highkey stressing over applying to this job the requirements for which are basically "know how to use excel and how to handle routine inquiries without flipping anyone off" and I would just like to know how I went from the most confident over achieving kid to someone who is terrified to apply for roles I coulda filled straight out of high school

Dell Boomi Quora

Dell Boomi: Your Questions Answered

Dell Boomi is a leading iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) solution renowned for its power, ease of use, and flexibility. If you’re wondering what Dell Boomi is, why it’s popular, or how to get started, this blog post is for you.

Common Quora Questions about Dell Boomi

1. What exactly is Dell Boomi?

Think of Dell Boomi as a cloud-based toolkit for connecting different applications, databases, and systems within your organization or with external partners. It streamlines data flow, enabling seamless communication between disparate technologies.

2. Why is Dell Boomi a popular integration choice?

User-friendliness: Boomi’s drag-and-drop interface and library of pre-built connectors make integration a breeze, even for non-technical users.

Speed: Boomi accelerates integration projects, leading to faster time-to-value than traditional methods.

Scalability: It easily handles growing data volumes and integration complexity as your business expands.

Versatility: Dell Boomi supports various integration patterns, from real-time syncing to batch processing and complex data transformations.

3. What are typical use cases for Dell Boomi?

Cloud Integration: Connecting cloud applications (like Salesforce, Workday, Netsuite) with on-premise systems or other cloud services.

Data Synchronization: Maintaining consistent data across different systems (CRM, ERP, marketing automation platforms)

B2B Integration: Streamlining processes and data exchange with trading partners and suppliers

API Management: Creating and managing APIs to expose business data and services

Master Data Management (MDM): Ensuring a single source of truth for critical business data.

4. How do I get started with Dell Boomi?

Free Trial: Dell Boomi offers a free trial to explore the platform and get hands-on experience.

Training and Resources: Boomi provides ample learning resources, including documentation, online courses, and a vibrant user community.

Consulting: Considering complex integration needs, consider working with a Dell Boomi partner for expert support.

5. Are there alternatives to Dell Boomi?

Yes, the iPaaS market has several competitors, including:

MuleSoft

Informatica Cloud

Workato

SnapLogic

Choose the platform that best aligns with your technical requirements, budget, and team skillsets.

Should you consider Dell Boomi?

Dell Boomi is worth exploring if you want to simplify integration headaches, improve business agility, and gain better control over your data flows.

You can find more information about Dell Boomi in this  Dell Boomi Link

 

Conclusion:

Unogeeks is the No.1 IT Training Institute for Dell Boomi Training. Anyone Disagree? Please drop in a comment

You can check out our other latest blogs on  Dell Boomi here – Dell Boomi Blogs

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Zoho Analytics Training

Introduction

Most people think of training as something they do to improve their performance. But the reality is that training can have a much more profound impact on your company and your team than just making you better at what you do. Zoho analytics training is an opportunity for everyone involved in the process to grow together, learn new skills, and build stronger relationships with each other—and it's not just employees who benefit from this kind of investment in their professional lives; it also benefits employers by helping them attract more talented workers who want to work for them because they know how much effort went into creating something great. Also Read: Is Zoho Status down in future? How to find ideas for your training ● Use Google Trends. ● Ask your team what they want to learn. ● Find gaps in your knowledge and those of the people on your team, then figure out how you can fill them with information from ZOHO Analytics Training. Ten key questions to ask yourself to craft relevant training. ● What is the goal of the training? ● What is the target audience for this training? ● What message do you want to convey in this training? ● Which concepts and skills are most important for your audience, and why? ● How will you structure your content, so it's easy for people to learn from, understand, and retain information from this course (i.e., do you want them reading through some slides or watching videos)? ● What do you want your learners to be able to accomplish at the end of this training?  ● Do you have any examples, stories, or case studies that would help illustrate these concepts for your audience?  ● What are some of the most common mistakes people make when working with data in ZOHO Analytics, and how can we avoid them?  ● How will you deliver this training, so it's easy for people to learn from, understand, and retain information from this course (i.e., do you want them reading through some slides or watching videos)?Must Read: Why Zoho Netsuite Integration is important? Testing and retesting your great ideas.

Testing and retesting your great ideas is essential. If you are planning to teach a course, you must test the training with a small group of people before you start classes. Then, after that initial testing period has passed, ask for feedback from those who have taken the course—especially those who didn't attend any classes! The goal here isn't just to find out whether or not people liked what was taught in class; instead, look for indicators of whether or not students got anything valuable from attending your session(s). This helps ensure that future sessions will be more successful because they will already have been evaluated by previous participants' responses and their own experiences with the content covered in earlier sessions. You are helping your team embrace the challenge of creating excellent training. Before you start putting together a training, take some time to think about who you will be teaching it. Will they be an internal team or an external one? If it is the latter, consider whether they will need additional resources like video or audio content that isn't specific to your organization. If it is internal and they don't have any existing materials (or even if they do), consider how much time you want to spend on training materials before choosing a format.Must Read: Integrate RingCentral with Zoho CRM in 5 easy steps When creating your training plans, consider how well motivated each person on the team is going into making something extraordinary happen with their job responsibilities—and whether or not any barriers are preventing them from doing so. For example: "I'm excited about this opportunity because I know my boss will appreciate all of my hard work when he sees what we have done here," says one employee who wants nothing more than praise from his boss; meanwhile, another coworker might say "This project needs more attention than usual because my manager has been away most of this week." You will want someone who feels passionate about their subject matter so that when given access to new territory, there won't be any hesitation in switching gears quickly enough before getting too comfortable with old ways again. A training plan is not something you do once but lasts for years and can benefit many people. A training plan is not something you do once but lasts for years and can benefit many people. It's a learning and personal growth framework that multiple teams, locations, and years can use. That is why we created the Zoho Analytics Training Plan template.  The first step is to choose a course or module from our list of courses below: ● ZOHO Analytics Data Science Course (https://www.zoho.com/analytics-data-science/) ● ZOHO Analytics Business Intelligence Course (https://www.zoho.com/analytics-businessintelligence/) You will then use the following steps to fill out your plan:  - Choose a course or module to start with - Go through the course materials, taking notes where appropriate (this will help you retain more information) - Consider what skills you want to learn and how they can be applied to your work tasks.  - After you have completed a course or module, look at your notes and decide on the next step. If you are still trying to decide what to learn next, consider using our analytics toolkit (https://www.zoho.com/analytics-toolkit/) to help guide your decision-making process.

Conclusion

You now know how to create excellent training and how to do it. But let's face it: sometimes, we all get stuck in our ruts. That is why I encourage you not to be afraid of asking for help. Asking for advice can be challenging, but if there is one thing I know about companies that have successfully implemented training programs. Related: Zoho data enrichment and benefits in easy steps Read the full article

Wholesale & Distribution Erp Sage Enterprise Administration & Bi Montreal Canada

NetSuite offers organizations with an built-in system of cloud functions that helps them run their enterprise.... Complete integration with manufacturing, stock, buying, gross sales, and finance provides a 360-degree understanding of all buyer exercise sage x3 food and beverage. Sage X3 helps organizations keep up with demand through real-time stock monitoring and status tracking. GetApp offers free software discovery and choice sources for professionals like you.

The mid-market ERP publishers, then again, corresponding to Infor or Epicor, are probably to offer significantly better worth for the mid-market producers. They present self-contained solutions and have industry-specific last-mile functionality built in for a quantity of manufacturing verticals similar to Industrial Automation or Machinery. Their products are technical to supply the needed flexibility for a lot larger manufacturing organizations.

Sage X3 helps your company comply by providing a convenient and environment friendly approach to gather and monitor related process data and eliminating guide procedures throughout the manufacturing process. With the rising variety of food safety incidents, a mock recall is nothing short of obligatory for producers critical about food safety. Tailor behaviour, user experiences and automate enterprise processes and operations easily. At the identical time, customers expect consistency whilst provide, demand, and the marketplace itself adjustments. It's difficult to stay in management, hold costs down, and retain flexibility for reacting to these modifications, however you can overcome it with the right resolution. Addressing these challenges will assist you determine if your business is compliant, accountable, ready for recalls, and capable of keep constant product quality.

I like the function and performance improvement course of that the supplier uses and believe this ERP suite is reasonably priced and enough for the million and billion dollar firms. A single cloud ERP resolution sage x3 food and beverage for fast-growing, mid-market companies to scale and compete with out the complexity and value. A confirmed ERP software program resolution to help distributors and producers run effectively.

Have the opportunity to standardize your unique recipe processes as a lot as a global scale with Ross. New Westminster, BC, September 5, (T-Net)--The Answer Company, a number one business management software program & expertise consulting firm, has been named one of many fastest-growing companies in B.C. Manufacturing resource planning software, generally referred to as material necessities planning or as MRP II software program, is the core know-how that sets manufacturing applications other than other kinds of enterprise software.

Better planning and monitoring leads to operations that generate less waste and less scrap, reducing environmental influence for those companies. Additionally, as more documentation is saved electronically, it reduces waste paper and cuts paper prices sage x3 food and beverage. Specialists in a single perform, similar to materials costing, may value the function depth of best-of-breed options designed for his or her perform.

Minimum of 1-year experience working machines such as lathes and milling machines (non-CNC) in a heavy manufacturing setting. We will be succesful of visibility and transparency across all vegetation for company, lowering the time for shut, as properly as sharing supplies and ingredients which would possibly be shared. Trace is a huge win for our Quality group for audits and any product tracing that's required, which a really nice time saver. EVERYTHING (Acctng,CRM,Orders,Inv/WMS,Purch,Ecom) on a single cloud enterprise suite from an moral, U.S. primarily based small business advocate. A higher method to handle your entire business, at a lower price and on a global scale.

And it is in fact essential to think about foreign money trade charges, as a end result of it's not unusual for importers to be incurring costs in two or more currencies. For foreign money conversion, assuming you haven't hedged currencies, the guidelines say to use the exchange price on the date of receipt of the goods. There are many strict laws to follow in phrases of the distribution of food and drink merchandise. Compliance with these rules is necessary to ensure the products’ freshness and high quality.

