Salesforce Growth Playbook
The customer success platform.
No Software
Iconic
Strategy
Protest
The Spark
Marc Benioff saw that enterprise software (Siebel) was expensive, required massive hardware installs, and was incredibly difficult to update.
The Growth Engine
Guerrilla Marketing Category-Kill & The 'AppExchange' Ecosystem Moat: Salesforce tacticaly conquered the enterprise by declaring war on 'Software'. Their growth engine was the 'No Software' campaign—staging mock protests at competitor events to signal that the Cloud was the future. By launching the 'AppExchange,' they turned their CRM into a platform, allowing 3rd-party developers to build on top of their data. This created massive 'Ecosystem Lock-in,' where a company's entire tech stack depends on Salesforce, making the software functionally impossible to remove once adopted.