How Salesforce built itself into a prime contractor
Gettyimages.com/ Frank Brennan
By
Nick Wakeman
National security leader says that close ties to defense and intel customers require a direct role instead of working only through partners.
It would be easy to correlate Saleforce’s prime contracting strategy to the Trump administration’s efforts to forge more direct relationships with commercial technology providers.
But the company’s shift from working predominantly through partners to also being the lead contractor for defense and intelligence community customers goes back years.
“Being able to deliver on both trust and customer success requires a level of intimacy with the customer and connectiveness that you can only get by being a prime contractor,” said Bill Pessin, senior vice president for national security at Salesforce. His business goes to market under the brand Missionforce.
To make the shift, the company has built the infrastructure needed to be a prime. Those investments stretch back several years and include the 2021 acquisition of Acumen, which was a 100% Salesforce professional services firm. More recently, it acquired Computable Insights to move more deeply into the defense and intelligence market.
“Our IC customers expect us to be able to operate and hold security clearances and to operate in classified spaces,” Pessin said. “We had already been partnering with Computable Insights and so we acquired their tech and their facility clearance.”
Computable Insights is a wholly owned subsidiary and is the name on some of Salesforce's large recent wins including a $5.5 billion Army contract. The Army contract is also available across all of DOD and will be a primary vehicle for Salesforce’s go-to-market defense strategy, Pessin said.
For example, in May, the Air Force used the contract to sign a $72 million enterprise license agreement with Salesforce.
Salesforce also has a similar contract vehicle that can be leveraged across the intelligence community, where the company is deploying an air-gapped Salesforce implementation. That work has accelerated Salesforce push to be a prime, Pessin said.
“We are not looking to have dozens and dozens of new IDIQs,” he said.
Salesforce also is not abandoning its work with partners. When the project is primarily based on Salesforce, the company will be the prime. When a Salesforce solution is more of a support feature, a traditional prime is more likely to take the lead.
“What’s really cool about this is our partners are finding this new motion to be truly exciting for them,” Pessin said. “We’ve always had a partner friendly approach to the business, and this move opens up a whole new dimension.”
Being a prime takes more than just adding a new label or marketing tag. In addition to the Acumen and Computable Insights investments, the company also has created a program management office, a beefier business development organization, and a larger contracts and legal apparatus.
“There are prime contractor responsibilities that you don’t necessarily get burdened with when you are just a vendor to a prime,” Pessin said. “You have to have the people, processes and technologies in place to do the things prime contractors do.”
But the benefits of being the prime outweigh the costs and added responsibilities, Pessin said.
“When a customer picks Salesforce for a mission critical capability or solutions, that’s our brand,” he said. “A direct relationship removes any daylight between us and our customers.”