Salesforce was where SaaS really got started. First, with its CRM, but now it's a multi-cloud giant with a whole suite of products. They have over 150,000 customers, annual revenues of $30B+, and almost 80,000 staff, making it one of the largest tech companies in the world.
When its customers have a problem, though, they go to the Trailblazers community in search of answers. With over 3M members, the community supports customers with an expansive set of programs and helps Salesforce scale its business and deliver sustainable growth.
For me, it’s the canonical example of a product community and this deep dive is packed with insights into how you, like Salesforce, can turn community into a strategic differentiator.
Let's get to it 💪
Salesforce was founded in 1999 by Marc Benioff, together with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez. Coming from Oracle, Benioff saw an opportunity to up-end the CRM category dominated by on-premise incumbents like Siebel with the first pure-play Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. They evangelized switching to the cloud and sold folks on a comparatively simple product. Although they got off to something of a rough start with the dot-com bubble bursting, they battled through, leveraging the incredible sales efficiency that being a SaaS offering afforded them. They became notorious for their "No software" tagline and guerilla marketing tactics, which saw them fake protests with hired actors outside competitor conferences.
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Such sales and marketing practices fuelled record high revenue growth - over 100% from 2001-2003, making it the fastest-growing SaaS company at the time [34]. But it wasn’t just marketing stunts that helped them get there. Being cloud-based meant it was easier to adopt than on-premise alternatives. The standard was for a top-down, sales-led approach. Now for the first time business leaders could bring in Salesforce to their organization without the need for IT, physical servers, and a lengthy sales process. Salesforce has been product-led since long before a term was coined to describe it. The software was simple to get up and running with self-serve, and the price point was low enough it could be purchased on a credit card. Early on, they also ran a program that made Salesforce free for up to 10 users for the first year [39]. By December 2003, they had revenues of $100M+, which powered them towards IPO in June 2004. Just seven years after its founding, the company was generating $500M+ in annual revenue [33].
Since then, they’ve continued to grow and grow, becoming the incumbent in the CRM space they had disrupted only a few years before. They’ve now been the clear market leader for over 10 years [29], and continue to gobble up market share - they currently have a 23% stake, eclipsing their closest rival's 6% share. They didn’t stay tied to the CRM category, though, becoming a multipurpose cloud service provider through a mixture of product innovation and a big dollop of acquisitions - they've bought up more than 50 companies between IPO and 2019 [27], and have spent tens of billions of dollars more in recent years buying up the likes of MuleSoft, Tableau, and Slack. In doing so, they’ve expanded use-cases beyond Sales, to include Marketing, Service, Commerce, Apps, BI, Productivity, and Integration, among others. By 2019, they had become the only US public company to grow by over 20% for 20 consecutive years [28].
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Their success inspired many other companies to build products for the cloud, too. Rather than wall themselves off, they invested in building an ecosystem. There is now a network of companies around Salesforce, from those selling ancillary products, to add-on cloud subscriptions and software, IT services, networking, security, hardware, training, and support. This really kicked in to gear following the introduction of its AppExchange in September 2005, enabling third-party developers to create their own apps and a store on which they could sell them to Salesforce customers [31]. They doubled down on this in 2008, with the launch of Force.com, the first platform as a service (PaaS) offering, enabling developers to quickly deploy apps on Salesforce’s architecture [33].
Its expansion to use cases beyond CRM only increased the value of Salesforce’s offerings. This meant that as the cloud grew and became the dominant means of software distribution, Salesforce and its ecosystem grew with it. According to an IDC white paper, by 2026 the Salesforce ecosystem will create 9.3M new jobs and $1.6T in new business revenue [32]. Meanwhile, Salesforce continues to set and achieve ambitious revenue growth goals and is targeting $50B in annual revenue by 2026 [35].
A remarkable trajectory and growth story. But one I tell to set the stage for another remarkable story - that of the Trailblazers community.
Salesforce has been running its DeveloperForce forum for coders building on the Salesforce platform since 2004 [1]. But its community story really starts in late 2005 with Erica Kuhl. She would later rise to become VP of Community with 11 years at the helm, but it all began when Erica was a Global Workshop Manager within Salesforce’s marketing department.
