Salesforce Is Making Headlines, But What For?

Salesforce is a household name for every professional no matter which industry we are from. And in this quarter they just became bigger when they announced their Q2 earnings on 26th August.

Salesforce reported revenue of a whopping $5.15 billion for their Q2, the first time ever in the history of their company with net income $2.63 billion. They had a 29% year-on-year growth beating all of their estimates.

This directly impacted their stock, which was made public in 2004, which jumped around 26%.

As reported by IDC in 2019, Salesforce has more market revenue share than Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, and Adobe combined.

When asked about what helped them pivot Salesforce during this pandemic where most of the businesses are struggling to even survive, Marc Benioff told Yahoo Finance’s correspondent Julia that staying relevant and having a beginner’s mind are the key.

But how did they stay relevant?

Around March and April, they launched Work.com which does contact tracing and helps businesses curb the impact of COVID-19 with features like Workplace Command Centre, Emergency Response Management, MuleSoft Accelerator for Work.com, and more.

Moreover, their two acquisitions, Tableau and MuleSoft, paid off big in maintaining their product’s relevancy as companies are starting to understand the importance of analytics and data visualization where Tableau comes in and having customer’s 360 information where MuleSoft comes in helping connect platforms and data mapping.

Moreover, they also realized that since everybody is going to be working from home for a long time, they’d require their tools and software to be as flexible which is when they announced the launch of their Salesforce Anywhere.

You can see their demo from here.

Marc also stated the importance of opportunities that Trailhead is helping them create not only for Salesforce but for everyone that is associated with the company by providing answers to every question they have and by educating them about the products and helping them understand how best they can use their products.

This is not the only thing that has kept Salesforce in the news for quite some days now.

Just after announcing the quarter earnings, Salesforce also announced that they will lay off around 1,000 of their employees which is around 2% of their workforce. 

“We’re reallocating resources to position the company for continued growth. This includes continuing to hire and redirecting some employees to fuel our strategic areas, and eliminating some positions that no longer map to our business priorities. For affected employees, we are helping them find the next step in their careers, whether within our company or a new opportunity,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement.

There was a lot of backlash on Twitter considering the timing as well as the situation but most importantly because of the pledge that Marc took to not lay-off people for at least 3 months.

And just a little after 150 days, they announced the layoffs which can show Salesforce in a negative light.

According to the conversation mentioned above, these steps are necessary for Salesforce to take in the light of shareholder capitalism and in his words, “you have to do well, to do good.”

Salesforce is helping these 1,000 people to find new opportunities inside the company as well as outside with reskilling and training. 

What’s your take?

According to you, what’s helping Salesforce stand out and maintain the lead in the CRM market? And what do you think about their layoffs?

Leave your comments.