Everyone looks at marketing and they have a different perception of what marketing is. What most of you told me are called marketing tactics. So when you go and talk to somebody about marketing, that's what they say, right? Well, I want to create a nice advertisement, or I want to reach someone, and those are all tactics of marketing. So what is your name?
Lucas.
Lucas. So Lucas brought up a— can you repeat your answer again?
So for P's product, place, price, promotion, basically knowing who your customers are, where they're going to be and how to best reach them or how to best deliver products that are going to attract them. Right.
So that is one of the key elements of marketing that is not visible. It's an invisible part, not the sexy part of marketing, but it's something that absolutely needs to be done. If you're considering launching your company, you need to do that. Okay? So in our definition of marketing, so marketing is something that— it's a process by which you create value for your customers. For your chosen customers. Keep that in mind. You've chosen someone that you want to go after with a product. So marketing essentially is, it's a process by which you create value for your chosen customers. Okay, so, so what? So when you create value for your customers, then how do you know that you're creating value? It's basically the benefit Yeah, so that's one way to look at it. Or you can say you're creating value by meeting your customer's need. Yeah? Any questions on that?
Okay.
So when you meet your customer's need, what happens then?
They're happy.
You can extract value.
Satisfied.
Yes, that's one. But you can extract value, and you extract value by pricing. And how do you make profits? By sustaining that, right? So you extract value by pricing, and if you're able to develop a mechanism by which you can sustain creating a value and capturing value, that's when you make profit. Now this is the unsexy part of marketing you absolutely need to do when you start your company.
Okay.
Questions? If you got this, I think that's— this conversation pretty much is done for me. So for us— so this— what I meant to say is this is called marketing strategy, right? There's marketing tactics and marketing strategy. So what we just went through in these few minutes is called marketing strategy. And one way to actually look at marketing strategy is go through what Lucas was saying, right? So, first you go through the— all of the traditional things. You probably are doing this already in some ways, but you just have to package it slightly differently, right? Know your customers, who your competition is, right? What environment you operate in, what's the context, who you collaborate with. So, you have all of that. So in marketing strategy parlance, it's called the 5 C's of marketing. So you analyze that. You want to analyze all of that first, right? Do you want me to—
Yeah. You want me to write that?
Yeah. So customers. So you have your customers. Competitors. Then you have your collaborators. Who are your collaborators? Who do you go to market with? And then what is the context? So the context could be your regulatory environment, your technology limitations that you have. So you want to analyze the heck out of all of this before you do anything, right? So once you do this, then you identify your segment that you want to target. So from this—
sorry?
Only 4.
4 C's. Yeah. Then you identify your market segment, right? So from your segment, then you go into the next level, which is what Lucas was saying, right? Then you look at your product, your pricing, your promotion. So those are called the I think they're called the 5 Ps: price, product, promotion, placement. Yep, all of those. Placement? Yeah. So once you have this, then you do the pricing, and then what you do is you have your customer acquisition strategy here. Customer acquisition is acquisition and retention. You also need to care about retention. Out of that you get your profits. And your company is only viable if you're able to sustain this process of creating value, capturing value through this, and sustaining value. Make sense?
Yes.
Okay. So now you can move into the acquisition part of it, and Adrian will take you through a process of What are the tactics that we can use? And how does B2B companies, or how does large tech companies look at acquisition, customer acquisition?
So this piece right here is not a miracle, but sometimes you could say, oh, a miracle happens and then you have the acquisition. So what's interesting about the acquisition specifically is that it's going to evolve, especially when you're small. Your first customer is the hardest customer to get. Then the 2 customers after that get easier, but those 2 are harder than the 2 after that. So the thing is that as you think about this, it's okay, it's gonna change constantly. And what I'm gonna take you through is hopefully something, a couple tactics or tools you could use to think about it for as you build a business or for your existing businesses, but ultimately speaking, it's really fluid. So in my role when I was running the growth team for Salesforce for small business, I spent 2 years where all my time, 50% of my time was spent with startups, fast growth companies, anyone who basically was what I called a temporarily small business. So not like the mom-and-pop shop around the corner who doesn't want to grow. Anyone who wants to grow, but any kind of industry across all the US. So I talked, I would average talk to about 25 to 30 customers a month and really focus on how we can help them grow faster, both from how technology can enable that, But another key piece is process. So it's almost guiding process, but empowering them with technology. So that's what I was doing. And from that, I'm going to share with you some things that I— some trends that I kept seeing that I think might be helpful for all of you.
