Marc Benioff Quotes

You need to get to the future, ahead of your customers, and be ready to greet them when they arrive.

The secret to successful hiring is this: look for the people who want to change the world.

You must always be able to predict what's next and then have the flexibility to evolve.

The only constant in the technology industry is change.

Most of all, I discovered that in order to succeed with a product, you must truly get to know your customers and build something for them.

Once you know what you want and what is important for you to achieve, also define the values associated with it. What is important? That is something a lot of entrepreneurs pass by too quickly. For us, the things that were important were, No. 1, customer success. Nothing is more important to us than making sure every customer is successful in our service.

You have chosen the wrong path if it's not fun. And you are probably not taking enough risk if it's not hard and rocky sometimes.

I always tell people: Life is the dance between what you desire most and what you fear most. You've got to be able to deal with the threshold of control.

Customers want new functionality, but they don't want the traditional complexity that has marred products in the past.

You need to have a beginner's mind to create bold innovation.

I’ve seen how important this concept is in business. To be truly successful, companies need to have a corporate mission that is bigger than making a profit. We try to follow that at salesforce.com, where we give 1% of our equity, 1% of our profits, and 1% of our employees’ time to the community. By integrating philanthropy into our business model our employees feel that they do much more than just work at our company. By sharing a common and important mission, we are united and focused, and have found a secret weapon that ensures we always win.

Business requires an unbelievable level of resilience inside you, the chokehold on the growth of your business is always the leader, it's always your psychology and your skills - 80% psychology, 20% skills. If you don't have the marketing skills, if you don't have the financial-intelligence skills, if you don't have the recruiting skills, it's really hard for you to lead somebody else if you don't have fundamentally those skills. And so my life is about teaching those skills and helping people change the psychology so that they live out of what's possible, instead of out of their fear.

I think a critical part of being successful in our industry is having a beginner's mind

As we talk about devices, you should never forget that behind every one there is a person - a customer. It“s not the Internet of Things, but the Internet of People - of customers. We are moving to one-to-one relationships.

If there wasn't any competition, I'd be very worried, because it would mean we were not doing very well.

If you look at the top 10 enterprise software companies, a lot of them are important but irrelevant companies. It's really important to be relevant and important.

Relationships with the media are really important. The media has a more important voice today than it has ever had. We don't advertise. We only have one marketing vehicle, which is editorial, and our ability to get our message out and communicate it effectively.

I know Donald Trump quite well. We've never shared values, he and I. But I respected his ability to turn it around. So I respect somebody who can turn things around and be successful. I think the president's communication style is the most difficult thing because he actually does care, people who know him know he cares. But his style of communication, his combative approach, the elements of ego that are obviously there in all of us but seem to be more easy to see in the president sometimes than other people, get in the way of his capacity to lead, unfortunately.

Staying relevant is key. When you're telling your story, you better have a modern story to tell. If I was still saying the same story I was saying 10 years ago, it would not be that interesting.

Multi-Tenancy is a requirement for a SaaS vendor to be successful

Life grows relative to one’s investment in it.

All this green stuff is great, it's great we don't have plastic bottles or plastic bags and all of that, but how about some great schools?

Don't forget to do something for other people.

One problem we discovered, for example, was that our "create a new account" button was in the wrong place...By simply moving it to the left side, mirroring the way people read, we saw a huge improvement in the way people used the site.

I don't look at business as a zero-sum game. I don't. I've never seen it play out that way in our industry, and I think you innovate and you add value, deliver value back to customers, and you get value back from the world.