Integrating to Netsuite - What You Will Need to Understand

Netsuite can be a whole ERP platform to encourage economic health and rapid growth of almost any size business. According to Netsuite's website, 20% of Fortune 100 Businesses use Netsuite. They claim that they are the Cloud ERP process. I think it, Netsuite is apparently anywhere and many of our prospective customers and clients really are seeking to CloudElements to help make their own netsuite integration less debilitating.

If you have a SaaS software or are a system integrator, then it is very likely that some subset your customers now utilize Netsuite and will take your application incorporates and syncs data using it if not, your web visitors can select an alternative vendor that will be able to do netsuite integration with crm.

Considering the fact that, exactly what are example usecases that would activate an integration using Netsuite?

Cause Customer: New guide generated in cloud marketing support. Sync with and Join contact or lead information using Netsuite to manage to buyer.

Quote-to-Cash: Opportunity set to shut obtained in cloud CRM services. Join and sync data across services out of customer's intention to get to realization of revenue.

Hire-to-Retire: New Employee inserted in your own cloud HR services. Build one employee opinion with Netsuite along with also other services by syncing Employee demographics (identification, position, identify, address, contact number, electronic mail , hire dates, and etc). So setup emails, computer tools, toddlers - and reverse the method.

Netsuite is excellent - a Effective ERP that has all the components necessary to run a business, including:

Finance / Accounting

Client Relationship Management (CRM)

Ecommerce

Professional Services Automation (PSA)

Industry Intelligence (BI)

However, software that is potent has an API and Netsuite is no exception. The netsuite integration with crm SOAP API might be daunting. Below Are Some Items Which You Have to contend with in order

SOAP API: You will require a powerful working knowledge of the SOAP protocol. As an example, Netsuite's API is complex for running searches, e.g. trying to find a touch by email address. If you've got standardized on HTTPS and REST in your application or services, then you might want to compose scriptlets (Java Script vulnerable as relaxation ) to convert Netsuite's SOAP protocols to REST in order to confirm HTTPS requirements.

Authentication: Netsuite supports equally Token based and Fundamental (account ) authentication. Which you ought to use is dependent upon your use scenario - .

Concurrency limitations: Netsuite allows in any certain time for just 1 API call a user accounts. All will fail, if significantly a lot more than one API contact is created at an identical period. Thus, you need to architect a solution that assures"gating" of all API requires a given user account.

Bulk Framework: Netsuite has asynchronous APIs for moving data in volume. This could aid with transferring a lot of data records depending upon your usecase. You will need to understand how Netsuite inquiries utilizing SOAP API phone calls for.

Eventing: Now enterprise resource planning Netsuite does not give polling predicated in eventing framework, built or webhooks. You need to be build 1 - with their own SOAP queries. Note: you may also need to handle event questions vs. API asks due to the concurrency limits mentioned previously.

Versioning: at present two main models used, 2016.1 and 2018.1, you will need to make sure beforehand compatibility in case a customers switch into this newer version.

REST Transformation. Optionally, if you standardize to REST, when integrating to your consumer's ERP Netsuite solutions, then it can require creating Scriptlets (JS vulnerable as relaxation ) - that you simply will have to hazard loading in your buyer's Netsuite sandbox.

Why Apps Developers and Users Need to Care About APIs

As a potential buyer of SaaS applications, one of the first considerations is integration. How can it be integrated into existing applications? How can it be integrated into new applications? How can it be integrated into social media? How can I import existing data? How painful is integration?

These problems are often underestimated by SaaS providers and they don't realize that they can be a major obstacle to acceptance of their application.

Some companies prefer fully integrated application packages such as NetSuite or Zoho, but many of us just want to choose and buy applications with applications. Open APIs and demonstrations of integration functions can make or cancel a sale here.

Simply put, Google Maps API Alternative is a technology that integrates a number of applications (or websites). In heterogeneous application environments, the API makes things work together. As a business owner, you might not be interested in the API, but then think of the flow between CRM, billing, billing, tax reporting ... it has to be direct. Not always!

There are many reasons why customers want an API and many reasons why vendors offer it. Regardless of whether channel partners and integrators adapt a number of applications to their customers' specific requirements or whether customers can facilitate the integration of new SaaS applications into their legacy applications, the API must be available.

The API can also be important if the provider is stuck or you just want to change providers because they can guarantee the export of data to retrieve data.

Because the API makes it easy for sales partners, the cost of acquiring new customers for SaaS providers can be reduced.

After considering the needs and benefits of the API, it is surprising that many SaaS companies do not yet have an open API as part of the road map for their development. Saas providers must offer open APIs to integrate it with other products and make their customers' lives easier and safer. John Musser, founder of ProgrammableWeb.com, said recently: "Not having an API in 2010 is like not having a website like 2001."

Vendors who already have a solid API strategy must take seriously the benefits of API management tools to get the most out of this service.

Enthusiastic users of cloud computing are familiar with the idea of ​​moving data and functions from closed, private systems to shared infrastructure. Tomorrow, your applications and services will be innovatively attracted by additional components in the cloud, as well as social and mobile applications that can add exponential value to your application and brand. This opens up new opportunities for your customers to use your services, and the API forms the core of the next generation of SaaS companies.

 The API is the glue of cloud computing. They offer new SaaS business channels to strengthen existing and new partnerships, stimulate innovation, reach customers, and create new sales opportunities. "

In a rapidly growing and competitive business software market, vendors need to ensure that their technology is crucial in the interconnected business application value chain. Otherwise, other people will "eat lunch".

There are a number of companies that understand the power of well-managed APIs and have developed technologies that others can use to start, manage and expand their API business. 3cale anticipates this market very well and responds with offers that help companies such as Skype and Wine.com and SaaS providers to fully manage their API infrastructure. Through a carefully thought out API strategy, they add magic sauce to the API and provide exposure, control and scaling requirements for the API to help businesses increase their sales.

If you are a company that wants to buy a new SaaS solution, ask the provider about their API strategy. Must be part of your ranking list. If you miss it as a SaaS provider, you need to add this as a top priority for your development roadmap.

 For More Details: Distance Matrix API

google maps api replacement

best alternative to google maps api

5 Ways CMOs Can Take Advantage of the Current Business Landscape https://kestreldigitalmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/nmprofetimg-188.png <p> Now is the time for CMOs to nurture relationships with the rest of the c-suite and trumpet revenue-generating results. </p> <div id="articleAdd" readability="159.58494208494"> <p> <time datetime="2019-11-06 18:34:00" itemprop="datePublished" content="2019-11-06T18:34:00Z"><br /> November<br /> 6, 2019<br /> </time><br /> 6 min read </p> <p> Opinions expressed by <em>Entrepreneur</em> contributors are their own. </p> <p> <small class="grey-text text-darken-1"><br /> </small></p> <p>After years of clamoring for more recognition, chief marketing officers finally have their seat at the table.</p> <p>Not so long ago, CEOs and CFOs tended to view marketing departments strictly as a cost center where artsy people sat around coming up with pretty pictures and creative ideas. That’s all been turned on its head as the top leaders i<a href="https://venturebeat.com/2016/12/16/almost-70-of-ceos-now-expect-cmos-to-lead-revenue-growth/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ncreasingly look to CMOs as vital engines of growth</a>.</p> <p> This new-found recognition means they are under more pressure than ever to prove their value to CEOs and CFOs in terms of revenue and profits, as well as justify the rising spend, especially on marketing technology.</p> <p>There’s simply no place for <a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/239563" rel="follow noopener noreferrer" target="_self">CMOs</a> to hide anymore. And they shouldn’t want to. The question is how they can take advantage of the opportunity and mitigate the outsized blame they receive when the company isn’t hitting the numbers. I believe the heart of the problem is that CMOs lack visibility into their marketing activities and can do a better job of creating metrics that show how their activities are generating revenue for the company.</p> <p><b>Related: <a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/video/327094" rel="follow noopener noreferrer" target="_self">Why the CMO — Not CEO — Should Create the Company Mission</a></b></p> <p>To begin to change all of this, CMOs need to nurture their relationships with the rest of the c-suite, and in particular the CFO. If the CMO isn’t working hand-in-glove with the CFO, the finance leader ends up operating in a vacuum when trying to quantify marketing’s contribution to the growth forecast.</p> <p>Without clear data and metrics from marketing, the CFO’s assumption might be that growth is coming from elsewhere, severely discounting marketing’s contributions when judgment time comes.</p> <p>CMOs have worked too hard to get that seat at the table to risk wasting it by failing to win the CFO’s understanding of exactly how the marketing department contributes to success.</p> <p>But there are things the CMO can do to forge a stronger partnership with the CFO and transform marketing’s reputation from a cost center to a profit driver.</p> <h2>1. Get on the same financial page.</h2> <p>Collaboration between a CMO and CFO will only work if they are using the same source of truth for their data on budgets and planning. Most of the time that isn’t the case, resulting in a lack of mutual transparency on budgeting and tracking spending. Even as marketing departments’ budgets have soared in recent years, they’ve stuck with the same antiquated budget and planning methods that contribute to their low visibility in the organization. While the CFO is logging into Netsuite or Oracle, the CMO is often grappling with spreadsheets and has no visibility into the CFO’s world. At best, marketing is using a separate system from finance; at worst it has no system at all. CMOs should figure out how to get on the same system as the CFO, even if that just means using the same spreadsheet.</p> <p><b>Related: <a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/video/322499" rel="follow noopener noreferrer" target="_self">This CMO Took Her Love for Hard Science and Made It Work for Her</a></b></p> <h2>2. Get smart about your spending.</h2> <p>One sure way to get in your CFO’s good graces is by becoming more disciplined about the marketing spend. In recent years, marketing departments have spent big on marketing technology. And often it is done so haphazardly that marketing departments are drowning in a sea of poorly matched technology solutions. With martech spending expected to hit <a href="https://www.marketingtechnews.net/news/2018/sep/24/global-martech-spend-estimated-100bn-according-warc/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">$100 billion this year</a>, the pressure is on from CFOs to rein in the costs or at least justify the spending with hard numbers. This means that CMOs may need to re-assess their spending processes, perhaps borrowing best practices from the IT/CIO department, which have a stronger track record on technology purchases.</p> <h2>3. Speak the same language as your CFO.</h2> <p>It seems like an obvious point, but marketing departments were in the wilderness for so long that they still use language and yardsticks that mean little to the CFO or CEO.<b> </b>As CMO, you may be proud of your recent MQL numbers or your latest campaign that harnesses social media influencers. Both could draw blank stares from your CFO unless they are linked to KPIs that he or she uses to measure success. CMOs need to know what KPIs actually move the needle for the CFO and align their metrics accordingly so they are not talking past each other.</p> <h2>4. Spend on people, not just programs.</h2> <p>As marketing budgets grow, the temptation for CMOs is to pour resources into program spending because it seems easy to scale. If you put a dollar into your Google search spend and get $3 back, why not repeat it as many times as possible? That’s fine until it starts to cause bottlenecks in your process because you haven’t invested in hiring good people to run the program. Spending money on people can be a hard sell, but in order to get those scale programs to work, you need to be willing to make some unscalable investments in people.</p> <h2>5. Declare war on waste.</h2> <p>Reducing wasteful spending, both externally and internally, is a sure-fire way to make friends with your CFO. One <a href="https://www.emarketer.com/content/marketers-waste-about-one-fourth-of-their-budgets" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">survey</a> found that marketers waste about a quarter of their spending, so there’s plenty of excesses to trim. A major culprit is the big chunk of marketing spending that has traditionally gone to external agencies, which tend to be both expensive and inefficient. Reliance on agencies can become a long-term crutch for marketing departments, leading to complacency and overspending. <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/04/firms-are-taking-more-marketing-functions-in-house-heres-why.html" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Increasingly,</a> marketing departments are moving to bring a lot of those functions in-house, helping to reduce costs and giving them more control over the content. Targeting internal inefficiencies and waste can be just as fruitful. Perhaps you have a creative services team that needs a revamp because it isn’t working efficiently, whether that’s due to technology, process, or people.</p> <p><b>Related: <a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/video/330212" rel="follow noopener noreferrer" target="_self">This CMO Thinks of Marketing Like a Brad Pitt Movie</a></b></p> <p>By taking most or all of these steps, CMOs can build a much stronger relationship with their CFOs and establish marketing as a well-integrated, profit-driving department. In doing so, CMOs can flip the usual dynamic in which they’re on the defensive, having to justify every dollar spent.</p> <p>Instead, the CFO might actively spend money on marketing because it’s demonstrably a central growth engine for the business. </p> <p> </p> </p></div> Kestrel Digital Media

