For the 120th episode of Burning Platform, we host John Taschek, Chief Market Strategy Officer at Salesforce.
We go through his two decades at the rocket ship called Salesforce and how he has handled industry analysts differently than most other vendor executives. His humility through out the conversation is striking.
I ask him how he got comfortable with boutique firms and independent analysts when most others prefer to deal with institutional analysts like Gartner and Forrester. His philosophy is he prefers to rely on the knowledge and the curiosity of the individual. and not the firm.
“Instead of tiering the analyst firms, why don’t we tier the analysts? That opens up the world quite a bit when you get away from just Gartner or just IDC. You look at all the independent analysts who have really unique point of views. I did it when Salesforce was very young and we could learn a lot from individual analysts, but I have never shifted from that position.”
We discuss how he has benefited from being on the Product side of the business versus the Marketing side
“I pushed early on to be on the product side. Because being closer to the product gives you a whole bunch of benefits when you are talking to analysts. You have more collaboration with the product teams, which are developing the strategy. I was against being positioned in marketing or comms… because that’s much more outbound. I didn’t want to be a pitch factory, just saying stuff about what we did and how great we were.”
We cover the massive new opportunity around Generative AI and the huge growth in their Data Cloud. We also spend a few minutes on monetizing data and impact on trust, emerging global opportunities and my upcoming fiction book – a thriller where an analyst helps the FBI around the disappearance of a Silicon Valley AI billionaire.
We discuss improvements he would like at analyst firms (too many silos across analysts, the “walls” between the sales and research sides of the firms) and the fact that “the bigger firms have great analysts who are doing great research. But overall, they are seen as safety nets for decision makers.”
As I mentioned earlier, his humility shines throughout. It is a truly enjoyable 40 minute conversation with plenty for both vendor executives and analysts to learn.
