Last month, Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire the Point-of-Sale (POS) software vendor “PredictSpring”.
Describing itself as a “leading omnichannel commerce platform”, PredictSpring delivers mobile POS solutions to retailers.
It also provides clienteling, inventory management, and order management solutions to the sector.
During a recent episode of CX Today’s BIG News Update, prominent analysts within the CX industry recently shared their thoughts on the acquisition.
In doing so, they made three significant observations.
“The Missing Piece”
Salesforce has successfully helped many of their B2B customers – like Fiserv and Peloton – shift to a B2C strategy.
Yet, according to Rebecca Wetteman, CEO & Principal Analyst at Valoir, there has been that one little piece missing: order management.
Thankfully, the PredictSpring hands them that missing piece, which is crucial for the overall data strategy and understanding the full customer view.
Wetteman summarized: “This addition is a very important move for Salesforce, giving them a much stronger position beyond just their B2B base, allowing them to better bridge the B2B to B2C gap.”
Omnichannel in Retail: PredictSpring Enables It
For Simon Harrison, Founder & CEO at Actionary: “This is about the opportunity to demonstrate omnichannel done better, done in a real-world way.
“It solves a lot of the problems we’ve got, like trying to combine the experiences we get through a service center or perhaps a chat with what just happened in the shop down the road.
“That’s pretty cool, and it’s great that they’re edging out with this kind of investment.
If you look at the benefits to the staff and the way that it can increase the overall experience in the shops as well, it is again a very clever move increasing the value and bringing some real solutions to some of the things that we’re trying to solve in today’s exciting and ambitious world of purchasing.
Vertical-Specific Solutions Are Mission-Critical for Salesforce
To keep investors happy, Salesforce needs to expand its TAM [total addressable market]. According to Martin Schnieder, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, building new relationships with retailers offers such an expansion opportunity.
“Retail is an interesting model because you really don’t have that type of long-term relationship,” he said.
“It is a different model. It is one with constrained margins where any way you can provide value right is highly rewarded and coveted.
That’s where Salesforce can bring its Data Cloud and its platform together with some of these other functional tools to really create an interesting vertical solution for retail that that they have just been missing.
According to Michael Fauscette, Founder, CEO and Chief Analyst at Arion Research, such vertical-specific thinking is something that Salesforce is starting to capitalize on.
“This is an interesting kind of playbook that they’ve been working across all their verticals,” he said.
“They go out, they find these startups that fill holes in their current footprint in the vertical, and they nurture that relationship for a period of time.
“They have proven that this process works, and by the way, with those partners, they do take them in,” he concluded. “They go to market directly with those startups, which is not what you always see from a lot of the enterprise vendors in their marketplace.”