“They'd fly out here, and they'd spend five amazing days with me. I was pouring my energy and effort, and knowledge into them. They were collaborating with one another from all different industries and backgrounds. And then after the fifth day, they'd leave… and they lost all those connections” [2]
Erica saw an opportunity. She pitched the idea of a community that would bring together Salesforce admins, enabling them to share their skills and product experiences. The result? “he laughed at me,” recalls Erica. But she got the go-ahead anyway and worked on it as a side project in a new Customer Marketing Programs role [3].
Taking on the success.salesforce.com website, then a static site housing Dreamforce presentations, she started by removing that existing content and working with the community to create something new: hacking together web pages and bringing over some forums using Lithium (now known as Khorus), OpenCMS, and a TypePad blog [3].
Salesforce’s massive growth meant they had a problem - they were struggling to keep up with demand [40]. So “I started with something very tangible, which was focused on getting questions answered by peers,” Erica explains [4]. We were “focused on the forum. And then we started building on from there, doing each thing as great as we can, and falling backwards sometimes, and then learning, and then iterating.” There was no community industry best practices to learn from or exemplars for inspiration. “I just had to do it based on gut and what I thought was right, with the guidance of the community” [2].
She needed to seed the important first-run experience and begged subject matter experts within Salesforce to answer the initial member questions [5]. But the vision was for a peer-to-peer network [6], so “as soon as I saw any community member answering another community member's questions, I quickly removed Salesforce out of the picture,” and I then “poured all my energy into that person,” encouraging them to keep answering. Erica would go a step further, too: “I called them up, and I asked them why they did it… why'd you answer that question?” For many, the motivation was to learn things themselves. If they saw a question they didn’t know the answer to, they’d enjoy researching and going back to answer it, so they could share their knowledge [2].
A humble start, then. It wasn’t about fancy programs or big swag budgets. Instead, it was solving a problem for the company while listening to the community and putting “programs in place that satisfy what they need,” layering in new initiatives only when existing ones were up and running [9].
One such initiative came a few months later: the IdeaExchange, which Benioff described in a press release as an “entirely new way to listen to customers on how to build great enterprise software, and satisfy their needs” [7]. In practice, this meant that community members could share product feedback requests and vote on top ideas. It was a mechanism to harness the feedback they were getting from customers. “Everything was going great; we were getting a lot of questions and a lot of answers, but when we started listening to feedback and responding to feedback… that really catapulted us” [2].
The core of the community platform remained Q+A and IdeaExchange, but in 2010, they tore down the existing site and replaced it with a custom-built platform. They’d been going down the route of a developer-focused community and wanted to reset with a more customer-focused direction. So they put a giant box on the homepage, asking ‘what’s your question?’ signifying them doubling down on Q+A. The re-focus paid off.
Between 2010 and 2013 Salesforce started working on a community product, which launched in July 2013. 3 weeks later they re-launched their community on that product. With the platform change, they added Chatter so people could communicate with other members via groups. At that time they had 545,000 members. By Jan 2014, they were at 1,000,000. In March 2014, the Dreamforce community was rolled into the Trailblazers community and by October 2014, they were at 1.4M members, adding 40,000 new members per month.
Erica learned the hard way the importance of data. Her motto now is: ”if you can’t measure it, don’t do it.” But that wasn’t always the case. “Data changed the trajectory of community success,” says Erica [13].
“I really hit stride… when I made that connection between community and bottom-line business value… almost overnight magic started happening because it brought community to the forefront” [9]
To gauge the impact of community, they compared customers who engaged in the community to those who didn’t. Where “engaged” was defined as a customer that posted, voted, commented, or asked or answered a question within the last 12 months, and they looked at four key ROI metrics: pipeline, ACV (Annual Contract Value), product adoption, and attrition [13].
The criticism, of course, is that this shows correlation, not causation, but the correlation was so strong it couldn’t be ignored. More community engagement meant better business outcomes, as we'll soon see.
Having and tracking data isn’t enough, though. You need to get it into the hands of stakeholders and make it real to them. Holly Firestone, then Senior Director of the Trailblazer Community, says it was key to be clear about exactly how community is creating value to change the perception of community from a cost center to a revenue driver [14].
The way Erica approached this was to talk “about what I was doing and how it was going to make their job better… to each part of the business in the way that matters to them” [8].
For marketing, for instance, they wanted to see numbers around brand awareness and mentions. She also started tracking marketing-specific metrics like speakers sourced, quotes and testimonials, and advocates identified. Erica discovered that their early Salesforce MVP program members generated a whopping 7-10% of their total Twitter mentions: “they amplified our messages in a massive way during events, and they were meeting each other and organizing meetups throughout the world. They really became an extension of the Salesforce team” [10]. The response from Marketing to this was great, it made community click for them.
