Trailblazer

by Marc Benioff

  This was a dark day for me on a number of levels. Losing Merrill as a client would be a disaster in and of itself, but the ripple effects could be catastrophic. Merrill’s rejection would send the message that Salesforce wasn’t ready for the big leagues, prompting other important clients to dredge up their own complaints and rethink their relationships with us. Beyond that, I was furious that we hadn’t been aware of these problems before they exploded into a five-alarm fire. Most of all, I just felt terrible that we had failed to live up to one of our core values: customer success.

  At Salesforce, our mantra is that nothing is more important than giving our customers the tools and support to be successful. Sometimes it’s a matter of growth, raising revenue or net profit; other times it’s a matter of better reaching and connecting with their customers. Often, success simply means streamlining previously byzantine processes and operations—enabling a customer of ours to redirect more of its time and attention elsewhere. It might sound hokey, but our customers’ success is how we measure our own success at Salesforce. After all, we can’t grow unless our customers are growing with us.

  Yet here we were at the edge of a cliff. We’d failed to uphold this value with Merrill Lynch.

  Shortly after that meeting, Mark Alexander, Merrill Lynch’s CIO, informed us that we’d been placed in “containment,” meaning that we could conduct no further new business with the bank until we’d fixed these usability issues. By “the bank,” he meant not just Merrill Lynch but also its parent company, Bank of America, one of the world’s largest financial institutions. We’d already landed some business with BofA and had been working hard to win more. Losing this account might shut that door forever.

  I knew my adviser was right; I had to step in and do something to address the situation—and fast. After clearing every other issue out of my brain, and off my desk, my first phone call was to Simon Mulcahy, a then forty-one-year-old London-born Salesforce executive we’d hired in 2009 to handle some of our most complex customer engineering projects. A former British Army officer, Simon had previously worked for the World Economic Forum, where he’d created an “Innovation Heatmap” that was so ingenious the Smithsonian wanted it for its collections.

  So there was no one better than Simon to spearhead a “Get Well” program to put us back on track with Merrill Lynch. He joined me in San Jose for a dinner with John Thiel, head of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, to whom I gave my word that we would fix these issues—and that Simon would have every resource necessary to do so.

  Working on borrowed time, and under enormous pressure, Simon began hopscotching around the country on a grand tour of Merrill Lynch’s regional offices. He’d set up meetings with several dozen advisers, who he hoped could shed more light on which features and functions of the software they (and their colleagues) hated most, and what specific improvements they hoped we could make to them.

  A couple of weeks into this journey, a funny thing happened. Simon discovered that his interview-style approach wasn’t yielding a lot of meaningful, actionable input. Most people in his position might have felt relieved by the fact that the majority of the advisers’ complaints amounted to small, relatively simple fixes to the software. But Simon couldn’t reconcile the fact that even when added together, these gripes didn’t seem to explain the intensity of the advisers’ frustration.

  It seemed that Simon had a mystery on his hands.

  * * *

  When I first started working in sales for Oracle, back in the 1980s, the notion of sitting down with clients to talk about how our products were working, let alone engaging in exhaustive bouts of problem solving, was rarely top of mind. Back then, Oracle and other fast-growing companies adhered to a simple strategy that went like this: “See a bear, shoot a bear.” In other words, if you were meeting with a customer, your singular goal was to leave the room with a signed contract—in as short a time as possible.

  I’d never been a fan of this strategy. The problem was, it didn’t incentivize anyone to consider whether the customers on the other side of these transactions really needed the software they had purchased, or whether it helped them make progress on their own business goals. And it didn’t leave a whole lot of time to build trust, either.

  When we founded Salesforce, I vowed to avoid that business model as much as possible. There were only a few companies selling enterprise products back then, and all of them required customers to lock into long-term contracts with hefty maintenance fees. If you didn’t like the results, in other words, you were pretty much stuck. So with Salesforce, we decided to sell subscriptions that could be canceled at any point, which meant that it didn’t matter how many bear pelts we collected. Our renewal rate became the measure of whether or not customers were getting what they needed from our software, and thus it also became our chief barometer of health.

  It took a while to get this formula right. In the beginning, our customers were mostly small businesses who paid us monthly on their credit cards and could cancel at a moment’s notice. After a while, I realized we had an attrition problem, and we needed to make a fundamental shift in our operational philosophy. We weren’t about to turn our back on our fundamental business model, so we had to reorient our efforts to show our customers that our mutual interests were aligned—that our success depended on how quickly they achieved their own.

  Our first step was to offer customers another point of contact beyond the sales department—a person whose job it was to listen, rather than to close deals. We created a team of customer success managers whose entire function was to understand how customers were using our software tools and, if they decided to bail on us, to circle back and find out why.

  Over time, our team of customer success managers continued to grow in importance, and in number. They became so much more than glorified customer service reps: They were the eyes and ears of our company, collecting the invaluable feedback that we used to not just improve our products, but also to tailor those improvements to the specific and unique needs of our customers.

