SaaS 2.0 - by Benn Stancil - benn.substack

One way to describe Salesforce’s flagship product—their customer relationship management tool, in which salespeople keep track of who they’re selling to and how those deals are going—is that it is a bunch of lists. People make this point sometimes: Salesforce is just a database with a point-and-click user interface on top. Businesses buy Salesforce to help their sales teams sell stuff, and when a business wants to sell stuff, they need to maintain a bunch of interconnected lists: Of companies they’re selling to, of their clients’ email addresses and phone numbers, of the products they sell, of the messages they've sent their prospects and the meetings they’ve had with them, and of various other things that you might imagine salespeople wanting to write down. The database part of Salesforce maintains those lists, and the interface part of Salesforce lets you look at and update those lists. But you could, as people sometimes suggest, also do all of this in a big spreadsheet. This isn’t e

One way to describe Salesforce’s flagship product—their customer relationship management tool, in which salespeople keep track of who they’re selling to and how those deals are going—is that it is a bunch of lists. People make this point sometimes: Salesforce is just a database with a point-and-click user interface on top. Businesses buy Salesforce to help their sales teams sell stuff, and when a business wants to sell stuff, they need to maintain a bunch of interconnected lists: Of companies they’re selling to, of their clients’ email addresses and phone numbers, of the products they sell, of