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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Marc Benioff
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July 20 - July 28, 2022
“The number-one mistake entrepreneurs make is that they hold their ideas too closely to their chest,” Bobby said. “Their destiny is their destiny, though. If they share their ideas, others can help make it happen.”
always ask yourself, “What’s my message?”
If there is no Goliath in your industry, go after the status quo.
two means that can be used effectively by any company: • Editorial: unbiased business and technology stories in the press • Testimony: the word-of-mouth phenomenon created by customers sharing their success stories with their peers
Now take it to the next level by turning customers into Street Teams: • Give customers a service or product they love. • Elicit customers’ insight—and use it—so that they’ll love what you’re offering even more. • Provide a platform for customers to share their enthusiasm. • Operate locally to build teams that influence others on a community level and collectively form a global network.
We let customers speak their minds and never censored what they said, or tried to quiet trivial concerns when they came up. In fact, we felt that these made the positive comments more believable.
You must always view an event as an opportunity to reflect—and extend—your image.
In order to remain relevant, you must establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Be the canary in the coal mine, warning people of what’s ahead—and demonstrate how your company is shaping the future.
“launch events” every six to eight weeks. That’s the period of time within which I believe something new should be introduced to the press.
Although a free trial has evolved into the industry standard, this was not the case in 1999.
Offering the service for free increased our opportunities to gain valuable feedback, which we knew was the secret to creating a successful product.
We created “bugforce,” a scaled-down database to track bugs and new ideas, which helped us rate the frequency of the problems or requests.
Our conversion strategy was successful for several reasons. First, through the free trial, prospects had already experienced the service, and they knew it worked. Second, it was a very low risk proposition because the service was billed monthly and there was freedom to change the plan or quit without any penalties. Third, it was such a good product that users became addicted. They needed it.
Before you have a single sales rep, you can invest in your Web site and let it do some selling. A good Web site is more effective than any direct marketing campaign. A lead capture screen, where visitors are required to enter their contact information, is an effective way to find hot leads. It’s essential to keep a Web site easy to use and fresh with regular updates.
If the deal didn’t close, it wasn’t tossed, but was kept active in an archive of warm leads. We found that by continuing to cultivate the relationship, we were likely to make the sale eventually.
90-Day Campaigns to Cash to Customer Cycle
Customers were curious about the lack of a face-to-face meeting at first, but soon they appreciated the calls and Web demos as effective time-savers for everyone.
Many of our sales reps who came from the enterprise software industry were accustomed to offering a discount. The discount had become their closing strategy when they had to make their targets. I didn’t think we needed that motivator, and I believed that our service was fairly priced. Discounts, I thought, were tied to perceived risk. Offering deals would compromise the service’s value.
by keeping the price the same for everyone, we kept the costs low for everyone. It was the most democratic way.
Why should someone pay less just because his or her company was bigger? That didn’t seem fair.
Unable to rely on a discount to close a deal, our salespeople actually became even better. Instead of waiting to push extra hard at the end of the quarter, they pushed to close deals immediately all year. The urgency to sell became about the customer’s need for our service, not about the salesperson’s need to make a quarterly quota. Our selling strategy—to be priced to the value of the market, keep costs low, and not favor anyone—not only was effective at closing deals but also became an essential part of our brand.
We quickly discovered that the more salespeople we hired, the more we saw revenue increase. This proved that we couldn’t simply encourage salespeople to sell more. We needed to increase the number of salespeople. This was the key to growing revenue.
Don’t skimp on sales reps: 25 to 50 percent of the employee base should be salespeople who report to the head of sales.
When you are in a growth phase, use cash to hire—and hire, hire, hire! You have to grow the distribution capacity by having as many salespeople as you can and by organizing and managing the sales team to ensure productivity.
Magdalena suggested that we change our strategy to collecting for a year or more up front and offering a discount as an incentive.
We created two factors to justify a discount: the total number of users and the length of the contract.
