The 80s marked the birth of the first digital sales application, called Act!, which stood for "Automated Contact Tracking"
Act! allowed you to move the paper world of the rolodex to the PC and let an individual sales rep track sales contacts and activity digitally.
What's crazy about Act!, is that they're still around today, with over 800,000 users.
Siebel Systems took the desktop world of Act!, and moved it to the enterprise with a client-server architecture in order to support large sales teams working together.
Tom Siebel not only launched a company, he launched an entire category by 1) buying up a conference and renaming it Sales Force Automation, where Siebel had the largest booth and the main keynote, and 2) co-authoring a book with Michael Malone "Virtual Selling: Going Beyond the Automated Sales Force to Achieve Total Sales Quality" that laid out how systems like Siebel's could make sales reps more effective. A masterclass on category design and positioning.
Siebel quickly became the dominant industry player, with over $1B of revenue and 45% market share, going public only 3 years after its founding. It was later acquired by Oracle for $5.8 billion.
Salesforce revolutionized CRM by introducing the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, making CRM accessible via the cloud. This eliminated the need for costly on-premises installations.
The biggest initial innovation was in the business model. By delivering Salesforce as a cloud service, anyone with a web browser and credit card could provision seats of a CRM in a matter of minutes, at a fraction of the cost of Siebel.
The second innovation came when they launched Salesforce AppExchange in 2005, the world's first enterprise software app store, which allowed third party vendors to fill in all the feature gaps faster than Salesforce could ever do on their own.
Salesforce’s early early marketing included hiring actors to protest against “traditional software” at a Siebel conference, promoting its “No Software” slogan
Salesforce was the first SaaS vendor to surpass $1B in revenue and today is the largest CRM player, with over 25% market share.
The CRM breakout player of the 2010s was HubSpot. But that’s not where they started.
Hubspot’s focus in the beginning was all around marketing, specifically a form of marketing they pioneered called Inbound Marketing. HubSpot started as a blog showcasing inbound marketing ideas before evolving into a full-fledged software company. Its founders even wrote a book titled Inbound Marketing to promote their philosophy.
Eight years later (about 10 years ago), they decided to expand their footprint and launched their CRM - Hubspot Sales Hub.
Sales Hub’s biggest draw was its free tier. If you were a Founder, you now had to choose between paying for seats of Salesforce, or getting something pretty comparable for free.
Hubspot also integrated a number of innovations that others had pioneered that had not made it into the core Salesforce offering - the Kanban pipeline view from Pipedrive, and the automatic logging of emails and calendar data from RelateIQ, which reduced manual data entry.
But the unique kicker was that Hubspot’s Sales and Marketing Hubs were integrated, so you could get a more complete view of customers across those two touchpoints.
Sales Hub gained a lot of traction in the SMB market, and quickly grew to be a big part of Hubspot’s overall product suite, which now has almost $3B in annual subscription revenue.