Jim Steele, Salesforce

This season features conversations with key decision-makers who have shaped the evolution of today's leading technology platforms. We talk to C-suite executives, board members, investors, and others who have been instrumental in driving platform transformation at scale.

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In this episode of The Platform Journey, Avanish sits down with Jim Steele, President of Global Strategic Customers and Partners at Salesforce.

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In this episode, Avanish and Jim discuss:

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• Jim's 46-year journey from IBM to Salesforce, including his role in scaling Salesforce from $22M to $5B in revenue
• How customer demands, particularly from companies like Cisco and Merrill Lynch, shaped Salesforce's platform strategy
• The strategic decision to separate the application layer from the platform, enabling customization while maintaining control
• Creating a successful customer success organization to drive adoption and showcase customer stories
• The evolution of Salesforce's partner strategy and metrics for measuring ecosystem success
• How the "tactics dictate strategy" philosophy helped Salesforce respond to market needs

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Episode Transcript:

Avanish: All right. Welcome, everybody, back to another edition of The Platform Journey. And, as you’ve heard now, this season we’re bringing in some pretty senior executives, C-level executives, across some of the best companies in the business. These are the folks who end up sponsoring and really being pretty critical in the process of getting a company to adopt a platform and ecosystem mindset.

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And today I could not be more excited, because today, once you hear this, you will see that the speaker is one of the best in the business. He’s a dear friend. He’s been a mentor. And I think, Jim, I counted it, it’s 15 years. So it’s been a while.

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And our guest today is Jim Steele. Jim is the president of global strategic customers and partners at Salesforce. Jim, welcome to The Platform Journey.

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Jim: Thanks, Avanish! Great to be here with you.

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Avanish: So Jim, look. People who know you, they know that you’re a legend. You’ve been an amazing, amazing not just sales leader. You’ve just been an amazing leader. But maybe we can start with a little bit of your personal background and history, which is so rich. But maybe give people a bit of your own journey and what you’re doing now.

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Jim: Sure. Well, Avanish, believe it or not, this is now the 46th year I’ve been in the business world. I started in 1978, out of college from Bucknell University, civil engineering. Nothing to do with sales or nothing to do really with computers. Because I had a slide rule, and I think I graduated… I did have a calculator by the time I graduated, and I did learn a little COBOL and Fortran back in college.But I started on Wall Street with IBM. I sold to banks for many years. I was a rookie. And I kind of followed that IBM track, where they put you through boot camp, a couple years before they even let you talk to a customer. And it was pretty grueling. They called it the…it was like the boot camp of sales training. But I did that for five or six years, got into management. IBM moved me, as they do, from New York City. I ended up being the assistant to the chairman/CEO of IBM, watching IBM’s demise back in the early ’90s.

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Luckily, IBM has recovered nicely since then. But it was a tough couple years watching the train wreck in slow motion in Armonk, New York, and not really being able to impact it. Just seeing… You know, the downside, when you don’t listen to your customers, you don’t listen to the market, you don’t make the changes to the culture that need to be made, and it really had an impact on me. Luckily, I got to watch Lou Gerstner come in. They fired my boss, the CEO, luckily after he promoted me. So I survived that.But watching the recovery of IBM under Lou Gerstner, how he changed the culture, changed the mindset, got us back in focus. And from there, ended up in Japan for a couple years, four years, running sales for IBM in Asia and seeing a whole different market, having that international experience. And then coming back to the US. IBM moved me to Silicon Valley, where all of a sudden I realized that I was working for a dinosaur, relative to all these Silicon Valley companies.

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And it felt so bad, because I loved IBM, but after 23 years, I got lured by money and greed with the Silicon Valley dot-com bubble. I went to Ariba to run global sales for Ariba, when Ariba was the poster child of the whole dot-com bubble, and watched the bubble burst. Unfortunately, I was part of that. Luckily, I had a very soft landing. Because when Ariba was imploding, I got a call from Marc Benioff saying, hey, I want you to come be president at Salesforce. I was like, what? This small little startup, 22 million in revenue, why would you ever consider me? So there’s a whole story behind that interview process, but after 37 interviews with all kinds of board members and psychologists and Marc’s golden retriever and girlfriend at the time, who’s now his wife, I finally made it through that very grueling interview process and started as president of Salesforce in 2002. And I had just an amazing run, 12-plus years, taking Salesforce at that time from about 22 million to 5 billion before I left.

