The Communication Skills Marc Benioff Says They Don’t Teach You In Business School

It’s a good week for Salesforce and CEO, Marc Benioff. One day after its name was added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Salesforce reported one of its best quarters in company history, blowing past Wall Street’s expectations. 

Benioff is a pioneer of cloud computing, a visionary, and passionate philanthropist. He’s also a disciplined communicator, a skill he began to hone early in his career. 

While attending USC, Benioff’s professors told him, “When you play with better tennis players, you’re going to get better. You need to go find the best salespeople possible.” 

Benioff heard that Oracle had the best salespeople in technology. He applied and was hired. “They started to work with me and helped me understand how to be a better communicator,” he said.

After 13 years at Oracle, Benioff had a vision of where the Internet was going, and started his own company, pioneering the category of ‘software-as-a-service.”

Benioff understood that to stand out and get noticed, he’d have to tell a story that captures the media’s attention. 

“Always pitch the bigger picture,” he once said. 

“Reporters are writers. They like to write stories with a protagonist, a villain and a plot. Our story was that the big evil software companies were extorting millions from customers. And the Internet was coming to save these customers…You don’t learn that in business school.”

When I interviewed Benioff for his first book, Behind the Cloud, I was impressed with how much thought he put into telling the Salesforce story.

“Communication is probably the most essential part of my job,” Benioff told me. 

“I spend a lot of time creating metaphors to explain what we do.

For example, early on I explained what we did with the metaphor ‘salesforce.com is Amazon.com meets Siebel Systems.’ Later when we launched AppExchange we called it ‘the eBay of enterprise software.’ You have to be able to relate your product to something familiar.”

Benioff said that creating metaphors is a hard exercise, but valuable because journalists, customers, employees and investors can’t always come up with one on their own. Benioff spent hours and hours on creating just the right metaphors because it was crucial to spreading the gospel of software as a service. 

Today, Benioff hammers home the message that companies can make a profit by doing good.

On CNBC’s Mad Money with Jim Cramer after Tuesday’s earnings announcement, Benioff called the record quarter “a victory for stakeholder capitalism,” a recurring theme at this year’s World Economic Forum at Davos. 

“It shows you can do well and you can do good at the same time,” Benioff said.

“This is a moment when we have to think, not only about serving all of our customers, but how to take care of our communities because there are in so much pain… While we are growing the company and while we are doing well for our customers, we are also taking care of our stakeholders. That is our very core of who we are at Salesforce.com.”

Leadership in today’s world requires that CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business professionals communicate effectively with a wide variety of stakeholders: investors, employees, potential employees, customers, regulators, partners, and people on social media.

Those leaders like Benioff who make communication a priority will stand out from the competition.