“Whoa, this little hacked-up Frankenstein community… is like generating an insane amount of link juice” [16]
So they doubled down. “I took the opportunity to step back and figure out the value proposition for organizations like marketing… product… support, and organizations like customer success” and then highlighted the value specific to that org. So for customer success, we might highlight how community enables “building loyalty and driving down attrition… for support, it might be case deflection. And for product that might be delivering the very best product feedback and insights” [15]. Rather than reporting on community-specific engagement stats and trying to show how that connected to the rest of the business, they led with the metrics and parts of the business people already understood, showing the impact community was having on them [16].
“Once I was able to show that, it became a lot easier to gain mind share,” says Erica [15]. Now, this is an ongoing, formalized process known as the Trailblazer learning journey. It’s a packaging up of all the key ROI details, which they proactively educate all new hires about [17].
Salesforce has made some bold projections of future revenue growth that it needed to live up to. In 2019, when it had revenues of $17B, they projected that would more than double to $35B by 2024 [28]. Analysts were cautious about their ability to deliver [36], even before COVID hit and SaaS fell out of favor on Wall Street. Regardless, they’re on track to meet it with revenue last financial year of $31.4B [37]. Three strategic drivers have powered this growth:
Community is an enabler for each of these growth drivers. Let's 🕵️ explore how, and along the way, we'll uncover the return on community investment figures that Erica was so excited to share with everyone.
With a land-and-expand strategy, you start with an initial deal with a customer and then form a solid relationship with them through a great product experience and exceptional service. This provides the opportunity to expand revenue by adding more users, getting them to use more of your product, use additional products, or provide more services. Salesforce does all of the above. They continue to innovate, adding functionality to existing products, creating new products, and acquiring other products to build out their offerings. This has the benefit of increasing the total addressable market as well as providing more opportunities to sell to an existing customer by expanding use-case coverage.
People who are active in the Salesforce community have a 33% higher adoption rate than non-community members [10]. Getting new customers to become active and engaged in the community is a key element of their land and expand initiative because their once simple product is now anything but. Salesforce administrator is literally a full-time job. Their CRM product is a hugely flexible and sprawling solution covering every conceivable Sales use case. Its multitude of other products only adds to this complexity. However, community helps them mitigate this. Potential buyers can learn from members of the community, rather than a pre-sales team. They can work out which package works for them, and resolve tricky implementation questions that would otherwise take a solutions architect to resolve. Beyond the Enterprise, most buyers prefer a self-serve approach, and 75% of buyers prefer purchasing via a website rather than through a sales process [43]. Community enables self-serve at scale, which in turn frees up revenue teams to focus on Enterprise accounts. Between 2016 and 2020, for example, Salesforce increased revenue from Enterprise accounts (those with contracts of $1M+) by 30% each year.
In addition to their own data, the community team surveyed community members to better understand the value Trailblazers were getting from the community, both for them personally as well as the member's organization. Their survey findings showed increased adoption of other products by community member orgs. So for example, if they were Salesforce CRM users they’d be more likely to consider adjacent solutions like their Service Cloud offering. In fact, 93% of community members said that community helped them find new products and tools they could use from within the Salesforce portfolio [6]. This delivers on their multi-cloud play, improving awareness and adoption of different solutions as a result of their community involvement.
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Community plays an important role in geographical expansion as it can help them to access markets where they don't already have boots on the ground. This means raising awareness among local customers and even enabling them to talk face-to-face with Salesforce experts, either through a partner or a community member.
Dreamforce is a program that's supported by the community team. It's an event that has long been a key date in the diary for folks in tech. The first Dreamforce in 2003 hosted around 1,300 people. By 2018 that was closer to 200,000. It’s now so big it takes over much of San Francisco, forcing up hotel prices, packing bars, and forcing Ubers into perpetual Surge pricing. Despite its popularity though, lots of folks don’t make the trip. So they run the Global Gathering program, which takes the best Dreamforce content and experiences out to local communities. They now have over 250 groups globally, extending the reach of Dreamforce to 15,000 people who would otherwise not experience it [6].
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The community team also takes this opportunity to get their hundreds of community leaders together at Dreamforce. As Tiffany Oda, then Senior Programs Manager, explains [47]:
"Our team comes together and presents the year review, how we grew any new things that we implemented, and talking about the road map for the future year."