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And Avanish and I both went to a very promising startup in Provo, Utah, that didn’t quite… The promise and the dream didn’t quite match the reality, unfortunately. Or I should say the reality didn’t measure up to what the dream was, and the promise. I think, actually, in looking back, we were probably about 10 years ahead of our time.

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‍Avanish: I think that’s exactly right. I would say the same.

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Jim: I do think this world of Open AI and ChatGPT and everything that’s happened since, in the last couple years, that would have really changed the game for us.

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Avanish: That was the story. Yeah.

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Jim: Did that for, what, two years, Avanish, before we were like, wow, this is not going to go well. And there’s another story behind that. But then, from there, I went to be president of Yext in New York City, which was a lot of fun. We took it public. Not quite the grand slam that I had at Salesforce, but it was great until Covid. And then things changed.And then I got another call from Marc saying come back to Salesforce. So I’ve been back for four years, running the global partner ecosystem and strategic customers around the world. So that’s the short story. [Laughs]

Avanish: Again, what a great journey. And look, I’ve known you for, like I said, 15 years now. So it’s been an honor to see you operate. And frankly, the one thing that’s always consistent about you, Jim, is how you build relationships and how you build trust. And that, I think, is one of the things that all of us admire. And frankly, many of us try to replicate that. Not so successfully. But you, you just set the bar very high for that. And the fact that you’re back at Salesforce, those of us who are still shareholders, very much appreciate that.

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Jim: Well, I appreciate that comment. I mean, Salesforce, as you know, we had a very special time together, kind of disrupting the industry, changing the world. And at the time that I joined, in 2002, it wasn’t clear that… First of all, it wasn’t cloud computing. We called it utility computing, ASP Gen 2. We called it on-demand. And it wasn’t for probably four or five years later that cloud became the term that applied.And even in those early days, all the big tech companies basically said, oh Marc Benioff and Salesforce will be out of business in a year or two. I mean, this is a flash in the pan. It’ll never survive. And I think Marc’s done a good job at proving them all wrong. When he interviewed me in 2002, I remember thinking, okay, I’ll talk to him, but I’m not really interested. And he started to describe, he said, “Jim, we’re going to become one of the top software companies in the world.” And I’m like, “Marc, really? You’re some little ankle biter. Why would you say that?”

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And he said, “Because…” And I’m bringing this up because you mentioned the trust factor. He said, “The software market has a real trust issue. Always overcommitting, selling the roadmap, and not delivering on the promises. And they’ve really created this trust gap. And we’re going to change that with delivering software as a service. And if the customer is not getting the value, they turn us off.” And that was a really pioneering, market-transformational thing that he did 25 years ago, when he started Salesforce.

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Avanish: Well, I mean, again, what a journey. So, Jim, that’s a great segue into what I wanted to dive into. So, again, you and I first met in 2009. And you were the president of Salesforce, and I had just joined to build out the AppExchange business. And you were frankly one of the C-level sponsors saying there’s this transformation of the premier Salesforce automation application company into a multiproduct and then into a platform company was absolutely the right thing to do.

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Obviously, Marc and Parker and others were supportive, but at the on-the-ground level, your leadership was pretty key. Talk to me a little bit about that evolution and how you, as a phenomenal sales leader, joined this dinky little company called Salesforce in 2002, and then by 2009 it was just under a billion dollars, I think. When you saw this bigger vision, talk to me about that vision and evolution of that and how you perceived it, and how has your thinking evolved around that?

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Jim: Yeah. You know, when I started, we had a stated… In 2002, we had a stated narrative strategy to avoid the CIO at all costs. Because we believed that the CIO would shut us down. We had an application that was very… It was like planting a seed. And the seed would grow, and flowers… But the CIO viewed us as like a virus. Jeez, don’t let these guys in the door because they’re going to expand. Land and expand, we called it. Or seed and grow.

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And it depends on what side you looked at. And I remember saying to Marc, “Marc, having been at IBM for all those years, for us to become an enterprise standard, we really have to have a platform.” Because that’s what works in the enterprise. They want to know that they’re buying something that’s foundational, that they can grow. And there was one example that really changed the game for us at Salesforce. Because we were going… We had an incredible salesforce at that point, and we continue to have an incredible sales organization. But we had an inside sales team that would be dialing for dollars all day long. We’d be calling up, and we’d say, hey, try and buy… Look how easy it is. Our sales strategy was, we’d go in and say we’re easy, we’re cheap, and we’re fast.

