- Marc Benioff has stressed prioritizing key values as the head of Salesforce. Here is how the key values drive the culture at Salesforce.
Marc Benioff is best known as the billionaire chairman and co-founder of Salesforce. At a stock price of more than $161, Salesforce is now valued at about $141.3 billion.
Launching Salesforce was not easy for the four co-founders: Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez. Benioff said that they pitched Salesforce to every venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.
In an interview with TechCrunch last month, Benioff said that investors were unable to visualize what Salesforce would become during the early days. “No one would give us money,” said Benioff at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference.
The Salesforce founders could have used the funding in the early days. Originally, the company started out in a tight one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco that Benioff rented after leaving a VP role at Oracle. So the four co-founders put in $500,000 of their own money to launch Salesforce in April 1999. And then they raised over $17 million in 1999 from a group of individual investors.
“We raised it all privately through individuals,” added Benioff in the TechCrunch interview. “I was lucky that I had some rich friends. If I didn’t, I would not be able to get the company going.”
Some of those investors include Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, CNET founder Halsey Minor, and angel investor Magdalena Yesil. And within five years of launching, Salesforce raised $110 million in an IPO back in 2004.
Despite all of the ups and downs of getting Salesforce going, Benioff emphasized several company values, including trust, customer success, innovation, and equality. By stressing these values, Benioff has been consistently ranked as one of the best CEOs.
The leadership teams at Salesforce also takes several measures to ensure that employees are living up to those values. For example, Salesforce’s SVP of employee marketing & engagement Jody Rennick Kohner told Business Insider that the company looks at results from a biannual employee-engagement survey to identify managers that stand out. And these results also helps employees determine which manager they may want to work for.
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There’s no way to put a dollar value on values. And yes, there will be times when prioritizing values, especially trust, will come at the expense of profits. In the short term, that is. But the money your company makes in any given quarter will never be more valuable than the trust you stand to lose over time,” wrote Benioff in his book Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change. “If you ask most successful CEOs, especially founders, to name the major milestones that really made their companies great, they usually settle on a story that revolves around a breakthrough product or idea. It might be a revolutionary clean-energy technology, a wildly popular accounting software program, or some small tweak to a search engine’s algorithm that left the competition grasping—or anything in between.”
When it comes to trust, Salesforce says that nothing is more important than the trusted relationship that it has with customers, employees, and everyone in its “Ohana” (family in the Hawaiian language). The trust.salesforce.com website is also updated with real-time information on system performance and security.
“Customers trust us to make them successful, deliver unwavering security, reliability, performance and compliance,” says Benioff about the trust value.
The customer success value focuses on helping customers achieve their goals so that they can continue growing together since their success is also Salesforce’s success.
“One of the reasons Salesforce has had so much success in the marketplace is because we’re focused on growth strategies that align with the CEO agenda and driving success for our customers,” stated Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block about the customer success value.
The innovation value emphasizes thinking differently. Salesforce delivers 3 innovative releases every year. The releases are put together based on customer input and new people and products are brought in through acquisitions. Plus Salesforce creates workplace communities and leadership teams that reflect its diverse communities and customers.
“Salesforce has been successful by keeping innovation at the center of everything we do. Thanks to this focus, we have democratized enterprise technology—making the cloud, mobile, social, IoT, and artificial intelligence accessible to all companies, regardless of their size. By consistently delivering powerful, innovative technology tools to all of our customers, we’ve empowered them to work smarter, make decisions faster, and connect with their customers in entirely new ways,” explained Harris.
In terms of equality, Salesforce says that it values and respects people of all backgrounds. The company believes that a diverse and inclusive workplace fosters innovation and creativity.
“We believe businesses need to focus on closing the Equality gap with the same energy they put into creating new products and markets,” says Salesforce Chief Equality Officer Tony Prophet.
Salesforce is hosting its Dreamforce conference from November 19 to November 22. Speakers at the event this year include Barack Obama, Tim Cook, Emilia Clarke, Megan Rapinoe, Yo-Yo Ma, and Marco Bizzarri.
