The Team That Wants to Make Salesforce+ the Netflix of Business

Salesforce has officially entered the streaming wars. On Tuesday, the CRM conglomerate revealed it’s launching Salesforce+, a streaming service featuring original digital content and live experiences around professional development.

The company has said it will have original series aimed at every “role, industry and line of business” with multimedia like television episodes, podcasts and live shows on thought leadership and expert advice around the future of technology at work. The service launches in September for free across the web, with plans to eventually move to a standalone streaming app.

A massive hiring effort was put behind this project in order to bring it to life. According to Axios, Salesforce hired more than 50 new staff in editorial roles over the past several months, including script writers and broadcast producers, and plans to add even more editorial positions as its programming slate grows.

However, hundreds of people across the company already have had their hand in this project, including many members of the product, marketing and digital teams. The Org has taken a look at some of the driving forces behind what could be the most ambitious content marketing project in decades.

The idea for Salesforce+ was born from the marketing firm’s experimentations with original content over the course of the pandemic. In April 2020, Salesforce launched its “Leading Through Change” series that racked up 700 million views across 70 episodes.

That show’s success can be credited to Cristina Jones, Chief Engagement Officer of Salesforce.org. Previously the SVP of Salesforce Studios and SVP of Customer Marketing, Brand Partnerships and C-suite engagement, Jones has long been making content and telling stories in authentic ways to achieve successful marketing campaigns and brand engagement. She has previously spent 13 years at Twentieth Century Fox, both working on the television distribution and technology side.

After analyzing positive audience behavior from Jones’s successful pandemic venture, members of the marketing department got together to see if they could develop a product that would bridge both content and events in an innovative way. SVP and Chief of Global Brand Marketing Colin Fleming was a key executive who led the charge on pushing Salesforce into a relatively new market of business entertainment.

“The people watching Disney+, the people watching ESPN+, are the same people watching Salesforce content in a business setting, so why wouldn’t we follow that sort of direction?” Fleming said in an official company post. “That’s really the genesis of this idea.”

Salesforce+ is boasting over 100 hours of original content across four different channels with 24/7 access to the platform. It will also be the home base to watch its annual professional development conference, Dreamforce, which users anywhere can stream for free.

Fleming has been with the company for 10 years, serving in various marketing leadership roles, such as Chief Creative Officer. He has always been heavily involved in the production of Dreamforce, which makes it no surprise to see its promotion tied so closely with the launch of Salesforce+. Years before his arrival to Salesforce, Fleming once competed as a Red Bull race car driver in Austria.

While Fleming is closely associated with the execution of Dreamforce across the platform, Chief Marketing Officer Sarah Franklin’s team will most likely be the most hands-on with the Salesforce+ product. At the end of the day, the streaming service will be used as another marketing vehicle (albeit a creative one) for Salesforce, rather than becoming an entertainment powerhouse.

As the former EVP and GM of Platform and AppExchange, Franklin previously led the company’s developer initiatives with a focus on democratizing technology. She pivoted away from product marketing after launching Salesforce’s gamified online learning platform Trailhead and brought that energy to the C-suite in January of this year.

She has also been a subject in what can now be seen as a pilot program for the launch of Salesforce+. Unveiled in June as “Connections with Sarah Franklin,” the Salesforce-produced video series on marketing transformations sees Franklin hosting and interviewing other CMOs at widely-acclaimed tech companies and brands.

Executing and producing this much originally produced content has been a heavy lift for Salesforce. An editorial team of script writers, producers and Hollywood technicians has been steadily built out for months in order for the firm to seriously jump headfirst into the content creation space.

Take Oren Popovsky, Executive Producer and Head of Production. Not a title you’d expect to see in a CRM-platform’s org chart. Popovsky previously worked as a Line Producer for USA Network and most recently spent the past four years as a Senior Executive Producer of Entertainment & Lifestyle Networks at NBCUniversal.

Pumping out the meme content on Twitter is social media professional Salil Patel, who holds the meta job of marketing the new content marketing project for the cloud marketing software firm.

Currently the Global Director of Social and Content Marketing, Patel used to run Shopfiy’s social media accounts and before that was the Head of Content for the Toronto International Film Festival. Salesforce+ has certainly made an impression already across social media and the marketing technology sector, but it is unclear yet if Salesforce’s ambitions will pay off.

As the platform continues to evolve, Fleming makes clear that the end goal is to turn Salesforce+ into a community-led platform.

“Our vision is to have our audiences and community develop content on their own and use this as a co-creation environment,” Fleming said. “It’s not just our stories but what people can tell us themselves. This is a platform for that.”