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And that worked with small businesses. It worked with medium-sized businesses. It was a harder story in the enterprise. But even with that said, we had big enterprises that were bringing us in, in departments. So we had Dell. We had Merrill Lynch. We had Cisco. Where they’d be buying licenses. They’d put them on their credit card. There’d be some sales manager that would say, jeez, I need to run my business, but I’m being so slowed down by this Siebel CRM tool.

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It’s so hard to use. The adoption wasn’t there. They had these big monolithic deployments on premises that would cost them a fortune. It would take them two years before they’d even turn it on. And then the sales teams would struggle. And I knew this because I was always the guinea pig sales exec at IBM for 20-plus years, trying to figure out how to use CRM. And I ended up… I had my spreadsheets. I had a staff…when we did deploy Siebel at IBM, I couldn’t figure out how to run it myself. So I had an army of operations and finance people that would run it. So I knew that no sales team had the patience. You know, sales reps – this sounds bad, but we’re coin operated. We want to grow our wealth, and you want to sell, and you don’t want to be slowed down. And we don’t want to be computer scientists on top of being salespeople, right? To run these technologies.

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So Marc and I, in 2004 – it was right after the IPO – and there was still a question: Why isn’t Salesforce growing into the enterprise facet? We had a few smaller deployments. But we got a call from Brad Boston, who was the CIO of Cisco. And Cisco, we had three or four deployments of department managers. We had one – a guy named John Mason was the sales exec running part of their sales organization in France. We had somebody in ASEAN, somebody in Australia.

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And Brad Boston calls Marc in, and Marc and I march into his office, and he said, “Look, I’m going to read you the riot act. I just discovered that you have 200 licenses throughout Cisco that our sales managers are paying for on a credit card. I’m going to shut them down, because you’re out of compliance. You don’t meet my global enterprise compliance…”

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‍Avanish: And security, etc. Yeah.

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Jim: And Marc and I were like, what are they? And he said, “You guys, I don’t care that you’re easy, fast, and cheap.” Which was our sales strategy. “I care about the following six things. I care about security, number one; reliability, scalability, performance, integration with other applications and with our back office, and customization. I don’t want the generic version of Salesforce, I want the Cisco version. And you haven’t demonstrated any of that to us.” And I remember writing this down, because this became our enterprise playbook. So I said to him, I said, “Okay, if we can demonstrate to you that we can achieve your criteria, your objectives for each of those six, can we win your business?” And he said, “Well, yeah, but you’d better be a hell of a lot cheaper on top of that.”

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And I said, wait a second. You can’t have it all ways. I said if we add value, and we can demonstrate that value in terms of higher adoption, we know that you only have 30% of your sales team using Siebel today. Even though you’re paying for 100%. And we know that the value is not there. If we can demonstrate that to you, and demonstrate ROI… And he said, look, he said ROI is a sales ploy. I’ll give you TCO. So we kind of settled on TCO. But I said all right, let us come back, and we’re going to talk about security, reliability… So I remember going back and got together with Parker Harris, Marc’s cofounder. Marc and Jim Cavalieri, who was our CIO at that time. And we all sat down, and we started to lay out, like what is our strategy for each of those six… And these are standard things today, right? But at that time, that was not part of our playbook.

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Avanish: It was pushing the envelope. Yeah.

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Jim: We really put together… And we kept going back. We went back to Brad Boston, and we went to Rick, the president and CRO, and John Chambers. And we ended up – it took us about two years to win the global deal. I think it was probably 2007 at that point that we finally won. And now Cisco is one of our biggest and best customers around the world. But we had to earn it. And what we learned from them is what we took to every other big enterprise customer. It’s what helped us get into Merrill Lynch on Wall Street. We had the same issue. We had sales managers using us there, and we finally won over Merrill Lynch, which changed the whole Wall Street market for us. The whole financial market.

