and seeing a brighter future for enterprise software.

Their 2019 revenue was $13.28 billion.

How?

This posts explains…



There is often a disconnect between what people actually sell and what people say they sell.

Welcome to marketing.

In case you were wondering what
actually sells:

People don’t want this ^^


:

People don’t want what you make.

They want what it will do for them.

They want the way it will make them feel.

So what did Salesforce do?

Over their twenty-year history… they have sold software with two borderline ridiculous
:

When
first presented this campaign to his team, they almost all hated it.

It leads with a negative message and the majority of
customers was software companies, so risked offending them.

(Of course, Salesforce still sells software, just with a different delivery method from their legacy competitors.)


persevered and ending up producing a commercial with a “No Software” fighter jet shooting down and old commercial plane, representing their competition.

is not selling software, they are selling a brighter future for their customers.

They picked out the small single advantage they had (cloud-based delivery so no need to install anything on-premise) and hammered it home with a polarizing message.




Check out this copy from the Salesforce Who We Are page:

Now anyone can be a Customer Trailblazer who transforms their company - grows their career - using our easy-to-use, yet powerful, technologies and tools.

It speaks directly to a person within a business that wants a promotion… that wants to change, that wants to become a
.

In a corporate environment where everyone is pursuing innovation and large businesses are sh*t scared of technological disruption,
is the savior.

They are not selling software, they are selling an aspirational identity to the people within large corporations that are responsible for not being out-innovated.

What did we learn?

You don’t sell software, you sell a brighter future or aspirational identity