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

4.4. Play #40: Make Every Customer a Member of Your Sales Team

Just as we tapped every employee as a marketing person, we believed that every customer could serve as a salesperson. Inside every customer there was unrealized potential. By offering training and support, we could build a sales army that was not limited to a finite number of salesforce.com salespeople, but could scale to hundreds of thousands—and, one day, millions—of customer salespeople.

The sales and marketing teams must work together to foster evangelists and build a sales army. At any company, the marketing department and sales department must be best friends. It's necessary to play together, partner together, and ultimately succeed together.

Although I believed that a service ...