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

7.5. Play #79: Scale Without Overspending

We began to grow with bigger customers, and recruited global leadership to help us build an enterprise sales team in Europe. We expanded the sales organization with carefully planned field offices. We were not influenced by the massive multiheadquarters mentality that defined the rest of the industry. We didn't have much revenue yet, so it made sense to spend less on office space and more on marketing and hiring sales professionals to sell directly.

Although our headquarters were in Dublin, the vast majority of our initial customers, press contacts, and analysts were in London, and I wondered if we needed more of a physical presence there. Because real estate was so expensive in central London, we set ...