Having a history of 22 years, Salesforce was the world’s second-fastest-growing brand in 2019. It is a cloud computing-based software company specializing in customer service relationships (CSR). The company was established in 1999 based on a rented apartment with only one bedroom in Telegraph Hill, San Francisco. From the very first year, the company has been growing fast. By the end of the year it started, Salesforce was a company with 40 employees and moved to an 8,000 square-foot office, and the growth curve has been going up since then. Salesforce is now a team of 49,000 people. It is ranked as the no. 1 CSR company in 2020 for the 8th time in a row. In 2019, Salesforce was one of the best companies to work for (or 12th time), one of the top 10 companies that were most admired, and so on. The company acquired Tableau in 2019, which is the world’s no. 1 analytics platform. The company is more powerful than it was by combining the best analytics and the best CRM platforms.
The current CEO of Salesforce is Marc Benioff. The executive team includes Parker Harris (Co-founder), Adam Selipsky (President & CEO Tableau), Amy Weaver (President and Chief Financial Officer), Alex Dayon (President and Chief Strategy Officer), and a bunch of experienced executives and talented people.
Salesforce’s mission is “to empower companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way.” With this mission, Salesforce has been helpful to companies during the past year of the COVID-19 pandemic. They launched-
- Salesforce care; it’s a free response to some common questions that help companies keep their employees, customers, and partners connected.
- Work.com is a collection of data, content, expert advice, and new products to help companies that were closed reopen the businesses and communities and support them to come back to growth.
- Vaccine cloud helps healthcare organizations to manage the vaccination process more efficiently.
The company is entirely cloud computing-based and uses software distribution models and applications to make them available online (Service as a software, SaaS). Salesforce uses different cloud platforms to help companies interact with diverse customer bases with sufficient data and service. Some of the platforms are- marketing cloud, service cloud, app cloud, health cloud, service cloud, etc. Companies use these clouds to manage a team, interact with the customers, track contacts and opportunities, and increase efficiency. But as said before, their specialization is CSR. It is a technology that helps companies manage relationships and interactions with customers and other stakeholders.
Salesforce has a few competitors in the market as the CSR concept is not unique. Few competitors of the company are- Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Hubspot, etc. Salesforce’s being entirely cloud-based makes it different from its competitors. It makes it easier for the customers to manage it anywhere, which is a huge plus point.
The company being philanthropic and helpful towards the community also adds a plus to its image. Recently, the COVID-19 situation has been increasing the number of homeless people rapidly. Salesforce announced $1.5 million grants to three organizations fighting homelessness in the Bay area. They’ve also launched an app to address homelessness. In 2020, Salesforce delivered 60 million pieces of equipment to protect personal hygiene to the people fighting with covid from the frontline. Over the past two decades, the company has given $330 million to different causes to help humankind. Their employees volunteer regularly, and almost 46,000 NGOs and non-profit organizations are using their service for free or using a discount.
In today’s fast-moving world, everything is moving around technology. Companies like Salesforce are the most needed for businesses to adapt to and cope up with this world. Among all, Salesforce has become the most trusted, the most successful of all the cloud companies. Over the years, they have established their brand value and earned trust and appreciation of the world’s critiques.
