Love them or hate them, Salesforce.com did something right when the tackled the enterprise software market with their intentionally inflammatory, yet attention seeking ‘End of Software’ rhetoric.  But that’s not the only thing they did right in the age of Internet.  In this podcast, SFDC EVP Tien Tzuo details some of the ideas about the ‘salesforce.com’ way in contrast to their more larger, traditional software rivals Siebel and Oracle.

Among the highlights:

  • customers want to do their own research before approaching vendors – give customers more information by putting it up on the website so they can educate themselves
  • build a presence of the Internet – bloggers, and press, easy to find on Google
  • let your customer trial your software – this gets you in the backdoor, so to speak, and often you can win the deal without even having to contest it with your competitors
  • design your software to be high usable, easily discoverable and layer the complexity into the details
  • leverage the creativity, energy and expertise of your customer and partner base to extend your product’s functionality footprint (e.g. AppExchange) instead of investing in more developers

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