Meetups are another community program that helps with international expansion. There are now community-run meetups in more than 90 countries [46]. The spread of meetups across the world gives them a global presence even in locations where they don’t have an office or dedicated team.
Salesforce still has a strong product-led growth motion, with a free trial that makes it easy for anyone to try out their product. Doing this at scale has its costs, though. Sales to small businesses come with a lower avg. margin (35%) than Enterprise sales (40%). Support costs are a contributing factor. However, by enabling a peer community who answer each other's support questions, they've been able to significantly lower those costs. What's more, community-provided support can often be a better experience.
“Our support team will tell you themselves that our community is faster than our in-house people at answering customer questions” [10]
This is an important point. Most other case deflection solutions, like suggesting knowledge base topics when submitting an issue, or routing people via AI chatbots before they get to speak to someone, often frustrate users. With community, there's no such trade-off. So they’re careful not to squelch the peer-to-peer aspect - their support staff only get involved if the community hasn’t answered a question after 24 hours. 4,000+ questions are asked and answered per month, of which 83% are answered by the community. Over time, they’ve established an enormous library of community-created responses, delivering ongoing value. Each month there are 500k views to answer pages, 85% of which come from Google. They estimate that each deflection saves their business $50 because each answer gets around 20 views. A response doesn’t just help the one person who asked it, but dozens of others who have the same question later. As a result, they save around $2 million each month in support costs [10]. This further helps them to increase profit by reducing cost-to-serve expenses, assisting with the steady improvement in aggregate margins they've seen from 2016 to date [35].
Underpinning their land and expand and multi-cloud adoption strategies is ongoing customer-focused product development. This is an area Salesforce has invested in to maximize the value they get from the incredible feedback they get from their community.
The community team initially lived within the marketing department, but the community has always been product-focused. However, it wasn’t until 2013 that they made the move into the Product organization. This was a “critical tipping point for the community,” says Erica, as it better aligned the goals of the community with the wider organization. “Being among the product organization, it changed the game because it was all about product and not about marketing,” and it sent an important signal to community members.
“When I'm literally in the product organization, they know I'm in it for them... That's when I think the community really, really started skyrocketing” [2]
The product team wanted a place to share ideas and people to bounce ideas off of, as well as quotes and testimonials for their product [10], and the community delivered “a silver platter of product innovation, co-innovation, insight, advocacy, and product beta testers” [3].
The heart of product feedback for Salesforce is the IdeaExchange, with members submitting ideas and others voting on them. Salesforce then uses those votes to gauge demand, prioritizing ideas for inclusion in their roadmap based on the numbers and profiles of the accounts interested in a specific feature [26].
Between its launch in 2006 and 2019, they’d logged more than 65,000 ideas, with around 50-100 new ones being added every month, and a total of 1.9M votes cast. Around that time too, the IdeaExchange was averaging 700,000 visitors a month.
Of course, submitting ideas is only one part of the process. If you want members to keep providing feedback, you then need to act upon it, and communicate how you’re doing so. Those 65k ideas have led to around 3,000 new features on the roadmap across Salesforce products. Integrating customer feedback at scale like that requires executive alignment and a commitment to community. With so many ideas coming in, you also need a robust product management process to make the tough decisions about what to build with the resources available.
To that end, every roadmap planning session incorporates customer feedback. Product managers at every level are held accountable by their leaders to review community-provided feedback, plan for how to deliver on the top requests, and ensure each release includes a subset of community-sourced features. To make this work, they incentivize product managers “to deliver on customer feedback with an awards program that recognizes… commitment to responding to the customer voice.” They also have a person within the community team dedicated to taking community-contributed ideas and working with the PMs to make sure they get implemented [22].
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At all stages, they try to make sure that they close the loop. Again, product managers are held accountable to communicate back about how they’re taking action. This extends to when they’ve chosen to not move forward with an idea, too. The goal is for the whole product feedback process to be “transparent, cohesive, measurable, and integrated enabling us to deliver products that reflect the needs of our community” [26]. Building solutions that better solve customer needs impacts several revenue-driving factors, from improving cross-selling and upselling outcomes to decreasing churn.
