Wisdom Of Marc Benioff And Salesforce.com, The

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Mar 2007 by Tehrani, Rich

Recently, I was invited to Manhattan for a Salesforce.com media and customer event. Initially, I wasn't sure what the event was about - I accepted it blindly. Why? Because there is always something so entertaining and informative about the events this company hosts - I just had to be there. So after checking for scheduling conflicts and finding none, I sent in my RSW, and a few weeks later, I showed up at the event, bright-eyed and bushy tailed (thank you, Starbucks) and ready to absorb new information. The event kicked off at 11:00 am, and there I was, on time to pick up my badge and associated company information.

Unlike the last event I attended in New York (see www.tmcnet.com/478.1), this one had pedestal booths. I would have been surprised that most of the booths were sponsored by financial companies if it had not been for an article (see www.tmcnet.com/479.1) I had read a few days earlier in Business Week discussing Salesforce.com's targeting of the financial services market through a new initiative called Wealth Management Edition or WME.

Salesforce.com has traditionally been very strong in delivering CRM products to the financial services community, so it made sense for them to branch out into the financial market by providing a service very similar to what might be offered from a Bloomberg Terminal (see www.tmcnet.com/480.1). The concept, of course, is that you don't need a terminal if you can host the service. The information provided consists of news, quotes, analyses, opinion, graphs, charts and more.

In addition, the information from WME is married to your traditional CRM system from Salesforce.com, meaning you can track stocks for customers more easily. Let's say a financial advisor has 1,000 clients and 75 of them have expressed interest in Apple as an investment. You can now ping those people more easily when you see Apple news of interest. In addition, you are able to log other information about clients such as their likes and dislikes. A platinum client who loves golf, for example, could be easily notified that Tiger Woods will be playing or appearing in the client's local area.

The point is, financial advisors are going away from a commission-pertrade model and instead are focusing on relationships and charging fees based on a percentage of assets. This means relationship building and touching customers frequently are more important than ever.

Since Bloomberg terminals really don't integrate very well with other systems, this sort of functionality could not be duplicated easily by the company built by the sitting mayor of New York City. Besides, there are millions of financial advisors out there and only a few hundred thousand use Bloomberg terminals.

So, will anyone buy this new service? The answer seems to be "yes," as Merrill Lynch conducted a pilot of 5,000 users and has now decided it wants a total of 25,000. I can't imagine a better customer with which to kick off this initiative.

Getting back to die exhibits, I wasn't so interested in the financial vendors, of which there were many. I wanted to know how CRM would improve in the investment community, so I focused on booths like those of Siemens (www.sicmens.com) and Cisco (www.cisco.com) where the themes were tying unified communications into wealth management systems. I also saw a service from StraightThrough (www.straightthrough.com) that integrated the investing tools into the CRM system even more tightly.

To be honest, I didn't really attend to see the exhibits. I came to hear Marc Benioff speak, as he is quite a maverick in the industry. He has a unique and refreshing style that has been largely lost in the CRM and call center markets. The call center and CRM players that existed up until about 2000 were fairly entrepreneurial; you could hear the fire and passion in the words of company founders and managers. In many cases, this passion has died as companies have been rolled up into larger and larger private equity-backed companies that are more focused on accounting than product development. Alternatively, they have become product lines at Oracle. Sure, Larry Ellison is charismatic, but as his net worth has become greater than that of most countries, he has become less and less accessible to the media. I suppose consolidation is a phase virtually all industries are dealing with but, thankfully, in the CRM space, BeniofFs passion is still inspiring (and accessible).

Marc explained to the audience that the total number of Salesforce.com customers now stands at 29,800, which equates to 646,000 paying subscribers. He also mentioned that in the fourth quarter, the company processed four billion transactions; the number of transactions has increased and the response time per-transaction has decreased by 50 percent over the last few years. This is an admirable accomplishment.

From there, Benioffwent into a discussion about Salesforce 2.0, a concept he calls "the new circle of success." This consists of six initiatives working together to become greater than the sum of their parts. These include Salesforce.com, AppStore, AppExchange, IdeaExchange and Apex.