Merkle Thrives as Salesforce Partner Ecosystem Evolves

Salesforce’s partner ecosystem has never been more important to its future growth prospects, and more importantly, its ability to meet the changing needs of its clients.

More than 70% of Salesforce’s customer engagements already involve a partner, and this rises to a much level when clients are looking to harness the vendor’s technology stack to drive essential transformation programmes.

As a result, the best-performing ecosystem partners are the ones with a proven ability to help organizations to drive positive, lasting business outcomes, and help them tackle the fundamental challenges facing their industry sectors.

One of the most dynamic players in the ecosystem is Merkle, part of Dentsu Group, one of the world’s largest marketing and advertising agencies. Merkle’s European business has grown rapidly in recent years, with a headcount of more than 5,000 employees in the region.

The company has close to 20 years-experience as a Salesforce partner (it now has Summit Partner status), with more than 2,000 implementations under its belt. It ranks as Salesforce’s largest global agency partners and has won multiple awards from Salesforce in recent years at both a local market and international level. It is the only three-time Marketing Cloud Partner of the Year and winner of five overall Partner of the Year awards.

Industry analyst firm PAC recently undertook an in-depth analysis of the Salesforce partner ecosystem to identify those organizations that are leading the way in delivering business-critical Salesforce engagements across key industry sectors. Merkle scored strongly in the analysis, achieving the “Best-in-Class” rating across four industry sectors: communications & media; financial services; manufacturing; and retail.

Merkle occupies an interesting position within the Salesforce partner ecosystem in Europe. It is able to combine the scale and technical competence of a large, international player, with a clear, outcome-centric approach to working with clients with a high degree of intimacy and attention.

In contrast to other companies from an agency background, Merkle has built deep industry domain capabilities within its Salesforce practice spanning multiple industry sectors. The company is also driving clear diXerentiation through the development of assets and accelerators that are enabling it to accelerate the time-to-value that its customers are able to achieve through their investments in the Salesforce stack.

Merkle continues to ramp up its investment in its Salesforce proposition across its target sectors in 2024, and PAC believes that it is on course to further improve its positioning in the next iteration of the study.

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