Salesforce of nature: how the CRM giant became a tower of power

TRP: How are you going to apply Internet of Things to CRM, sales, customer service and other areas of what you offer?

CC: To give you an example, General Electric's aviation division connects their jet engines to deliver service on those parts, which is the most profitable part of the business. By having them connected and using Salesforce they can see when those engines need maintenance after flying, say, the next 500km.

So instead of making a short flight from London to Dublin they get proactive service. It means they can delight their customers but at the same time deliver the service in a more profitable way because their devices are talking to them. There's myriad of examples that we're seeing really gain traction in that area.

TRP: Salesforce.com beat analysts' expectations for another quarter, but once again it hasn't managed to drive a profit. How is it going to do that?

CC: I can talk about the growth aspect of it, which I feel that I can do as growth is part of our story, particularly in a region like Europe, where we feel like we're scratching the Surface.

You see it here today with 10,000 plus people and announcements around Salesforce Tower and investments in the market - we're doing that because we're seeing an acceleration off what's already a significant business.

I can take us back to the business when you said why is all of that happening, why in 15 years and some of the things I think we're not entering that extreme momentum phase outside of the US like in places like the UK and Europe, it's just tremendous growth.

TRP: We've talked a lot about enterprises, but what is the company doing for SMBs?

CC: I think that's an interesting part of the innovation that Salesforce can bring to our customers that sometimes gets lost. We grew up as a company sort of selling to small and medium sized business, whereas most enterprise customers start at the top and bring their complex difficult to use solutions down.

I think that's why we've been successfull in selling to all these segments, but it also means we've got 100,000 people giving us feedback.

I think that also feeds our culture and innovation and ability to really bring our customers in like the executive briefing centre and say this isn't just what we're hearing from the Burberrys, here's what we're hearing from the Halos or Addison Lees that do businesses just as successfully as the enterprises.

TRP: Where are the opportunity segments and trends that Salesforce will be taking advantage of over the next few years?

CC: I think it's a great thing that we have 100,000 customers that can give us feedback - from SMBs to large enterprise. I think we can improve at helping our customers extract more value out of great technology and things like Salesforce1 if we can have a more specific dialogue within different industries.

And part of that's also to make sure that we build out an ecosystem based on industries. Whether it's financial services or manufacturing or automotive, there's certain applications - maybe some on the AppExchange and maybe some that aren't - that would help us round out the offering to a customer from that segment, so that's going to be a big bet for us going forward.