How Do Acquisitions Put a Startup in Front of Salesforce's Sales Force?

Alex Immerman says an acquisition can put a startup in front of Salesforce's 15,000 sales reps, and that in the case of Listen Labs a handful of those reps can open the product to the whole sales team. John Somorjai says building that channel alone takes a very long time. A company has to hire the reps, ramp them, enable them, and get them productive, across small business, medium-sized business, and enterprises, and it has to do that globally. He calls that a heavy task.

Salesforce also keeps a partner path. Somorjai says the company works with probably more than 8,000 ISV partners, and Salesforce Ventures sometimes invests in those partners, so a customer can buy a partner product or a Salesforce product. A founder then decides whether this is the right time to sell and plug the technology into a company that already has the channel, or to keep going alone, keep raising, and dilute further. He sets many years of that work against getting the technology into customers' hands as widely and as quickly as possible.