It sounds like they paid about 10x revenue per customer (according to dhh https://twitter.com/dhh). That doesn't seem unreasonable, but I'm not sure about the murky area of valuation. Is it high compared to other similar acquisitions? Also, how does talent factor into a valuation?
Salesforce Buys ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion
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Re: Salesforce Buys ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
My own experience is that their internal sales teams and enterprise consultants are separate islands based on the product and they are very poor at cross-selling. We're a pretty decent size Salesforce.com customer and they have never even attempted to sell us other services. Not Radian6, not Buddy Media - hell, we had to ask them about Data.com. So I'm doubting their ability to cross-sell. And then the integration is…
Do you feel your experience is representative of how their sales teams generally work? (genuine question) If that's the case I'm surprised, since decision makers (especially at C-level) overlap a lot, their products' basic use cases and value propositions are relatively straightforward and they have armies of pre and post sales specialists to refine the proposal and worry about implementation details. Maybe I'm overe…
In this case, I think it is a function of the fact that these are acquisitions and my guess is you have stovepiping going on. Meaning, the organizations probably aren't properly aligned.
Sales teams can function this way - but usually the way I've seen it setup is that you have a group that is focused on cross-sell/up-sell after the close of some additional business (farmers) vs. a hunter organization.
Re: Salesforce Buys ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion
#53We're the little guy competing against ExactTarget. I had no idea their business wasn't profitable. From their customers who have reached out to me, it seems that for web businesses to integrate with them there are huge complexities (like mirroring your production database, and having ET engineers write custom code for you). Even with all this they've clearly been successful on the revenue front. With an acquisition…
If you're that hung up on profits you're likely to remain the little guy. It's idiotic to try for profits when you're in growth mode.
Re: Salesforce Buys ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion
#54I would comment on this, but DHH has captured my thoughts nearly exactly on Twitter today: http://twitter.com/dhh This is insane. $2.5b for a company that has lost money through its existence, has a very small set of (likely not-so-diverse) clients (6,000ish), and makes 10% of what they paid for them in revenue ? Strikes me as a crazy purchase, but perhaps there's something else afoot that I don't see. I've been prov…
BuddyMedia was losing money also it didn't stop salesforce from buying them for 600M http://www.businessinsider.com/look-inside-buddy-media-money...