MNGT Project
Salesforce
Salesforce

What does it take to make a successful company? There are many companies in various different industries that have been great businesses. Most businesses either start with a hobby or an idea to make life easier. This hobby or idea than is sold to others to make use of in improving their life. Some ideas are improvements of other ideas and they enhance what once was. For this assignment, I was given a company that is considered by Forbes as the number seven company in 2014 to work for. What makes a company great to work for? How does the business continuously succeed? What do they do to maintain their quality? These were some of the question I asked myself in the research. The company assigned to me is Salesforce. Salesforce is a software company that is leading provider for businesses to build their customer relationship management. Customer relationship management (CRM) is all about managing the relationships companies have with their customers. CRM combines business processes, people, and technology to achieve this goal, getting and keeping customers. It's a strategy to help businesses learn more about their behavior so they can develop stronger relationships that will benefit both of the customers and the business. Salesforce also adds the elements of social media and making the transition to a social enterprise to connect with customers in new ways. Successful CRM involves many different areas of a company, starting with sales and extending to other customer-facing areas like marketing and customer service. Salesforce.com offers a technology solution for all those areas. With Salesforce cloud computing platform, businesses can mind their customers and their budget at the same time. (http://www.salesforce.com/) I’ll start with the company’s CEO Marc Benioff. He founded salesforce in 1999. Benifoff graduated from University of California in 1986 with a Business administration degree. Benioff, before starting salesforce was an employee who worked as an assembly language programmer at the Macintosh Division of Apple Computer, where he was inspired by the company and its co-founder, Steve Jobs. Then he moved into Oracle where he held variety of executive positions in sales, marketing, and product development. While still in high school he created liberty software which specializes in microcomputer games, creating and selling games for Atari. In 2010 he was named on of smartest mind technology, as well as top 50 people in business Fortune. Benioff’s philanthropy pioneered the 1/1/1 integrated philanthropic model, by which companies contribute 1 percent of profits, 1 percent of equity, and 1 percent of employee hours back to the communities it serves. This has been the core for employment at salesforce. This idea is a major role player in the success of his business. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Benioff)
Timeline-
In 1999 Salesforce was founded by Marc Benioff who left Oracle at the time. His partners included Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez. All three were software developers at Clarify they created the initial sales automation software. In 2000 it launched a very successful ad campaign with “Success. Not Software.” The ads built on the momentum salesforce.com gained against enterprise software providers such as Siebel and SalesLogix, with examples from salesforce.com's own customer base that have made the switch from traditional software to the hosted, Web Services-based CRM service salesforce.com venders. Tom Wong, vice president of marketing for Gomez, Inc., is quoted in the ad saying, "We switched from Siebel software to salesforce.com's Web-based service because people tend to use applications that make their jobs easier or help them make more money. Salesforce.com does both. With salesforce.com, we are reaping all of the benefits of a world-class online CRM solution and seeing marked improvement in both productivity and ease of use."