Founded in 1999, Salesforce.com has become a forceful player in the world of business technology, specializing in software that helps organizations manage customer relationships, handle marketing contacts, coordinate and analyze sales, and manage customer service. Salesforce.com was an early believer in cloud-based software, offering its sophisticated applications via remote access rather than having business customers pay hefty upfront fees to acquire and install the software on individual computers. As a result, businesses don’t have to worry about outdated or mismatched versions of the software their employees use to track contacts with prospects and customers, process orders, analyze service inquiries, and manage other functions. They rely on Salesforce.com for the technology to meet the needs of their customers. In fact, on any given day, 150,000 business customers use Salesforce.com’s software to generate 1.4 billion email messages, track 2.4 million sales leads, manage 3 million customer orders, and enable 600 million e-commerce pageviews.

Salesforce.com targets startups, small businesses, medium-sized businesses, and corporate giants, as well as nonprofit organizations. It has also introduced software tailored to the  specific needs of particular industries, including financial services and health care. Through a strategic partnership with IBM, Salesforce.com offers its own Salesforce Einstein artificial intelligence along with IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence to give businesses more analytic and predictive capabilities for better decision making. Through a strategic partnership with Google, Salesforce.com offers businesses the option of integrating G Suite office software tools and Google Cloud storage for added productivity. 

Questions for Discussion

1. How does Dreamforce help Salesforce.com market to business buyers in multiple stages of the business buying decision process

2. Why would Dreamforce include a special series of sessions for the CEOs of customer companies? Explain your answer in terms of the organizational influences on the buying decision process

3. Is Salesforce.com’s involvement with philanthropy and volunteerism a good way to show that the company understands the primary concerns of business customers? Explain your answer