For companies looking to disrupt an industry—whether as a start-up challenging incumbent “dinosaurs” or a division in an established firm looking to be a disruptor (such as moving into cloud XaaS solutions),
Salesforce provides an important—really, the iconic—model. Salesforce is not only the most successful cloud-based business software firm in the world, it innovated the technology.
Not everyone can develop a once in a generation disruptive technology like Salesforce did. Or come up with a particularly clever and memorable marketing and branding campaign: “no more software.” But a third, lesser known strategy that founder Marc Benioff used was to co-create the customer experience (CX) with his customers, which he did throughout the customer journey and by deeply embedding co-creation deeply into his firm from the start.
Here’s how he did so in Salesforces marketing and sales operations, product development, and the firm’s vaunted customer community (whose membership has grown into the multi-millions).
Co-creating product development and sustaining innovations
When Benioff left Oracle to start Salesforce, he integrated customers immediately into core Total Customer Experience functions from the get go. The firm’s software was created in an intensely iterative process with selected customers, back and forth, to ensure customers (primarily sales people) were getting the experience they wanted. That gave Salesforce an immediate, palpable performance advantage over enterprise software. Benioff also took advantage of the cloud’s ability to show how customers were using Salesforce software, enabling additional refinements on an ongoing basis—and in effect market testing them on the fly with other customers.
“Software was created in an intensely iterative process with selected customers, back and forth, to ensure the experience customers wanted.”
That approach is still used at Salesforce—scaled by its IdeaExchange platform—to help manage the complex process of deciding what features and functionality should be added to successful, maturing solutions. IdeaExchange is a software interface that helps product developers understand, group, and prioritize the tens of thousands of feature requests it gets from customers. That helps developers determine which requests are the ones people want most, and the process also makes it likely that customers will continue to provide input. It also keeps customers who are ticked off when their suggested changes aren’t implemented; they can see for themselves when very few of their peers are interested in the suggestion.
Co-creating marketing and sales
Benioff also built customer co-creation into the sales and marketing operations. Using references wasn’t just left to the discretion of his salespeople. Benioff required them to use customer references in three of the firm’s prescribed five steps for sales calls: salespeople were required to share customer stories with the prospect, back them up with customer testimonials, and then offer let the prospect talk to a customer directly.
One co-created marketing tool was discovered quite by accident. When he launched “City Tour” events—a roadshow featuring Benioff and other executives giving visionary presentations about the future of CRM—for audiences that included not only prospects but also enthused Salesforce customers along with a local journalist or two. Despite the grand sounding name, the first City Tour events drew perhaps a dozen or two attendees.
“When corporate objected that Benioff could do only so many events, the salespeople said they didn’t need Marc! They just wanted a few hundred bucks to get prospects and Salesforce customers together over beers!”
The firm found that 80 percent of prospects who attended the City Tour events eventually became Salesforce customers. At first Benioff and his team beamed over their obvious dynamism. But then his salespeople started requesting funds for hosting events in their territories. When corporate objected that Benioff could do only so many of these, the salespeople said that was no problem, they just wanted a few hundred bucks to get prospects and Salesforce customers together over beers. The firm found that those events—sans Benioff and his team—also scored the 80 percent eventual close rates!
It was the interactions between prospects and customers—both at the Benioff-hosted events and the beer busts—that propelled prospects through the sales funnel.
Mining the value of peer interactions
Salesforce’s vaunted customer community is a phenomenon—as of the writing, it has over 6 million members. Led by the firm’s vaunted MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals), the Salesforce community provides a formidable resource for engaging prospects and customers throughout the customer journey. Erica Kuhl, a Salesforce vice president, manages—really, enables—the community and its MVPs, who make extraordinary contributions.
For example, for engaging its market, Kuhl found that the handful of MVPs she’d recruited generated an astonishing 5% to 7% of all Twitter mentions of Salesforce on social media. During major events, like Dreamforce, they were extremely active on social media and in organizing live events on their own. Prior to product releases, Kuhl forwards confidential pre-release information to the MVPs, asking them to hold it until she gives the word. In turn, the MVPs absorb the information thoroughly and broadcast it to their networks with rich detail and, of course, with more credibility than a house agency or marketing department can muster.
“Often overlooked with customer communities and other forms of engagement is the value customers receive just by participating in them—quite apart from any referrals, references or product guidance they might provide.”
That’s what motivates the Salesforce product team to engage with community members for input during development and launch of new offerings—the developers welcome the users for bouncing ideas off of, and to test products and provide testimonials. The MVPs, meanwhile jump at this: It further burnishes their reputations as leaders in the industry and insiders at Salesforce.
Often overlooked with customer communities and other forms of engagement (such as advocacy programs and advisory boards) is the value customers receive just by participating in them—quite apart from any referrals, references or product guidance they might provide. The firm, which is extremely business-case-focused, did extensive research into this for its own customer community. Kuhl’s team found that:
- Community members generate two times more sales pipeline than other customers do.
- They close 2.5 times more business (in terms of annual contract value).
- Active community members are 33% more likely to adopt new products.
- 86% of members add new products or services as a result of participating in the community.
