SAN FRANCISCO — Salesforce.com Inc. and Google Inc. announced a strategic partnership on Monday that will see Google’s enterprise software better integrate with Salesforce, as well as a commitment between the companies to use each other’s products.
Customers of both Salesforce and G Suite or Google Analytics 360 can expect new product integrations to roll out next year. Existing integrations between the two products include hooks from the Salesforce product into Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Drive. Executives from both firms described better integration as the most-requested feature from customers, during a press conference at Dreamforce.
“The number one ask I get is to combine online and offline data together,” says Paul Muret, vice-president of display, video, and analytics, at Google. “This partnership today really enables that. It enables a new direction for all the marketers in the world.”
Marketers working to build customer segments with Salesforce data and combine it with Google Analytics (i.e. who’s visiting their website) have faced some friction in the past. While it’s been done, the data must be wrested from Google Analytics in a format that will work with Salesforce. That can be done manually for ad hoc segmentation building, or by tapping APIs. Now Google and Salesforce seek to offer something at a deeper layer.
“We are expanding what we’ve been doing to some degree with G Suite and Salesforce, diving into a deeper level of co-engineered solutions,” says Ryan Aytay, executive vice-president of business development and strategic accounts at Salesforce. “We’re providing a seamless experience between online and offline data.”
Google is also extending an offer to Salesforce customers to use G Suite for free for a year. It hopes that will hook even more customers into this new integrated experience, says Tariq Shaukat, president of partners & industry platforms at Google Cloud. He says G Suite is much different product than Google Apps.
“We engineer it with a business-first road map instead of a consumer first road map,” he said. “This is a reflection of the investment we’ve been putting in and the adoptin we’ve been seeing at a corporate level.”
The new partnership also comes with some commitments between Google and Salesforce to adopt each other’s products. Google will standardize on Salesforce to run its CRM. In turn, Salesforce is now describing Google as a preferred public cloud vendor.
That commitment doesn’t affect existing partnerships that Salesforce has with Amazon Web Services, Aytay says. For example, Salesforce continues to run on AWS in Canada and its Heroku platform will continue to run on AWS as well.
A Google blog on the new partnership describes it as “a first-of-its-kind strategic partnership” that details several of the product integrations that are either already in place, or coming soon:
- Salesforce Lightning for Google Sheets: Embed Sheets anywhere in Salesforce, and with a single click push content from Salesforce Records or Reports to a new Sheet. Data will automatically update bi-directionally to ensure everyone has the most recent information.
- Quip Live Apps for Google Drive and Google Calendar: Quip Live Apps will integrate with Google Drive and Calendar, allowing you to access information in a more collaborative, open cloud environment, and embed any list of Drive files, including Google Docs, Slides and Sheets, or your Google Calendar inside Quip. This new combination of Quip and G Suite will create a modern alternative to legacy intranet content services. [Pricing for this is $25 per user per month.]
- Salesforce for Hangouts Meet: Access relevant customer and account details, service case histories and more from Salesforce CRM directly within the Hangouts Meet interface. This gives you powerful insights directly in the communications platform to conduct better sales conversations or efficiently resolve customer service issues.
The new integrations between Salesforce and Google Analytics will come with no extra cost.