  In 2013, however, this system seemed to have fallen short. Merrill Lynch was so big, and its needs so specific, complex, and difficult to articulate, that we hadn’t been able to see that our products weren’t getting the job done.

  By this point, Salesforce was fourteen years old and our engineering team had become a formidable force. We were confident that we had enough programming firepower to fix whatever was wrong. But even as Simon took meeting after meeting with Merrill’s advisers, he was still having a hard time figuring out exactly what the problems were, let alone what needed to be done to solve them.

  Simon began to get the feeling that the advisers were only telling us a partial story. He had noticed that Merrill’s advisers had plenty to say about the small glitches, like address book navigation, that they thought we should be able to fix. What they weren’t talking about were the big, sweeping improvements that could fundamentally transform how they did their jobs—because they simply didn’t realize that our software might have the power to solve them.

  So Simon decided to pivot. He tucked the script of questions he’d been asking back into his briefcase and started opening meetings by asking the advisers to forget about software for a second. He invited them to pull the camera back from the minutiae of their workflow and show him a more panoramic, zoomed-out view of the larger challenges they faced in their work. Now, finally, the truth began to emerge. For example, when they asked for faster speed in navigation, what they really needed was smarter “tasks” that could do things like triggering proactive alerts about their clients and guiding them to useful market data.

  When Simon told me about how this approach had immediately started generating scores of promising ideas, it reminded me of a quote attributed to my boyhood hero, Albert Einstein: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend fifty-five minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”<
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  In the end, Einstein was right. If you focus the bulk of your time and effort on understanding the problems, solving them becomes the easy part. In the past, we’d been trying to help our customers simplify or automate all of the small, tedious business functions that ate away their time. That was important, but in a world where technology holds almost limitless possibilities, marginal improvements couldn’t come at the expense of stepping back and identifying the biggest, most urgent and potentially painful challenges our customers faced, and then figuring out how to address them.

  It’s hard to overstate how important this shift would turn out to be. It allowed us to see that the real problem wasn’t the software we’d built for Merrill. It was the customer success infrastructure we’d built. What Merrill’s advisers showed us is that we were going about the process backwards.

  By tackling the problems behind the problems, we could engineer the software to make our customers more efficient in ways they couldn’t have imagined. From that point forward, we knew we had to stop focusing on checking off boxes and start trying to figure out how to deliver breakthroughs.

  This philosophy isn’t just applicable to the software business, or even to the technology world. Any company can provide its customers with features that can make them more successful than they ever thought they could be. They just have to stop shooting bears and start listening for what their customers really need.

  Dreamforce and the Power of Community

  Salesforce was one of the first companies to make “customer success” a stated value, but we always knew the job didn’t end there. After all, values aren’t worth much unless they translate into behavior and are brought to life.

  One of the tactics we’ve used to animate the principle of customer success might seem elaborate, or even moderately to highly outrageous: We made it the focus of a conference that has become an annual festival.

  If you happen to live in the Bay Area, you are likely familiar with this spectacle. Every fall, more than 170,000 members of Salesforce’s extended family of employees, customers, practitioners, independent software developers, partners, and investors from ninety countries register to visit San Francisco and are joined by another 15 million people who follow the proceedings online. We call this event Dreamforce.

  Dreamforce is often described as a software conference, and I guess that’s accurate. We’re definitely a software company, and we do hold scores of seminars, product demonstrations, and other conference-like fare. When we launched Dreamforce, the idea was to bring lots of our customers to our home base all at once, to showcase our new products and generate more business. But many of our participants prefer to describe it as a family reunion, and while that may sound a little exaggerated, it’s equally fitting. A lot of people come to Dreamforce to see old friends, to meet new ones, and to revel in the feeling of community.

  To some extent, it’s a four-day opportunity to consider big ideas and pursue better versions of ourselves. We’ve had keynotes by Michelle Obama, Melinda Gates, and Jeb Bush. We host a CEO series where business leaders discuss everything from women’s leadership to equality, sustainability, and mindfulness. We’ve invited Al Gore to deliver a lecture on confronting the climate crisis, Congressman John Lewis to talk about advancing equality, and Oscar-winning actress Patricia Arquette to talk about equal pay. Participants can join daily meditation sessions led by saffron-robed Buddhist monks.

  On some level, it’s also a blowout party. Participants organize big, boisterous dinners at San Francisco restaurants, and we’ve hosted concerts by Stevie Wonder, U2, Lady Antebellum, Neil Young, and the Foo Fighters.

  The way I think of it, Dreamforce is where Salesforce comes alive, a place where people come together under the umbrella of our shared values to mix and mingle, eat and drink, meet and share learnings with interesting people in many different fields. No two people come for the same reasons or leave with the same feelings about what the gathering meant to them.

