Serious Cold Calling 2.0 Challenges At Salesforce.com You might assume that the prospecting was easy "just because it was Salesforce.com," now a well known brand, and those companies would take our calls. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although today Salesforce.com is a globally recognized brand company and the Software-as-aService (SaaS) licensing model is broadly accepted, back in the early and mid-2000’s, things were different: Salesforce.com was unknown and misunderstood in most companies. If someone had heard of Salesforce.com, they typically thought, “Don’t you offer outsourced sales teams?” Salesforce.com was pioneering the concept of Software-as-aService, offering its products online and on-demand; SaaS had not yet become accepted by mainstream companies. Furthermore, traditional prospecting techniques just didn’t work. (That's why I decided to throw out all the books and legacy ideas and start from scratch. Because I had zero sales experience prior to Salesforce.com, I had a fresh perspective.) All of these factors stood in our way—but we didn’t give up. The executive team gave me the time (four months) I needed to keep experimenting until I could create a process that worked. Are you making excuses (which may sound like extremely logical reasons) for not finding ways to get around your challenges?