💃 Marc Benioff Didn't Care About Salesforce🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Let us disregard the current news cycle around Salesforce, and focus on the disruptive mindset that Marc Benioff brought to the table.

Yes, Salesforce is the best CRM on the planet.

Yes, Salesforce is the poster child for "this is how you SaaS."

But this is all secondary to Marc's greatest accomplishment, which happens to directly impact us - 💃 the Salesforce Professionals!🕺

Agenda for today includes

• Marc Benioff Didn't Care About Salesforce

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

Marc Benioff Didn't Care About Salesforce

• #1 CRM in the world? CHECK.

• $100 billion, 70,000 person company? CHECK.

• Iconoclastic CEO? CHECK.

A Salesforce CRM is an enterprise software application that has the ability to manage billions of dollars of revenue, with tens of thousands of users, and has its own ecosystem of resources to support it.

This is a true enterprise solution as good, or, most likely, better than Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP, the tech titans who dominated the CRM landscape before Marc showed up.

All this amazing-ness, and we have yet to mention the most game-changing thing about it.

Enter - The Salesforce Admin. 

Never before has an enterprise business application been so self-serve-able as Salesforce is. By making administrative functions so simple that a dedicated Salesforce Administrator at a frontline worker's salary (~$40k as recently as 2017) could support it.

Of course not all admins are created equal and the spectrum of knowledge, skills and experience is wide.

However, how many of you started your career as accidental admins?

And how many accidental Microsoft Dynamics admins are out there? Or SAP CRM accidental admins?

They don't exist!

The complexity of these competitor's platforms requires it to be an intentional decision to build your career around their CRM.

Marc's genius is in creating a highly accessible enterprise solution with a low barrier of entry to service it. This is an incredibly difficult thing to pull off!

And we're not done yet!

Then, he creates the 100% free Trailheads and the Trailblazer Community, making the profession even more accessible! Incredible!! 🔥🔥

Salesforce is not a cheap solution, with Sales Cloud Enterprise licenses at about $150/license.

But when you consider that your business systems expenses are not just licensing costs, and that you need skilled and experienced resources to leverage your return on investment, then Salesforce becomes a much better value. 

The Salesforce community is large and passionate about working, creating solutions, and sharing them with others. 

There are armies of certified professionals who are capable of managing an org.

The same cannot be said of Microsoft Dynamics administrators.

Salesforce professionals love to tinker in their orgs and are consistently provided significant updates, like Classic to Lightning, and Process Builder to Flow. Microsoft is not bringing much to the table for Dynamics...

Marc's book Trailblazers contains some insights including his grandfather giving homeless people large sums of money, Marc ensuring Salesforce has a strong equality and diversity culture, and speaking out against anti-gay laws in Indiana.

Perhaps it has always been in him, or at least impressed into him by familial influences, to make the world an accessible place.

Being an iconoclastic CEO, he was able to have full control over creating an environment where nearly anyone can thrive professionally through the Salesforce Administrator role.

Marc is currently being ran through the negative news gauntlet.

Between the initial layoffs, Activist Investors, and the much needed vacation after another round of layoffs, he is losing the "what have you done for me lately" game.

But, when it's all said and done, and Salesforce is presumably still around after Marc is gone, a big part of his legacy needs to be his vision, turned to reality, that Salesforce is an accessible enterprise technology solution.

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes