Story of Salesforce from Doom to Domination

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO ???? of salesforce, founded salesforce in 1999, in his San Francisco???? apartment ??with a bold vision ??of making the software ????business affordable?? and accessible to more companies ??and which enterprises ??use to manage their customer interactions??.?

He envisioned?? using the Internet?? as a platform to deliver business software ????to corporations?? as a service, rather than as a product. The idea ??was that firms?? would subscribe to software applications ??hosted by salesforce on a ‘‘pay-as-you-go’’ ??basis and access them using just a web browser ????rather than having them installed on employees’ ??PCs??, thus avoiding the expensive license fees?? and maintenance costs?? charged by large software???? vendors like Oracle, Siebel, and SAP.

Yet in 2001, just as salesforce was about to take off??, the dotcom bubble burst?? and the stock market plummeted??. Large corporations?? perceived Benioff ????as yet another dot-com entrepreneur???? peddling snake oil and refused to buy into his vision?? of Software ????as a Service (SaaS).

Benioff???? and his startup ??were ridiculed by large competitors ??who questioned the security?? and scalability?? of the SaaS model. In April 2001, Tom Siebel ????CEO and founder of Siebel, predicted that salesforce would be out of business ??by 2002.?

But Benioff ????saw a silver lining in the dark economic cloud ??that engulfed corporate America ??????in the early 2000s. He realized that his cost-conscious potential customers ??were confronted with their own challenges??. In particular, they were struggling?? to extract?? more value from their software investments ????without breaking the bank??, and they wanted their existing software solutions ????to quickly adapt to rapidly?? evolving business needs??.?

Unfortunately, firms ?? were stuck with software applications ????that were too expensive?? to maintain and not flexible???? enough and they had trouble ??finding an alternative solution. Sensing an opportunity, Benioff ????started evangelizing ??to potential customers???? the merits of the SaaS model, rather than salesforce’s capabilities????.?

He passionately articulated?? the value?? of SaaS, not only to frugal technology buyers??but also to flexibility-seeking C-level executives????. Benioff???? also tirelessly promoted ??the SaaS model to the press??, analyst firms??, and other influential tech industry figures????. Eventually, large businesses?? warmed to SaaS and began to buy ??into salesforce.

Thanks to Benioff’s ????persistent evangelizing?? of SaaS, a groundswell movement was ignited?? in the tech sector??. As more software developers???? recognized ??the benefits of the SaaS model, they started building more solutions?? using the model, spawning a whole new software ecosystem ????that made the model self-sustainable. Salesforce's subscriber base grew ??by 1,500 percent in the following seven years, and it currently serves more than 100,000 customers??????.?

The SaaS movement that Benioff???? initiated has since evolved and is now known as ‘‘cloud computing’’, an appropriate name, born out of Benioff’s ????ability to see a silver lining ??in every dark cloud ?? . All the major?? software vendors ????who initially ridiculed ??salesforce’s business model has since jumped onto the cloud computing bandwagon??.

??Learning from the story

When you create a New category being the first; your job is not to market your product but to market your Category.

If you want to be a leader??, your job is to create a New Category in your products/services what ever small it can be. People only remember the FIRST?? ones.

That's what Benioff did and is dominating the category till date.

?? Questions to ask ourselves

What New Category can I create being the first?

How can I keep dominating the Niche Category I have created?

|| Curated & Shared by Nilesh Roy || 28 February 2022 || Mumbai ||