New Post has been published on https://kestreldigitalmedia.com/blog/5-ways-cmos-can-take-advantage-of-the-current-business-landscape

5 Ways CMOs Can Take Advantage of the Current Business Landscape

Now is the time for CMOs to nurture relationships with the rest of the c-suite and trumpet revenue-generating results.

November 6, 2019 6 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

After years of clamoring for more recognition, chief marketing officers finally have their seat at the table.

Not so long ago, CEOs and CFOs tended to view marketing departments strictly as a cost center where artsy people sat around coming up with pretty pictures and creative ideas. That’s all been turned on its head as the top leaders increasingly look to CMOs as vital engines of growth.

 This new-found recognition means they are under more pressure than ever to prove their value to CEOs and CFOs in terms of revenue and profits, as well as justify the rising spend, especially on marketing technology.

There’s simply no place for CMOs to hide anymore. And they shouldn’t want to. The question is how they can take advantage of the opportunity and mitigate the outsized blame they receive when the company isn’t hitting the numbers. I believe the heart of the problem is that CMOs lack visibility into their marketing activities and can do a better job of creating metrics that show how their activities are generating revenue for the company.

Related: Why the CMO — Not CEO — Should Create the Company Mission

To begin to change all of this, CMOs need to nurture their relationships with the rest of the c-suite, and in particular the CFO. If the CMO isn’t working hand-in-glove with the CFO, the finance leader ends up operating in a vacuum when trying to quantify marketing’s contribution to the growth forecast.

Without clear data and metrics from marketing, the CFO’s assumption might be that growth is coming from elsewhere, severely discounting marketing’s contributions when judgment time comes.

CMOs have worked too hard to get that seat at the table to risk wasting it by failing to win the CFO’s understanding of exactly how the marketing department contributes to success.

But there are things the CMO can do to forge a stronger partnership with the CFO and transform marketing’s reputation from a cost center to a profit driver.

1. Get on the same financial page.

Collaboration between a CMO and CFO will only work if they are using the same source of truth for their data on budgets and planning. Most of the time that isn’t the case, resulting in a lack of mutual transparency on budgeting and tracking spending. Even as marketing departments’ budgets have soared in recent years, they’ve stuck with the same antiquated budget and planning methods that contribute to their low visibility in the organization. While the CFO is logging into Netsuite or Oracle, the CMO is often grappling with spreadsheets and has no visibility into the CFO’s world. At best, marketing is using a separate system from finance; at worst it has no system at all. CMOs should figure out how to get on the same system as the CFO, even if that just means using the same spreadsheet.

Related: This CMO Took Her Love for Hard Science and Made It Work for Her

2. Get smart about your spending.

One sure way to get in your CFO’s good graces is by becoming more disciplined about the marketing spend. In recent years, marketing departments have spent big on marketing technology. And often it is done so haphazardly that marketing departments are drowning in a sea of poorly matched technology solutions. With martech spending expected to hit $100 billion this year, the pressure is on from CFOs to rein in the costs or at least justify the spending with hard numbers. This means that CMOs may need to re-assess their spending processes, perhaps borrowing best practices from the IT/CIO department, which have a stronger track record on technology purchases.

3. Speak the same language as your CFO.

It seems like an obvious point, but marketing departments were in the wilderness for so long that they still use language and yardsticks that mean little to the CFO or CEO. As CMO, you may be proud of your recent MQL numbers or your latest campaign that harnesses social media influencers. Both could draw blank stares from your CFO unless they are linked to KPIs that he or she uses to measure success. CMOs need to know what KPIs actually move the needle for the CFO and align their metrics accordingly so they are not talking past each other.

4. Spend on people, not just programs.

As marketing budgets grow, the temptation for CMOs is to pour resources into program spending because it seems easy to scale. If you put a dollar into your Google search spend and get $3 back, why not repeat it as many times as possible? That’s fine until it starts to cause bottlenecks in your process because you haven’t invested in hiring good people to run the program. Spending money on people can be a hard sell, but in order to get those scale programs to work, you need to be willing to make some unscalable investments in people.

5. Declare war on waste.

Reducing wasteful spending, both externally and internally, is a sure-fire way to make friends with your CFO. One survey found that marketers waste about a quarter of their spending, so there’s plenty of excesses to trim. A major culprit is the big chunk of marketing spending that has traditionally gone to external agencies, which tend to be both expensive and inefficient. Reliance on agencies can become a long-term crutch for marketing departments, leading to complacency and overspending. Increasingly, marketing departments are moving to bring a lot of those functions in-house, helping to reduce costs and giving them more control over the content. Targeting internal inefficiencies and waste can be just as fruitful. Perhaps you have a creative services team that needs a revamp because it isn’t working efficiently, whether that’s due to technology, process, or people.

Related: This CMO Thinks of Marketing Like a Brad Pitt Movie

By taking most or all of these steps, CMOs can build a much stronger relationship with their CFOs and establish marketing as a well-integrated, profit-driving department. In doing so, CMOs can flip the usual dynamic in which they’re on the defensive, having to justify every dollar spent.

Instead, the CFO might actively spend money on marketing because it’s demonstrably a central growth engine for the business. 

  Kestrel Digital Media

Kellie Romack of Hilton: Giving Employees the Same Great Technology We Give Our Customers is Key to Our Success

Back from another conference!  This time it was Oracle’s big annual user conference OpenWorld in San Francisco.  And baked into that conference is NetSuite’s (acquired by Oracle a few years ago) SuiteConnect event. There I caught up with a few small business friends including Melinda Emerson (aka Small Biz Lady), Laurie McCabe and Ramon Ray. You can check that chat out here.

The Employee Experience at Hilton

But one of the most interesting conversation I had during the week was with Kellie Romack, Vice President of Digital HR and Strategic Planning for Hilton.  Hilton was recently named the best place to work in the country, and during OpenWorld Kellie was part of a keynote session sharing why the company is gearing up to roll out Oracle’s new digital assistant technology to its workforce.  And I had the pleasure of grabbing a few minutes of her time to ask her a few additional questions.  And even though Hilton is a huge organization with locations all over the world, businesses of any size can learn from one of Kellie’s key themes — employees should have access to the same great tech as guests staying at their hotels do in order to create the best experiences they can for guests and themselves.

Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.  To see the whole interview watch the video or click on the embedded SoundCloud player below.

How to Keep Customers Connected

Brent Leary: Before you went to the HR side, you were on the front end side, right?  Helping the customers get connected with technology and Hilton, and all the innovative stuff you guys are doing.

Kellie Romack: Absolutely. I ran our websites for Hilton. I’ve run our mobile apps for Hilton and ran a lot of the IT functions and frameworks. So really enjoyed the commercial side of it, creating technology for our guests and making that technology seamless and frictionless and easy to use. And we are super excited to start bringing that to team members on the HR side as well.

Brent Leary: You’ve had all that good stuff going on, on the consumer side, and we had a previous call before we got together here, and one of the things that stood out to me was you said, “Yeah, it’s great to have it on a consumer side, but the employees could use it too.”

Kellie Romack: Absolutely. From a team member perspective, I have the philosophy of we have to make technology just as good for our team members as we do for our guests, because our team members don’t need to be bogged down with administration or things that are complicated to use. They need to be able to simply do what they need to do, from an HR perspective, from a team member perspective, so that get on serving guests like yourself.

Bringing Digital Assistants to HR

Brent Leary: So one of the areas that I really focus in on is this whole thing around digital assistants and being able to speak to devices and have them give quick answers back. And a lot of the focus has always been on the consumer side of the house with that. But you’re looking to bring that to the HR side of it. I’d like you to talk a little bit about that.

