Delighted to be kicking off day three here, our final day of the conference. Sad that it's coming to a conclusion, but it's been an exciting week here. We're delighted to be inviting Salesforce to the conference. Welcome, Brian Millham.
Thanks, Brad. Appreciate it.
Thanks. Thanks so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
President and COO. I'm Brad Sills. I'm a senior analyst on large-cap software. And before we get started, just a quick commercial. It is II season, and we would love your vote. The tech team works hard here to put on events like this and content through the year. So, your support on the II vote is always much appreciated. With that, Brian, again, welcome. Looking forward to the discussion.
Thank you.
Thanks so much.
Looking forward to it too.
Why don't we just start, you know, on your role as President and COO and your areas of responsibility in the organization.
Sure.
You know, how that fits in with the rest of the executive team, Marc and the executive team.
So I'm responsible for, COO of the company, obviously, and responsible for all of our sales organization, our professional services business, our partners, what we call customer success as well. I have HR. I have our business technology organization. And so I have roughly about 70% of the org. I always say maybe it's easier to talk about things that I don't have, which is finance and, and our product and engineering organization.
Okay.
A huge chunk of that rolls up through me.
Wonderful. Great. Q1 results, you know, fresh off the results last week.
Yep.
Why don't you do you wanna just touch on some of the key highlights that, you know, from the earnings report?
Yeah. There was, you know, I think I'd describe it as a mixed result for Salesforce. Some certainly some highlights in the quarter. Obviously, cash flow is very strong. Our attrition numbers are good. We had strength in our business and, and what we call multi-cloud deals, our large transactions. We're very good, actually, in the quarter, growing 25%, deals over $1 million. So feel, feel good about where we're going on the, on the multi-cloud strategy. Strengths around the geographies. We saw very good strength in, in our Japan business. It continues to be a great, great part of our organization. A great leader, Koide-san, over there that, has been with us for quite some time, 10 years, and really outstanding leader. Canada was a strength for us, which was good to see, and North America to see some strength, in that business.
India continues to be a great driver of growth for us, albeit smaller, but also a great strategy for us as we think about location strategy. We've really moved a lot of our talent. I should say we haven't moved them. We've hired a lot of great talent into the India market.
Okay.
As a strategy for scale and growth. And, you know, some of our industries performed very well. PubSec was very, very strong for us in the quarter. Financial services was strong in the quarter, which is great to see.
Mm-hmm.
Some great transactions in that business. I may have mentioned our attrition numbers, but a real strength for us in the quarter too was our attrition was lower than expected. We actually beat plan on the attrition side.
Mm-hmm.
Still seeing a lot of customer success.
Mm-hmm.
With our customers. So, you know, those were certainly the good stories.
Mm-hmm.
We did feel some headwinds in our Americas business, and EMEA as well. And then, a bit of a surprise in the quarter was our Latin America business did not perform as well.
Mm-hmm.
has been a strength for this organization for quite some time and really, a driver of growth. Largely due to deals pushing out in that market. We had some large transactions that did not come together in Latin America. Good news is many of them have come over the line in May.
Good.
And so, feel good about where they're gonna be in the second quarter.
Mm-hmm. Wonderful. You're certainly not alone in the software industry with experiencing some macro pressure.
Yep.
I think you also talked about some execution changes.
Yeah.
That also had some impact. So if you could elaborate on that as well.
Yeah. Happy to. It's always a challenge. Q1 is always a difficult quarter.
Yeah.
You spend a year executing as well as you can, and then you look forward and say, "Hey, what are the things that you wanna do as a leader to make sure you're set up for growth and scale?
Yep.
Not in Q1, but over the next 3 to 5 years, how do you think differently about your go-to-market strategies?
Mm-hmm.
We, I think, as you probably know, Brad, if you've been following us for quite some time, we wanted to make some changes in our go-to-market. We think we can get more efficient in the way that we dedicate our resources to the opportunity.
Mm-hmm.
We don't need a fully dedicated sales team for every product that we have.
Mm-hmm.
And so as we brought teams together, it does create some account relationship changes in the quarter.
Mm-hmm.
I'll give you an example. We really feel like, our core sellers can sell our Slack technology as an example.
