At a press and analyst briefing toward the end of Dreamforce, the Salesforce conference which drew 150,000 plus attendees to San Francisco in September, SVP and President Keith Block opened his remarks saying "It has been a pretty good couple of days, lots of enthusiasm and good feeling, customers are feeling a lot of attention from us, a lot about success and there’s been a lot of leveraging of our technology and our customer success platform."
Block identified consistent themes of the Salesforce conference.
"Every CEO and senior exec I spend time with tells me their agenda is growth and shareholder value. And when you have those conversations, it is clear customers and companies can no longer cut their way to prosperity. "
"It is all about innovation and we are really in the age of the customer," says Block.
The activity in the marketplace that Block focuses on is addressing changing business models and shifting Salesforce to address this by speaking the language of industry.
Pivot to vertical markets
Being a disruptor means Salesforce lives with disruption and Block says that over the last couple of years the company has changed.
"Some companies pivot from a horizontal geographic model to a vertical model overnight and its a huge disruption as you can imagine. You have to realign all sorts of territories. It would be highly disruptive and not the most efficient cost model. What we’ve done over a couple of years is build a vertical capability and build those vertical organisations. So the way it started was to look logically at a city, say London, big in financial services. So we’d say in London lets create a financial services selling team, rather than one across the whole of EMEA."
"Over time you find an industry you want to go hard into. You turn it into a national vertical or a global vertical. So in many of the top 25 [global] cities we have some sort of orientation. The same holds true in the US. In the US we’ve got healthcare and life sciences, financial services, financial services cloud, and public sector. That’s the evolution that we’re going on. We’ve done it very carefully and we’ll accelerate."
Building on the platform
Accenture agreed to build a trade management and promotions package. A critical, core business process for Consumer Packaged Goods firms, will be built on the Salesforce platform.
"Accenture has historically been an incredible partner of ours and have signed to become an ISV in the consumer packaged goods space. They are particularly strong in that market – you go to 48 of the top 50 CPG firms in the world and talk to the board and they will talk about Accenture influencing where their business goes," says Block.
This will serve as a model for further SI engagement.
Keeping focused
Going forward Salesforce, he says, will always stay the course with its customers and not get distracted.
"We’re all about the customer. We don’t dilute ourselves from selling servers and infrastructure, that’s not our gig, we’re not in general ledger and accounts payable. We’ll always focus on engagement with the customer. That way our product is architected, the product is multi-tenant and built on a meta data model so when you customise everything is carried forward. Think of it as an ISV, the way the product is architected everything is brought forward to minimise customisation. So if you have customisation, when you upgrade it is upgraded automatically, so we will not leave our customers behind. We’re very focused on our platform, that’s our secret sauce, and we won’t be diluted. You’ll continue to see our product portfolio grow. But it will always be based on our platform."
Next page: The partners, the opportunity, who are customer CEOs visiting
Taking tension out of the partner ecosystem with dull conversations
With such a huge and growing number of partners Salesforce has a lot more management to do to ensure mutual opportunity at a time of growth and take into consideration what it builds and what its partners or customers build doen’t clash.
Block says "It’s been done [by others] but not very well. When you want to build a big partner ecosystem what is important to the partner is transparency. Its about trust. They want to know your platform and know that you are not going to compete with them. Trust is everything in the cloud. Our process is our industry team working in hand with our ISV team to build process roadmaps by industry. We publish them. They are available to existing and prospective partners."
"And we have very dull conversations. We sit with partners, and we say, we’re going to go here, and you’re going to go here, and that’s the way it works. And that’s what separates us from other firms, who might say, here’s a platform, its an open market we’re going to compete, good luck."
"It’s not 100 per cent perfect, there will be tension but people want predictable behaviour. They want to build a business."
Block says the addressible market opportunity is so huge it will take years to tackle.
"This opportunity is so huge, there are 25 industry verticals and within those there are micro verticals. And it will take years, that’s how big the opportunity is.
Who’s not talking to whom
Block ends by saying he doesn’t have many concerns.
"The pace at which companies can innovate and disrupt is un-precendented. Five years ago it was about being Amazon, now it is about Uber and being Uberised out of the market. So I don’t get concerned about market conditions [for Salesforce]. We have an unprecendented number of CEOs visiting us. That is not happening to other companies, or maybe one other. It is not happening to Oracle, it is not happening to SAP."
