Salesforce Gets a Dose of Oracle Discipline

More than a decade ago, Salesforce. com became the first powerhouse tech company built entirely around sales and customer service software that’s distributed, managed, and maintained online. Today it has annual revenue above $5 billion and a market value of close to $50 billion. But because it built its business selling to smaller companies, Salesforce is still a fraction of the size of rivals such as Oracle and IBM, which regularly nail down bigger deals. In February, founder and Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff set a goal of $10 billion in annual revenue, though he didn’t say when. That’s for Keith Block to worry about.

Block, Salesforce’s president and a 26-year veteran of Oracle, has spent the past two years trying to make the cloud company sell more like the hardware giants. He’s focused the sales team on securing multiyear megadeals with the likes of Coca-Cola and Barclays instead of pitching software in bits and pieces to businesses of any size. He’s asking software designers to build more products aimed at specific industries, and he’s developed a more rigid, aggressive sales strategy meant to answer any question a big client could have.