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

4.13. Play #49: Old Customers Need Love

Although companies must always be on a quest for new customers, they can never forget about existing customers. We built a customer success managers (CSM) organization to ensure that current customers continued with our service. The SaaS model makes it easy for customers to churn if they are not successful, for unlike the on-premise model, it doesn't force customers into taking on excessive up-front costs and technical infrastructure changes.

Because we can see if the users are logging on to the Salesforce application (it's running on our computers), we know that if a customer is not logging on, he or she is not achieving success and will therefore almost certainly leave us at the end of contract. Our ...