Copying Benioff's No Software campaign 26 years later

In 1999 Salesforce ran a campaign that was a red circle with a slash through the word "software." They hired fake protesters. They picketed a Siebel conference. The message was aggressive, slightly absurd, and completely legible to anyone walking past.

We ran "No SaaS" at SaaStr this year, which is that campaign with one word swapped.

I'm not going to pretend that's original. It's the point. The reason to study it is that it's one of the few campaigns in b2b history where you can trace a category shift back to a piece of creative, and the mechanics of why it worked are all still available.

Why the original worked

Three things, and none of them are the design.

It named an enemy that wasn't a company. "Software" meant on-prem, meant implementation consultants, meant 18 month deployments. Every buyer had personally suffered it. Attacking a pattern lets everyone who has been burned by that pattern join in, and it doesn't make you look like you're punching at a competitor.

It was a physical object in a place where buyers already were. Not a campaign page. A thing you saw on your way into a building.

And it committed. Half-doing this reads as a stunt. Doing it everywhere, for years, reads as a position.

What we did

Our enemy is per seat pricing. Same shape: a pattern, not a person, that our buyers have all personally suffered. Every support leader has had the conversation where they can't add a contractor for a busy month because seats cost money, and every one of them has now had the newer conversation where the vendor charges per seat and per AI resolution.

So: "No SaaS," pointed at the pricing model rather than the delivery model.

Panda mascots, because they photograph well and people take pictures with them and those pictures go out on other people's LinkedIn.

Sign holders at Gate 15, so attendees saw it before they got inside the building and past the sponsor wall we'd paid to be on.

Hawaiian shirts on the whole team, which sounds like a small thing and was one of the highest-leverage decisions we made. At a conference where every booth is dark blue and every shirt is a black quarter-zip, you can find our people from across a hall.

What worked

Being findable. That's most of it. In a room of 300 vendors saying "agentic," the differentiator wasn't the message, it was being physically identifiable at 40 feet.

The message doing the qualifying. "No SaaS" is confusing enough at a saas conference that people ask what it means, which is a conversation opener that isn't "can I scan your badge." Then the answer is "$0 per seat," and either their eyes light up or they don't, and either way you know in 10 seconds.

Other people's cameras. We spent on a videographer and got more distribution out of attendees photographing the pandas than out of anything we produced ourselves.

What didn't

The joke has a ceiling. "No SaaS" is a great 8 second hook and a bad 20 minute explanation. Once someone's sitting down, the campaign stops helping and the product has to work. We were slower than we should have been to make that handoff on the floor.

And a borrowed campaign carries the risk that someone in the room remembers the original. A few people did. Reaction was split between "nice" and a raised eyebrow, and the eyebrow is fair. If you're going to lift a playbook you should say you lifted it, which is what this post is.

The transferable part

Pick the pattern your buyers have suffered, not the competitor you're annoyed by. Put it somewhere physical, before the place they expect to be sold to. Be findable. Commit to it long enough that it stops looking like a stunt.

None of that is about pandas.

We'll run it again in September and again in Barcelona in October. At some point it stops being a campaign and starts being what we're known for, or it wears out and we find out that too. Third time will tell.