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Avanish: Yeah. So, again, the fact that you centered it around customers is vintage Jim, right? Which is, you start with the customer and then you expand from there. So, again, rolling tape a little bit forward. So 2009, 2008, now platform as a service. So there was software as a service, platform as a service, and force.com and AppExchange were becoming front and center.And one thing that I learned, frankly, a lot with you was this notion of, hey, we talk to customers. We paint this vision. And then we also say we are a platform. We have all the elements of scale and performance and security you talked about. But by the way, we’re also here to help you solve other problems, right? And we can sell to you, but we can also bring in our ecosystem, both of ISVs and then also services.

And now, you’re running that business. You’re running the partner team. Talk a bit about the early days of that. When you were moving into this enterprise model, you guys started working with Accenture, with Deloitte and others. How did that come about, and what are some of your takeaways from that?

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Jim: Well, I remember, when we were selling… First of all, in the early days of Salesforce, we had very few partners. Because they kind of viewed us as, okay, well, you have these no-software buttons that we’d all wear. [Laughter] And they said… We’d say, oh, we’re so easy and cheap and fast. And it’s self-implementing, almost. And partners would say you may as well have a button that says no services. Because we don’t see the value. And when I joined Salesforce, I went to all my friends back at IBM Services. I went to Accenture, Deloitte, PWC, all the big services companies. And they were like, we don’t really see the opportunity here. You’re still down in that SMB mid-market, and until we see that you’re really enterprise ready, we don’t see it roll for us.

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So we had a lot of smaller, kind of boutique-ish SIs. Bluewolf, for example, that IBM bought years later, Appirio, Curie, and all these very small model metrics. And they were really the initial SIs. But the platform story is what changed the whole game, Avanish. And that’s when you came in. What happened there, and I can remember this like it was yesterday, we were trying to sell to Merrill Lynch. We now had their interest. Tien Tzuo was one of our top technology guys, and Tien is now CEO of Zuora and founder. And we would go to Merrill Lynch, to their IT team, their CIO, their head of operations. And they had Siebel. And no one was using it. They’d spent tens of millions of dollars on Siebel and weren’t seeing the value. Everyone had their shadow CRM systems, their spreadsheets. And we brought them all to California, to our headquarters. And Marc said hey, now is the time, we need to work on this… You need to standardize on Salesforce across all of Merrill Lynch. And I remember the CIO and the head of operations, John Hogarty, said, okay, Marc. We now see the value. We know that we’ll get the adoption because you’ve spent a lot of time working with our financial advisors – and Marc’s financial advisor happened to be from Merrill Lynch, so he worked with him say how do you run your business, day in the life of…

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So we presented this amazing proposal. We got them excited. We were so excited. We were going to win all of Merrill Lynch, which was going to change the game for us. And John said, “Hey, all that is great, Marc. And we’re ready to sign.” This was like a 30-plus-million-dollar deal. And Marc and I were getting excited. We’re sitting in the Hawaii conference room at the landMarc building at 1 market. “I just need one change, Marc. We want the on-premises version of Salesforce. We’ll buy it, and we’ll actually pay you more. We’ll pay you $10 million more. Just give us the software, let us implement it ourselves.”

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And Marc looked at him and said, “I’m sorry. That’s not our business. If I turn all this over to you, we’ll become like every other software company where we’ll always be behind on releases. We’re never going to satisfy you. We’re always going to be promising something that we can’t deliver on, because that’s the way the on-premises software world works. And I’m sorry, we’re done here. We’re not interested.”

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And me, as the sales guy, I was like, “Marc, how do you turn down a $40 million deal?” And I was pulling my hair out. And Marc said, “That’s not what we do. That’s completely breaking our model. Our model is one to many. And we’re going to mask all the complexities of the IT so you can focus on the use of the tool and the adoption and let us run the infrastructure.” You know, it’s that iceberg chart that we used to show. And we walked out of the room. Everyone was disappointed. We kept going back to them. And they still were not comfortable that they were handing to us the control of what was underneath the surface. All of the infrastructure.

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So it took us another 6 to maybe even 12 months before we convinced them that we could do it more cost effectively. We would have better security, because we’re listening to signals from thousands and thousands of customers around the world, and we have to satisfy all of them. So we’re spending way more on security than they could ever for even a size of an enterprise like Merrill Lynch. So that’s when we came back to them and said, you know what? We hear you. We are now going to separate the application layer from the platform. And we’re going to give you access. Because what they were really saying is, they wanted to make a lot of changes to the way the application would work. And that’s when we separated the platform from the application.

