The new direction of enterprise software

The great development of the Internet has opened up a new direction for enterprise software. Mark Benioff saw the opportunity for development. He gave up his job as a top executive in the top 500 companies and practiced the dream of his own start-up cloud company - letting enterprises The software is as easy to use as the website. Practice has proved that the "social experience" learned from large companies in the past can guide and help entrepreneurs to succeed.

Creative dreams come

After graduating from college, Marc Benioff worked for Oracle for 10 years. He had a great deal at this large IT company, and his experience with Oracle, in particular, laid the foundations for his start-up: first, understanding the client; and second, learning about entrepreneurship courses from Larry Ellison. Oracle turned Mark, a "shy computer-programming geek obsessed with technological research and development" into a professional manager with many "social experiences." The so-called "social experience" refers to the "social experience" Deal with the experience.

Mark recognizes that word-of-mouth is a great help to businesses: if you make your customers successful, your customers become fans of your brand and your products are recommended whenever possible. As the saying goes, business is only temporary, and the partnership is long-lasting. Understand customers, that is, understand the principle of common prosperity with customers, the customer is your link to the success and bridge. Larry's "mentor belt" is, in the final analysis, a sentence like this: "The market is not immutable. You must keep pace with the times and act according to circumstances."

Mark likes to dream, and the idea of ​​starting Salesforce came from a strange dream: he dreamed he founded Amazon, but the site label was not a book, a CD or a DVD, but "customer, contract, opportunity, forecast And report. " When it woke up, Mark sorted out his thoughts and found that he had a clear idea of ​​the direction of future startups. Walt, the founder of DreamWorks, once said: "As long as you can think of it, you can do it." Mark's later practice fully proved this point.

It should be said that the creation of a company with both profit and passion is Mark's fate. Mark is an entrepreneur with a strong genetic background and is the inventor of the BART Rail in San Francisco Bay. As long as he goes to the Bay Area and enters the city from the Bay Area, it is necessary to take a ride because it is convenient and saves energy, eliminating the need to drive into cities and metropolitan traffic jams, Car trouble. Mark grew up loving brain, when he was in high school, he wrote the first software "trick", earning himself the first pot of gold - 75 US dollars. At the age of 15, he and his friend started a software company called Liberty Software to develop an adventure game for the Atari800, holding $ 1,500 a month to cover his college expenses.

End software

In 1996, Mark saw business opportunities in the new direction of business software. He found that anyone who can make the process of purchasing software easier, more user-friendly, free from complicated installation and maintenance, and who does not need frequent upgrades can make a fortune. Mark's thinking is to change the existing software sales model, the customer to buy millions of dollars in traditional software packages, 6 to 18 months time to implement, coupled with the huge investment in hardware and network equipment costs and maintenance, into a Software as a service to sell, that is to promote cloud computing model. Businesses use headcount and number of purchased services, which are distributed in the cloud and used by connecting to the Internet.

To this end, Mark resigned from Oracle in 1999, leaving the comfortable working environment, stable payroll and generous options of senior vice president of Oracle, and from the very beginning, created this platform-replacement software Salesforce. His purpose for the company was to "sell services without selling software" and kill the market with the slogan "End Software."

Mark hit the difference between brand products and services, with its unique three principles to solve the traditional software sales problems:

1, fast. Fast For sales force oriented service is particularly important because they urgently need access to information, fast is the foundation of this service model;

2, simple. Make services simple and easy to use, just as you buy books on Amazon Web sites;

3, correct. Get it once, without regret. Software development is very complicated. Software development is like a button, the first button "prototype" is wrong, the situation will be worse and worse, and over time, can not continue.

Mark has learned from experience that while each and every one of the founders of the company is ambitious and energetic, the biggest danger for start-up technology-based enterprises is that they have too much to cover and need to concentrate their superior forces on annihilation and focus on The most needed thing. So, he needs to take the opportunity, the first is to borrow the existing development tools to achieve the company's cloud computing service goals.

Salesforce bet on internet and Java web programming languages ​​and relied on Oracle's database. The second allows client companies to implement "private customization" on their own and to ensure that they continuously update their data. Mark has set a model for the industry in full compliance with cloud computing services: No company needs to develop new technologies from scratch. You can develop on the Internet platform, you can take advantage of the distribution center, data center that unlimited computing power. The cloud computing model can save time and money, so that customer service enterprises can focus on this professional innovation, regardless of the IT infrastructure.

Climb to the back of the elephant

Salesforce's market goal is to differentiate to gain a competitive advantage and to declare war on inefficient traditional software distribution. Differentiation of their products on the market communication performance is to promote the product's ease of use, risk-sharing business model and low-risk commitment, these are not the characteristics of traditional software. Winning the war is the key to Salesforce's entire business. Salesforce believes that Salesforce will surely be able to make money if it is to stand on the customer's feet and find ways to make them successful.

Salesforce chose to promote the model is to challenge the industry leader Siebel, so that we accept the new Salesforce brand. And its slogan "NO SOFTWARE" effectively expresses Salesforce's distinctiveness. Mark NO SOFTWARE made LOGO printed on all the material, and made badges require employees to wear, Salesforce's own 800 phone has become a 1-800-NO · SOFTWARE.

