Salesforce.com, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) has set a revenue target of $20 billion in three to four years. To enable it to accomplish this goal, the company has assembled an elite team whose task will be to offer guidance to business organizations that have yet to make digital technologies work in their favor. This elite team of strategists was poached from firms such as Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL), International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM), Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corporation (NYSE:BAH) and McKinsey.
Free consultation
The strategists will, in a process named Ignite, engage prospective customers as well as existing ones in a consultative exercise aimed at helping them in the transformation of corporate culture, improvement of operational efficiencies, and unlocking of new revenue streams. The consultation will come at no cost to the customers.
“We are not just selling cloud technology, we are selling a vision, and we are selling the value of that vision,” the chief operating officer of Salesforce, Keith Block, told Fortune.
Research conducted shows that there are billions of dollars in new revenue that could be unlocked by investing in mobile apps and cloud services. This is in sectors such as manufacturing, life sciences, retail, insurance, healthcare and financial services meaning the revenues could be much more if other industries had been incorporated in the study.
Disrupt or be disrupted
Before that value can be unlocked, however, business organizations will have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in hiring application designers and software engineers to help them overhaul or replace their existing software and systems. The formation of the Salesforce team is meant to guide companies willing to take the necessary steps to disrupt themselves before they are disrupted.
While there are other firms offering similar services like the one being provided by Salesforce’s team of strategists, Salesforce is distinguishing itself from the crowd by offering a lot of consultation time, running for several weeks in some cases. Some of these competitors include Oracle, SAP SE (ADR) (NYSE:SAP), and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT).
In Thursday’s trading session, Salesforce closed the day at $71.86 a share having edged up by 0.11% from previous day’s trading.