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We said, you know what? Here’s the platform. We’ll give you all of the same development tools that our developers use, and you can build custom code that’s Merrill Lynch specific, department specific. And that really created the first real platform. That’s when we separated it. And the rest is history. That’s when we had all the ISVs come in and start to build Apex code, if you remember. And all the ISVs took off. And now we have this ISV ecosystem of 7500 ISVs that have built technology. Because you can’t go to any one software company in the world and get all of your needs. That was the problem with IBM back in the ’80s and ’90s. IBM was so dominant that we thought – maybe with a touch of arrogance – that we could provide… All of your IT needs could come from IBM. One-stop shopping. And that can’t be the case.

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Even today, whether it’s Microsoft or Oracle or SAP, or any of the big software companies, none of them can provide all of your technology needs. It’s a heterogeneous environment out there.

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Avanish: Yeah. Again, brilliant way of connecting so many different dots there, Jim. So thank you for setting that context. And of course, I personally cannot be more appreciative of all that legwork that you and Marc and others did so that it would make my life a bit… Not easy, but a bit easier [Laughs] when I came on board.

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So, Jim, again, amazing journey. So what are some of the signals – the readiness that you described around Merrill as a customer, and the cycle it took to get them there – what are some of the signals you were looking for internally? That would say, hey, we are ready. We should do this? Obviously, you had C-level alignment with Marc and Parker and others. But it’s a big lift. It’s a big commitment. And how do you get everybody – particularly you have to align sales and marketing and customer success and services and so on – how did you get that alignment in an organization that was growing so fast?

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Jim: Well, you know, Avanish, Marc has this amazing alignment tool called the V2MOM that you’re very familiar with. And that’s how you get different departments in the company, different divisions, all working together. Marc was always good at setting the vision. And he said, look, we have to come up with the vision, the values that we stand for as a company, which are around trust and customer success and innovation, for example. And we have to get everyone aligned.

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And then the methods. What are the things that we’re going to achieve? And Marc would always say, you know, we kind of overestimate what we can do in a year, and we underestimate what we can do in 10 years. But Marc… I think back to when – it seemed so ridiculous at the time that Marc said, “Jim, we’re 22 million today, but we’re going to be a billion-dollar company in the next five years.” And sure enough, we went from 22 million to 50 million to 100 million to 200 to 350 to 500 in those five years. And then we kept going. And now, this year, we’re 38 billion I believe.

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Avanish: 38 billion

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Jim: So the methods are, here’s the specific things we’re going to focus on, the obstacles that are going to hold us back, so that we can be realistic that there are always obstacles that we have to overcome. And then the metrics. And then holding ourselves accountable. Marc is… Many CEOs are visionaries, but they don’t know enough about any one particular discipline within their company.

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They might be good on technology, but they’re not so good on sales or operations. I’ve never seen an executive like Marc Benioff. He can do a deep dive on anybody’s business and ask the uncomfortable questions that you would basically be able to mask from other CEOs that weren’t that familiar with… And then the accountability. Marc was always about accountability and alignment and getting everyone on the same page.

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And the thing that I always felt grounded Marc and the business was the customer and what we’re hearing from the market. If you came into an ELT meeting with Marc with opinions that were not grounded with real live customers, Marc would basically say, “I’m not hiring a Harvard MBA to just preach to me about what you believe. I need to be grounded.” And he’d always talk about tactics dictate strategy.

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So if a customer was pushing… Like the Merrill Lynch thing, that story I told you, that is the mindset of Marc. That pushed us to separate the application from the platform and to become a platform company. That was the driver. And that happened… It started in 2005. We closed that deal in 2007. And then our ecosystem just took off from there.

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But this is the alignment that happens. And if you’re trying to build something that doesn’t align with that strategy, you’re not going to last long at Salesforce. As you’ve seen, many people have come and gone over the years. I won’t use any names, but there was an executive that tried to build basically a mini Accenture inside of Salesforce. And this person went down that path.