Mm-hmm.
A dedicated team of, you know, 500 sellers. Why not put that product in the bag of our 10,000 sellers?
Mm-hmm.
Good idea. Worked actually very well in our first quarter. Actually saw great growth. That would be a change that we created.
Mm-hmm.
Another change would be, we sell a commerce product and a marketing cloud product. Both buyers are VP of marketing.
Mm-hmm.
Well, let's put those two teams together and see how we can go accelerate that business. Short-term disruption, but longer-term scale that we're gonna get in that business. So some examples of things that we're doing to drive more efficiencies in the organization long-term will be much better for the company.
Mm-hmm.
Both from a cost perspective, but we really believe selling more of our technology, more in the hands, drive productivity up for our sellers will be a driver of growth going forward. And that's why we created some of those changes.
Okay. Wonderful. And, you know, back to the macro commentary. I think, if I'm reading this properly, it sounded like the environment kinda reverted back to what you had seen in Q3. Q4 might have been a situation where you sales reps rose to the occasion. You executed really well, but the underlying demand environment might have been kinda pretty similar to what you've been seeing. And I know it's been challenging really for the last couple of years.
That's right.
In general across the industry.
Yeah.
So how would you describe it? I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but.
No, you kinda nailed it. I think we all had hopes coming out of Q4 that this was the new normal and we're gonna see this sort of acceleration. We had a very strong fourth quarter from an execution perspective. In retrospect, looking back on it, I think it was probably more to do with really strong execution by the sales teams, the product teams, our executive staff, everybody in delivering our fourth quarter.
Mm-hmm.
versus it being a change in the macro environment. We still feel the measured environment out there right now.
Mm-hmm.
and really felt it in Q1. You know, Q1s to Q4s are also very different. They're different fields. You know, you.
Yeah.
As you know, in tech, everyone sort of gears up. They have that big fourth quarter.
Sure.
We certainly did that this year and had the big deals and the small deals and mid-sized deals. It all came together in our fourth quarter.
Okay.
Every time you roll over to a new year, it's a new start and you're trying to figure out go-to-market changes, for example.
Mm-hmm.
You couple that with, you know, what I think we've been very clear about is sort of the pipeline issues that have existed for Salesforce. What we call coverage ratios when we enter a quarter. Q3, Q4 last year, we were able to bridge weaker coverage ratios with just better execution.
Mm-hmm.
Q1 with some changes, a tough macro that exists and just sort of the natural sort of slowdown you see in a Q1.
Right.
Sort of combined with some tougher environments out there.
Yeah.
You saw it. I mentioned the Latin America business. You know, one of the strongest sales leaders we have was not able to get some of the big deals that we bet on across the line.
Mm-hmm.
Well, when you diagnose those and you dissect what happened, you're seeing more pressure on budgets. You know, we've gotta, you know, rebuild the ROI plan that we had on the closed design.
Yep.
You know, a lot that's going on that feels very similar to the first half of last year versus the Q4 that we delivered for the business. And so.
Mm-hmm.
You see compressions of deals. We closed a bunch of deals that we thought would be a little bit larger. That's sort of a natural outcome.
Mm-hmm.
So we feel good about our plan for the year. If you ask me, I hold ourselves to a pretty high bar.
Mm-hmm.
We probably had, we could have executed slightly better in Q1.
Mm-hmm.
We had a macro that felt more like the first half of, for us, fiscal year 2024.
Understood. Understood. Well, before we move on from Q1 results, there was a lot of discussion on pipeline at.
Yep.
Earnings call. Wanted to double-click on that if we could, please. Just where is the focus there? You mentioned that there was a bit of a shortfall this, this quarter. I know that's an initiative to kind of improve upon that. What, what, what is the focus there?
Yeah. You know, it's interesting. We've, you know, in my tenure at Salesforce, I, we've always had this mantra of you need to have 3x pipeline coverage in any given quarter that you're entering to get to the numbers and the commits you wanna get to. It's been harder. In the same way, it's harder to close deals.
Mm-hmm.
You know, it's harder to generate pipeline in this market as well.
Mm-hmm.