As the source of customer information within an organization, CRM is one of five core systems of record within a typical Enterprise (Finance, HR, IT, and Ops being the others). As such, CRM systems can be sticky. Many Sales and Marketing workflows, like source tracking and lead scoring, work around the CRM making switching costs high. But this is especially true for Salesforce, which has more than 5,000 listings on their AppExchange, meaning it's the largest B2B app exchange in the world. That makes it easier than ever for customers to integrate Salesforce into their wider tech stack. And the community is on hand to help answer any integration questions and guide solution choices along the way. In fact, community members are 3x less likely to churn than non-community members. As a result, Salesforce has seen declining attrition for over 10 years, helping it to sustain its growth [28].
Combining the benefits that they derive from community, it's perhaps not surprising then that they found that community involvement improves revenue. What is surprising though, is just how much. People who are active in the Salesforce community spend, on average, 2x more than people who are not active. Meaning, that the average order value (AOV) of a community member is double that of non-community members [10].
There’s an essential element of any community strategy: the reciprocal creation of value for both the organization running the community and its members. You can’t expect to capture any business value if you don’t first create value for members. Their survey results showed that the community was impactful in building members’ professional networks, building their personal brand, and changing their career trajectories [13].
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The core focus of the community was to get members’ “questions answered fast” and to “connect them with other people in their area” so they could be more successful [2]. 93% of members reported that they discovered new solutions via the Trailblazer community, while 82% said that the community increased the ROI of their investment in Salesforce's tools [17].
Other data highlighted that participating in the community helps increase innovation, gets a faster return on their product investment, and that it led to higher productivity and adoption of the product internally [13].
Members contribute to the community in many different ways, from running groups and speaking at events to regularly taking part in discussions on their forums. As you scale, you need to create rewards and recognition to motivate all the different segments of people within your community, relative to their engagement level. This helps ensure you maintain or further their involvement and model the behavior you want to encourage within your community [16]. Holly Firestone, who ran the MVP program for 5 years, identified a number of common motivators among members and used this to develop the SNAP community incentivization framework. This incorporated learnings from other top contributor programs like the Microsoft MVP Program and the IBM Champions Program, too [18].
SNAP stands for Status, Networking, Access, and Perks, which covers the main categories of rewards that Holly says, “helps the initial small flame of engagement grow into a roaring fire.”
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With such a huge ROI, getting customers into the community is critical for Salesforce. As a result, they've grown the community team over time, although it still runs lean. There were 5 staff in 2014, and 12 by 2021 [6]. Initially, the team was structured programmatically - “we had somebody running the online community, we had someone running the community group program, we had someone running the MVP program,” but that didn’t scale as the team did. Doing it that way meant initiatives becoming “siloed and they started competing against one another.” So now they're broken down functionally: “Everybody does everything across all of the programs,” but each has a focus, “one primarily on content... one focused primarily on product management engagement within the company. And then we have one strategically focused on engagement in the community.” They have community operations roles too, helping to facilitate the programs and keeping the community running [12]. The focus here is on balancing the need for automation, to keep such a large community functioning, while maintaining the personal touch [47].
Speaking of programs, let's take a closer look at the key programs employed to help understand how the community delivers such massive ROI.
The MVP program is there to recognize the outstanding contributions of some of the most dedicated members of the community. The initial framework for the program was created in consultation with Sean O’Driscoll, who built the Microsoft MVP Program. It launched at Dreamforce in 2011 with an initial batch of 15 members [2] and has grown steadily, passing 250 people in 2021 [6]. MVPs are a truly prolific group. They create customer-driven content, speak at events, and account for a big chunk of brand mentions on Twitter. What’s more, MVPs answer 30%+ of all questions they get on their forums. Steve Molis, for example, a 14-time MVP, has answered over 82,000 questions. That’s an average of 22 answers every weekday across those 14 years [1]. MVPs are an incredible source of product knowledge, and as such, have become a respected source of product feedback. They sign NDAs so the product org within Salesforce can consult them with new projects and run ideas by them.
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However, their impact extends beyond their individual contributions. As Holly says, “you have really got to build this core group of people… starting things off and setting up this environment.” They become an extension of your brand and model the values and behavior the rest of the community takes their queues from [14]. Maintaining such a program is an important responsibility, though [18]:
“If you ask for their feedback, listen to them and implement their feedback. If you can’t implement what they’re asking for, take the time to close the loop and give them the why behind it. If you take the time to do this, they will be your fiercest advocates.”
Salesforce are quick to highlight its ecosystem advantage in its ability to drive growth. 70% of Salesforce implementations are led by partner experts [30] and MVP programs are a great incentive for these experts to share their knowledge and achieve credentials beyond the standard certification programs. That’s why it’s common to see press releases from Salesforce partners celebrating their consultants achieving and renewing MVP status [38]. Making it an annual program provides a reason for MVPs to sustain their engagement within the community, too.
