Head In The Clouds: SaaS Solutions With Bao Nguyen, Salesforce Country Manager — VNI Ep.28 Recap

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Listen and subscribe to “Vietnam Innovators” in Vietnamese: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | YouTube.

In the US, Salesforce is huge: the B2B software company is a crucial part of the infrastructure of American business. Even those unfamiliar with CRM, the company's core business, would have heard of its billionaire founder Marc Benioff and marquee clients like Spotify and Amazon.

Vietnamese businesses are only beginning to discover the benefits of SaaS, says Bao Nguyen, Salesforce Country Manager for Vietnam who started in his role just over six months ago. Bigger conglomerates like Vingroup, OMG, Vietnam Airlines, TIKI, Sendo and Shopee who understand the value of SaaS are already using Salesforce solutions, but signing SMEs as clients will take more than merely improving brand awareness in the local market.

More sales boots on the ground

When it comes to the original client outreach, right now it’s the business development team in Singapore that is doing most of the heavy lifting. There are also regional offices in Sydney, Tokyo and the San Francisco “mothership”, of course. Bao’s mandate is to eventually set up a rep office in Vietnam in addition to building an ecosystem of resellers. With several partnership models to choose from — from consulting and fulfillment resellers to full cloud resellers — opportunities to partner on a local level are many.

University partnerships are also in Bao’s sights. If all goes to plan, very soon Salesforce’s Trailhead tutorials will be incorporated into the curriculum of the 3rd and 4th year university students. Having learned to code for the Salesforce platform, the thinking goes, fresh graduates might want to join the Vietnam rep office as software engineers and analysts. But that’s looking ahead. For now, Bao is recruiting for senior sales roles.

From Excel to cloud

Emerging markets like Vietnam are starting to want to understand data. But before investing in data visualization tools like Tableau, which Salesforce acquired in 2019, most companies poised for digital transformation want to have the basics covered first: a sales cloud tracking the sales team’s activity towards their KPIs in real time; a service cloud for CRM and upselling solutions; and one for tracking marketing campaigns and making sure the revenue is realized.

Whether the goal is increased revenue or lower IT costs, the clouds are the answer.