Vote of Confidence

Benioff gets animated as he contemplates the outrage of enterprise software. "We're the antithesis of that! We're like electricity! You only pay us if you use us. But Tom Siebel would say, 'We're going to build a nuclear-power plant for you right here on 57th Street.' Even if a company buys one of our competitors' products, we're still not out of the game, because odds are, they'll never get it running," he says with serene self-confidence. Until that customer finally comes to its senses, salesforce.com will keep trying. "And we will go back, and we will go back, and we will go back, and we will go back."

Tom Siebel has plenty to say about Benioff and his claims. He regularly predicts salesforce.com's demise and notes that Siebel Systems is the only company to be ranked by Fortune in the top 20 of the 100 fastest-growing companies in America for four straight years. Still, Benioff is clearly on to something.

"Other than market-saturation issues, the expense and complexity of installation is probably the number-one obstacle for growth in enterprise software," says Charles Phillips, Morgan Stanley's managing director of enterprise and Internet software. "Marc has a point that there's another way to do it, and sometimes it's a better way. For small companies in particular, it doesn't make sense to deal with all of the software issues yourself."

It is tempting to dismiss Benioff's bravado as hyperbole from another era. And his company has had its share of setbacks. In November 2001, Benioff fired his former CEO, John Dillon, over differences in product and marketing strategy. Last March, he dismissed his CFO, Andrew Hyde. Benioff is now handling CEO chores himself and has hired former Autodesk CFO Steve Cakebread to replace Hyde. But Benioff didn't put in 13 years at the knee of one of the technology industry's toughest CEOs without learning a few lessons about building a competitive business. "I learned at Oracle that you need to have a highly differentiated product, a strong value proposition, a good distribution organization, and a lot of focus," he says.

Benioff insists that salesforce.com will thrive because it has the right stuff built into its very DNA. "When we started, we said that there were three things we were going to do differently from other companies," he explains. "One was to have a radically different technology, which is the utility idea. The second was to have a radically different business model -- the idea that you can pay as you go. The third was to have a radically different philanthropic model."

In July 2000, Benioff launched the salesforce.com Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides technology and software to young people in disadvantaged communities from San Francisco's bleakest housing projects to Israel's West Bank to Tibetan refugee facilities in India and Nepal. From the start, it was decreed that 1% of the company's stock would be held by the foundation when salesforce.com went public, 1% of the company's profits would be donated to the community, and 1% of employees' time (typically, four paid hours a month) would be given to charitable causes. To date, salesforce.com employees have donated more than 3,000 hours.

Benioff calls the foundation his secret weapon. "It's a great program, it does amazing work, but it also builds confidence in our employees," he says. "It makes people feel that this company is grounded. People learn that there's more out there than just themselves. When you talk to our employees, they say that they aren't here for the IPO. They're here because they want to be part of something big."

ORLANDO

HOW TO COACH CONFIDENCE
Hurricane Isidore is hovering off the Gulf Coast, making Orlando hot, humid, and overcast. But inside the offices of LGE Performance Systems Inc., Jim Loehr is worried about another, potentially more devastating tempest. "Life is about storms," says Loehr, tall, tan, and loose limbed. He's talking about the pressures that push people physically and emotionally, that test their character. "This is the most that people have ever been pushed," says Loehr. "The people we've seen are pretty far out on the edge. In many cases, they're way beyond their limits, and they're in pretty significant pain."

Loehr is a performance psychologist and the author of 12 books. He coached speed skater Dan Jansen back from his disaster at the Calgary Olympics in 1988 to win a gold medal at Lillehammer in 1994. He's the force behind Monica Seles, Jim Courier, Eric Lindros, and Nick Faldo. But Loehr's bigger challenge these days is rehabilitating the shaken ranks of corporate America. His company teaches executives to cope -- to rebuild their confidence -- by building and managing their energy. Clients such as AOL, Estée Lauder, General Motors, Pfizer, and the FBI have all shelled out $3,000 a head to bring their top performers to the three-day program.