Back to all stories

At this year’s Dreamforce event, Salesforce announced a strengthened relationship with Microsoft that will enable both organisations’ customers to be on the cutting-edge of technological innovation. By providing better integration with Microsoft products to better fit the Salesforce ecosystem, the move will give their customers unprecedented access to integrated software to improve efficiency and productivity whilst strengthening their own customer connections.

Salesforce and Microsoft effectively connected the office ecosystem by integrating OneNote, Skype for Business and Office 365 into Salesforce and the creation of a Windows 10 Salesforce app. Writing for The Australian, David Swan quotes Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who says, “It’s a multidimensional relationship. We’re their customer, they’re our customer. They’re our competitor, we’re their competitor. And, we’re their partner and they’re our partner. It’s important to be able to lay it all out there, and say we can do all those things and move forward.”

CMO also reported on the Microsoft partnership announcement, as Benioff said “Our customer service platform at Salesforce truly focuses on the customer and sales, we have had huge breakthroughs in technology and we need to get ready for a new kind of customer success. We’re more connected than ever before and it’s no longer about an IT revolution, but a customer evolution. It’s no longer about the Internet of Things, but about the Internet of Customers.”

So with this in mind, how important is it to move beyond your comfort zone to find opportunities that create something unique for the market? Through strategic partnerships like the one between Salesforce and Microsoft, the two companies are able to drive innovation collaboratively to better serve the customer, which will ultimately deliver bottom line benefits to both players. While the benefits of such an integration are obvious, the move poses the question to all businesses and CMOs, could your next innovation actually come from partnering with your competitor?

Why partnerships?

It’s important for businesses of all shapes and sizes to realise that there is strength in numbers, and to consider when it’s right  to go beyond their comfort zone for the benefit for the customer. It’s not just companies like Salesforce and Microsoft who are joining forces to show customers their commitment.

Take Microsoft and Apple, for example, two computing companies with a huge history of competition between them. Several times, these two tech giants have come together behind the scenes and in public to work on projects with mutual benefits. Perhaps one of the most influential partnerships, was when Microsoft penned their first deal with Apple to produce the Office for Mac product. The increased productivity and history that many business users had in the Microsoft Office environment, combined with the growth in consumer popularity towards the Apple Mac, paved a clear path for the two competitors to come together to benefit the customer. The Office for Mac suite of software is still hugely popular among users today.

Every business has something that makes them unique. By sharing both common and core technologies, companies are allowed access to additional intelligence in a partnership that can provide unprecedented benefits to customer. Further to this, strategic partnerships can allow companies to bridge the gap in their technological ecosystem to give their customers a full circle experience.

What does the partnership mean for Salesforce?

For Salesforce and Microsoft, it means deeper integration of software, and heightened productivity for users. The extension of their partnership will connect Salesforce Customer Success Platform to Microsoft Office productivity apps and services.

The two leaders plan to deliver new solutions that integrate Salesforce with tools like Skype for Business, OneNote, Delve and Windows 10 to empower companies to connect with their customers and collaborate more effectively.

Microsoft and Salesforce have committed to working together to bring the following solutions to life:

  • Skype for Business Integration with Salesforce Lightning Experience: Office 365 customers will be able to use Skype for Business to create Web meetings, determine if colleagues are online or not, click to chat and make voice and video calls from the Salesforce Lightning Experience

  • OneNote Integration with Salesforce Lightning Experience: Users will be able to associate notes with Salesforce records, and view and edit notes directly in OneNote from the Salesforce Lightning Experience

  • Salesforce Integration with Office Graph and Office Delve: Enabled by Office Graph, an open ecosystem for sharing, collaboration and discovery, Office 365 users will be able to view and discover Salesforce content in Office Delve, such as sales opportunities, customer accounts and service cases

  • Salesforce1 Mobile App for Windows 10: Salesforce will deliver a Windows 10 app to empower sales teams to move deals forward while on the go, using their favourite Windows device

If you would like to find out more about how you can make things simpler and make more sales with Salesforce CRM and Microsoft, see here.