Salesforce Gets Into the Streaming Wars in a Very Salesforce Way

In her essay “The White Album,” Joan Didion famously wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” As far as human beings go, it’s as good an explanation as any. But how about business-to-business software companies? Why do they do it?

At this late stage of the streaming wars, it seems like there’s no business that isn’t in show business. Consider Salesforce+, the online streaming channel that Salesforce.com Inc., the world leader in customer relationship management software, started in September. The channel, which I recently spent a couple days watching, is a collection of shows available through Salesforce’s website where people (usually company executives) interview business owners, entrepreneurs, and fellow executives. There’s The Inflection Point, where chief executive officers (and, in one episode, CNBC’s Jim Cramer) talk about themselves. The series Leading Through Change focuses on “how business leaders are navigating the Covid-19 pandemic.” Simply Put promises, in six-minute episodes, solutions to “complex industrywide problems.” A lot of the interviews are about telling stories: either of personal journeys, or corporate transformations, or, ideally, stories that tie the two together into parables of purpose-driven capitalism. In one episode of Connections, Sarah Franklin, Salesforce’s chief marketing officer, travels to Austin to speak to Carla Piñeyro Sublett, IBM Corp.’s chief marketing officer. As the two walk through a park wearing athleisure clothing and matching foam-and-mesh trucker hats, Sublett confides that she wants IBM’s marketing to win an Academy Award. “I want to bring these stories to life in a way that no B2B tech marketer ever has done before,” she says. “I just got chills when you said that!” Franklin responds. “That’s such beginner’s mind and such innovative thinking.”