A community group is a group of customers who get together regularly, often in-person but sometimes virtually, to talk all things Salesforce. Despite the popularity of their digital platforms, people still want to build and create connections with others face-to-face. For Erica, those in-person connections were a critical component in deepening member relations [6, 23]:
“They bring that personal connection online… [they] engage differently… they can't hide behind a profile or a username, and they treat each other and the company with a different level of respect.”
What’s more, it helps spread the reach of their other programs. The community team can’t be everywhere at once, so user groups provide the means for members to connect with their local community of users [1]. Practically, that means covering their expenses (things like name tags, drinks, etc.), providing swag, and the software to manage their groups. To ease the operations of this, they host their own swag store, and leaders order what they need.
Covering the expenses is important as otherwise the event dynamic is very different: Meetup organizers spend all their time finding sponsors, and the content of the meetup often focuses on sponsor demos. Covering the expenses means organizers can keep the focus on providing value for attendees instead.
The first Salesforce user group was established in 2006. As Erica explains, there wasn’t a lot of bureaucracy around the program [24]:
“If they had the desire to run a group in their local community, we didn't vet that there was a certain number of customers in the area or… how much product was being sold. It was like, do you want to do this? And then we said, yes. And then we gave them the tools.”
By 2011, there were 140 groups. This passed 200 in 2014, which consisted of 65,000 members who attended 150+ meetups per month. By the end of 2016, there were 382 groups, and that’s when they got some additional headcount on the community team and were able to devote more resources to the program to move it forward [22]. You can see this reflected in the growth of the program thereafter. There was a 50% jump in 2017 to 740 groups, as a result, in part, of them merging their developer groups into the program. But they’ve seen sustained growth since, with the number of groups increasing 30%+, passing 1,000 groups in 2019 and 1,300 in 2023, all managed by 1,800 community volunteer leaders.
The community groups cover a range of topics. There are administrator groups, developer groups, and student groups. As well as industry groups, like non-profits and financial services, and special interest groups like Women in Tech [22]. The breadth of topics is important, as Salesforce deploys a customer-focused coverage model to accelerate their growth. That means they have specific plays for each of the different roles that interact with their organization.
For CEOs they focus on digital transformation, for CIOs, they focus on integrations, etc [28]. A top-down motion targeting CxOs may be cost-effective with a sales-led approach, but when it comes to reaching the many individual contributors and managers, they need something more scalable and with a lower acquisition cost. Community plays a role here, reaching more than 3M members and beyond.
Finally, there's the Trailblazer Connect program. As Erica explains, “the ultimate goal for us is to get our Trailblazers into amazing jobs” [24]. After all, it’s a win-win for both members and Salesforce. Salesforce provides job marketing and networking through things like career fairs and events, alongside a mentorship and placement program. This helps members gain and put their skills to use and land their dream jobs. While for Salesforce, it strengthens the ecosystem around their product. It's easier for customers to adopt and integrate Salesforce products and for partners to hire talent with the necessary credentials, building Salesforce's competitive moat.
In recent years, they began and have now fully integrated Trailblazers into the Trailhead learning platform and its 6M learners [44], with users “learning on Trailhead and connecting with Trailblazers in the community” [25]. It’s now a one-stop shop to learn skills, earn certifications to prove them, discover opportunities, and build connections within the community.
Community has become a strategic differentiator for Salesforce. Customers are buying Salesforce not only because it's a great product, but because it comes with an incredible ecosystem that has the Trailblazer community at its center [17]. As David Spinks mentions in his book, Business of Belonging [4]:
“When you buy Salesforce software, you're not just getting the tools, you're getting access to a massively valuable social and support network. The community has become invaluable to many of its members, who turn to the network for training and education. It's helped them grow in their careers, get promotions and raises, and form deep relationships. That's something no other CRM software provider can provide.”
Over a little more than 15 years, Trailblazers has grown from a simple forum into a vibrant community of millions of people. It's now a hugely valuable part of the Salesforce business. It helps them continue to efficiently scale the business and is now one of their four pillars of growth [35].
That’s it! That’s how community growth works at Salesforce. For more detail, dig into the sources below. If you found this newsletter useful, please share it with friends and colleagues. And if you haven’t already, subscribe below. ✌️
