Salesforce COO Bret Taylor says he wants to 'double down' on strategies started by former co-CEO Keith Block
- Salesforce COO Bret Taylor said he hopes to "double down" on the strategies former co-CEO Keith Block implemented during his time at the company.
- Taylor said at a conference earlier this week he sees an opportunity to build on the deep relationships that Block helped foster with customers and partners.
- A lot of Salesforce's growth in the last few years, Taylor said, has been because of the sales strategy that focuses on specific industries, something Block started.
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Salesforce COO Bret Taylor said former co-CEO Keith Block was a great mentor to him - and that he hopes to "double down" on the strategies that Block implemented during his time at the company.
Taylor told attendees at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom conference earlier this week that when he looks at Block's legacy at Salesforce, he sees an opportunity to build on the deep relationships Block helped foster with customers and partners.
"I think even more importantly though, his focus on bringing our products to market by industry and really speaking the language of our customers," Taylor said.
What Taylor refers to is a sales strategy Block implemented that focuses on tailoring its products to industries like financial services, healthcare and government. A lot of Salesforce's growth in the last few years, Taylor said, has been because of this strategy because of new customers for products like Financial Services Cloud, Health Cloud, the Consumer Goods Cloud and Manufacturing Cloud.
"...We're really providing these business-critical processes for these industries and really kind of speaking the language of our customers in every interaction in a way that, I think, really with the transformation for the company, I think Keith deserves a lot of credit for," Taylor said.
Taylor said Block's achievement in his time at the company was incredible, Salesforce's annual revenue when he joined in 2013 was $4 billion, and now its about $17 billion.
Taylor added that he thought it was fitting that the acquisition of Vlocity, a startup that makes cloud and mobile software tailored to specific industries on top of the Salesforce platform, was announced the same day as Block leaving. "That was really sort of the culmination of a lot of his vision when he entered the company," he said.
Analysts say that the $1 billion Vlocity acquisition is significant because it gives Salesforce a ton of extra expertise in this industry-specific sales strategy, especially amid Block's departure.
Taylor was promoted to Block's old chief operating officer position last fall, after previously holding the chief product officer role. He joined Salesforce in 2016 when Salesforce acquired his company Quip. Block was promoted to the co-CEO position in August 2018 before leaving his post last month.
While Block's departure came as shock to many given how much of an asset he was to the company, analysts think it may be CEO Marc Benioff's way of paving the way for a future generation of leaders - like Taylor.
A 360-degree customer view
More broadly, Taylor said this year the sales strategy he'll be focusing on at Salesforce this year is centered around telling customers that its products can help them get a "360-degree" view of their customers across the sales, service, and marketing departments.
"But our strategy, which we talk a lot about, is really around this vision of Customer 360. And it really is representing not necessarily going into customers and selling just one of our clouds, like a Sales Cloud or a Service Cloud. It's really helping them transform their business, be customer-centric," Taylor said.
That strategy is dependent on the technology Salesforce has gotten from its recent acquisitions of MuleSoft and Tableau, he said. Salesforce bought MuleSoft for $6.5 billion in 2018 and Tableau for $15.7 billion last year.
MuleSoft is what enables all of Salesforce's different products to connect and communicate, Taylor said. And Tableau offers software to help companies analyze the huge amounts of data they will be generating from using the rest of the software, he adds.
"MuleSoft is the foundation, this Customer 360 technology is in the middle and Tableau and this system of insight at the top of it, I think, is a really amazing set of technologies, I think, for most companies in the world to enable them to actually reach, as you called it, that holy grail of the Customer 360," Taylor said.
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