  When we held our first Dreamforce in 2003, we had no idea how many people would sign up. At the time we had fewer than four hundred employees and just eight thousand paying customers. I remember telling our conference chair, Elizabeth Pinkham, to lower the ticket price because I was afraid no one would come. I asked her to pull two hundred chairs from the main auditorium just to avoid the embarrassing spectacle of empty seats. “I want it to look like standing room only,” I told her. Needless to say, I was overjoyed when more than a thousand people showed up.

  Today, we cordon off the streets surrounding the Moscone Center to accommodate our “Dreampark” campus, where we lay down AstroTurf for an entire city block; erect climbing walls and waterfalls; have a dozen bands perform in rotation on an outdoor stage; and set up picnic tables piled high with boxed lunches that our busy participants can grab as they race between activities. Events, meetups, and happy hours spill out into dozens of hotels and restaurants in the city’s South of Market, Financial District, and Union Square neighborhoods. I can barely find a moment to sleep while Dreamforce is going on, and I still don’t manage to experience the full breadth of what’s happening there. One year, turnout was so high that we partnered with Celebrity Cruises, who docked a ship we called the Dreamboat in San Francisco harbor to house all the participants that local hotels or Airbnb hosts couldn’t handle.

  It never ceases to amaze me when the tactics you employ to meet one goal evolve to serve another. What started as an opportunity to sell more software has become the embodiment of an idea: putting the customer at the center of everything we do. In fact, the larger Dreamforce has gotten, the less it has become about us. Today it’s a celebration of our customers, a place where they come to revel in their success, acquire new skills, study broader trends in technology and innovation, and discuss social issues. These trailblazers aren’t just thinking of their own success; they want to inspire others to take their businesses, and their careers, to another level. This is why many of the twenty-seven hundred educational sessions and workshops are actually led by customers rather than employees, and why some customers have begun organizing their own affinity groups and events, or even hosting their own Dreamforce-related podcasts.

  In other words, Dreamforce isn’t about bolstering our bottom line, it’s about helping our customers to continue making progress in a world that’s continuously being disrupted by advancements in the cloud, mobile technology, social media, and artificial intelligence. It’s hard to describe the combination of joy and purpose our participants radiate while they’re dashing around the campus, soaking up all the learning they can and sharing their discoveries with one another. It’s a strange, sometimes wacky energy field where our community’s trailblazing spirit comes to life.

  A few weeks before Dreamforce 2016, I hosted a dinner at the Westin Hotel in Times Square in New York. I wanted to deliver a preview of my keynote address to a handpicked group of customers and skilled practitioners of our technology. They ranged from CEOs of large financial firms to Salesforce evangelists from every level of their companies. The dinner was meant to be a fun way of thanking them for their loyalty and support, but it was also an opportunity to get some feedback on a speech I was about to deliver to thousands of people.

  The main topic of my Dreamforce keynote was a new product called Einstein, which would allow our customers to tap into the increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence capabilities we’d been building into our software (you’ll read more about it in Chapter Five). I was ecstatic about its impending launch, and I hoped my guests would be swept away by my boundless enthusiasm. When I finished my dress rehearsal, I opened up the floor.

  “You are our focus group,” I said. “Tell me what you think.”

  The response wasn’t the one I’d expected. Nobody wanted to talk about my keynote, or about Einstein. They weren’t really interested in talking about software at all. What they really wanted to discuss wa
s how excited they were to head to San Francisco in a few weeks to reunite with friends and colleagues at Dreamforce, and what new knowledge they might be able to absorb there.

  It dawned on me then that whatever was transpiring inside Salesforce’s engineering laboratories paled in significance compared to what was going on outside them. Dreamforce was the focal point of a community: one comprised of bright, engaged, ambitious people coming together to prepare themselves for the challenges and opportunities of the future. They came to make progress and celebrate their accomplishments, but they came to celebrate one another’s progress and accomplishments as well.

  Today, if I’m talking to the leaders of a company and they don’t seem to be buying my arguments about the value of values, I explain how Dreamforce is the ultimate expression of our brand and customer success, and how our community inspires and creates a virtuous circle of growth. People who become successful using our products want others to join them, and in turn, our community and our business grow.

  Connection, on Every Level

  As the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, many Salesforce customers faced a reckoning they’d long dreaded. The era of easy money and aggressive expansion vanished, quite literally overnight. The best many executives could do was tread water and pray they could manage to stay afloat until things returned to normal.

  Even as the economy began to bounce back, however, many of our customers knew intuitively that the notion of “normalcy” had to be reevaluated. The euphoria of the roaring economy had given them permission to keep pursuing familiar old business models. Yet the moment that narcotic wore off, they faced a second frightening fact: Technology was coming for them. The skies had begun to clear, but we at Salesforce saw a new set of clouds looming menacingly on the horizon. Many of our customers were about to be at a critical infection point. Home Depot was one of them.