Our Strategy
Our objective is to be the leading provider of on-demand application services for businesses worldwide. Key elements of our strategy include:
- Continue to lead the industry transformation to on-demand application services. We believe that the market transformation to on-demand application services enabled by utility computing is an emerging trend in the technology industry. We believe we have established a leadership position in this new industry both as a successful vendor of on-demand application services and also as a key thought leader helping to define the architecture and vision of utility computing. We seek to extend our leadership position in this industry by continuing to innovate and bring new on-demand application services and value-added technologies to market.
- Strengthen and extend our service offering. We designed our service to easily accommodate new features and functions as well as the release of entirely new application services. For example, while our service in 2000 offered only sales force automation functionality, by 2002 we had added marketing automation and customer support functionality. More recently, we added file and document management capabilities and enhanced analytics tools to enable businesses to track and analyze data to better understand the health of their customer relationships. We intend to continue to add CRM features and functionality to our service that we will make available to customers at no additional charge. For example, in our most recent release, we added contract management, dashboards and workflow automation. We may also offer advanced modules for an additional subscription fee to customers that require enhanced CRM capabilities. In addition to accommodating new CRM features, we believe that our technology infrastructure is able to support entirely different, non-CRM application capabilities.
- Pursue new customers and new territories aggressively. We believe that our on-demand CRM application service provides significant value for businesses of any size, from small businesses to the largest Fortune 500 corporations. As a result, we will continue to aggressively target businesses of all sizes, primarily through our direct sales force. We have steadily increased and plan to continue to increase the number of direct sales professionals we employ, and we intend to develop additional distribution channels for our service. We have created several editions of our service to address the distinct requirements of businesses of different sizes. We also believe that there is a substantial market opportunity for our service outside of North America. We plan to continue to aggressively market to customers outside of North America by recruiting local sales and support professionals, building partnerships that help us add customers in these regions and increasing the number of languages we support. As of October 31, 2003, we offered our service in 11 languages and had paying subscribers in approximately 70 countries.
- Deepen relationships with our existing customer base. We believe there is significant opportunity to leverage our relationships with existing customers. We seek to attract more users from existing customers by targeting additional functional areas and business units within the customer organization, pursuing enterprise-wide deployments and providing consulting offerings that are complementary to our service. In addition, by continuously enhancing the functionality of our service, we believe that customers will find more uses for our service and therefore purchase additional subscriptions, continue to renew their existing subscriptions and upgrade to more fully featured versions such as our Enterprise Edition.
- Encourage the development of third-party applications on our sforce platform. Our sforce platform enables existing customers and third-party developers to develop and deliver applications complementary to our core service offering. Sforce enhances the attractiveness of our service, particularly to enterprise customers, by enabling them to accelerate the integration of our service with their existing applications. We plan to continue to augment the sforce tools and services we provide to developers and foster their development of new applications.
The salesforce.com Service
We provide a comprehensive array of on-demand CRM application services for businesses of all sizes and industries worldwide. These services enable companies and individuals to systematically record, store and act upon customer data, helping businesses manage their customer accounts, track sales leads, evaluate marketing campaigns and provide post-sales service. We also enable companies to generate reports and summaries of this data and share them with authorized employees across functional areas. CRM includes sales, customer service and support and marketing automation:
- Sales force automation enables salespeople to be more productive by automating manual and repetitive tasks and providing them with better, more organized data about their current and prospective customers. It permits companies to establish a system and a process for recording, tracking and sharing information about sales opportunities, sales leads, sales forecasts, the sales process and closed business.
- Customer service and support automation allows companies to interact better, more efficiently and professionally with their existing customers in a variety of areas, such as requests for repairs, advice about products and services, complaints about faulty goods, warranty management and the need for additional goods and services.
- Marketing automation enables companies to manage marketing campaigns from initiation through the development of leads that are passed to the sales team and enables them to determine the effectiveness of each campaign by quantifying the revenue generated as a result of specific marketing activities.
We offer three principal editions of our service, each targeted at a different market segment: Enterprise Edition, Professional Edition and Team Edition.
Enterprise Edition. Enterprise Edition is our most fully featured service offering and is targeted primarily at large companies that have several different divisions or departments. It includes many administrative features that are particularly useful to large companies, such as workflow, the ability to customize views for different departments and a set of controls that allows a system administrator to designate which users have access and modification rights to the different types of information within the system. It also includes a Web services-standard XML API that enables companies to readily integrate our CRM service with ERP applications, Web services and other data sources and a weekly export service that permits a customer to download all data input by users into the service in a machine-readable format. It also includes our offline and wireless features that permit users to access information through laptops, PDAs and wireless devices.
Professional Edition. Professional Edition is targeted primarily at medium-sized and large businesses that need a robust CRM solution but do not need some of the more advanced administrative features and integration capabilities of Enterprise Edition. The offline and selected other features of Enterprise Edition that are not included in Professional Edition are available to Professional Edition customers for an additional charge.
Team Edition. Team Edition is targeted primarily at small businesses that seek a robust sales force automation solution without the more sophisticated features that are required by larger companies, such as integration, analytics and workflow. Team Edition includes sales force automation and case management but does not include customer service and support or marketing automation features.
Enterprise Edition, Professional Edition and Team Edition offer customizable fields and pick lists, customizable reports and customizable list views. Enterprise Edition and Professional Edition also offer multi-language support and multi-currency support. The amount of storage offered for each edition also varies.
The following table summarizes the functionality provided in each of our three principal editions.
Enterprise Professional Team Feature Edition Edition Edition ------------------------------- ---------- ------------ ------- Account Management - - - Contact Management - - - Opportunity Management - - - Case Management - - - Activity Management - - - Email Templates - - - MS Office Integration - - - MS Outlook Integration - - - Palm Synchronization - - - Reports - - - Analytics - - Forecasting - - Lead Management - - Mass Email - - Advanced Case Management - - Solution Management - - Record-based Security - - Multi-currency Support - - Documents and Attachments - - Campaigns - Available Offline - Available Wireless - Available Weekly Data Export - Available Sforce (Web services API) - Available Multiple Business Processes - Available Product and Annuity Forecasting - Self-service Customer Portal - Multi-department Customization -
Available means available for an additional charge.
Our offline functionality enables users to readily access and use key account, contact, opportunity and other information when traveling or otherwise when an Internet connection is not readily accessible. Users access the offline functionality using a browser and the same user interface as our online editions.
We also offer wireless functionality that enables access to a subset of a user’s data through a variety of devices, including the RIM BlackBerry, Pocket PC and Palm operating system-based wireless devices and WAP-enabled mobile phones. Our wireless functionality permits interaction with our service both through free-form text queries and through a graphical user interface.
As part of our marketing programs, we recently released our Personal Edition service which includes a contact management database and several other features that are useful to individual sales representatives and others who need a centralized way to organize contact data and access that data over the Internet. It is intended for use by a single user and is currently available at no charge. As of October 31, 2003, approximately 10,000 users had activated Personal Edition accounts. In addition, we offer a service called Developer Edition, currently at no charge, to developers and others interested in building applications on our sforce platform. As of October 31, 2003, approximately 1,500 users had activated Developer Edition accounts. |