Kellie Romack: Our team members have questions every single day. So whether it’s, “What is my paycheck, right? How many absence balances do I have left? How do I go and sign up for a new learning class?” If they have to look up someone in the directory, whatever questions they have, we’re really focused on helping them understand the answers and get real time answers quickly. Typically, what we do, we’ve looked at our service records, team members ask the same questions about 60% of the time. So those are repeatable functions that were very easy to create scripts, create standardization, and then use the Oracle technology to implement the digital assistant on our pages within HCM (human capital management).

Brent Leary: You were up on stage on the keynote and one of the things that stood out to me is, I think you said 95% of the time your folks work on the go. They were using mobile devices.

Kellie Romack: Absolutely, yes.

More Secrets of Good Employee Experience at Hilton

Brent Leary: And so what does the combination of mobility and this digital assistant provide them from an employee experience?

Kellie Romack: Our team members, 95% of them, are deskless. They are working in our rooms, being room attendants, restaurants, banquet facilities, front desk, we are there to serve our guests. We’re in a people serving people business. So what we want to try to do is make everything available on their mobile phone. And that’s no different from the digital assistant. So anything we do, we do mobile first delivery. It’s very, very important. So we look at, what are the features and functionality that they use on their mobile phone and how can we have the digital assistant work with natural language processing to make things happen?

Brent Leary: So you’re about to roll this out to the employees.

Kellie Romack: Yes.

Running Down the Numbers

Brent Leary: Give us some idea of the numbers we’re talking about here.

Kellie Romack: Sure, absolutely. So Hilton, we have 170,000 direct team members and we have 240,000 franchise team members. For a total of 410,000 team members globally. So, for digital assistant, we went and looked at our numbers and we’re going to focus in on our first rollout be about 80,000 of those team members. So we like to do things in a big bang approach, so we’re going to give that a go. And our team members are amazing. We listen to them. They give us feedback, our guests give us feedback. So that’s how we make things better. We hear people try ideas, we’re able to innovate. Innovation’s in our DNA at Hilton.

Brent Leary: You mentioned that you worked on the front end side and improved the customer experience, but what impact does helping the employees get digitally transformed have on the customer experience?

Kellie Romack: Oh, it’s huge. It was a real shift to move from working on customer’s side to the team member side, but I’ve absolutely loved it. Our team members are at the heart of everything we do and they love to serve guests, they enjoy hospitality. So when we provide them a very seamless, frictionless experience with technology and make their jobs easier. They’re appreciative, they’re happy, they’re able to go about their job and have more time to spend with our guests in making the experience great.

How to Share Information with Your Team

Brent Leary: So, from your personal perspective, how does this improve the way that you look at Hilton, being able to bring this information and this technology to other employees?

Kellie Romack: I believe strongly that we have to treat our team members just as good, again, as guest’s technology. And I think it’s very important that our team members feel like we’re paying attention to them, that we’re listening or hearing their feedback. We’re not just asking them to do more, right? So if we roll out things, we can’t just give our team members, “Here, learn this, learn this, learn this.” We have to get it simplified, streamlined, easy access, easy to use.

Brent Leary: And what does success look like once you get this out there and you get people starting to use it? What do you consider to be success?

 Kellie Romack: I believe success comes through people adopting the technology, using the technology, and not necessarily training them on it, but just helping them understand it’s out there, and then adoption comes, right? They start to organically grow and speak to one another. So when we go to hotels, like the one down the street that you’re staying at, we can walk in and say, “Tell us all about it. How do you feel about this piece of technology? What feedback?” And we love it, we think it’s great, and that’s incredibly rewarding.

What Challenges Arise with Innovation

Brent Leary: Are there any challenges you see that you have to be prepared for as you roll this out?

Kellie Romack: Sure, absolutely. I mean, adoption’s always something that we can’t take lightly. We have to make sure we’ve educated people on how to use it or not even how to use it because we want it to be easy to use, but that it’s out there and that it’s available and that they can take advantage of it. And how does it benefit them? How does it make their life easier? So that education and once they use the technology and they see how simple it is, we feel like it’ll speak for itself.

Brent Leary: You mentioned during the presentation earlier that Hilton was what the number one place to work in the U S.

Kellie Romack: We’re the number one place to work in the U.S., and number two in the world.

Summing Up Lessons from Employee Experience at Hilton

Brent Leary: So it seems like the employee base is already pretty happy about being at Hilton. How do you think this kind of technology will impact not just the experience from a customer perspective but just being a happy employee, because it already sounds like there’s a lot of them there already?

Kellie Romack: We’ve worked very hard on our culture. Our CEO Chris Nassetta is amazing and he helps to infuse that culture across the board. And again, we’re a business of people serving people and hospitality is at our core. I believe anything that we do for our team members in their interest, trying to improve their way of working at Hilton, they’re appreciated and they’re able to focus more on our guests. And we can spend time with our guests and doing their job and servicing their job better.

This article, “Kellie Romack of Hilton: Giving Employees the Same Great Technology We Give Our Customers is Key to Our Success” was first published on Small Business Trends

https://smallbiztrends.com/

The post Kellie Romack of Hilton: Giving Employees the Same Great Technology We Give Our Customers is Key to Our Success appeared first on Unix Commerce.

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Tech Helps Kiva's Loans Aid Global Small Businesses In Getting Out of Poverty

Want to help fund a small business in a developing country? Take a look at how Pam Yanchik Connealy and Kiva are using tech to fund entrepreneurs all over the world.

Pam is the CFO of Kiva, a revolutionary crowdfunding platform that provides loans to the working poor, particularly in third world countries.

From a woman opening up a dress store in Lebanon to a man in Guatemala investing in a herd of cattle, Kiva lets people get together to donate money to help support small businesses.

Why is Kiva important?

“Kiva is focused around eliminating and reducing financial exclusion globally.” -Pam Yanchik Connealy

Although we don’t have to worry about losing our identity in developed first world countries, not everybody is as fortunate.

For a lot of governments, most identification documents are paper and easily lost or the person just never had any identification documents.

For instance, when Haiti was hit by Hurricane Matthew, a lot of their paper documents were destroyed and since that’s all there was, things quickly became chaotic. Because there were no documents, everything was suddenly up for grabs--some people lost everything.

Refugees are also among those most affected. Often, they have to give up everything, including their identity, to flee.

The result?

Without an established identity, it can be difficult for these people to start a business and get out of poverty. Often, they have no credit or even identification that they can take to the bank to get a loan with.

That’s where Kiva comes in. Using blockchain technology, they’re able to build a platform that lets users crowdfund businesses for compromised people, allowing them to start or grow their own businesses. Eventually, this lets them build an identity that then enables them to use the banks in their country.

How Do They Do It?

“When I first came to Kiva, people would say, ‘Are we a nonprofit? Are we a social impact organization? Are we financial services? Are we high-tech?’ and I would say ‘Yes, we’re all of those’.” -Pam Yanchik Connealy

The true beauty of Kiva is that they’re not just a nonprofit. Rather, they’ve opened themselves up to the possibility of several different sectors and embraced them all. By taking on the mantle of nonprofit, social impact organization, financial institute, and tech powerhouse, they’re able to do things no one else can.

What’s their secret, you might ask? NetSuite.

“I’m not sure how we could be doing new products and new initiatives if I didn't have a core financial system like NetSuite in place to make me sleep better at night.” -Pam Yanchik Connealy

By using an Enterprise Resource Planning software like NetSuite as the core of their system, Kiva is able to combine several systems onto one cohesive platform that they then use to power the business.

With the help of their unique team of engineers, Kiva is able to effectively build interfaces between microfinance institutions in some of the poorest countries in the world and their own core systems and NetSuite, allowing them to bring about significant change in struggling countries.

What’s It Like to Work at an Organization Without NetSuite?

As far as Pam is concerned, Kiva wouldn’t be the same without NetSuite. A veteran of the social impact field, she’s done her fair share of time working at companies that don’t have a robust ERP system in place. This results in:

More work for the employees

A lack of cohesivity across departments

High risk if an employee leads because there’s no documentation to refer to

A massive headache

Is ERP software a Good Investment for a Small Business?

“One of the things I've always appreciated about NetSuite is being able to put something in that does have a nice lightweight footprint, that could work for both a smaller organization and a large organization.” -Pam Yanchik Connealy

Whether a business has 500 or 5,000 employees, it’s still a good idea to have a solid ERP in place. Not only will it help keep things organized and productive, but it will also help streamline growth and make it as painless as possible.

“Figuring out how to make an investment in a system that will scale with you, that will allow for the appropriate internal controls, like NetSuite,” says Pam, “is a really good thing to think through.”

The Takeaway

Kiva is combating financial inequality by providing loans to the working poor

They are able to accomplish this unique mission by embracing aspects of several sectors

Using an ERP like NetSuite gives them a solid foundation on which they can grow

The post Tech Helps Kiva's Loans Aid Global Small Businesses In Getting Out of Poverty appeared first on SmartHustle.com with Ramon Ray.

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Salesforce at 20 offers lessons for startup success

Salesforce is celebrating its 20th anniversary today. The company that was once a tiny irritant going after giants in the 1990s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market, such as Oracle and Siebel Systems, has grown into full-fledged SaaS powerhouse. With an annual run rate exceeding $14 billion, it is by far the most successful pure cloud application ever created.

Twenty years ago, it was just another startup with an idea, hoping to get a product out the door. By now, a legend has built up around the company’s origin story, not unlike Zuckerberg’s dorm room or Jobs’ garage, but it really did all begin in 1999 in an apartment in San Francisco, where a former Oracle executive named Marc Benioff teamed with a developer named Parker Harris to create a piece of business software that ran on the internet. They called it Salesforce .com.

None of the handful of employees who gathered in that apartment on the company’s first day in business in 1999 could possibly have imagined what it would become 20 years later, especially when you consider the start of the dot-com crash was just a year away..

Party like it’s 1999

It all began on March 8, 1999 in the apartment at 1449 Montgomery Street in San Francisco, the site of the first Salesforce office. The original gang of four employees consisted of Benioff and Harris and Harris’s two programming colleagues Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez. They picked the location because Benioff lived close by.

