Salesforce Chief Voted CNN Business CEO of 2020

Deafening silence submerged the offices of Corporate America throughout the year; the sounds of clicking, tapping and phone calls reverberated throughout the country’s living rooms, kitchens, and home offices.

Corporate America was put through intense and testing times and continues to be. And despite the hardships and closures – both temporary and permanent – there were some companies that truly thrived given the challenges.

Among these companies is Salesforce – the cloud-based CRM that includes best-in-class digital solutions to ecommerce such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud (both B2C Commerce and B2B Commerce).

SFCC is the heavyweight champion for high-volume, complex brands and retailers who require complex digital solutions to set up, manage, and deliver effective ecommerce operations. It has A/B testing so that companies can trial and analyze tweaks to their site; the ability to personalize, for example showing different versions of their site to different groups of consumers depending on geography.

And built around SFCC is an entire universe of integrations (which Salesforce likes to call cartridges) so that brands can tweak and change and add almost anything about the online experience, from new shipping methods and payment gateways to blog and forum extensions.

Back in August the San Fran-based company was added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and one month later reported a 21% boost in its second quarter earnings. And earlier this month, they announced the ambitious and pricey acquisition of communication platform Slack.

Such a strong performance during difficult times contributed to CNN Business naming Salesforce chief Marc Benioff its CEO of 2020.

Speaking of the announcement, beyond mentioning his pride that Salesforce has become one of the biggest tech companies in the world, Benioff also focussed on continuing to promote “values that we felt were important – especially with this Covid nightmare.”

Salesforce collaborated with Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba to obtain 60 million items of personal protective equipment (PPE) for hundreds of first responders, nursing homes, and hospitals.

“We also have to take care of others who are less fortunate,” Benioff said. “Small- and medium-sized businesses are on my mind. Many of them will not recover.”

On top of that, SF also developed brand new software called Work that has helped businesses handle Covid-19 contact tracing as well as other emergency response measures.

“We are happy we could do this,” added Benioff. “We’ve had a great shareholder return since going public in 2004 but also a great stakeholder return… We can all get through this together. That’s what is really important to us.”

Speaking of the Slack acquisition, Benioff said: “Slack is our new headquarters. We are moving into Slack… We will be working from home forever. Will physical offices come back? Yes. But the home workplace will be dominant.

“Putting Salesforce and Slack together is a one plus one equals seven equation. Slack benefits because of our reach.”

Such a trajectory puts Salesforce on a path in which they hope to hit $50 billion in annual revenue within the next couple of years.

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