Why you should copy Salesforce's growth strategy...and how to do it

Salesforce certainly wasn't an indie hacker by any stretch of the imagination. Marc Benioff quit Oracle to set up his own company and raised money from the get-go.

But that doesn't mean that his growth strategy for the company contains no lessons for indie hackers.

Salesforce and their CRM solution were up against giants with huge amounts of money when they launched in 1999- arguably they had it tougher in terms of competition than nearly any business today.

What’s more, their competitive advantage was one that could be really easily copied by their competitors - a SaaS business model.

Benioff knew this, and knew that if he branded Salesforce as a CRM company with superior features and benefits he would lose. His competitors would copy his features and benefits and he would fade into obscurity.

So he did something else entirely - something that enabled his company to not only grow like crazy but also maintain their positioning and differentiation in the market.

Instead of branding Salesforce as a CRM company, he branded it with an ideology - a set of beliefs about how his customers should achieve their goals.

Salesforce’s ideology - NO SOFTWARE.

Instead of selling a CRM software, Salesforce sold a set of beliefs that set up the need for their solution.

Instead of selling the features of their solution, they spent their time evangelising their NO SOFTWARE ideology.

This did 2 things.

Firstly, it harnessed the power of story. By selling a set of beliefs rather than features and benefits, their marketing message was more like a story than a sales pitch.

Stories are the most powerful persuasion tools we have, and Salesforce rode their story to the top of their category and have stayed their for the last 2 decades. Their growth in market share in 2017 was more than their top 20 competitors combined.

Secondly, they created sustainable differentiation for themselves.

By branding themselves like this, they became more than just a CRM company - they became a NO SOFTWARE company, a company dedicated to the advancement of the NO SOFTWARE (SaaS) movement that they started.

Sure, their CRM competitors quickly copied this business model but, thanks to their brand identity, they weren’t impacted by this. Whilst their competitors were focused on building the best CRM, Salesforce was focused on building the best solution for NO SOFTWARE.

Essentially Salesforce had created a brand new category off the back of a single feature.

So, applying this to your own startup.

Stop looking at your product as a singular product - start looking at it as a vehicle for selling a set of beliefs that are bigger than your product that set up the need for solution.

You want to essentially turn your business into a religion - religion doesn’t sell the features and benefits of going to a place of worship every Sunday. They sell a set of beliefs. It just so happens that, in order to properly implement those beliefs you need to go to their place of worship each Sunday.

Another great example of this is Hubspot. They didn’t sell their marketing automation solution - they sold the ideology of Inbound Marketing. They built their brand around this set of beliefs - a set of beliefs that set up the need for their solution.

In doing so they harnessed the power of story to grow from $0-100 million revenue in 8 years and created a sustainable differentiation for their business against every other marketing automation tool.

Whilst your startup will (probably) never get as big as theirs, you can use the same strategy to achieve the full growth potential of your startup.