Marc Benioff has always been respectful of consumer tech pioneers. In my book, The New Polymath I quoted him saying “ We stand on the shoulders of giants like Jerry Yang [founder of Yahoo!], Pierre Omidyar [of eBay], Jeff Bezos [of Amazon], and Biz Stone [of Twitter]. ”
So, I was not surprised when he started talking “cloud computing” a few years ago, and then “social enterprise” as terms which reflect Apple and Facebook impact on our lives. I would have guessed he would next spin some version of eBay mobile or Google Big Data into his messaging.
I am sure he will continue to use those as sub-themes, but I was pleased to see him move to an overarching Customer Company theme at a New York event this week. It’s been a long time coming for the CRM category to evolve beyond sales force automation. Salesforce.com’s own investments in customer service and especially recent ones in marketing areas are giving it a broader “customer company” profile.
I was not at event but I heard the Unilever (and how it built a Facebook campaign in real time around Oscars with salesforce’s Buddy Media) and the Obama campaign (and use of salesforce Chatter and Radian 6 social monitoring tools) use cases drove home the new customer world.
I was a few blocks away with Francisco D’Souza, CEO of Cognizant describing a world where his IT services pedigree firm is now the agency of record for some clients and where global brands are using his tools to organize their growing digital marketing libraries. More customer company use cases.
And Salesforce.com is well positioned as a leader and glad its messaging now points that out. As Marc asked in NYC:
“How do you listen to every customer?” “How do I engage them on every channel? How do I service customers through the retail store? How do I create communities?”
It’s a new customer world.