We felt very good about our ability to generate. The demand environment is still strong. It's actually where the pipeline is landing in quarters.
Yep.
Into the future.
Yep.
So in a better market condition, you might see, you know, you generate $1 billion in pipeline and it lands, you know, 50% of it will land in the quarter you're in and 50% will land in the quarter that's one out. We're seeing those deals landing further and further out in the quarter. So it's our job to go figure out ways either to generate more pipeline.
Mm-hmm.
In quarter so that we're able to hit the numbers or be able to put more value associated with the transaction so that we're able to pull them forward from future quarters.
Mm-hmm.
We need our product teams more integrated into the demand. So we've really built a tighter partnership around the campaigns that we're gonna go to run and generate that pipeline.
Mm-hmm.
So feel good about where we are. As an example, in our Q1, we beat our pipeline goals significantly. We're very happy about the demand that we're seeing out there.
Mm-hmm.
You know, do we need to raise the targets a little bit in this environment to make sure that we've got the coverage on the, on the bookings number? I think we do. And that's, that's the plan that we have in place right now. Everyone focused across the company, our marketing organization, our product teams, our sales organization, our SEs, everybody focused on this pipeline generation issue. We wanna get to a quarter that we're not having to grind out every single month because it's just tough in this market.
Sure.
Let's raise the pipeline volume so that we're able to deliver the numbers.
That makes sense. That makes sense. Are there any bright spots within the pipeline build effort?
Yeah.
Any clouds or offerings you'd call out?
Yeah. There's, you know, the resilience of our big Sales Cloud and Service Cloud products is sort of amazing. I'm always sort of blown away when you look at those technologies. Sales Cloud and Service Cloud alone would be some of the largest software companies, cloud companies in the world just in a standalone environment.
Uh-huh.
We continue to see demand for sales and service. Our Data Cloud product has been a home run for us and we continue to see the demand from our customers there, albeit an organic innovation that takes a while to have a big impact on an org of our size. We are seeing great acceleration there. Our Industry Clouds continue to be a great driver of our growth for us and really solid. We feel very strong about where the pipes are landing by regions as well. And so, this is all broken down. The cloud variance will sort of change slightly by markets. And so it's hard to give you like a specific, but on the roll-up, we feel very good about our core technology.
Mm-hmm.
And the demand that we're creating on the pipeline front.
Wonderful. Great to hear. Thank you. Why don't we shift to some of the key areas of focus in your role as COO? Operational efficiency.
Yeah.
Has been a big focus for the organization. Last year was a big step forward in that, obviously, and you made some tough choices.
Yep.
on some reduction in force. So just, I think it'd be helpful if you could comment on kinda where you are with that effort. Where's the focus incrementally from here on driving operational efficiency and,
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, you're right. Big step forward in a tough year for Salesforce. You never like to take some of the actions that we had to take last year, but appropriate, given the circumstances. And we're proud of the work that we've done. You know, as hard as it was, we've got ourselves in a very different place from a margin perspective. But the work's not done. We always feel that there's more that we can be doing. I mentioned I hold myself to a high bar and it's sort of my job. And I know you had a dinner with Amy Weaver. The two of us are really responsible for the operational efficiencies of this organization.
Mm-hmm.
We're gonna continue to look for ways to drive those efficiencies, but we're also gonna couple that with growth. And so when we make decisions around where we wanna invest now.
Mm-hmm.
It is oriented to how are we gonna go drive the top line and keep an eye on the bottom line? Things like spans and layers, for example.
Mm-hmm.
Do we have places in the organization where we can take people out potentially and invest in things like more AEs or more SEs, for example, in a more technical sale that we're in right now?
Mm-hmm.
with Data Cloud and AI. And so, it is top of mind for us. It's all about operational excellence. That's what we ground ourselves in. It's really changed the culture of the business as well.
Mm-hmm.
We've always been, you know, you sort of look at our business 25 years in and we've always been a performance culture.
Mm-hmm.
We're trying to take that to the next level right now and orient everybody on, hey, we've gotta go figure out a way to grow faster in this business, and this business environment, I should say, but also keep an eye on that, on that bottom line as well. And so strategic investments, let's make sure we're very clear about that. And let's also ask ourselves, are we getting the most from everybody in the business? And if we're not, we're gonna have to make reshaping decisions around the org.
