No one should invest in Marketing Cloud

It’s clear that Salesforce isn’t investing in Marketing Cloud—so why should you?

Before we dive into that, let me share some history about my relationship with Salesforce and Marketing Cloud. Back in 2008, while working at Housing Works, I led the rollout of their brand new Salesforce Nonprofit Starter Pack.

We also needed an easy way to mass email all our donors and customers, so we chose ExactTarget. At the time, it claimed to have the "best" Salesforce integration. While it wasn’t perfect, it worked well for Housing Works.

Fast forward to 2013, and I felt even more validated in our decision when Salesforce acquired ExactTarget, rebranding it as Marketing Cloud. It seemed like the sky was the limit.

However, despite all the promises, Marketing Cloud has remained largely unchanged—not just since the acquisition, but since I first used it 16 years ago. There’s been ongoing talk of a mysterious “Marketing Cloud on Core” for years. Salesforce says they’re finally doing the right thing by rebuilding Marketing Cloud on top of their core platform. But, much like Commerce Cloud, it always seems five years away. In the meantime, they’ve barely touched the legacy platforms.

As Salesforce has grown, it’s struggled to keep pace with competitors. Instead of doubling down on their core B2B offering, they seem determined to be all things to all people, buying up companies to check off boxes for their sales teams.

When I joined Casper in 2021, I learned they were longtime Marketing Cloud customers. I got excited. Surely, after a decade, the platform must have grown by leaps and bounds, right? Nope. It looked exactly the same as it did when I used it at Housing Works.

So, I made it my mission to transition Casper—who, like Housing Works, started off as ExactTarget customers—to a more modern platform. After tons of hard work by my teams, we are finally live with Attentive and Bloomreach! It’s bittersweet to end my personal journey with this part of Salesforce. I've been a cheerleader for Salesforce and their Customer 360 vision for most of my career, but enough is enough.

If Salesforce isn’t investing in Marketing Cloud or Commerce Cloud, neither should you.