Dreamforce, the Internet of Things and lying to your dentist

If you buy into Marc Benioff’s keynote at Dreamforce 2013 this morning, you heard a wake up call for marketers. Benioff sees every device that we will connect to the Internet as a potential marketing opportunity, as data flowing to and from inanimate things can be used to pitch products and services.

The Internet of Things translates to all-new ways that we’ll interact with “things,” and as an example, he singled out his own toothbrush. In Benioff’s future world, his dentist will no longer ask him how often he brushes but instead will see a report of his dental hygiene from the device itself. A device can remind us to brush and a device can recommend its own replacement parts.

Blurring line between marketing and CRM

He’s right, though there’s certainly no guarantee that Salesforce can retool quickly enough to be the company to enable our relationships with connected things. I give him credit, though, for recognizing that sales and marketing in a data-rich world are becoming one and the same. He’s thinking big but he’s not alone in this realization. We’ve said before, the line between CRM and marketing software is becoming quite blurry and his connection of that trend to the Internet of Things makes sense but isn’t likely to be in place anytime soon.

Back here on Earth

In the meantime, in today’s world of the Internet of People, there is an enormous opportunity for many sources of data to be useful to marketing. In fact, the more sources, the more effective segmentation and targeting can be. We dont have to wait for Benioff’s toothbrush to be developed…there are ample opportunities in front of us to take historical data and enrich it with new sources like social media and location data to market products and services on the fly.

Smart marketers aren’t going to wait for a monolithic platform like Salesforce to meet this opportunity. They’re doing it already.