How Salesforce Launched an Award-Profitable Content material Journey for Gross sales Professionals

Did Salesforce really need another content project?

The company’s successful Trailblazer program, launched in 2007 as IdeaExchange, has grown into a global community (primarily Salesforce admins and developers) that helps its members learn and succeed in their careers and businesses. In 2014, the free online learning platform Trailhead was launched as a further step in the experience.

But sales professionals – the primary users of Salesforce’s OG product, Sales Cloud – weren’t interested in this journey.

As competitors began to take market share and website traffic declined, Salesforce’s visionary CEO Marc Benioff planted a seed. “He saw these headwinds coming and wanted our company to take the lead,” says Melissa LeuSenior Director of Content Strategy at Salesforce.

The Salesforce team asked themselves, “How do we reestablish market leadership?” How can we show that we are innovating? How do we show we care about sellers? How can we show that we are there to meet their needs?

The answer manifested itself in a new path designed for sales professionals — Sellerwhich debuted in spring 2023.

The adventure bears fruit. Among its audience wins are 5 million unique page views in the first year and 15,000 people joining the Slack community in its first six months.

Salesblazer was named Project of the Year among the competitive entries for the 2024 edition. Content Marketing Pricing after being named Best Content Marketing Launch and Best Content Marketing Program. It also earned Melissa a spot on the shortlist for the 2024 B2B Content Marketer of the Year award.

Start a different path

Salesblazer started, as most content marketing projects do, by identifying the problems audiences were facing.

Melissa Leu
Senior Director of Content Strategy, Salesforce
Finalist for B2B Content Marketing of the Year 2024

“Sales can be a pretty lonely career in some places. In other places, it’s a team sport. It seems a lot like a numbers game. You just have to hit your quota, figure out how to do it, and go,” says Melissa.

Yet a Salesforce study found that only 28% of sales professionals expected their team to hit their quotas. Conversations with customers revealed that many wanted more than Salesforce software. They wanted help to succeed and grow in their business careers.

Once the Salesforce team identified the key challenges for the target audience, they looked at the company’s strengths: its expertise and a network cultivated over 20 years as a sales leader.

Salesforce had built the Trailblazer program around these same strengths, but this community targeted a more technical group. Sales professionals didn’t see this as a program for them.

Melissa explains that the Salesforce team thought, “We can be curators of all this community knowledge, domain experts. How can we share this with everyone?

The Sales Cloud content team has blazed a new trail. “It was a quick fail, a quick learn,” Melissa says.

The failure never happened. However, the project evolved after the team learned some lessons.

Building the Salesblazer journey

The team responsible for creating Salesblazer must have been disjointed. Although Salesforce employs more than 72,000 people, fewer than 15 people make up Salesblazer’s core team. In just a few months, they created the website, developed the content, launched the community, hosted events, and achieved professional certification for its online courses.

“It was a lot of things at once,” Melissa says.

Fortunately, they were able to draw on their own and others’ content marketing expertise, as well as subject matter experts elsewhere in Salesforce. “There were dozens and dozens of people we could go to to share their expertise on how to do things,” says Melissa.

Salesblazer’s high visibility within the company, a sign of management’s commitment, enabled calls, emails and messages from the team to be responded to quickly. Still, it hasn’t been all smooth sailing, Melissa says. “With something new, you have to teach people what it is. You have to convince them why it’s important. It happens both externally and internally.”

The Salesblazer Content Hub is a testament to this widespread expertise and cooperation. It serves as a centralized sales career hub filled with free resources, including a mix of Salesblazer-specific content and other relevant Salesforce articles.

Visitors can follow a journey based on their role: sales representatives, operations or leadership. They can download the Salesforce Sales Health Report or dive into a Salesblazer Ask Me Anything feature provided by an industry expert. They can watch demos and webinars. They can download free templates, worksheets, reports and guides. They are also invited to sign up for a bi-monthly newsletter and join the Salesblazer Slack community.

Regardless of the tactic used, all content is filtered based on whether it helps a sales professional grow their career. “It’s really our North Star,” says Melissa.

But Salesblazer’s first tactic wasn’t the content hub. This was an educational event held in New York in April 2023. “We wanted to start with our core group of Salesforce customers, prospects, and fans and see [their] reaction, get feedback, and then evolve from there,” says Melissa.

The event featured Salesblazer partners including well-known names like Dale Carnegie and industry organizations like Women in Sales.

The team contacted Dale Carnegie because it aligned with Salesforce’s goal of helping salespeople improve their careers, Melissa says. “There was a natural overlap and complementary skills that we could bring to each other. »

The partnership with Women in Sales came about through the intervention of someone from Sales Cloud’s existing influencer program. “THE a whole group of influencers have been essential in providing feedback on our program, helping us create content, and generating word of mouth to the community,” says Melissa. “They’re real salespeople, so they were our focus group.”

Deliver results and scale for greater impact

In its first year, Salesblazer saw over 5 million unique page views, powered by thousands of keywords ranking in search. Merchandising Salesforce product offerings within content led to a 250% increase in referrals to product pages.

Salesblazer has generated over 3.2 million social impressions and 102,000 social engagements. More than 45,000 people subscribe to the newsletter and more than 230,000 engage on community platforms. The Salesblazer community earned 320,000 badges through the Trailhead learning platform, and thousands of people expanded their networks across 46 events.

However, success did not come without evolution.

“We learned that we had disconnected our company’s content. It was all about community and community,” says Melissa.

The team realized they had been ignoring some content marketing best practices: links and SEO. As a result, the content did not reach the expected organic heights. “Once we finished those post-launch efforts, we said, ‘OK, well, we want to build an audience; we want the audience to come back. How can we do this?’ », explains Melissa.

They pivoted, implementing these best practices, link to related contentand double down on search engine optimization efforts.

They also told a better story internally, so people understood that Salesblazer wasn’t just a fun side project, but something that led to product page views and long-term engagement. And that’s when the content side of Salesblazer accelerated to produce impressive results.

Another lesson learned: what works for one audience won’t necessarily work for others. “With this program, it’s about seeing what works, investing in what works, and moving on from what’s not working. It’s a lot of listening to feedback from our community and what they’re looking for,” says Melissa.

The biggest change since launch is where the Salesblazer community gathers. Initially, it used the same forum infrastructure as the Trailblazer group.

“We’ve found that sellers aren’t necessarily attracted to a forum experience. They want that real connection. They want to be able to reach someone in real time,” says Melissa.

So Salesforce moved the Salesblazer community to a Slack channel, where it grew twice as fast as the forum iteration (attracting 15,000 members in six months).

“When the public is not yet ready to buy,” explains Melissa, “these [Salesblazer] engagements play a crucial role in keeping Salesforce ahead and positioning us as a leader in empowering sales professionals.

But for the Content Marketer of the Year finalist, one personal moment helped her appreciate the impact of Salesblazer.

“It didn’t hit me until we attended one of our events. Someone came up to me and said, “I’m so grateful for this program. It changed my career. It brought inspiration back to me and I’m very grateful to have this as a resource. They got a job thanks to the connections they made in the community and the learning they acquired,” says Melissa.

“It’s a moment like that where you’re like, ‘Oh my God, we did it.'”

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute