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

7.14. Play #88: Bring Old Tricks to New Regions

Although the model that worked in North America and Europe needed to be tweaked, many of the fundamental pieces have worked throughout the world. For example, we have always invested in building market awareness and demand before we build a physical presence. In addition, we've seeded the market with corporate sales, which is easier to start and experiences shorter sales cycles. Corporate sales also proved to tap into a great market: China and India are driven by small and midsize companies.

We discovered that it was possible to recycle some of the same marketing tactics we'd used elsewhere. We also learned the importance of doing due diligence to make sure our efforts would work in a new market, ...