Many of these customers said that they were motivated by the price discount, and they believed that paying on an annual basis was simpler than dealing with a monthly billing cycle. Whereas I had always been concerned that customers would feel constricted by an annual contract, it turned out that many of them saw it as a good opportunity to lock in favorable terms.
By collecting up front—and offering sales reps a real motivator to ensure that we closed multiyear deals—we went from cash flow negative to cash flow positive in less than a year.
There is only one way to get customer support: earn it. If you deliver on your promises and treat customers well, you will earn their trust and loyalty. That makes customers root for your company and its success.
In the very beginning, we cast a big net, fishing for any customer who bit. For the most part, we caught a lot of minnows, and then, as we became more established, we attracted some tuna. Many of our minnows got washed away in the dot-com crash, but the bigger fish, such as American Medical Response and Analog Devices, found our elastic service fitting for precarious times, and they weathered the storm with us.
The corporate sales team, which conducted business mostly over the phone and via Web conferencing tools, was based at our headquarters in San Francisco. Having everyone in one place had proven to be a terrific way to build competition and camaraderie, and it also made it simple to deliver frequent training.
when you are starting out, you can’t try to capture an entire company at once. Start in a small division. Companies are looking to limit their investment risk, and they appreciate an opportunity to take a smaller position, experience the benefits, and then make additional purchases.
Frank believed that customers weren’t thinking as carefully about their salesforce.com implementation as they would had it required a larger investment. He found that users weren’t conducting appropriate due diligence and weren’t striving to win the support of their executive committees. The absence of that buy-in had an adverse effect on customer success—and on our business.
Instead of sneaking in under the radar, we needed to respect organizational hierarchy.
we evolved the free trial to a “buy and try” experience. We found that with skin in the game on both sides, we were able to connect more easily with the appropriate business and technical constituents and win organization-wide support.
Although companies must always be on a quest for new customers, they can never forget about existing customers.
The SaaS model makes it easy for customers to churn if they are not successful, for unlike the on-premise model, it doesn’t force customers into taking on excessive up-front costs and technical infrastructure changes.
It’s amazing to consider that no matter what size customer we were pitching, or where in the world we were selling, a singular idea drove all our accomplishments: we never sold features. We sold the model and we sold the customer’s success.
The words of Walt Disney rang in my mind: “If you can dream it, you can do it.”
Our philosophy was to write code that lasted for the long haul. Practically on day one, Parker, Dave, and Frank developed their own guiding principles about the system: “Do it fast, simple, and right the first time (and did we mention fast?).”
our vendors’ executives were personally committed to our success.
The site—located at trust.salesforce.com—offers real-time information on system performance with up-to-the minute information on planned maintenance, historical information on transaction volume and speed, reports on current and recent phishing and malware attempts, and information on new security technologies and the best security practices. Instead of hiding behind our problems, we started educating customers, prospects, and journalists about where they could find the information they needed. It was liberating not to have to act defensively.
Reliability Is a Tech Problem, but the Way You Solve It Is Not with Technology Alone—It’s with Communication
Today, if our servers are down—even for twenty minutes—we call our top customers. I call many of our customers personally to apologize and share what is happening.
We found, however, that open communication, in tandem with quickly fixing the problem, is the only way to build and retain trust.
creating a platform offered a way to resolve our biggest problem: customers were clamoring for more applications, and we didn’t have the resources to build everything ourselves.
We called the marketplace AppExchange and set it up as a single site where developers could upload applications they built, and customers could search, read reviews, test for free, and ultimately purchase and download new applications.
Since we’ve launched it, we’ve received eleven thousand ideas, 257,000 votes, and twenty-six thousand comments—all written by customers.
I realized that these superficial achievements did not provide real meaning or true happiness. Despite a list of impressive titles and a pile of material possessions, I felt that something was missing, and began to consider my place in the world and how I could make a difference.
I realized that although in theory doing good was a relatively short order for a corporation, it was too tall a task to simply tack on. I understood that to succeed, such a program had to be woven into the fabric of an organization.
