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

7.10. Play #84: Fine-Tune Your International Strategy

After some time building the business in Japan, we found that Oracle's model—that of using partnerships to sell the service—was not working effectively enough for salesforce.com. Winning partners was a long process, and we needed a better and faster way to penetrate the market. Although the strategy was unusual in the highly fragmented market of Japan, we decided to go back to our basics and build salesforce.com as we first had in the United States and Europe, through aggressive marketing and a direct sales team. This strategy worked, but we did have to make several adaptations to fit the Japanese market.

We recruited Eiji Uda, a direct-sales genius with 20 years' experience at IBM and the ...