Salesforce Marketing Cloud wins Tech Company of the Year Mira Award
Salesforce Marketing Cloud — the unified marketing platform to know consumers, engage them, and personalize their experience across everything — won the Tech Company of the Year award during TechPoint’s 19th annual Mira Awards honoring the best of tech in Indiana.
Salesforce, the global customer relationship management (CRM) leader, has a thriving employee base in Indiana — home to its second largest hub outside of its San Francisco headquarters. With 1,650 employees in Indianapolis as of December 2017, the Salesforce Indianapolis campus is a hub for world-class, diverse and local talent, enabling the company to deliver new innovations to more than 150,000 customers around the world.
About 75 percent of the employees in Indiana work on Salesforce Marketing Cloud (acquired as ExactTarget for $2.5 billion in 2013), which is now the number one digital marketing solution in the industry, according to IDC. The Mira Awards judges were impressed by the local growth of talent (up to 25 percent of the workforce) in company areas outside of Marketing Cloud.
The judges believe it would be hard to argue with the monumental impact Salesforce has had on the Indianapolis tech community and the state of Indiana over the past five years, but its achievements in 2017 alone are what earned the company top honors as Tech Company of the Year.
Growing at nearly 40 percent year-over-year in 2017, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (headquartered in Indianapolis), enables marketers to know more about consumers with powerful data management, engage them across channels and personalize the experience with built-in artificial intelligence. They can power 1-to-1 consumer journeys across email, mobile, social and advertising — uniting marketing, sales, commerce, and service. Salesforce Einstein empowers marketers to tap into the power of artificial intelligence in order to discover and predict the optimal timing, channel, content and audience for any marketing message.
Top brands such as adidas, Hotels.com, 21st Century Fox, Fidelity and many others turn to Salesforce Marketing Cloud to improve consumer engagement and move their business forward. On average, companies that have deployed Marketing Cloud see a 27 percent increase in campaign effectiveness and 26 percent increase in marketing ROI. (Source: Salesforce Customer Success Metrics Survey conducted from 2015-2017 on 7,000 customers randomly selected.)
In addition to adding another 200 new high-wage jobs in 2017, Salesforce celebrated the grand opening of Salesforce Tower Indianapolis, which is the tallest building in Indiana and one of just four such locations in the world — San Francisco, New York, London and now Indianapolis. Placing a tech company logo on the state capitol’s tallest building marked a significant milestone in the growth of Indy’s tech community, and the building serves as a beacon space for employees, customers, partners and the community.
During the opening, Salesforce announced plans to train 500 workers in Indiana by 2020, enabling these trainees to begin new careers in technology as part of Salesforce’s commitment to workforce development and equality. Delivering on its promise, in November 2017, Salesforce introduced the Pathfinder Training Program as a pilot program in Indianapolis with the goal of taking the initiative to other major cities around the country. The four-month program will focus on training for software development and data management jobs, specifically Salesforce Developer and Salesforce Administrator — ranked two of the top 10 jobs in America in 2017.
The company and its employees are also focused on supporting the local community through the 1-1-1 model philanthropy model. Salesforce contributes one percent of the company’s equity, one percent of employee time and one percent of product back to the communities where its employees live and work. . More than 90 percent of Salesforce employees in Indiana volunteer in local public schools and with nonprofits. They volunteered over 65,000 hours in 2017, and over 183,800 hours since the Salesforce acquisition of ExactTarget.
TechPoint, the growth initiative for Indiana’s tech ecosystem, honored the successes and innovation of Indiana companies, entrepreneurs, educators, and other leaders at The JW Marriott Indianapolis during the 19th annual Mira Awards gala presented by Angie’s List, Infosys, and Salesforce.
A total of 15 award winners and two honorable mentions were chosen from the 100+ outstanding companies, organizations, and individuals who were selected as nominees this year out of the 205 applications received highlighting achievements during the 2017 calendar year.
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Fifty-two independent, volunteer judges spent more than 850 total hours reviewing and ranking applications, interviewing nominees, and selecting this year’s winners. Judges included company founders, CEOs and presidents; CTOs, CIOs and software developers; professors and chancellors from Indiana universities; design, human resources and sales professionals, and a variety of other subject matter experts.
The Mira Awards are named after the first of the brilliant variable stars to be discovered – the Mira Star. It is also the Latin root meaning “worthy of admiration, wonderful, marvelous.” The awards represent the best of tech in Indiana each year.
