Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Said On Wednesday Salesforce Is “The Fastest Growing Enterprise Software Publisher Of All Time” With Successful Organic Growth And Shutdown Recently
acquisition
of the Slack collaboration app for roughly $ 28 billion.
“We are the fastest growing enterprise software company of all time,” Benioff told listeners on the company’s second quarter earnings conference call on Wednesday. “You know that. You follow us. You see where the numbers are going. You can see what the trajectory, the velocity of the business is, both in terms of revenue and margin. And now you can. also see that no other software company of our size and scope is really good at this level.
Milestones for the San Francisco-based customer relationship management software company over the past three months include its first quarter to surpass $ 6 billion in sales, up 23% year-over-year . Salesforce has struck the “biggest deal ever, based on new annual recurring revenue” in the United States – with a public sector client, Gavin Patterson, Salesforce chief revenue officer, told auditors – and the start of contracts including Slack, which was acquired on July 21.
[RELATED: Salesforce Closes $27.7B Slack Acquisition, Preparing For Microsoft Teams Battle]
Gireesh Sonnad, CEO of New York-based Salesforce Partner Silverline, told CRN in a recent interview that his business has grown “on par” with the Salesforce ecosystem. His company added a division serving media and entertainment companies with the July acquisition of Toronto-based Shift CRM.
“We are really excited about the future,” Sonnad said. “We continue to be quite optimistic, of course, about the Salesforce ecosystem. ”
He said Silverline has generated a lot of customer interest in MuleSoft’s integration work and that he expects more work to come using Tableau for performance analysis. And his company is still in its infancy exploring how Slack fits into its portfolio of products and services.
“We’re pretty optimistic about Slack and what it might mean going forward and how Salesforce will continue to drive it as part of its overall collaboration suite and the ‘work from anywhere’ concept. “, did he declare.
Praise for Slack
The number of Slack paying customers spending more than $ 100,000 a year accelerated in the quarter, up 41%, Salesforce CFO Amy Weaver said on the call.
Patterson said the company’s sales teams use Slack to close deals, providing customers with real-time demos of what they’re buying.
“We are starting to sell through Slack,” he said. “Often the most powerful presentation in sales teams is Salesforce on Salesforce. And so, Slack on Slack is a very compelling way to explain how we use the product. We are starting to do more and more of this.
“We are looking to close deals by doing the deal itself on Slack, creating channels between us and the customer, and making sure everyone working on the deal can have real-time access to the deal. these channels, ”he continued. “This means that deals close much faster. In fact, the Slack deal itself was made on Slack.
Salesforce COO Bret Taylor told listeners to look forward to further offerings involving multiple Salesforce clouds that include Slack as well as integrations with Slack and the Salesforce suite of products, which includes the Tableau data analysis tool and MuleSoft integration tool.
On August 17, Salesforce announced new integrations with Slack under the platform name “Slack-First Customer 360”, according to a statement from the company. Integrations include digital transaction roms that allow sales reps to update Salesforce records and meeting information from within Slack; daily automated briefings in Slack; the ability to create Slack channels for service teams to collaborate on complex cases; Direct sharing in Slack of Marketing Cloud information and Datorama and Slack notifications connected to Tableau data that require action.
Slack will bring “a whole new dimension to Salesforce” with collaboration apps serving as the front-end to the way employees work in 2021.
“There couldn’t be a more relevant product at a more relevant time for each of our customers,” he said. “If you talk to any CEO, read the headline of any newspaper, or even look in the home office that most of you are sitting there right now, you can see the depth of work. transformation that was accomplished this year. Sales meetings have gone from conference rooms to Slack and Zoom. Contact centers were once buildings, and now they exist entirely in the cloud. My commute is moved from the highway to mainly my lane. Slack is at the center of it all. Slack is how organizations around the world are successful in this all-digital work in your world. This is your digital HQ. It connects your employees, partners, customers on a single platform and a platform that people love to use.
“Slack is a one-of-a-kind company that is transforming the way we work and the vision we have for our business over the next decade,” he continued.
One of the trends fueling the company’s growth is the continued investment in remote working even over a year since the start of the global pandemic, Taylor said.
“We’ve opened half of our offices but, as you can imagine, there aren’t as many people registered as we had hoped at this point due to this pandemic,” Taylor said. “I started two businesses and started planning my office space. Now, if you’re starting a business, you start by planning your digital HQ. And that’s really what we want to bring to every business in the world: to help them build the digital infrastructure to help them succeed in this new normal. “
Quarterly performance
Salesforce reported revenue of $ 6.34 billion for the quarter, which ended July 31, an increase of 23% year-over-year. It has a current remaining performance obligation of around $ 18.7 billion, a 23% year-over-year increase, according to the company. Salesforce is still on track to hit $ 50 billion in sales in fiscal 2026, Weaver said.
“Our seven-figure contracts averaged over four and a half clouds,” she said. “The number of seven-digit agreements, including five or more clouds, increased 29% year-over-year, showing the continued momentum of our corporate agreements. ”
“We continue to build on what we learned during the pandemic on how we can work effectively in a digital-first or hybrid environment,” she continued. “Some examples of this: the virtual move to market, the activation of sales, which is largely virtual at this point, thanks to digital, and also a renewed emphasis on financial automation, which I think , will pay off in the long run. “
The company expects revenue of between $ 6.78 billion and $ 6.79 billion in the next quarter. He expects to earn between $ 26.2 billion and $ 26.3 billion in the year, including $ 530 million net of purchase accounting from Slack.
Subscription and support sales were $ 5.9 billion, up 22% year-on-year.
The company’s sales cloud grew 15% year-over-year to $ 1.5 million in sales. Service Cloud reported revenue of $ 1.6 million, up 23% year-over-year. Marketing and Commerce Cloud reported revenue of $ 955 million, up 28% year-over-year.
Taylor said Industry Cloud grew 58% year-over-year in terms of annual recurring revenue. Four of the top 10 second quarter deals came from the public sector.
The company’s platform and other division reported sales of $ 1.9 million, a 24% year-over-year increase. Tableau and MuleSoft’s subscription and support sales combined accounted for 42% of those sales.
“Tableau is in nine of our top 10 deals this quarter,” Taylor said. “MuleSoft was in eight of our top 10 deals.”
Slack’s revenue “accelerated to 39% year-over-year growth on a stand-alone basis,” Taylor said, without providing specific numbers. Slack Connect has grown 200% year over year.
“Slack comes back in every one of my conversations with customers, and I couldn’t be more thrilled with the momentum of the business,” Taylor said.
Salesforce stock rose about 1.78% on Wednesday after hours, trading at $ 265.50 per share. It opened at $ 260.86.
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