Behind The Cloud

Behind The Cloud tells the story of Salesforce.com, one of the biggest and earliest cloud computing, software-as-a-service companies in the world and how it went from small startup to billion-dollar status.

The only way to become a billion-dollar business is if people talk about you. A lot. One of the ways Salesforce tried to harness the human desire to share was to focus on editorials, which are written up, unbiased reviews by individuals, published in news outlets or even on personal blogs. Another was going after testimonials, which is when a user tells about his or her success with the product and thus inspires others to give your service a try.

Interestingly, in spite of being an online business, Salesforce found offline events to be a great avenue to pursue both of these.

What they did differently than most other tech companies and startups, when they go “offline” in their marketing, though, was that instead of pitching the executives in charge of the money and decisions, who would ultimately have little to do with the product, they held public events for the end users of their product: sales agents, customer service people, etc.

These “City Tours” were dedicated to celebrating real customers, packed with keynotes, user demos, customer presentations and even posters of users as a tribute. As a result, around 80% of prospects ended up becoming customers.

Eventually, they later replicated this by hosting private cocktail parties, which were less costly, but just as user-focused.

Salesforce started with a mission to bring about “the end of software.” That’s a scary thing to announce, but an even scarier to thing to actually live and breathe.

On several occasions, this meant Marc had to make decisions that had the potential to hurt the business, but were ultimately what’s best for the customer.

For example, they used a model called “multitenancy,” which meant users could use the software right from Salesforce’s servers, but still work with their own data – kind of like everyone in an apartment building pays cleaning fees, but still has their own apartment.

Now cloud computing has become standard, but think about how scary this was in 2000. However, because it allowed Salesforce to give all users access to new features and updates simultaneously, it improved the experience for everyone.

Similar decisions included a public bug report system and giving all developers access to the code to build their own apps on top of the platform.

I’ll admit, this one is probably far off in the future for you, but it’s a worthy reminder nonetheless. When Salesforce dipped its toe into overseas water for the first time, they set up headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, for two reasons: They…