March 8th 1999 Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, Frank Dominguez, & I showed up at 1449 Montgomery Street & we started a company called https://t.co/GcJjXaxGXz & introduced the end of software (now called the the cloud). Congratulations ⁦@parkerharris⁩ on 20 amazing years! pic.twitter.com/qIbpbBl2C6

— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) March 5, 2019

It would be inaccurate to say Salesforce was the first to market with Software as a Service, a term, by the way, that would not actually emerge for years. In fact, there were a bunch of other fledgling enterprise software startups trying to do business online at the time including NetLedger, which later changed its name NetSuite, and was eventually sold to Oracle for $9.3 billion in 2016.

Other online CRM competitors included Salesnet, RightNow Technologies and Upshot. All would be sold over the next several years. Only Salesforce survived as a stand-alone company. It would go public in 2004 and eventually grow to be one of the top 10 software companies in the world.

Co-founder and CTO Harris said recently that he had no way of knowing that any of that would happen, although having met Benioff, he thought there was potential for something great to happen. “Little did I know at that time, that in 20 years we would be such a successful company and have such an impact on the world,” Harris told TechCrunch.

Nothing’s gonna stop us now

It wasn’t entirely a coincidence that Benioff and Harris had connected. Benioff had taken a sabbatical from his job at Oracle and was taking a shot at building a sales automation tool that ran on the internet. Harris, Moellenhoff and Dominguez had been building salesforce automation software solutions, and the two visions meshed. But building a client-server solution and building one online were very different.

Original meeting request email from Marc Benioff to Parker Harris from 1998. Email courtesy of Parker Harris.

You have to remember that in 1999, there was no concept of Infrastructure as a Service. It would be years before Amazon launched Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud in 2006, so Harris and his intrepid programming team were on their own when it came to building the software and providing the servers for it to scale and grow.

“I think in a way, that’s part of what made us successful because we knew that we had to, first of all, imagine scale for the world,” Harris said. It wasn’t a matter of building one CRM tool for a large company and scaling it to meet that individual organization’s demand, then another, it was really about figuring out how to let people just sign up and start using the service, he said.

“I think in a way, that’s part of what made us successful because we knew that we had to, first of all, imagine scale for the world.” Parker Harris, Salesforce

That may seem trivial now, but it wasn’t a common way of doing business in 1999. The internet in those years was dominated by a ton of consumer-facing dot-coms, many of which would go bust in the next year or two. Salesforce wanted to build an enterprise software company online, and although it wasn’t alone in doing that, it did face unique challenges being one of the early adherents.

“We created a software that was what I would call massively multi-tenant where we couldn’t optimize it at the hardware layer because there was no Infrastructure as a Service. So we did all the optimization above that — and we actually had very little infrastructure early on,” he explained.

Running down a dream

From the beginning, Benioff had the vision and Harris was charged with building it. Tien Tzuo, who would go on to be co-founder at Zuora in 2007, was employee number 11 at Salesforce, starting in August of 1999, about five months after the apartment opened for business. At that point, there still wasn’t an official product, but they were getting closer when Benioff hired Tzuo.

As Tzuo tells it, he had fancied a job as a product manager, but when Benioff saw his Oracle background in sales, he wanted him in account development. “My instinct was, don’t argue with this guy. Just roll with it,” Tzuo relates.

Early prototype of Salesforce.com. Photo: Salesforce

As Tzuo pointed out, in a startup with a handful of people, titles mattered little anyway. “Who cares what your role was. All of us had that attitude. You were a coder or a non-coder,” he said. The coders were stashed upstairs with a view of San Francisco Bay and strict orders from Benioff to be left alone. The remaining employees were downstairs working the phones to get customers.

“Who cares what your role was. All of us had that attitude. You were a coder or a non-coder.” Tien Tzuo, early employe

The first Wayback Machine snapshot of Salesforce.com is from November 15, 1999, It wasn’t fancy, but it showed all of the functionality you would expect to find in a CRM tool: Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Forecasts and Reports with each category represented by a tab.

The site officially launched on February 7, 2000 with 200 customers, and they were off and running.

Prove it all night

Every successful startup needs visionary behind it, pushing it, and for Salesforce that person was Marc Benioff. When he came up with the concept for the company, the dot-com boom was in high gear. In a year or two, much of it would come crashing down, but in 1999 anything was possible and Benioff was bold and brash and brimming with ideas.

But even good ideas don’t always pan out for so many reasons, as many a failed startup founder knows only too well. For a startup to succeed it needs a long-term vision of what it will become, and Benioff was the visionary, the front man, the champion, the chief marketer. He was all of that — and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Benioff: Every VC in Silicon Valley turned us down

Paul Greenberg, managing principal at The 56 Group and author of multiple books about the CRM industry including CRM at the Speed of Light (the first edition of which was published in 2001), was an early user of Salesforce, and says that he was not impressed with the product at first, complaining about the early export functionality in an article.

A Salesforce competitor at the time, Salesnet, got wind of Greenberg’s post, and put his complaint on the company website. Benioff saw it, and fired off an email to Greenberg: “I see you’re a skeptic. I love convincing skeptics. Can I convince you?” Greenberg said that being a New Yorker, he wrote back with a one-line response. “Take your best shot.” Twenty years later, Greenberg says that Benioff did take his best shot and he did end up convincing him.

“I see you’re a skeptic. I love convincing skeptics. Can I convince you?” Early Marc Benioff email

Laurie McCabe, who is co-founder and partner at SMB Group, was working for a consulting firm in Boston in 1999 when Benioff came by to pitch Salesforce to her team. She says she was immediately impressed with him, but also with the notion of putting enterprise software online, effectively putting it within reach of many more companies.

��He was the ringmaster I believe for SaaS or cloud or whatever we want to call it today. And that doesn’t mean some of these other guys didn’t also have a great vision, but he was the guy beating the drum louder. And I just really felt that in addition to the fact that he was an exceptional storyteller, marketeer and everything else, he really had the right idea that software on prem was not in reach of most businesses,” she said.

Take it to the limit

One of the ways that Benioff put the company in the public eye in the days before social media was guerrilla marketing techniques. He came up with the idea of “no software” as a way to describe software on the internet. He sent some of his early employees to “protest” at the Siebel Conference, taking place at the Moscone Center in February, 2000. He was disrupting one of his major competitors, and it created enough of a stir to attract a television news crew and garner a mention in the Wall Street Journal. All of this was valuable publicity for a company that was still in its early stages.

Photos: Salesforce

Brent Leary, who had left his job as an industry consultant in 2003 to open his current firm, CRM Essentials, said this ability to push the product was a real differentiator for the company and certainly got his attention. “I had heard about Salesnet and these other ones, but these folks not only had a really good product, they were already promoting it. They seemed to be ahead of the game in terms of evangelizing the whole “no software” thing. And that was part of the draw too,” Leary said of his first experiences working with Salesforce.

Leary added, “My first Dreamforce was in 2004, and I remember it particularly because it was actually held on Election Day 2004 and they had a George W. Bush look-alike come and help open the conference, and some people actually thought it was him.”

Greenberg said that the “no software” campaign was brilliant because it brought this idea of delivering software online to a human level. “When Marc said, ‘no software’ he knew there was software, but the thing with him is, that he’s so good at communicating a vision to people.” Software in the 90s and early 2000s was delivered mostly in boxes on CDs (or 3.5 inch floppies), so saying no software was creating a picture that you didn’t have to touch the software. You just signed up and used it. Greenberg said that campaign helped people understand online software at a time when it wasn’t a common delivery method.

Culture club

One of the big differentiators for Salesforce as a company was the culture it built from Day One. Benioff had a vision of responsible capitalism and included their charitable 1-1-1 model in its earliest planning documents. The idea was to give one percent of Salesforce’s equity, one percent of its product and one percent of its employees’ time to the community. As Benioff once joked, they didn’t have a product and weren’t making any money when they made the pledge, but they have stuck to it and many other companies have used the model Salesforce built.

Image: Salesforce

Bruce Cleveland, a partner at Wildcat Ventures, who has written a book with Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm fame called Traversing the Traction Gap, says that it is essential for a startup to establish a culture early on, just as Benioff did. “A CEO has to say, these are the standards by which we’re going to run this company. These are the things that we value. This is how we’re going to operate and hold ourselves accountable to each other,” Cleveland said. Benioff did that.

Another element of this was building trust with customers, a theme that Benioff continues to harp on to this day. As Harris pointed out, people still didn’t trust the internet completely in 1999, so the company had to overcome objections to entering a credit card online. Even more than that though, they had to get companies to agree to share their precious customer data with them on the internet.

“We had to not only think about scale, we had to think about how do we get the trust of our customers, to say that we will protect your information as well or better than you can,” Harris explained.

Growing up

The company was able to overcome those objections, of course, and more. Todd McKinnon, who is currently co-founder and CEO at Okta, joined Salesforce as VP of Engineering in 2006 as the company began to ramp up becoming a $100 million company, and he says that there were some growing pains in that time period.

Salesforce revenue growth across the years from 2006-present. Chart: Macro Trends

When he arrived, they were running on three mid-tier Sun servers in a hosted co-location facility. McKinnon said that it was not high-end by today’s standards. “There was probably less RAM than what’s in your MacBook Pro today,” he joked.

When he came on board, the company still had only 13 engineers and the actual infrastructure requirements were still very low. While that would change during his six year tenure, it was working fine when he got there. Within five years, he said, that changed dramatically as they were operating their own data centers and running clusters of Dell X86 servers — but that was down the road.

Before they did that, they went back to Sun one more time and bought four of the biggest boxes they sold at the time and proceeded to transfer all of the data. The problem was that the Oracle database wasn’t working well, so as McKinnon tells it, they got on the phone with Larry Ellison from Oracle, who upon hearing about the setup, asked them straight out why they were doing that? The way they had it set up simply didn’t work.

They were able to resolve it all and move on, but it’s the kind of crisis that today’s startups probably wouldn’t have to deal with because they would be running their company on a cloud infrastructure service, not their own hardware.

Window shopping

About this same time, Salesforce began a strategy to grow through acquisitions. In 2006, it acquired the first of 55 companies when it bought a small wireless technology company called Sendia for $15 million. As early as 2006, the year before the first iPhone, the company was already thinking about mobile.

Last year it made its 52nd acquisition, and the most costly so far, when it purchased Mulesoft for $6.5 billion, giving it a piece of software that could help Salesforce customers bridge the on-prem and cloud worlds. As Greenberg pointed out, this brought a massive change in messaging for the company.

