I’d like you to think about something. The Big 4 of CRM are
considered the following:
1. Oracle
2. SAP
3. Microsoft
4. Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com CRM Services has at best 1/15th the revenue of
the smallest revenue of the other three. At best. By no standard
imaginable - except one - does salesforce.com marketing
automation belong in this list - especially IF size matters.
But that one factor is the combination of their continuing
ability to at least be the leading market edge when it comes to
recognizing CRM management trends and at best be the innovator
and the creator of those trends. Plus the incredible energy and
charisma of Marc Benioff doesn’t hurt either. ’Cuz if it were
sheer numbers that determined the leadership - not just the
shareholder value - there is only a big three - and little
slightly more than a billion dollar salesforce.com wouldn’t be
on that list.
But larger than (business) life they are - as Yoda told me just
the other day.
So where are they with the release of what Marc called the “4th
Cloud” Salesforce.com Chatter yesterday along with the other
three - SalesCloud 2, ServiceCloud 2 and CustomCloud? I’d say,
at least if choosing my body of options, they aren’t creating
the trends or innovating here. What they are doing is nailing
what the trends are and being on the leading edge of those
trends. That’s going to be the suit they wear in the post-Dreamforce
2009 class that we will all be inhabiting after this week.
Marc and salesforce.com have always had an uncanny ability to
see the sales force management business world in its sexy glory.
Marc put it well several times when he said that creating the
company and the initial sales force automation app/service were
inspired by Amazon and the current incarnation of salesforce.com
with its products, courses, workshops, seminars, etc was
inspired by Facebook, Twitter and what pretty much amounts to
the social web.
Of course, my take has always been that consumer thinking has
penetrated the sales CRM enterprise - been saying this since I
was a young whippersnapper back in 2003. But salesforce.com has
had a vision for years and been following through on that vision
with an extraordinary rigor.
What is that vision, you ask? Well hop onto the Wayback Machine,
Sherman and let’s go to 2003. The scene is a hotel workshop in
Shanghai with men and women of mystery eating their breakfasts,
talking to “someone”, murmuring under their breath about
important classes. I’m sitting at a table with Tien Tzuo, the
then CMO of salesforce.com, now CEO of the very successful SaaS
billing and payment systems vendor Zuora. Know what he’s telling
me?
(This is a paraphrase. Read the 3rd edition of CRM at the Speed
of Light for the literal): “We want to be the place that all
business people come to run all their business applications. We
want to be the Business Web. We’re not just a CRM sales force
automation company.”
Guess what folks, while this may be an ambitious goal and one
that they’ve tempered with the message that Marc peppered his
two days of keynotes with at the seminar that (again
paraphrased) “we realize that sales automation companies will be
running other systems and classes,” this is precisely what they
are continuing to drive for - with force.com and cloud
computing. Have they succeeded? No, not yet, there is a long way
to go, but they are walking on the same road - even trotting on
it - that they were walking back in 2003. To those who say that
force.com takes them away from their “core competency.” Knaves,
you are wrong. Force.com is salesforce.com’s core competency.
(Boom. Fade to black).
Source: Paul Greenberg
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Related: Salesforce.com CRM
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