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And he wasn’t thinking of the customer, necessarily. He wasn’t thinking of our license revenue. He wasn’t thinking of customer success. He was thinking about building a giant consulting firm inside of Salesforce. And I remember when we had an ELT meeting in Hawaii, and Marc Benioff listened to his plan and turned to the CFO, Steve Cakebread, and said, “Steve, what is this going to do to our business?” And he said, “Well, it’ll take our operating margins from about 80% down to about 50%.” Our multiples will go from whatever the multiples of the SaaS business was, let’s say it was at least 10X, to maybe 2X to 5X max. And yeah, our stock will plummet. It might take a little while, but…And Marc said, okay, John, basically your plan is declined. I just said the name – I probably shouldn’t have. And he was gone like a month later, or less than a month. Because that was incongruent with the market and what the market was asking. They weren’t asking us to build a consulting firm. And so when you go off the rails, you might be able to do it for some period of time. But at some point, you’re going to get…your day of reckoning will come in one of these V2MOM moments.

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Avanish: Yeah. And I think, Jim, to that point, if I can just comment on that… So, obviously, I was there for a number of years. And in my first – at that time it was in Half Moon Bay, before he moved to Las Vegas and then Hawaii, the leadership meeting, at the Ritz Carlton. And Marc put up a slide that said – we were a billion-dollar company at the time, you had seen the journey from 22 million to a billion – and he was like, we’re going to be a 10-billion-dollar company.

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And to be a 10-billion-dollar company, we have to be a platform. And you cannot be a platform without a robust ecosystem. So that was coming from the top. And it was the, frankly, one, it was the mandate for myself and my peers to go figure that out. But two, exactly to your point, it was the alignment that it forced across all of us. Product, marketing, sales, services, customer success. We have to work together. And that, I think, is always one of the key takeaways I talk about. If you don’t have the… This is not an easy business. This takes a lot of time. I mean, you described some of the timelines. It takes a lot of time and money and commitment. It’s not a flip of a switch. And if you don’t have that alignment, you’re never going to get there.

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Jim: Yeah. The alignment is key. And when you deliver software as a service that everyone takes for granted now, you’re only as good as the service you’re delivering and whether the customers are adopting it. And, as you remember, Avanish, we built this really important customer success organization. Where we had customer success managers, because… And this is the paranoia and never taking your customer for granted kind of mindset that we always had at Salesforce.

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Because you’re delivering a service, the customer isn’t seeing value, they’re going to turn you off. So we were so obsessed with customer adoption that we built this customer success organization that was in with the customers, looking at their adoption rates, and also looking at what features and functions they were using, both from the platform and the applications, and saying, hey, you’re not leveraging this valuable asset that you’re paying for. It’s all part of the subscription that you’re paying. And here’s… This is low-hanging fruit for you to get the value.

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And as you know, when you’re delivering a subscription service like this, with Salesforce, we had three major releases every single year. And what people didn’t necessarily understand is that there were three parts of those releases. There were performance releases, which improved the performance of the applications. There were security releases, because security is one of those things that the job is never done. There’s always hackers out there, and security.

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And then there was new functionality that we would bring in. So the combination of the three of those, three times a year, just created this mindset. Customers were used to having… And by the way, they would automatically get them. They didn’t have to opt in. They would automatically get them. And they were like, wow.

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And the challenge in the software industry was always, yeah, you know, my software vendor has had three or four new releases, and we don’t have the budget. We can’t go through the disruption of going to these new releases. So we’re on old releases. Until, all of a sudden, they get this threatening email from that vendor saying “end of life is coming,” and a year from now, you’d better upgrade, or you’re going to be…And you hear of different vendors – I won’t name them, some of our competitors – that would basically do the annual audits to see what the customer is using. And then they’d slap a big penalty, a charge…

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Avanish: I may have worked for one of those as well in my past, yes. [Laughs]

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Jim: And the software industry got away with so much for so long because customers didn’t have an option. Now that everybody’s moved to cloud, pretty much, it’s a whole different world. But our challenge is always… There’s a mindset created by the on-premises software world of, whatever you have up and running, just keep it. Don’t do change for change’s sake. Just use what you know and what you’re comfortable with.

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So we’re always going back to the customer and saying, hey, your view of Salesforce may be frozen in time from when you acquired us three or four years ago. Do you realize that, four years later times three major releases, you have 12 new releases that are out there. Let’s make sure you’re leveraging those. You don’t have to go through an upgrade to do that. You just have to know what’s there and how to use it.

