Salesforce.com Organizational Analysis: CRM and SaaS
This paper presents an organizational analysis of Salesforce.com, examining the legal, social, global marketing, and economic factors shaping the company's growth. The analysis covers Salesforce's corporate structure and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, its pioneering use of social networking tools such as Chatter, and its position as the worldwide leader in cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software with approximately 14% market share. It also explores the operational transparency strategies that helped Salesforce build enterprise trust, and identifies customer churn among small and mid-range accounts as the primary long-term business risk. The paper draws on investor relations filings and academic sources to assess Salesforce's competitive positioning on the SaaS platform.
- Introduction to Salesforce.com and SaaS: SaaS model, CRM market, and analysis scope
- Legal Structure and Corporate Governance: Corporate form, NYSE listing, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance
- Social Networking Strategy and Chatter: Social media integration and Chatter product suite
- Global Marketing and CRM Market Position: 14% global market share and SaaS leadership
- Operational Management and Cloud Transparency: Trust-building, R&D investment, and agility strategy
- Customer Churn and Change Factors: Low-end customer churn as key long-term risk
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- The paper applies a clear multi-factor framework — legal, social, global marketing, operational, and change factors — giving the analysis coherent structure rather than an unfocused description of the company.
- It grounds claims in specific evidence, including market share figures (14%), competitive positioning data, and references to verifiable company practices such as the trust.salesforce.com uptime dashboard.
- The use of both academic journal sources and investor relations filings demonstrates an ability to triangulate across different types of evidence, lending credibility to the business analysis.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates applied organizational analysis: taking a real-world company and systematically evaluating it against defined analytical dimensions. Rather than simply summarizing company history, the author interprets how each factor — governance, social strategy, operational design — contributes to or constrains the firm's competitive position. This is a core skill in business and management writing.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with an industry-context introduction explaining the SaaS model and Salesforce's competitive advantage. A brief but important section on legal structure follows. The analysis then moves through social strategy, global marketing (supported by a market-share figure), operational management, and concludes by identifying customer churn as the key vulnerability. Each section builds logically on the last, moving from structural foundations to market position to risk factors.
Introduction to Salesforce.com and SaaS
Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) has completely redefined the economics of cloud computing by successfully using the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, which enables enterprises to pay only for the software they use while significantly streamlining the agility and speed of application customization. These are major improvements over how enterprise software has traditionally been sold, where sales cycles were often very long, expensive, and complex — frequently taking nine to twelve months to complete. Being able to pay for enterprise software from an operating expense (OPEX) budget quickly is replacing the more time-consuming and expensive capital expense (CAPEX) budgeting process (Upson, 2011).
Salesforce.com competes in the global Customer Relationship Management (CRM) enterprise software industry, which is a class of software that companies use for better attracting, selling, and serving their customers (Denning, 2011). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate the basic legal, social, global marketing, and economic factors that are affecting Salesforce's ability to grow today and into the future. The potential change factors that will affect Salesforce's growth over the long term are also discussed.
Legal Structure and Corporate Governance
Salesforce.com operates as a corporation with limited liability as defined by its organizational structure. It is, however, a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), and as a result must abide by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 reporting requirements, including the disclosure of significant financial events that could affect its overall financial performance.
Social Networking Strategy and Chatter
The social aspects of Salesforce.com are prevalent throughout the many social networks the company participates in. Its CEO and founder Marc Benioff was also recently recognized as one of the most socially active CEOs in the industry (Salesforce.com Investor Relations, 2013). Salesforce.com has also devised a unique and highly differentiated suite of applications entirely based on social networks, the most well-known being Salesforce.com Chatter (Denning, 2011).
Chatter is a product suite that combines the ease of use found on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter with integration into a given company's CRM systems and overall system of record for managing finance, operations, and manufacturing (Denning, 2011). As a result, Salesforce.com is deeply immersed in social networking and leads the enterprise software market in the adoption of these technologies.
References
Denning, S. (2011). Successfully implementing radical management at Salesforce.com. Strategy & Leadership, 39(6), 4–10.
Lee, S. M., Kim, T., Noh, Y., & Lee, B. (2010). Success factors of platform leadership in web 2.0 service business. Service Business, 4(2), 89–103.
Orr, B. (2006). SaaS just may be the end of software as we know it. American Bankers Association. ABA Banking Journal, 98(8), 51–52.
Salesforce.com Investor Relations. (2013). Investor relations and filings with the SEC. Retrieved June 2, 2013, from
Upson, S. (2011). Cloud computing. IEEE Spectrum, 48(1), 43.
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.