“With the Salesforce acquisition of MuleSoft, it allows them pretty much to complete the cycle between back and front office and between on-prem and the cloud. And you notice, all of a sudden, they’re not saying ‘no software.’ They’re not attacking on-premise. You know, all of this stuff has gone by the wayside,” Greenberg said.

No company is going to be completely consistent as it grows and priorities shift,  but if you are a startup looking for a blueprint on how to grow a successful company, Salesforce would be a pretty good company to model yourself after. Twenty years into this, they are still growing and still going strong and they remain a powerful voice for responsible capitalism, making lots of money, while also giving back to the communities where they operate.

One other lesson that you could learn is that you’re never done. Twenty years is a big milestone, but it’s just one more step in the long arc of a successful organization.

Salesforce wants to reach $60 billion revenue goal by 2034

Salesforce at 20 offers lessons for startup success

Salesforce is celebrating its 20th anniversary today. The company that was once a tiny irritant going after giants in the 1990s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market, such as Oracle and Siebel Systems, has grown into full-fledged SaaS powerhouse. With an annual run rate exceeding $14 billion, it is by far the most successful pure cloud application ever created.

Twenty years ago, it was just another startup with an idea, hoping to get a product out the door. By now, a legend has built up around the company’s origin story, not unlike Zuckerberg’s dorm room or Jobs’ garage, but it really did all begin in 1999 in an apartment in San Francisco, where a former Oracle executive named Marc Benioff teamed with a developer named Parker Harris to create a piece of business software that ran on the internet. They called it Salesforce .com.

None of the handful of employees who gathered in that apartment on the company’s first day in business in 1999 could possibly have imagined what it would become 20 years later, especially when you consider the start of the dot-com crash was just a year away..

Party like it’s 1999

It all began on March 8, 1999 in the apartment at 1449 Montgomery Street in San Francisco, the site of the first Salesforce office. The original gang of four employees consisted of Benioff and Harris and Harris’s two programming colleagues Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez. They picked the location because Benioff lived close by.

March 8th 1999 Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, Frank Dominguez, & I showed up at 1449 Montgomery Street & we started a company called https://t.co/GcJjXaxGXz & introduced the end of software (now called the the cloud). Congratulations ⁦@parkerharris⁩ on 20 amazing years! pic.twitter.com/qIbpbBl2C6

— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) March 5, 2019

It would be inaccurate to say Salesforce was the first to market with Software as a Service, a term, by the way, that would not actually emerge for years. In fact, there were a bunch of other fledgling enterprise software startups trying to do business online at the time including NetLedger, which later changed its name NetSuite, and was eventually sold to Oracle for $9.3 billion in 2016.

Other online CRM competitors included Salesnet, RightNow Technologies and Upshot. All would be sold over the next several years. Only Salesforce survived as a stand-alone company. It would go public in 2004 and eventually grow to be one of the top 10 software companies in the world.

Co-founder and CTO Harris said recently that he had no way of knowing that any of that would happen, although having met Benioff, he thought there was potential for something great to happen. “Little did I know at that time, that in 20 years we would be such a successful company and have such an impact on the world,” Harris told TechCrunch.

Nothing’s gonna stop us now

It wasn’t entirely a coincidence that Benioff and Harris had connected. Benioff had taken a sabbatical from his job at Oracle and was taking a shot at building a sales automation tool that ran on the internet. Harris, Moellenhoff and Dominguez had been building salesforce automation software solutions, and the two visions meshed. But building a client-server solution and building one online were very different.

Original meeting request email from Marc Benioff to Parker Harris from 1998. Email courtesy of Parker Harris.

You have to remember that in 1999, there was no concept of Infrastructure as a Service. It would be years before Amazon launched Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud in 2006, so Harris and his intrepid programming team were on their own when it came to building the software and providing the servers for it to scale and grow.

“I think in a way, that’s part of what made us successful because we knew that we had to, first of all, imagine scale for the world,” Harris said. It wasn’t a matter of building one CRM tool for a large company and scaling it to meet that individual organization’s demand, then another, it was really about figuring out how to let people just sign up and start using the service, he said.

“I think in a way, that’s part of what made us successful because we knew that we had to, first of all, imagine scale for the world.” Parker Harris, Salesforce

That may seem trivial now, but it wasn’t a common way of doing business in 1999. The internet in those years was dominated by a ton of consumer-facing dot-coms, many of which would go bust in the next year or two. Salesforce wanted to build an enterprise software company online, and although it wasn’t alone in doing that, it did face unique challenges being one of the early adherents.

“We created a software that was what I would call massively multi-tenant where we couldn’t optimize it at the hardware layer because there was no Infrastructure as a Service. So we did all the optimization above that — and we actually had very little infrastructure early on,” he explained.

Running down a dream

From the beginning, Benioff had the vision and Harris was charged with building it. Tien Tzuo, who would go on to be co-founder at Zuora in 2007, was employee number 11 at Salesforce, starting in August of 1999, about five months after the apartment opened for business. At that point, there still wasn’t an official product, but they were getting closer when Benioff hired Tzuo.

As Tzuo tells it, he had fancied a job as a product manager, but when Benioff saw his Oracle background in sales, he wanted him in account development. “My instinct was, don’t argue with this guy. Just roll with it,” Tzuo relates.

Early prototype of Salesforce.com. Photo: Salesforce

As Tzuo pointed out, in a startup with a handful of people, titles mattered little anyway. “Who cares what your role was. All of us had that attitude. You were a coder or a non-coder,” he said. The coders were stashed upstairs with a view of San Francisco Bay and strict orders from Benioff to be left alone. The remaining employees were downstairs working the phones to get customers.

“Who cares what your role was. All of us had that attitude. You were a coder or a non-coder.” Tien Tzuo, early employe

The first Wayback Machine snapshot of Salesforce.com is from November 15, 1999, It wasn’t fancy, but it showed all of the functionality you would expect to find in a CRM tool: Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Forecasts and Reports with each category represented by a tab.

The site officially launched on February 7, 2000 with 200 customers, and they were off and running.

Prove it all night

Every successful startup needs visionary behind it, pushing it, and for Salesforce that person was Marc Benioff. When he came up with the concept for the company, the dot-com boom was in high gear. In a year or two, much of it would come crashing down, but in 1999 anything was possible and Benioff was bold and brash and brimming with ideas.

But even good ideas don’t always pan out for so many reasons, as many a failed startup founder knows only too well. For a startup to succeed it needs a long-term vision of what it will become, and Benioff was the visionary, the front man, the champion, the chief marketer. He was all of that — and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Benioff: Every VC in Silicon Valley turned us down

Paul Greenberg, managing principal at The 56 Group and author of multiple books about the CRM industry including CRM at the Speed of Light (the first edition of which was published in 2001), was an early user of Salesforce, and says that he was not impressed with the product at first, complaining about the early export functionality in an article.

A Salesforce competitor at the time, Salesnet, got wind of Greenberg’s post, and put his complaint on the company website. Benioff saw it, and fired off an email to Greenberg: “I see you’re a skeptic. I love convincing skeptics. Can I convince you?” Greenberg said that being a New Yorker, he wrote back with a one-line response. “Take your best shot.” Twenty years later, Greenberg says that Benioff did take his best shot and he did end up convincing him.

“I see you’re a skeptic. I love convincing skeptics. Can I convince you?” Early Marc Benioff email

Laurie McCabe, who is co-founder and partner at SMB Group, was working for a consulting firm in Boston in 1999 when Benioff came by to pitch Salesforce to her team. She says she was immediately impressed with him, but also with the notion of putting enterprise software online, effectively putting it within reach of many more companies.

“He was the ringmaster I believe for SaaS or cloud or whatever we want to call it today. And that doesn’t mean some of these other guys didn’t also have a great vision, but he was the guy beating the drum louder. And I just really felt that in addition to the fact that he was an exceptional storyteller, marketeer and everything else, he really had the right idea that software on prem was not in reach of most businesses,” she said.

Take it to the limit

One of the ways that Benioff put the company in the public eye in the days before social media was guerrilla marketing techniques. He came up with the idea of “no software” as a way to describe software on the internet. He sent some of his early employees to “protest” at the Siebel Conference, taking place at the Moscone Center in February, 2000. He was disrupting one of his major competitors, and it created enough of a stir to attract a television news crew and garner a mention in the Wall Street Journal. All of this was valuable publicity for a company that was still in its early stages.

Photos: Salesforce

Brent Leary, who had left his job as an industry consultant in 2003 to open his current firm, CRM Essentials, said this ability to push the product was a real differentiator for the company and certainly got his attention. “I had heard about Salesnet and these other ones, but these folks not only had a really good product, they were already promoting it. They seemed to be ahead of the game in terms of evangelizing the whole “no software” thing. And that was part of the draw too,” Leary said of his first experiences working with Salesforce.

Leary added, “My first Dreamforce was in 2004, and I remember it particularly because it was actually held on Election Day 2004 and they had a George W. Bush look-alike come and help open the conference, and some people actually thought it was him.”

Greenberg said that the “no software” campaign was brilliant because it brought this idea of delivering software online to a human level. “When Marc said, ‘no software’ he knew there was software, but the thing with him is, that he’s so good at communicating a vision to people.” Software in the 90s and early 2000s was delivered mostly in boxes on CDs (or 3.5 inch floppies), so saying no software was creating a picture that you didn’t have to touch the software. You just signed up and used it. Greenberg said that campaign helped people understand online software at a time when it wasn’t a common delivery method.

Culture club

One of the big differentiators for Salesforce as a company was the culture it built from Day One. Benioff had a vision of responsible capitalism and included their charitable 1-1-1 model in its earliest planning documents. The idea was to give one percent of Salesforce’s equity, one percent of its product and one percent of its employees’ time to the community. As Benioff once joked, they didn’t have a product and weren’t making any money when they made the pledge, but they have stuck to it and many other companies have used the model Salesforce built.

