Salesforce’s Talent Acquisitions: It’s more than just companies the cloud CRM’s after

Not too long ago, in its discussion with stakeholders, Mark Benioff brought up the ‘public company’ experience among Salesforce’s leadership bench.

And this is quite telling when you look at the suite of executives Salesforce propelled to its top jobs.

For context, here’re some cloud company’s recently made power hires(there’s a recurring theme here).

First on the list is :

One of the most recognizable faces in Indian finance, she’s the first woman to be at the helm-of-affairs of the 2 centuries-old bank. She’s worn many hats, and presently chairs the Swift network’s Indian arm.

A source tells Reuters that her move to the Ohana fold aims at strengthening Salesforce’s base in India, one of its fastest-growing target demographics.

In another first, there’s now a position for a Salesforce CEO down under. With more than 2 decades behind her at Microsoft, she’s already worked in key executive capacities(one of them being Managing Director) for the software giant in Australia, making her an obvious choice for the role.

She’s positioned to lead operations through the next stages of growth and customer success.

Now a familiar face and constantly rising up the ranks, as COO, Bret’s areas of operation are…

‘product, engineering, security, marketing, and communications’

(-As per an official press release).

Before Quip, which he built, Bret was Facebook’s CTO. He’s built a few popular platforms over the years that went on to be acquired- like FriendFeed, which Facebook themselves took over, and the now ubiquitous Google Maps, which he co-created.

It goes without saying, but nothing spells ‘Product-man’ quite like creating industry-standard solutions that get picked up by BigTech one after another. His wealth of experience brings together the two things products need to thrive – abundant innovation and scale.

We then move on to…

Salesforce Talent Acquisitions

They couldn’t bag Linkedin in 2016, but they got the professional networking site’s Product Manager for Sales Navigator(a social-selling tool that allows identification of key buyer personas at a company that can help sales reps land an account). The tool also updates and automates sales communique.

That said, the tool became a key reason for Microsoft’s interest in an acquisition. The Sales Navigator has since supported Dynamics 365, which competes head-on with the Sales Cloud.

And with the Sales Cloud now accounting for a fourth of its revenue, Salesforce saw an executive in Camplejohn that had front-row seats to see how a definitive, modern selling platform was built, and could then do one better..

And finally, we have…

Frequent membership at groups associated with WEF put Gavin in a unique position to help Salesforce spin networks and reach out to large European corporations, projecting him as a global leader. So, it only makes sense that he’s also chairman of the board of the Middle East, African, and European ops.

Besides working in several large, public firms over the years(Virgin, BT, Procter & Gamble) in key positions, he’s also led the 15B acquisition of EE(Everything Everywhere) by BT(British Telephony) and initiated work on laying ultrafast fiber in the UK.

As with all the other top-hires, Gavin’s is in keeping with the pattern of Large-scale corporation experience.