Salesforce.com 2014 Annual Report Download - page 13

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Marketing
Our marketing strategy is to promote our brand and generate demand for our offerings. We use a variety of
marketing programs across traditional and social channels to target our prospective and current customers,
partners, and developers.
Our primary marketing activities include:
• Press and industry analyst relations to garner third-party validation and generate positive coverage for
our company, offerings and value proposition;
• User conferences and events, as well as participation in trade shows and industry events, to create
customer and prospect awareness;
• Social marketing and engagement on social channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube;
• Search engine marketing and advertising to drive traffic to our Web properties;
• Web site development to engage and educate prospects and generate interest through product
information and demonstrations, free trials, case studies, white papers, and marketing collateral;
• Multi-channel marketing campaigns;
• Use of customer testimonials; and
• Sales tools and field marketing events to enable our sales organization to more effectively convert
leads into customers.
Customer Service and Support
Our global customer support group responds to both business and technical inquiries about the use of our
products via the web, telephone, email, social networks and other channels. We provide standard customer
support during regular business hours at no charge to customers who purchase any of our paying subscription
editions. We also offer premier customer support for an additional fee, which includes services such as priority
access to technical resources, developer support, and/or system administration.
Seasonality
Our fourth quarter has historically been our strongest quarter for new business and renewals. For a more
detailed discussion, see the “Seasonal Nature of Deferred Revenue and Accounts Receivable” discussion in
Management’s Discussion and Analysis.
Competition
The market for our offerings is highly competitive, rapidly evolving and fragmented, and subject to
changing technology, frequent introductions of new products and services, and as we have seen recently,
consolidation. Many prospective customers have invested substantial personnel and financial resources to
implement and integrate traditional enterprise software into their businesses, and therefore may be reluctant or
unwilling to migrate to an enterprise cloud computing application service. Additionally, third party developers
may be reluctant to build application services on our platform since they have invested in other competing
technology platforms.
We compete primarily with vendors of packaged business software and companies offering CRM apps. We
also compete with internally developed apps and may encounter competition from enterprise software vendors
and online service providers who may develop toolsets and products that allow customers to build new apps that
run on the customers’ current infrastructure or as hosted services. Our current principal competitors include:
• enterprise software application vendors;
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