Salesforce - Connecting Companies To Their Customers

Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Salesforce.

Salesforce is a provider of enterprise software, delivered through the cloud, with a focus on customer relationship management that helps businesses connect with and get more information about their customer base. The Company focuses on cloud, mobile, social, Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence technologies.

Read on to know more about the Salesforce company profile in this article.

Salesforce - Company Highlights

Salesforce - About and How it Works?
Salesforce - Recent News
Salesforce - Logo and its Meaning
Salesforce - Founder and History
Salesforce - Mission
Salesforce - Business Model
Salesforce - Revenue and Growth
Salesforce - Funding and Investors
Salesforce - Investments
Salesforce - Acquisitions
Salesforce - Competitors
Salesforce - Challenges Faced
Salesforce - Future Plans
Salesforce - FAQs

Salesforce - About and How it Works?

Salesforce.com, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management service that helps businesses connect with and get more information about their customer base.

Salesforce also sells a complementary suite of enterprise applications focused on customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development. Salesforce's services allow businesses to use cloud technology to better connect with customers, partners and potential customers. The software has become the number one for customer success and helps businesses track customer activity, market to customers and many more services.

The company is a service as a software (SaaS) - which means it uses a cloud-computing, software distribution model that hosts applications and makes them available online. Salesforce hosts numerous different cloud platforms that allow companies to interact with different data and service their customers in various capacities.

As of 2020, Salesforce has multiple different cloud platforms - a service cloud, marketing cloud, health cloud, app cloud, community cloud, analytics cloud, IoT cloud, Chatter cloud, commerce cloud, Heroku engagement cloud and more.

Salesforce - Recent News

As of December 2020, Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, announced that they will collaborate to help Gavi manage critical information to equitably distribute approximately two billion COVID-19 vaccines to 190 countries by the end of 2021.

Fair, rapid and equitable access to vaccines is critical to ending the global pandemic. Public-private partnerships, such as Gavi, which are focused on getting vaccines to some of the world’s poorest countries, need to be armed with data and technology to facilitate distribution at scale.

In June, Gavi and other partners launched COVAX, a global alliance whose goal is to ensure that people in all corners of the world get access to COVID-19 vaccines, regardless of their wealth. COVAX will achieve this by supporting the research, development and manufacturing of a wide range of COVID-19 vaccine candidates, and also negotiating pricing and distribution for the 190 countries that have joined the alliance to date.

Salesforce - Logo and its Meaning

The Salesforce logotype is based on a metaphor: the cloud symbolizes the cloud architecture on which the service is built.

Salesforce - Founder and History

The Salesforce founding date goes back to February 3, 1999 when former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, together with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez as a software as a service (SaaS) company, and was launched publicly between September and November 1999.

In June 2004, the company had its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock symbol CRM and raised US$110 million. Early investors include Larry Ellison, Magdalena Yesil, Halsey Minor, Stewart Henderson, Mark Iscaro, and Igor Sill, a founding member of Geneva Venture Partners.

In October 2014, Salesforce announced the development of its Customer Success Platform to tie together Salesforce's services, including sales, service, marketing, analytics, community, and mobile apps. In October 2017, Salesforce launched a Facebook Analytics tool for business-to-business marketers. In September 2018, Salesforce partnered with Apple intended on improving apps for businesses.

Salesforce - Mission

Salesforce's mission statement says, "Our mission is to help our customers transform themselves into customer companies by empowering them to connect with their customers in entirely new ways. To deliver our customers a carbon neutral cloud we went even further offsetting emissions throughout our data center supply chain."

Salesforce - Business Model

Salesforce is a leading provider of enterprise software, delivered through the cloud, with a focus on customer relationship management, or CRM. Salesforce introduced a first CRM solution in 2000.

The key to the successful Salesforce business model is based on the fact that service offerings can be deployed rapidly, configured easily and integrated with other platforms and enterprise applications, or apps. While this might seem trivial today, it wasn’t back in the 2000s. CRM services often required high upfront costs together with expensive services hard to run and maintain. Salesforce changed all that.

Those services are delivered in two ways:

• Via major internet browsers and on leading mobile devices
• Direct sales efforts and also indirectly through partners

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Salesforce - Revenue and Growth

The Salesforce revenue generation strategy is based on a subscription-based cloud service. Over 92% of Salesforce revenues come from four categories of cloud Customer Relationship Management services, that span from the sales cloud to marketing cloud.

The remaining revenues are primarily driven by professional services. In 2017 the company generated $8.39 billion in revenues. Salesforce, Inc revenue for the twelve months ending October 31, 2020 was $20.286B, a 27.99% increase year-over-year.

| Year | Amount | Percentage change from last year |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 2020 | $17.098B | + 28.73% |
| 2019 | $13.282B | +26.02% |
| 2018 | $10.54B | +24.93% |

Salesforce - Funding and Investors

Salesforce has raised a total of $65.4M in funding over 6 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jan 1, 2003 from a Venture - Series Unknown round. Salesforce is funded by 21 investors. Emergence and New Enterprise Associates are the most recent investors.

Salesforce - Investments

The number of Salesforce investments stands at 38. Their most recent investment was on Feb 20, 2020, when Resily raised ¥500M.

Salesforce - Acquisitions

Salesforce has acquired 66 organizations. Their most recent acquisition was Slack on Dec 1, 2020. They acquired Slack for $27.7B.

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Salesforce - Competitors

Salesforce's competitors are:  Zendesk, Pega Systems, Oracle, Microsoft Dyamics, SAP, Appian, ServiceNow,  Jira Software etc.

Salesforce - Challenges Faced

Subject to a phishing attack - In November 2007 a successful phishing attack on a Salesforce employee compromised contact information on a number of Salesforce customers, which was then used to send highly targeted phishing emails.

Attempt to trademark Social enterprise- In July 2012, Salesforce applied to trademark the term "social enterprise" in the United States, the European Union and Jamaica where the term was in widespread use to describe businesses with a primarily social purpose. This was successfully challenged by a campaign called #notinourname which was launched by Social Enterprise UK, resulting in Salesforce.com withdrawing their trademark application and agreeing not to use the term in their future marketing.

Tax avoidance- In December 2019, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that Salesforce was one of 91 companies who "paid an effective federal tax rate of 0% or less" in 2018, as a result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Their findings were published in a report based on the 379 Fortune 500 companies that declared a profit in 2018.

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Salesforce - Future Plans

• CRM market potential is projected to grow annually at 12% to reach $82B by the year 2025.
• Salesforce recently announced a goal of reaching $60B in revenue by the year 2034.
• Salesforce is expected to increase its workforce from around 30000employeesto around 45000 by the year 2022.

Salesforce - FAQs

What does Salesforce do?

Salesforce is a provider of enterprise software, delivered through the cloud, with a focus on customer relationship management that helps businesses connect with and get more information about their customer base.

Who founded Salesforce ?

The company was founded on February 3, 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, together with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez as a software as a service (SaaS) company, and was launched publicly between September and November 1999.

What companies do Salesforce compete with ?

Salesforce's competitors are  Zendesk, Pega Systems, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, Appian, ServiceNow,  Jira Software etc.

How does Salesforce make money?

Salesforce main revenue generation strategy is based on a subscription-based cloud service. Over 92% of Salesforce revenues come from four categories of cloud CRM (Customer Relationship Management) services, that span from the sales cloud to marketing cloud.