After 10 years at Oracle, Marc Benioff had a lot on his mind. He was restless and wondered what he should do next.
He wanted to revolutionize the business world by moving away from clunky, expensive software that businesses bought and installed on their own servers. Instead, his new company would sell CRM software that was hosted in the cloud.
How Salesforce is Changing the Way Businesses Work
In 1999, Marc Benioff founded Salesforce. It was one of the first cloud computing companies. The company’s platform is designed to allow users to work on a single system that works through the internet, unlike traditional software that runs on servers in a business’s basement or datacenter.
The system can be used by businesses of all sizes to manage customer relationships, automate business processes, and track sales data. The company also has a platform called AppExchange that allows third parties to create apps and extend the capabilities of Salesforce.
Salesforce also has a number of features that help improve productivity and provide better customer service. For example, the company’s Customer Data Cloud enables users to track real-time customer behavior and deliver hyper-personalized experiences. It also allows for data sharing across teams and departments, including with outside partners.
Another Salesforce feature is Salesforce Einstein, which helps users make sense of large amounts of data. This feature provides predictive analytics and recommendations to help customers understand how their actions may affect future outcomes. It also helps users identify and act on new opportunities.
During its boom years, Salesforce grew fast and spent big. It put its name on skyscrapers around the world and paid actor Matthew McConaughey more than $10 million a year to promote the Dreamforce conference, which brings thousands of employees to San Francisco. The company’s massive charitable giving is another way that it fosters a sense of community among its workers.
As Salesforce continues to grow, its leadership is evolving along with it. For example, Benioff recently tweeted that he would pull his investments from Indiana after Governor Mike Pence signed the state’s anti-LGBTQ law. He later clarified that he was only expressing his personal opinion and did not plan to de-invest from the entire state.
Despite the changes in management, Salesforce has remained true to its core values. It has also continued to innovate and grow by developing artificial intelligence tools and adopting the latest in cloud computing technology. This has allowed it to stay competitive and remain a leader in the field of CRM.
The Future of Work
A few Salesforce executives are milling around, but it’s clear their CEO isn’t in the room. He is, though, a videoconference away–his floating face appears on a monitor that’s been wheeled out for the meeting. Every now and then, someone asks: “Is Marc there?”
Back in 1999, Benioff founded Salesforce with the idea of building cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) applications that companies could access on the Internet. He figured they would be less clunky and pricey than the bloated enterprise software that Oracle, SAP, and other big technology companies were selling at the time. Theirs would be easy to set up, integrate with existing systems, and a snap to pay for as a subscription.
It worked: The company has grown from a tiny startup to one of the world’s largest software providers, and it has grown its revenue at a faster pace than any other tech firm in recent years. Moreover, it’s the only major cloud-based enterprise software maker that can challenge Microsoft in the field of CRM.
The company also happens to be one of the best-known brands in Silicon Valley, with its iconic Dreamforce conference that morphs into a rock festival each autumn. And it’s a rare CEO who enjoys the same level of celebrity status as Benioff, who is notorious for his chronic tardiness and globe-trotting lifestyle.
Among other things, the 66-year-old cofounder and chairman of Salesforce leads the largest corporate philanthropic initiative in the country; last year, it donated $1.5 billion to nonprofits. He has authored books, spoken at universities, and endorsed politicians. He is a regular at the World Economic Forum’s Davos summit, where he has long advocated for a “stakeholder capitalism” that puts social and environmental concerns alongside financial ones in a balanced mix.
It is this combination of a vision for how businesses should be run and a commitment to a broad range of issues that makes him so influential. And it is also what’s driving the future of work. Because as automation becomes increasingly pervasive and the workforce becomes more diverse, it will require leaders to balance these two powerful forces.
The Future of Customer Service
In the early days of Salesforce, Marc Benioff and his co-founders worked out of a rented apartment in San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill neighborhood. Their company was the first to offer customer relationship management (CRM) software hosted in the cloud—a radical departure from the on-premise software model that dominated the industry at the time.
But Benioff’s vision was bigger than cloud computing. He wanted to create a new business model that prioritized social good. He believed that business leaders should use their privilege and position to help others, rather than just pursue profits. He was influenced by his mentor, the spiritual master Mata Amritanandamayi, who taught about “finding one’s calling and doing service to others.”
When Salesforce first started out, its CRM software helped businesses track and organize sales data. Today, the company offers a variety of tools for managing all aspects of customer relationships. These tools help businesses automate processes, optimize their marketing efforts, and improve the overall customer experience.
The company’s integrated platform also allows businesses to ask for feedback from their customers at any point during the interaction. This information can then be used to improve the customer experience and increase customer loyalty.
Salesforce has a huge global ecosystem, and its user base is projected to reach $6.3 trillion by 2023. Its cloud-based CRM applications for sales, support, and marketing don’t require complex installations or a team of IT specialists to manage and maintain. In addition, the system’s mobile-friendly apps and APIs allow companies to access their data from anywhere at any time.
In a world of increasing societal disconnection, it’s no surprise that Benioff’s focus on social responsibility and community service resonates with employees and customers alike. This ethos has made Salesforce the perennial winner of best places to work lists for over a decade and helped propel one of the fastest-growing tech companies in history.
When Salesforce began, the company was a small startup with only four people. Over the years, it has grown to employ 78,000 people worldwide. Despite its massive growth, the company has never lost sight of its original vision and continues to invest in the future of technology.
The Future of Marketing
The world of business software has changed a lot over the past two decades. Salesforce has been one of the hottest companies in that period, growing faster than most other large software firms. The company has built offices in towering skyscrapers in San Francisco and Tokyo, hired celebrities like Matthew McConaughey as a creative adviser, and paid for its name to be put on the sides of buildings around the globe.
Salesforce has also built a massive cloud-based customer relationship management software platform that other developers can use to create their own applications. These applications, called apps, run in the cloud on Salesforce’s servers and can be used from any device with an internet connection. The apps can help businesses manage sales, service, and marketing. The apps are easy to set up and don’t require IT experts to run. They can be updated automatically and can easily be accessed by employees at all levels of the organization.
In the early days of Salesforce, the company focused heavily on evangelizing its vision of the future of CRM software and encouraging other developers to build apps. The company even launched an app marketplace called the AppExchange that lets users share their own apps with others.
As Salesforce’s competitors have improved their own products, the company has had to adapt. For example, during the Covid pandemic, the company allowed its employees to work from home and was more flexible about when people needed to come into the office. Despite these changes, Salesforce remains one of the most popular tech places to work and is consistently named on best workplace lists around the world.
Benioff has also been an advocate for corporate philanthropy, spending millions of dollars to support education projects and children’s health care through his foundation. He is also an outspoken advocate for equality, donating to groups that promote equal pay and opposing legislation that would allow employers to discriminate against LGBTQ workers.
The 58-year-old founder of Salesforce has brought his energy and enthusiasm to Silicon Valley, where he believes that technology can be fun and that people want their jobs to be meaningful. His focus on creating a company where employees feel connected to each other and that work has meaning beyond just meeting quarterly goals has helped make Salesforce the global leader in business software.
