Jason M. Lemkin explains why Salesforce and HubSpot won by building multiple products while Dropbox and Box struggled as single-product companies. Salesforce now needs three times the pipeline coverage it used to, a sign that deals are getting harder to close.
Salesforce also just said that now they need 3x pipeline coverage versus 2x historically. Now they need 3 because it's just 50% harder to close. What Salesforce got right was they have a lot of clouds. HubSpot also got this right. HubSpot if it didn't have five core products it would be slowing. When we look at the boxes and the Dropboxes and I think both Aaron and Drew are honest here, they were very late to go multi product and arguably Dropbox isn't multi product at all. Arguably it's one product but box is kind of getting there. But I would say it's like multiple facets of the same product. So that's a different existential issue that founders need to be laser focused on after a certain amount of customers just to not exhaust the one product world. We're getting better at it but I think getting caught as a one product company is very different than Salesforce getting that right. But seeing saturation in multiple products.