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So that’s our customer success organization. And the other part of that is leveraging the voice of the customer. I’ve never seen a company like Salesforce that puts the customer up on stage at all of our conferences. We don’t want to be preaching to our customers and telling you, oh, here’s why we’re so much better. Let the customer tell those stories. They’re so much more credible and so much more authentic. Let the customers share their stories. And you can’t pay a customer to tell a reference story about their use case and their success that they’ve had. They only do it if they are excited about it. And getting customers passionate about using your technology is this flywheel effect. We get customers, then the partners. You create the ecosystem. And that’s that flywheel effect that creates the energy and the growth engine that’s been so successful for Salesforce over so many years.

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Avanish: That’s awesome. Hey, Jim, just a couple more questions. Again, we could talk for hours, which is always the fun of chatting with you. So now you’ve got the partner organization rolling up to you. How do you measure the success of a partner organization? How do you think about, hey, are we doing the right things? Are the customers getting the value? Etc. How do you think about that? Because I think that’s evolved over time. So I’d love to hear how you see it now.

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Jim: As you know, Avanish, since you really helped define our strategy, there are so many different parts of our partner ecosystem. You have the implementation partners. And now we have all of the top GSIs, Accenture, Deloitte, PWC, IBM, Capgemini, Slalom, all of them, and the Indian SIs as well, the Infosys, and Tata Consulting, and Cognizant, and all of these amazing implementation partners.

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They have, collectively, millions of consultants out there that are in all of our customers’ shops every single day, advising them on new technology. So we are training and certifying – we have all our credentialed individuals from all those partners. You think about it, we have, internally, probably about 10,000 consultants that do implementations. We try to focus on the expert services, the product-related stuff that’s deeply tied to our platform, where we do the implementations.

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And then we have another 250,000 consultants out there that are certified on Salesforce. And now, with the focus on AI and data cloud, we have all these consultants here. So we have that whole SI and consulting partner ecosystem, including the management consulting partners, like the McKinseys and Bain, and what’s the other one?

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Avanish: BCG?

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Jim: BCG, sorry, thank you. And so we have all the management consultants. And they’re oftentimes setting the C-level vision for these companies and strategies. So they’re very important. So we’re engaged with all of them. And many of them are our customers too. So we look at, if you’re our customer, you’re going to be that much more credible when you’re in front of our customer talking about how you can help our customer achieve value leveraging Salesforce.

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So we look at which ones are our customers and how much business they do in their Salesforce practice. So we measure how big their Salesforce practice is. We measure how big their spend is with Salesforce. That’s very important to us. And, as you know, we probably have – at least 70% of all of the Salesforce deployments out there in the world are touched by our partners. They’re either the lead implementers or they’re subcontractors.

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So we have all these metrics on that ecosystem, in terms of how many credentialed consultants do they have, how big is their practice. We have all these measurements. We’re very focused on sourced revenue. In other words, we can’t touch every opportunity out there. So how much of that market is that community bringing to us? Is our partner community bringing to us.

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And they know it’s important. We don’t want them just riding our coattails. We do all the heavy lifting, we sell, and all of a sudden a partner comes in and swoops in and says, oh, yeah, we want… That’s changed dramatically. The partners are very engaged in helping us influence the customer as well as sourcing those deals.

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Then we have the whole ISV ecosystem that you really helped build. I mean, your leadership in creating that 75… So we have about 8,000 of those SI partners and management consulting partners out there. And we always have to have new innovations to get them excited, because we have some that are maybe more dormant than others. And now with our agent force announcement the last few months, that’s really… And AI and data cloud, that’s completely, we’ve activated this whole exciting new ecosystem around that.

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But back to the ISVs. Many of our customers come to us and say, hey, we want you to build this feature and that feature. And we have this vertical market and that vertical market. And we can’t be all things to all customers in all markets. So that’s where having the platform and allowing these independent companies to come in and build applications on our platform has changed the game.

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This is a very large business for Salesforce now. And since I don’t think we talk about it – I can’t really tell you…

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Avanish: I don’t think the data is public, yeah.

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Jim: Yeah. But we do talk about the 7,500 ISVs. And I remember one of the first ones we were talking about, years ago, with Apttus, which is now part of Conga, we gave them our first Appy award back in 2007. But we have companies like nCino, and companies like Docusign and IQVIA that are all focused on the markets – nCino is the financial services market, and IQVIA on the healthcare sciences market.