A Salesforce meeting crashed with Siebel's activity in San Diego, Southern California. This unexpected situation gave Salesforce an excellent chance to protest against its rivals:

Salesforce distributes donuts and mugs with coffee free of charge to rival conference participants, quoting a quote from a famous analyst on the cup: "Wake up, Salesforce rival, Salesforce is a very dangerous dark horse, Will gradually become a leader in the CRM market. "

It's a very smart move, and many people go into the Siebel venue with Salesforce mugs, and even the Siebel CEO himself has generously drank a cup of this coffee.

Another time, during the European User Week in Siebel, a seaside city in the French Riviera, Salesforce rented all of Cannes' taxis, provided free pick-up service, taxis marked NO SOFTWARE logo and Salesforce brochures. Salesforce is using this ants that act as clinging to the back of an elephant and, through its unique tactics, brave the soreness of the elephant.

The purpose of Salesforce is to infuriate the opponent, because you hit the ball past, the opponent must hit the ball back. Whether it's Salesforce's guerrilla tactics, retaliation against rivals or wall-digging from rivals, Siebel's personal emotions are mixed with irritation. This emotional response leaves Siebel in a very bad position. Salesforce is to disrupt each other's feet, make them angry. Let them lose their calmness, holding their noses away. Salesforce has already entered the back of the enemy when the adversary acknowledges the existence of Salesforce and begins to defend: the media likes this battle, and it's so much fun and growing, that it's Salesforce's purpose.

Trust the website

New ideas for managing information systems and purchasing services are not easily accepted, especially for customers such as banks and telecoms. The behind-the-scenes salesforce for customers and businesses is actually leaving all the complexity behind, arguing that the only way to ensure the stability of cloud computing services is to do so.

Salesforce's approach is to have the database run on a few different servers, so that even if one server goes down, the rest of the servers will still work and the continuity of the customer's business will be guaranteed.

But even with prevention as the top priority, Salesforces faced the biggest crisis with service providers in late 2005 - when the system went down and customers complained about service unreliability. Even worse, competitors learned of the Salesforce service offline and took the opportunity to offer a free trial sign-up and expose all Salesforce issues to the media. It is no exaggeration to say that the reporter called in a few minutes. It did not take long before the reliability of the Salesforce service was overwhelmed by the hassle.

At that time, to be fair, Salesforce downtime was rare and 99% of its service was fine, but any interruption to the customer was intolerable. Lost trust, this is the most horrible thing. At the time, Salesforce and Mark instinctively adopted a strategy of "keeping things in check when conditions are unknown, keeping things low as long as possible before problems are resolved." The company stopped answering calls and answering calls. Although this is not the usual way for the company to feel uncomfortable to the leadership, it is out of frustration.

"This is not our usual course of action and we have to take the initiative." Some experts remind Mark of the crisis, "Concealment is wrong." The leadership began to realize that silence could be a very wrong strategy. Not only is it wrong to hide facts, and mistakes do not respond as soon as possible, is a very irresponsible behavior to customers. Must find a fast, honest communication channel. Salesforce's leadership decisively decided to immediately release a detection system within the company to track the status at a glance: green means everything is OK, yellow means operational problems and red means service terminated. This is indeed a bold move, but also a big leap of trust.

Salesforce's trustsalesforce.com site gives the public and competitors real-time visibility into the daily health of the Salesforce system, including up-to-date routine maintenance information, historical transaction and speed information, current and recent site phishing and malware reports, up-to-date security Technology and best safety practices. Salesforce educates clients and prospects and journalists and has the information they need here, with no questions to hide. This gives Salesforce sufficient access to communications.

This move was started in the media. And blocked the rival's mouth. Later feedback showed that trusting sites gave Salesforce extra points in terms of transparency. Of course, the foundation is that Salesforce constantly improves technology and optimizes access speed and reliability.

As of 2009, Salesforce's service history shows that 99.99 percent of its service facilities are up and running, with 200 million transactions traded daily and response times under 1 second. Salesforce has been constantly improving to further enhance the speed of access. Post a trusted site that differentiates Salesforce. Transparency and trust are important parts of the Saelsforce brand and identity. The initiative comes from initiative, and the best marketing is open exchange of trust.

Giant organizations around the world are adopting Salesforce's cloud services offerings, such as Citibank's use of Salesforce's products to create programs for private bankers and financial advisors that Morgan Stanley uses to create hiring applications. International multimedia news group Thomson Reuters camp on Salesforce's platform to implement a suite of sales strategies for its platform-based products. Japan Post, the world's largest asset holding organization, uses the platform to create regulatory compliance software for more than 70,000 employees.

Finally, Salesforce's customers and partners embraced Salesforce's model and created more than 110,000 custom applications across everything from holiday requests to receivables, which in turn has greatly enhanced Salesforce's cloud computing capabilities.

In the short span of 10 years since its founding in 1999, Salesforce has transformed itself from Mark's "Cloud of Dreams" into a $ 1 billion company. The book Raiders of Cloud, co-authored by Mark and Carlyle Adler, details Salesforce's brutal growth. (Text / Wu Jie)