Fool's Gold: What Marketing Cloud Pricing Strategies Tell Us About Their CDP Offerings'

Tony Byrne's recent post for Real Story Group called "Salesforce's Crazy CDP Pricing" is worth a read in its entirety. But this excerpt really stood out:

"The $50-65k/mo editions put you at the very top of the CDP pricing range, where competitors at this price point are likely to offer super-sophisticated data processing, eventing, and activation for tens of millions (or more) of records. With Salesforce you receive healthy data transfer volumes, but still limited at this price to 500k records, and still a feature-poor platform."

For me, this whole post confirms what we see in the market consistently from the wannabe CDPs. Where pure-play CDPs deliver against all three facets of data scale - Volume, Variety, and Velocity - because of architectures explicitly designed for this purpose, an inability to deliver on one undermines the whole, which is exactly the case for the #MarketingCloud editions and many other pivots into this category. And really, this isn't about cost (pricing-opaque Adobe is "giving away" a year of their CDP which I can only assume is enough time to 1) maybe actually build something and 2) be able to claim "X # of customers use our CDP") but rather about creating cover for the margin for all the non-scaleable resources required to even quasi deliver CDP-like functionality. How else to explain $1 per profile per year?? ?? There's "golden records" and then there's records that are like, actually worth-their-size-in-gold ???♀? Hang on a sec while I do the quick math on BlueConic customers' six billion-and-counting profiles at that premium...??

Honestly, even I am getting tired of my own broken-recordness on the inadequacies of the Clouds, but as Tony also points out in this article, “The sheer mis-match between list price and what you actually get with this CDP could also confirm my suspicion that Salesforce — like some of its peers — is not trying to win CDP deals on value, but on pre-existing relationships.”

And I know that relationships are hard to build and that the best ones are based on a genuine trust built up between vendor and buyer - it’s a true partnership. But we also know that in an effort to rationalize huge acquisitions and validate massive positioning exercises, these behemoth vendors are showing up with slideware, untested “co-sell” propositions, and wacky pricing and hoping that their relationships give them a pass on value. Doesn’t sound like much of a partnership from where I sit and that whole mechanism is bad for marketing tech buyers writ large - not just in CDP.

All I’m saying is that if you have a couple million dollars lying around and you’d like to spend it on more than 500,000 records and a promise of future glory because your marketing cloud sales rep told you so, well, I have some ideas for you.