Learning from the Best

November 11, 2009

Last week I traveled to Salesforce.com head quarters in San Francisco with a few other members of the OpenView team and a collection of portfolio company CEOs and sales and marketing executives. The purpose of the trip was to have a full day conference in which managers and leaders of Salesforce.com’s sales and marketing team presented the strategy and some of the tactics that have led them to such great success over the last ten years.

In addition to the excellent hospitality they provided, the event was an educational and inspirational experience to all those who attended. Salesforce.com pioneered the SaaS category and continues to successfully drive innovation within it. For the leadership teams of expansion stage SaaS companies to be exposed to the mother of all SaaS companies and how they became so successful was an eye opening experience.

While they shared a lot of their sales and marketing special sauce with us, one thing stood out to me as the most important contributor to their success. Focusing on the success of their customers and enabling them to share that success, has been the single most important thing Salesforce.com has done as an organization to get them to where they are today. This focus on customer success has also been one of Salesforce.com’s major differentiators from their competition. CEO and founder Marc Benioff further elaborates on both points in his book Behind the Cloud which I am currently reading, and would highly recommend it to any entrepreneur.

We are always trying to provide sales and marketing support and to introduce best practices to the expansion stage companies in our portfolio. Coordinating events like this is one way we do that. However, despite their success, not everything they do at Salesforce.com is right for every SaaS company, especially earlier stage companies like ours.

As a result it is important to be able to separate the best practices that apply to our portfolio companies from the ones that apply to Salesforce.com because it’s a 1.3 billion dollar company.

In my next blog post I will try to distill the more specific best practices that we learned at the event that are the most relevant to expansion stage SaaS companies.

Check back next week for some interesting best practices.

VP, Sales

Ori Yankelev is Vice President, Sales at <a href="https://www.ownbackup.com/">Own Backup</a>. He was previously a Sales and Marketing Associate for OpenView.