Image: Salesforce

Bruce Cleveland, a partner at Wildcat Ventures, who has written a book with Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm fame called Traversing the Traction Gap, says that it is essential for a startup to establish a culture early on, just as Benioff did. “A CEO has to say, these are the standards by which we’re going to run this company. These are the things that we value. This is how we’re going to operate and hold ourselves accountable to each other,” Cleveland said. Benioff did that.

Another element of this was building trust with customers, a theme that Benioff continues to harp on to this day. As Harris pointed out, people still didn’t trust the internet completely in 1999, so the company had to overcome objections to entering a credit card online. Even more than that though, they had to get companies to agree to share their precious customer data with them on the internet.

“We had to not only think about scale, we had to think about how do we get the trust of our customers, to say that we will protect your information as well or better than you can,” Harris explained.

Growing up

The company was able to overcome those objections, of course, and more. Todd McKinnon, who is currently co-founder and CEO at Okta, joined Salesforce as VP of Engineering in 2006 as the company began to ramp up becoming a $100 million company, and he says that there were some growing pains in that time period.

Salesforce revenue growth across the years from 2006-present. Chart: Macro Trends

When he arrived, they were running on three mid-tier Sun servers in a hosted co-location facility. McKinnon said that it was not high-end by today’s standards. “There was probably less RAM than what’s in your MacBook Pro today,” he joked.

When he came on board, the company still had only 13 engineers and the actual infrastructure requirements were still very low. While that would change during his six year tenure, it was working fine when he got there. Within five years, he said, that changed dramatically as they were operating their own data centers and running clusters of Dell X86 servers — but that was down the road.

Before they did that, they went back to Sun one more time and bought four of the biggest boxes they sold at the time and proceeded to transfer all of the data. The problem was that the Oracle database wasn’t working well, so as McKinnon tells it, they got on the phone with Larry Ellison from Oracle, who upon hearing about the setup, asked them straight out why they were doing that? The way they had it set up simply didn’t work.

They were able to resolve it all and move on, but it’s the kind of crisis that today’s startups probably wouldn’t have to deal with because they would be running their company on a cloud infrastructure service, not their own hardware.

Window shopping

About this same time, Salesforce began a strategy to grow through acquisitions. In 2006, it acquired the first of 55 companies when it bought a small wireless technology company called Sendia for $15 million. As early as 2006, the year before the first iPhone, the company was already thinking about mobile.

Last year it made its 52nd acquisition, and the most costly so far, when it purchased Mulesoft for $6.5 billion, giving it a piece of software that could help Salesforce customers bridge the on-prem and cloud worlds. As Greenberg pointed out, this brought a massive change in messaging for the company.

“With the Salesforce acquisition of MuleSoft, it allows them pretty much to complete the cycle between back and front office and between on-prem and the cloud. And you notice, all of a sudden, they’re not saying ‘no software.’ They’re not attacking on-premise. You know, all of this stuff has gone by the wayside,” Greenberg said.

No company is going to be completely consistent as it grows and priorities shift,  but if you are a startup looking for a blueprint on how to grow a successful company, Salesforce would be a pretty good company to model yourself after. Twenty years into this, they are still growing and still going strong and they remain a powerful voice for responsible capitalism, making lots of money, while also giving back to the communities where they operate.

One other lesson that you could learn is that you’re never done. Twenty years is a big milestone, but it’s just one more step in the long arc of a successful organization.

Salesforce wants to reach $60 billion revenue goal by 2034

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/08/salesforce-at-20-offers-lessons-for-startup-success/

Salesforce at 20 offers lessons for startup success

Salesforce is celebrating its 20th anniversary today. The company that was once a tiny irritant going after giants in the 1990s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market, such as Oracle and Siebel Systems, has grown into full-fledged SaaS powerhouse. With an annual run rate exceeding $14 billion, it is by far the most successful pure cloud application ever created.

Twenty years ago, it was just another startup with an idea, hoping to get a product out the door. By now, a legend has built up around the company’s origin story, not unlike Zuckerberg’s dorm room or Jobs’ garage, but it really did all begin in 1999 in an apartment in San Francisco, where a former Oracle executive named Marc Benioff teamed with a developer named Parker Harris to create a piece of business software that ran on the internet. They called it Salesforce .com.

None of the handful of employees who gathered in that apartment on the company’s first day in business in 1999 could possibly have imagined what it would become 20 years later, especially when you consider the start of the dot-com crash was just a year away..

Party like it’s 1999

It all began on March 8, 1999 in the apartment at 1449 Montgomery Street in San Francisco, the site of the first Salesforce office. The original gang of four employees consisted of Benioff and Harris and Harris’s two programming colleagues Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez. They picked the location because Benioff lived close by.

March 8th 1999 Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, Frank Dominguez, & I showed up at 1449 Montgomery Street & we started a company called https://t.co/GcJjXaxGXz & introduced the end of software (now called the the cloud). Congratulations ⁦@parkerharris⁩ on 20 amazing years! pic.twitter.com/qIbpbBl2C6

— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) March 5, 2019

It would be inaccurate to say Salesforce was the first to market with Software as a Service, a term, by the way, that would not actually emerge for years. In fact, there were a bunch of other fledgling enterprise software startups trying to do business online at the time including NetLedger, which later changed its name NetSuite, and was eventually sold to Oracle for $9.3 billion in 2016.

Other online CRM competitors included Salesnet, RightNow Technologies and Upshot. All would be sold over the next several years. Only Salesforce survived as a stand-alone company. It would go public in 2004 and eventually grow to be one of the top 10 software companies in the world.

Co-founder and CTO Harris said recently that he had no way of knowing that any of that would happen, although having met Benioff, he thought there was potential for something great to happen. “Little did I know at that time, that in 20 years we would be such a successful company and have such an impact on the world,” Harris told TechCrunch.

Nothing’s gonna stop us now

It wasn’t entirely a coincidence that Benioff and Harris had connected. Benioff had taken a sabbatical from his job at Oracle and was taking a shot at building a sales automation tool that ran on the internet. Harris, Moellenhoff and Dominguez had been building salesforce automation software solutions, and the two visions meshed. But building a client-server solution and building one online were very different.

Original meeting request email from Marc Benioff to Parker Harris from 1998. Email courtesy of Parker Harris.

You have to remember that in 1999, there was no concept of Infrastructure as a Service. It would be years before Amazon launched Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud in 2006, so Harris and his intrepid programming team were on their own when it came to building the software and providing the servers for it to scale and grow.

“I think in a way, that’s part of what made us successful because we knew that we had to, first of all, imagine scale for the world,” Harris said. It wasn’t a matter of building one CRM tool for a large company and scaling it to meet that individual organization’s demand, then another, it was really about figuring out how to let people just sign up and start using the service, he said.

“I think in a way, that’s part of what made us successful because we knew that we had to, first of all, imagine scale for the world.” Parker Harris, Salesforce

That may seem trivial now, but it wasn’t a common way of doing business in 1999. The internet in those years was dominated by a ton of consumer-facing dot-coms, many of which would go bust in the next year or two. Salesforce wanted to build an enterprise software company online, and although it wasn’t alone in doing that, it did face unique challenges being one of the early adherents.

“We created a software that was what I would call massively multi-tenant where we couldn’t optimize it at the hardware layer because there was no Infrastructure as a Service. So we did all the optimization above that — and we actually had very little infrastructure early on,” he explained.

Running down a dream

From the beginning, Benioff had the vision and Harris was charged with building it. Tien Tzuo, who would go on to be co-founder at Zuora in 2007, was employee number 11 at Salesforce, starting in August of 1999, about five months after the apartment opened for business. At that point, there still wasn’t an official product, but they were getting closer when Benioff hired Tzuo.

As Tzuo tells it, he had fancied a job as a product manager, but when Benioff saw his Oracle background in sales, he wanted him in account development. “My instinct was, don’t argue with this guy. Just roll with it,” Tzuo relates.

Early prototype of Salesforce.com. Photo: Salesforce

As Tzuo pointed out, in a startup with a handful of people, titles mattered little anyway. “Who cares what your role was. All of us had that attitude. You were a coder or a non-coder,” he said. The coders were stashed upstairs with a view of San Francisco Bay and strict orders from Benioff to be left alone. The remaining employees were downstairs working the phones to get customers.

“Who cares what your role was. All of us had that attitude. You were a coder or a non-coder.” Tien Tzuo, early employe

The first Wayback Machine snapshot of Salesforce.com is from November 15, 1999, It wasn’t fancy, but it showed all of the functionality you would expect to find in a CRM tool: Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Forecasts and Reports with each category represented by a tab.

The site officially launched on February 7, 2000 with 200 customers, and they were off and running.

Prove it all night

Every successful startup needs visionary behind it, pushing it, and for Salesforce that person was Marc Benioff. When he came up with the concept for the company, the dot-com boom was in high gear. In a year or two, much of it would come crashing down, but in 1999 anything was possible and Benioff was bold and brash and brimming with ideas.

But even good ideas don’t always pan out for so many reasons, as many a failed startup founder knows only too well. For a startup to succeed it needs a long-term vision of what it will become, and Benioff was the visionary, the front man, the champion, the chief marketer. He was all of that — and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Benioff: Every VC in Silicon Valley turned us down

Paul Greenberg, managing principal at The 56 Group and author of multiple books about the CRM industry including CRM at the Speed of Light (the first edition of which was published in 2001), was an early user of Salesforce, and says that he was not impressed with the product at first, complaining about the early export functionality in an article.

A Salesforce competitor at the time, Salesnet, got wind of Greenberg’s post, and put his complaint on the company website. Benioff saw it, and fired off an email to Greenberg: “I see you’re a skeptic. I love convincing skeptics. Can I convince you?” Greenberg said that being a New Yorker, he wrote back with a one-line response. “Take your best shot.” Twenty years later, Greenberg says that Benioff did take his best shot and he did end up convincing him.

“I see you’re a skeptic. I love convincing skeptics. Can I convince you?” Early Marc Benioff email

Laurie McCabe, who is co-founder and partner at SMB Group, was working for a consulting firm in Boston in 1999 when Benioff came by to pitch Salesforce to her team. She says she was immediately impressed with him, but also with the notion of putting enterprise software online, effectively putting it within reach of many more companies.

