What Happened At The Salesforce Connections Event?

In a report released Wednesday, DA Davidson analyst Jack Andrews reiterated a Neutral rating and $75 price target (up from $73) on shares of salesforce.com, inc. CRM, and provided some notes from the "Salesforce Connections" event, hosted last week in New York. The event was focused on Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud business, which accounted for roughly 10 percent of last year’s sales.

The analysts left with the impression that, “While customer enthusiasm and engagement seemed high, quantifiable metrics around deal flow, attach rates associated with various clouds, and other market data were hard to ascertain.”

The Next Generation Marketing Cloud

The company released its next generation marketing cloud, which is focused on personalization rather than scale.

Its three main components are: (1) better performing and easy-to-use email; "(2) journey builder (improved testing and analytics, integration with sales and service clouds); and (3) advertising (customers will have the ability to trigger ads from CRM data and display them anywhere).”

Other Issues

Salesforce also said it believes customers are shifting from best of breed point solutions to product suites, recognizing the need -- or benefits -- of having a “comprehensive, holistic view of a customer across multiple touch points," the note said.

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In addition, the company expects to achieve a full integration between its Wave analytics product and marketing cloud over the course of the year.

“The company noted that predictive content tends to lead to much higher sales conversion rates than non-predictive content,” the analysts added.