Salesforce acquires ExactTarget (2013)
Salesforce bought ExactTarget, an email marketing company, for about $2.5 billion. The purchase became the foundation of what is now Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Salesforce gained a large email marketing customer base and cross-channel marketing tools.
Founded the template of Salesforce buying marketing technology at a premium and folding it into its CRM suite.
This is the same playbook applied to real-time engagement: buy the category leader, pay a premium, integrate into Marketing Cloud.