“He was the ringmaster I believe for SaaS or cloud or whatever we want to call it today. And that doesn’t mean some of these other guys didn’t also have a great vision, but he was the guy beating the drum louder. And I just really felt that in addition to the fact that he was an exceptional storyteller, marketeer and everything else, he really had the right idea that software on prem was not in reach of most businesses,” she said.

Take it to the limit

One of the ways that Benioff put the company in the public eye in the days before social media was guerrilla marketing techniques. He came up with the idea of “no software” as a way to describe software on the internet. He sent some of his early employees to “protest” at the Siebel Conference, taking place at the Moscone Center in February, 2000. He was disrupting one of his major competitors, and it created enough of a stir to attract a television news crew and garner a mention in the Wall Street Journal. All of this was valuable publicity for a company that was still in its early stages.

Photos: Salesforce

Brent Leary, who had left his job as an industry consultant in 2003 to open his current firm, CRM Essentials, said this ability to push the product was a real differentiator for the company and certainly got his attention. “I had heard about Salesnet and these other ones, but these folks not only had a really good product, they were already promoting it. They seemed to be ahead of the game in terms of evangelizing the whole “no software” thing. And that was part of the draw too,” Leary said of his first experiences working with Salesforce.

Leary added, “My first Dreamforce was in 2004, and I remember it particularly because it was actually held on Election Day 2004 and they had a George W. Bush look-alike come and help open the conference, and some people actually thought it was him.”

Greenberg said that the “no software” campaign was brilliant because it brought this idea of delivering software online to a human level. “When Marc said, ‘no software’ he knew there was software, but the thing with him is, that he’s so good at communicating a vision to people.” Software in the 90s and early 2000s was delivered mostly in boxes on CDs (or 3.5 inch floppies), so saying no software was creating a picture that you didn’t have to touch the software. You just signed up and used it. Greenberg said that campaign helped people understand online software at a time when it wasn’t a common delivery method.

Culture club

One of the big differentiators for Salesforce as a company was the culture it built from Day One. Benioff had a vision of responsible capitalism and included their charitable 1-1-1 model in its earliest planning documents. The idea was to give one percent of Salesforce’s equity, one percent of its product and one percent of its employees’ time to the community. As Benioff once joked, they didn’t have a product and weren’t making any money when they made the pledge, but they have stuck to it and many other companies have used the model Salesforce built.

Image: Salesforce

Bruce Cleveland, a partner at Wildcat Ventures, who has written a book with Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm fame called Traversing the Traction Gap, says that it is essential for a startup to establish a culture early on, just as Benioff did. “A CEO has to say, these are the standards by which we’re going to run this company. These are the things that we value. This is how we’re going to operate and hold ourselves accountable to each other,” Cleveland said. Benioff did that.

Another element of this was building trust with customers, a theme that Benioff continues to harp on to this day. As Harris pointed out, people still didn’t trust the internet completely in 1999, so the company had to overcome objections to entering a credit card online. Even more than that though, they had to get companies to agree to share their precious customer data with them on the internet.

“We had to not only think about scale, we had to think about how do we get the trust of our customers, to say that we will protect your information as well or better than you can,” Harris explained.

Growing up

The company was able to overcome those objections, of course, and more. Todd McKinnon, who is currently co-founder and CEO at Okta, joined Salesforce as VP of Engineering in 2006 as the company began to ramp up becoming a $100 million company, and he says that there were some growing pains in that time period.

Salesforce revenue growth across the years from 2006-present. Chart: Macro Trends

When he arrived, they were running on three mid-tier Sun servers in a hosted co-location facility. McKinnon said that it was not high-end by today’s standards. “There was probably less RAM than what’s in your MacBook Pro today,” he joked.

When he came on board, the company still had only 13 engineers and the actual infrastructure requirements were still very low. While that would change during his six year tenure, it was working fine when he got there. Within five years, he said, that changed dramatically as they were operating their own data centers and running clusters of Dell X86 servers — but that was down the road.

Before they did that, they went back to Sun one more time and bought four of the biggest boxes they sold at the time and proceeded to transfer all of the data. The problem was that the Oracle database wasn’t working well, so as McKinnon tells it, they got on the phone with Larry Ellison from Oracle, who upon hearing about the setup, asked them straight out why they were doing that? The way they had it set up simply didn’t work.

They were able to resolve it all and move on, but it’s the kind of crisis that today’s startups probably wouldn’t have to deal with because they would be running their company on a cloud infrastructure service, not their own hardware.

Window shopping

About this same time, Salesforce began a strategy to grow through acquisitions. In 2006, it acquired the first of 55 companies when it bought a small wireless technology company called Sendia for $15 million. As early as 2006, the year before the first iPhone, the company was already thinking about mobile.

Last year it made its 52nd acquisition, and the most costly so far, when it purchased Mulesoft for $6.5 billion, giving it a piece of software that could help Salesforce customers bridge the on-prem and cloud worlds. As Greenberg pointed out, this brought a massive change in messaging for the company.

“With the Salesforce acquisition of MuleSoft, it allows them pretty much to complete the cycle between back and front office and between on-prem and the cloud. And you notice, all of a sudden, they’re not saying ‘no software.’ They’re not attacking on-premise. You know, all of this stuff has gone by the wayside,” Greenberg said.

No company is going to be completely consistent as it grows and priorities shift,  but if you are a startup looking for a blueprint on how to grow a successful company, Salesforce would be a pretty good company to model yourself after. Twenty years into this, they are still growing and still going strong and they remain a powerful voice for responsible capitalism, making lots of money, while also giving back to the communities where they operate.

One other lesson that you could learn is that you’re never done. Twenty years is a big milestone, but it’s just one more step in the long arc of a successful organization.

Salesforce wants to reach $60 billion revenue goal by 2034

Via Ron Miller https://techcrunch.com

4 Ways to Better your Resume

You got the interview.  Congratulations! Now what?  How about 4 ways to better your resume?

You need what I call the "ILM" file.  It's the evidence every professional should have at their fingertips to help come from a position of strength.

The ILM file. ILM? Wait, what the heck is that?  Ha!  It's an acronym I came up with about 20 years ago.   It stands for "I LOVE ME".  Yup. I coined that one. Let me explain what it is and how you do it. It's the art of collecting evidence of your awesomeness.  Your uniqueness. Your successes.  Whatever makes you stand out. For salespeople, the obvious accolades are in the form of awards, certificates, trips, etc.  But there are a LOT of other pieces of evidence that prove that you are the cat's meow. (Sorry, I'm a sucker for tacky sayings)

Here's where to collect YOUR evidence:

  1. from...Internal company correspondence.

Internal Company Emails are Gold! Haven't you ever received an email from your boss or peer saying "Way to go!", "Congratulations!" or any sort of email acknowledgement?  Perhaps it was for that way you got an appointment with that tough account, or how you managed a call, or how you closed that deal. And usually those emails copy other people - peers and other directors and VPs - in those emails. And guess what happens next?  Usually people copied on this correspondence reply with their own "Hey, great job!", often with their email signature notating their position within the company.  One great move can translate into a ton on emails.  ALL those emails are EVIDENCE. Evidence that you are that cat's meow. (sorry, again - I really like cats.) What do you do next?  You immediately forward these emails to a personal Gmail account and save them in a file called "ILM".  Do NOT let them sit in your company email and think, "I'll get to it later".  Because you won't. It takes a second.  And you'll be glad you did. Later, print each email out. 2. from...Sales tools and Management Reports

Reports and Rankings - Save them! Other evidence can come from reports in whatever tool your company uses to manage the sales process, like Salesforce or NetSuite.  Perhaps you ranked high in closing deals one particular quarter.  Get that report downloaded and saved.  Then again, send it to your Gmail account and print it out.  Salesforce and tools like it have tons of ways and reports to show off whatever strength you have - pipeline management, closing, names of "A" accounts that  everyone wants that's sitting in your pipeline.  Find a way to take a screen shot or download a file or report for every possible way you can show your strengths at any particular time (when you really rocked it something fierce) at the job. Then email it to that Gmail account and print it out. 3. from...Partners and Peers

Don't underestimate the power in your peers! How about those partners you've worked with?  Have they ever thanked you for the way you trained them so they could close that special account?  Have they included you in some sort of positive correspondence?  It's evidence. Or how about the peer that you were tasked to take under your wing and train or shadow you on the road?  They might send you an email talking about it. Or you could send an email to them that will elicit a positive response. That's evidence that the company thinks highly enough of you to show someone else the ropes. Forward it all - right away - to that Gmail account of yours to print later. 4. from...The Diamond - THE CLIENT

Clients are KEY! Another easier overlooked piece of evidence I rarely see people capturing is that from the actual CLIENT. I think this is as important - in some ways, MORE important - than other evidence.  No doubt you've created some relationships with some special accounts.  Haven't they ever sent you an email thanking you for something?  Going above and beyond or something special you did?  It will likely have their email signature with all their information, which can be helpful for your cause.  Forward that email to your Gmail and print it out. Solid evidence. Something I've also done that I RARELY see salespeople do.  If I'm new to a territory, and I establish a strong and loyal relationship with my client that I've just closed, I ask for a FAVOR. Ask if they will be a referral, but don't stop there. Ask if they could please write a letter on company letterhead (or an email, if they seem too lazy).  You can even offer to write it for them, if they seem to interpret this favor as a huge task.  This letter should not only be about referring your company's products, but strongly highlighting your talents as the company's representative.  Not only will it help you grow your business while you are at your current job, but you can use it for clients during your sales process at your next job to help earn trust.  But most importantly, for the sake of this article - you scan it, download it, forward it to your Gmail account and print it out. THIS - from your clients - is STELLAR evidence.

And then this beautiful thing starts to happen.....

  As you put your printed copies in page protector 3 ring sheets for your ILM binder, you start to realize that you ARE the cat's meow.  Your confidence starts to soar.  You stand a little taller and don't sell yourself scared. And you bring that sucker with you to each and every time you meet with a company YOU might be interested in sharing your talents.  It's a position of strength.  The resume becomes more of a minor detail when you have a mountain of evidence of your awesomeness from multiple sources over the years. You now have FOUR ways to come from a position of strength.  You've got the evidence.  Get your resume cooking! Get your ILM file together today. And, please - let me know how it goes.  I want to hear from you! Read the full article