* Q4 sales forecast slightly better than consensus

* ExactTarget acquisition going smoothly, sales goal lifted

* Shares trading near all-time highs

By Gerry Shih

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 18 (Reuters) - Salesforce.com Inc forecast fourth-quarter revenue to come in slightly better than analysts' projections, helped by a strong performance by newly acquired email marketing firm ExactTarget.

The San Francisco-based cloud computing company paid $2.5 billion in June for ExactTarget, its most expensive acquisition to date and a sum that has invited scrutiny from investors.

But Salesforce executives Monday said they had raised ExactTarget's estimated revenue for the year from roughly $140 million to $180 million, alleviating concerns about the deal.

Brian Schwartz, an analyst at Oppenheimer and Co, said ExactTarget's new revenue forecasts topped his own projections by $20 million.

"They're starting to execute on their marketing strategy," Schwartz said. "They have traction in there."

For the fourth quarter ending Jan. 31, Salesforce predicted revenue of between $1.12 billion and $1.13 billion, versus $1.12 billion expected by analysts.

It expects fiscal 2014 sales to come in between $4.05 billion to $4.06 billion. It also projected 2015 sales of between $5.15 billion and $5.2 billion, in line with analysts' estimates of $5.2 billion.

Chief Executive Marc Benioff has roughly quadrupled top-line sales in four years and its shares are trading near all-time highs.

Much like Amazon.com Inc's chief executive Jeff Bezos, Benioff, who founded Salesforce in 1999, has for years shrugged off calls from Wall Street to turn a bigger profit by arguing that it was more important to re-invest earnings to gobble up market share.

GETTING THE RIGHT BALANCE

For the quarter ended Oct. 31, Salesforce said revenue rose 36 percent to $1.08 billion, narrowly beating Wall Street expectations, as its core sales software business held firm.

Excluding certain items, it earned 9 cents per share in the third quarter, in line with a Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S analyst consensus.

Salesforce's unbilled deferred revenue, a critical measure of contracts that have been closed with business customers but remain off-balance sheet, rose to $4.2 billion, up 40 percent from a year earlier.

Total operating expenses rose 38 percent from a year prior.

For the fourth quarter, Salesforce said it expects to earn 5 cents or 6 cents per share, slightly below the 7 cents expected.

Benioff said Monday that he would seek to balance "growth and profitability" but stressed that he would not jeopardize his company's "outrageous" pace of revenue expansion.