Book Summary : Behind the Cloud

Amazing read for anyone starting a company in general, and a must read for people starting an enterprise focussed B2B company. This book recalls all the learnings and playbooks of Marc Benioff while building salesforce.com.

• Believe in yourself
• Trust a select few with your idea and listen to their advice
• Pursue top talent as if your success depended on it
• Sell your idea to sceptics and respond calmly to critics
• Define your values and culture upfront
• Work only on what is important
• Listen to your prospective customers
• Have dozens of companies try out your things
• Defy convention of your industry
• Have and listen to a trusted mentor
• Hire the best players you know
• Larry Ellison playbook: Always have a vision, Be passionate, Act confident even when you’re not, Think of it as you want it not as it is
• Don’t let others say you from your point of view
• See things in the present even if they are in the future
• Don’t give others your power. Ever.
• Be willing to take a risk. No hedging
• Think bigger

Marketing playbook

• Having the right marketing agency is critical
• Companies must embrace bold marketing tactics from the beginning in order to break through all the industry noise
• Create a persona
• A brand is not just a logo, it’s your most important asset
• Make every employee a key player on the marketing team and ensure everyone is on message
• Always go after Goliath
• Tactics dictate strategy. Read Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. Appear at places that would make your event rush and rush to places they least expect
• Engage the market leader
• Reporters are writers, tell them a story
• Make your own metaphors

Part three the events playbook

How to use events to build buzz and drive business

• Feed the word of mouth phenomenon
• If you want a successful event, you have to project success.
• Make your customers your evangelists
• Sell to the end user
• The event is the message
• Seize unlikely opportunities to stay relevant
• Look at the event playbook
• Leverage the new age mediums of marketing to your advantage
• Let your website be a sales rep
• Don’t devalue your product by offering needless discounts
• Sales is a numbers game. Segment your customers carefully
• Always listen to your customers, they need to be assured that any changes are communicated and theirs needs taken into consideration
• Picking top sales team: look at David Rutnitsky
• Enterprise customers care a lot more about value than price
• Don’t cold call for sales, use your network, research and find out about the company and find the right person
• Always focus on why a deal might not close
• Get face time with your customers
• Be proactive with all the paper work
• Hire sales people that can say no
• Go after game changing deals
• Land and expand
• Customer success teams got enduring happiness of current customers
• Professional services team is for formal guidance on using the product
• Don’t sell features, sell the customer’s success
• Metrics to keep track of for sales: Inbound sales, Web traffic, Capture rate, Lead conversion rate, Close rate, Average deal size, Percentage of business that is from new customers versus customer add ons, Sales cycle length, Sales productivity ( average amount a single sales rep closed in a given month)

Part 5: technology playbook

How to create products users love

• Don’t try to build the moon
• Pay attention to things like reliability
• Don’t build everything from scratch, reuse
• Scoop up ideas from customers, have a forum
• Build a self sustaining ecosystem such as app exchange that helps in customers becoming more sticky but have standards
• Develop communities of collaboration

Part 7 the global playbook

How to launch your product in New markets

• Adapt
• Understand cultural nuances
• For example Japan playbook has important notes. What matters is having internal contacts and being vetted by the government or big corporations there.
• Europe on the other hand was a lot more like US, where you could target small and medium businesses.

Part 8 the fundraising playbook

• Be super professional in all your money raising activities. Apply professional standards in structuring and documenting all investments. Create a plan that includes formal projections and an assessment of when investors will see a return.
• Look to sources other than venture capital and don’t under estimate your needs
• Be Scrappy
• Measure your success initially on revenue not profit