Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company—and Revolutionized an Industry

3.2. Play #28: Build Street Teams and Leverage Testimony

Although I had been inspired by the customer energy that Steve Jobs had built around the Macintosh, the idea for cultivating a group of salesforce.com enthusiasts did not come from the technology community; it emanated from the hip-hop community. A friend introduced me to MC Hammer, who visited our San Francisco office (wearing a business suit, not the trademark Hammer pants) and shared his "Street Team" concept: that of building local networks of people to back you. At the time, I didn't know how salesforce.com Street Teams would work in action, but I thought that MC Hammer was a creative genius and that this unconventional idea was worth investigating.

Our City Tour program served as ...