Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company - and Revolutionized an Industry

Marc R. Benioff is the chairman and CEO of salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), which he cofounded in 1999. Under Benioff's direction, salesforce.com has grown from a groundbreaking idea into a publicly traded company that is the market and technology leader in enterprise cloud computing. Salesforce.com has received a Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award, been lauded as one of BusinessWeek's Top 100 Most Innovative Companies, been named No. 7 on the Wired 40, was selected for the past two years as a Top Ten Disrupter by Forbes, and been voted one of the world's most ethical companies by Business Ethics Magazine. Benioff is the recipient of many awards for pioneering innovation, including the 2007 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2000, Benioff launched the Salesforce.com Foundation - now a multimillion-dollar global organization. He lives in San Francisco. Carlye Adler is an award-winning journalist whose articles have appeared in BusinessWeek, Departures, Fast Company, Fortune, Forbes, Portfolio, Wired, and Time. She cowrote, with Marc Benioff, The Business of Changing the World. She lives in New York City.

Foreword (Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO of Dell).

Introduction.

Part 1 The Start-Up Playbook: How to Turn a Simple Idea into a High Growth Company.

Play #1: Allow Yourself Time to Recharge.

Play #2: Have a Big Dream.

Play #3: Believe in Yourself.

Play #4: Trust a Select Few with Your Idea and Listen to Their Advice.

Play #5: Pursue Top Talent as If Your Success Depended on It.

Play #6: Sell Your Idea to Skeptics and Respond Calmly to Critics.

Play #7: Define Your Values and Culture Up Front.

Play #8: Work Only on What Is Important.

Play #9: Listen to Your Prospective Customers.

Play #10: Defy Convention.

Play #11: Haveand Listen toa Trusted Mentor.

Play #12: Hire the Best Players You Know.

Play #13: Be Willing to Take a RiskNo Hedging.

Play #14: Think Bigger.

Part 2 The Marketing Playbook: How to Cut Through the Noise and Pitch the Bigger Picture.

Play #15: Position Yourself.

Play #16: Party with a Purpose.

Play #17: Create a Persona.

Play #18: Differentiate, Differentiate, Differentiate.

Play #19: Make Every Employee a Key Player on the Marketing Team, and Ensure Everyone Is On-Message.

Play #20: Always, Always Go After Goliath.

Play #21: Tactics Dictate Strategy.

Play #22: Engage the Market Leader.

Play #23: Reporters Are Writers; Tell Them a Story.

Play #24: Cultivate Relationships with Select Journalists.

Play #25 Make Your Own Metaphors.

Play #26: No Sacred Cows.

Part 3 The Events Playbook: How to Use Events to Build Buzz and Drive Business.

Play #27: Feed the Word-of-Mouth Phenomenon.

Play #28: Build Street Teams and Leverage Testimony.

Play #29: Sell to the End User.

Play #30: The Event Is the Message.

Play #31: Reduce Costs and Increase Impact.

Play #32: Always Stay in the Forefront.

Play #33: The Truth About Competition (It Is Good for Everyone).

Play #34: Be Prepared for Every Scenario . . . and Have Fun.

Play #35: Seize Unlikely Opportunities to Stay Relevant.

Play #36: Stay Scrappy . . . but Not Too Scrappy.

Part 4 The Sales Playbook: How to Energize Your Customers into a Million-Member Sales Team.

Play #37: Give It Away.

Play #38: Win First Customers by Treating Them Like Partners.

Play #39: Let Your Web Site Be a Sales Rep.

Play #40: Make Every Customer a Member of Your Sales Team.

Play #41: Telesales Works (Even Though Everyone Thinks It Doesn't).

Play #42: Don't Dis Your First Product with a Discount.

Play #43: Sales Is a Numbers Game.

Play #44: Segment the Markets.

Play #45: Leverage Times of Change.

Play #46: Your Seeds Are Sown, so Grow, Grow, Grow.

Play #47: Land and Expand.

Play #48: Abandon Strategies That No Longer Serve You.

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