Companies that use Salesforce tend to have high adoption of marketing automation platforms and strong emphasis on sales, marketing and customer service.

Salesforce continues to grow as users continue to adopt the CRM platform in droves. Still, are there any unique characteristics that differentiate companies that use Salesforce versus other companies? Can you actually predict who is a Salesforce user just by looking at data that is publicly available online (while sprinkling some powerful predictive analytics)? That’s the challenge that our team at Mintigo took.

To analyze the DNA of Salesforce users, Mintigo used its own technology to find companies that use Salesforce (no data was received from Salesforce). We crawled the websites of millions of companies in order to find code and technology that suggest using Salesforce. In addition, we crawled social networks, job boards and other databases to find proprietary evidence for using Salesforce. We crunched all these data points into a model that predicted whether a company uses Salesforce or not.

In the next stage of our analysis, we took the group of companies that uses Salesforce and compared it to the group that does not use Salesforce. We compared both groups on a few thousands of indicators including company demographics, financials, org-charts, job hiring, marketing and sales tactics and deployment of technologies.

Here are the results of the analysis.

Company sizes and industry verticals

Salesforce is popular across industries and company sizes. In fact, it is especially popular among mid-size companies and in the Software, Business Services and Manufacturing verticals. Further analysis by Mintigo shows that 74% of companies that use Salesforce have annual revenue of $1-$50 million and that 63% of companies are in the Software, Business Service, or Manufacturing verticals.

Pardot is second most popular

When analyzing marketing automation platform adoption, we discovered surprising trends. For example, we found that companies that use Salesforce are 21 times more likely to have a marketing automation platform in place. Pardot, Salesforce’s marketing automation platform, is the second most popular among Salesforce users with 19% share. 

Another interesting finding is that companies that use Salesforce have a strong emphasis on sales and marketing—and are 4 times more likely to have sales and marketing teams. 87% of companies that use Salesforce have a sales team, as compared to just 24% of companies that don’t use Salesforce. Furthermore, 71% of companies that use Salesforce have a marketing team, as compared to just 14% of companies that don’t use Salesforce—a 5-fold increase.

In addition to sales and marketing, Salesforce is also very strong among companies with a customer service team. 51% of companies with Salesforce have a dedicated customer service team as compared to just 5% of other companies—a 10-fold increase.

The strong position of Salesforce in the technology vertical is evident when looking at organizational org-charts. Companies that use Salesforce are 6 times more likely to have an IT department, 5 times more likely to have software development and engineering teams and 9 times more likely to have a QA team.

Lastly, if you would like to work for a company that uses Salesforce, we analyzed job boards across the web to find positions that were published in the past year by companies that use Salesforce. Results show that the most popular positions are Business Analyst, Agile Developer and Business Applications experts (which typically includes the Salesforce Admins).

Conclusion

The wealth of data online can reveal interesting results about the DNA of customers and prospects. Salesforce’s customers tend to be mid-size, in verticals such as technology, services and manufacturing. They also tend to use marketing automation and have a strong emphasis on sales and marketing. This kind of data is available online for countless technologies and companies. When you are looking for your next customer, data like this is not only interesting—it’s priceless.

About the Author

Dr. Jacob Shama is the CEO and co-founder of Mintigo. He brings more than 20 years of executive experience in the fields of Information Technology and Communications. Prior to Mintigo Jacob was Vice President of Products and Vice President of Operations at modu mobile, the modular mobile handset company. His previous experience includes various managerial and leading research positions. He received his Doctorial D.Sc. degree from George Washington University, Washington DC, and both his M.Sc. and B.Sc. with honors from Tel-Aviv University. Dr. Shama specializes in communications, signal processing, data analysis and processing, algorithm research and patterns recognition. Read Jacob’s blog at CustomerIntelligence360.com.