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And we have the Congas building CPQ, and we have all these amazing partners. And some of them we’ve acquired. Like OWN Backup, for example, which renamed itself OWN, is now part of Salesforce. And we have this whole, we call it the Salesforce economy, which we believe is a multiple of Salesforce in terms of the impact we have in the market. But it’s this whole ecosystem that is innovating at a pace that no single company could ever achieve. And that’s been an exciting part of my responsibility, to help fuel that growth. We’ve gone, post Covid, what’s happened, we were growing in high double digits for so many years, and even through Covid, and then we all hit the economic wall in 2022. And we’ve had this rebirth… Not rebirth, but we’re reigniting the whole partner ecosystem around focusing on growth. And that’s what’s exciting to me. I love working with these ISVs.

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I’d say that, by reinvigorating that team, reigniting it, I brought it into this organization under this executive, Brian Landsman. And Brian had been part of the office of the CEO, where he was working on big strategic tech partnerships with Google and even Microsoft, and Facebook, and AWS, and Snowflake, and Databricks. All these companies that we sometimes compete with, but we’re looking at it from a customer perspective. How do we help the customers work across this amazing ecosystem of tech companies and make sure that they’re getting the best value?

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They’re not getting it all from Salesforce, but they want to know that Salesforce is embracing their other tech partners. Anyway, Brian Landsman was part of that organization, and we brought that very strategic thinking from the office of the CEO that Marc Benioff was very engaged with all those tech partnerships to now he’s got responsibility for the ISV organization. And it’s really brought a whole new sense of urgency and growth mindset to that business. And I’m really excited. Because he’s bringing it back to where you were 15 years ago when you started.

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Avanish: That’s awesome. Look, Jim, again, we could talk for hours. Any final thoughts? You fly a lot, like you were saying when we were chatting. If you were sitting next to one of your peers at another company, any thoughts on if they were to go down a similar journey or path? I mean, you’ve shared some amazing insights, but any final thoughts you’d share with one of your peers?

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Jim: You know, I think of, again, 46 years that I’ve been in this business, and why do I still do this? I love change. And after working for IBM for many years and being told that you never change for change’s sake. If you have a formula for success, keep it going. And then that all changed with Lou Gerstner. Marc Benioff has taken that to a whole ‘other level.

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He has this mindset of embracing change. And you never get too complacent with your leadership position because it can change quickly. You have to disrupt yourself before an outside company, competitor, disrupts you. So embrace change. And if you don’t enjoy change, you’re not going to like working at Salesforce, for sure.

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But always be open to new models. And the only way you’re open to change is listening to customers and not thinking you have all the answers. I spent so much time – and that’s where Marc is like, if he sees me in the office, he gets very nervous. What are you doing here? I don’t see a customer. I paid you to be out there with customers, not be an armchair quarterback.

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And I’d say just listening. What’s working and what’s not out there? I spent an hour on the phone with one of our customers, talking to their head of channels and alliances, hearing from them what they’re doing. And I picked up some good ideas. But be open to change, be a good listener. And then thinking about your relationship with customers and partners. It’s a journey with them. It’s not a transaction. If they feel like you’re just trying to close a deal, they kind of like, okay, that’s a short… You’re not building trust. You’re not building a journey with them, a relationship. And that’s the way I look at life.

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You know this. My friendships matter to me, over many, many years. And think of your partners and your customers like you’re creating a journey with them, and you’ve got to earn that over and over again. You can’t take it for granted. So many companies we’ve seen, they get success, and they start to get cocky and arrogant. And there’s no bigger turnoff to customers and partners than when they think that you’re so… It’s not confidence, because confidence is good. And passion is good. But arrogance and cockiness and thinking that you’ve got all the answers is absolutely a turnoff to your customers and your partners.

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So that’s the way I think. And at my ripe old age in this business, so many years, I’m always learning. I’m constantly learning. And I never think that I’ve got all the answers. [Laughs]

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Avanish: Again, I can’t think of a better person to learn these lessons from, Jim. So thank you for sharing. Thank you for your friendship and mentorship over so many years. And looking forward to always spending more time together.

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‍Jim: Well, thanks, Avanish. It’s great to reconnect with you here. And let’s make sure it doesn’t go too long before I see you in person, and we can have a cocktail together.

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Avanish: Absolutely. Thank you, Jim. Jim Steele, president of global customers and partners at Salesforce. Thank you for joining The Platform Journey.

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Jim: Thank you so much, Avanish.