If you have ever been asked to create or participate in such an activity you may have immediately turned to Google to find a template or wiki definition, or perhaps you smartly realized strategy is not so easy or well defined. In practice, strategy is hard! However, with hard-work and some key knowledgeable and willing participation a lot can be accomplished. Strategy isn’t really like cooking, but if it were….Simply gather as many inputs (internal and external) as you can find, fill in the gaps from your organization’s knowledge of customers, financials, etc., mix all of this together with stakeholders, customer input, workshops and assessments, then bake quickly to produce some ‘living’ documents. For example, a minimal digital strategy for any organization should produce (then maintain) a Vision (what we want to be), Roadmap (how to play), Capability from/to (where to play) and Dashboard/ KPIs (how we measure).

Salesforce has made a strong (and not-cheap) venture into the world of eCommerce. Salesforce is an established cloud platform provider – focused on the CRM space, offering  Service, Sales and Marketing Cloud tools. Today it  has plugged a long time gap in its platform – namely Commerce by buying Demandware – a cloud eCommerce platform (src. Techcrunch.com June 1st 2016). This allows Salesforce to firmly compete in the Commerce space, pitching it against the likes of the “all powerful” Amazon, eBay and Magento to name by a few.  Interestingly, the combined Salesforce company platform can cover Sales, Marketing, Service and Commerce capabilities for an organization – all via cloud based solutions – reliving a organization from the need to invest in its own on-premises infrastructure.  Salesforce isn’t new to acquisitions – and pundits may note it’s track record of integrating these acquisitions technically often lags far behind the initial closing of the financial transaction.

At Connected Agency, we believe in the power of connected customer journeys to propel your brand (and it’s revenues) forward. For organizations laser focused on omni-channel customer success,  this $2.8B acquisition could be a serious future platform contender (or bring new capabilities to existing customers).  According to Gartner , it “estimates that worldwide spending on digital commerce platforms is expected to grow at over 14 percent annually, reaching $8.544 billion by 2020, according to figures provided by Salesforce.”