I was sitting up on the patio of our building in New York City looking at the boats going by. We are down in Battery Park which is just next to Tribeca. You can see the Statue of Liberty off in the distance and it’s amazing how many different types of boats go through the Hudson. 

In our new program at Salesforce, building out a Sales leader coaching practice, one of the things we have been talking about is you to best utilize your resources when working with a customer.

I see similarities between the size of the boat you move in and how you bring value to a customer.

Sometimes you are paddling in a two-person kayak.

Other times you may need a little bit more horsepower and have 4-6 people in a speedboat.

Sometimes and a little more rarely you see these pretty big yachts that are coming in from the islands and they are parked down by this little harbor and we walk down and check them out.

Kayak is like your account executive and solutions engineer going to help a customer who just wants to get up on one product.

The speedboat you’ve got a few more resources in there with, maybe it’s the account executive, one of your co-Prime’s it’s your Solution engineer, maybe it’s someone from the Business value team working on a Total cost of ownership analysis, and it’s focused on that midsize industry deal. 

And then there is the yacht. That’s the full power of your company.  At Salesforce, we like to provide value by holding executive briefings for our customers on key topics they care about, we host fun and creative marketing events, and we invite other customers to share how they are succeeding with Salesforce. We host really big industry events that bring the whole ecosystem together like Dreamforce (in person or virtually last year where millions of people came together).

We are a sales-focused organization and everyone helps lean in to win as a team. With 60K employees, you can think about everyone as stars in the sky that can be pulled down to join the conversation on the big boat and share some expertise that solves a challenge a customer is focused on.

It doesn’t matter what size of company or industry you are in, these three different approaches are available to you in some form.

Defeating Average as a team.

Colin