Mm-hmm. Okay. Great. Thank you for that. Why don't we shift to the core business, sales and service?
Yeah.
You mentioned earlier that it's been resilient and we certainly see that in the results.
Yeah.
I think 10%-12% growth consistently over the last several years.
That's right.
I think it'd be helpful to understand kinda where are you in terms of, you know, penetration of that market?
Yeah.
It's one of the largest markets in software.
Yep.
You're the largest vendor in it.
Yep.
So where's the incremental seed coming from and where are you seeing the continued strength in that business?
Yeah. I think, there was sort of this notion that, in the near term, AI was gonna transform sellers and service people. And, and then you realize people still have to get to their numbers.
Yeah.
They still need to hire people and they still need to add more salespeople. We are adding incremental sellers. The base is growing, not quite at the level it was pre-pandemic or even post-pandemic when we saw the cloud companies really accelerate.
Mm-hmm.
We are seeing some growth in that. We also have done a very nice job of pricing and packaging and thinking differently about what products we put in the hands of our sellers.
Mm-hmm.
So we introduced last year what we call UE Plus, Unlimited Edition Plus, which has now been changed to Einstein 1 Edition. So we're seeing a higher price point per user that we're getting from our base. So obviously expanding.
Mm-hmm.
We also have a lot of new technology that we're adding to the portfolio in Sales Cloud. We, you probably know, we did an acquisition for compensation incentive management.
Mm-hmm.
A company called Spiff that has been a nice add-on and will be a driver of growth. Revenue Cloud is an example, something that sits in that portfolio and is driving net new transactions with customers who already use Sales Cloud. And so when we talk about multi-cloud, oftentimes people think, oh, go sell Sales and Service and Marketing and Commerce together. We also have sort of a deeper view of this in a Sales Cloud world where you have Sales Cloud and you can buy.
Mm-hmm.
Spiff or you could buy Revenue Cloud or you could buy ECI or you could buy a bunch of other products as well. And so we've got a sort of a deeper vertical view of it or you can go horizontal across the multi-cloud strategy.
Mm-hmm.
Both are true, by the way, for both sales and service.
Okay. Wonderful. Great to hear. So maybe if we just take a step back here and just look at the kinda broader tech stack that Salesforce offers.
Yep.
What are the key pillars to growth in your mind, you know, going forward?
Yeah. Obviously, the multi-cloud strategy is one. When you have a broad portfolio like this, it's a huge opportunity to go talk to a customer.
Mm-hmm.
Who's happy on your technology, uses you for sales and service, and maybe they wanna use you for marketing or maybe they wanna use for commerce.
Mm-hmm.
Or maybe they wanna build a deeper strategy with their data.
Mm-hmm.
That has become a big opportunity for us as we think about MuleSoft sitting in the center of that.
Mm-hmm.
Bringing data into Data Cloud and then leveraging that as part of the AI strategy going forward.
Mm-hmm.
That's one big growth driver for us is gonna be that multi-cloud strategy. Industries, I mentioned.
Mm-hmm.
A big part of our strategy and has been for quite some time.
Mm-hmm.
Our go-to-market organization shifted to an industry view probably 15 years ago.
Mm-hmm.
We wanna show up to our customers in the right way. When you show up at Bank of America, you don't wanna speak the language of a tech company. You actually wanna speak the language of a bank.
Mm-hmm.
We made that shift, and it was great that we did it and we were winning more deals because we were speaking the language of the customer.
Mm-hmm.
But what we started hearing from them is we also want product. We want product to show up this way as well. I don't wanna have a generic, you know, horizontal product. I want Financial Services Cloud.
Mm-hmm.
So, you've probably seen from our earnings very good results on our Industry Clouds. Been very, very strong.
Mm-hmm.
As you probably know, we're also a very direct-oriented organization. We are a, you know, hire more salespeople and go win the market.
Mm-hmm.
We think we've got an opportunity to do more in the indirect channels as well as a growth driver for us.
Mm-hmm.
I think a big opportunity to leverage new motions. Certainly the old motions of ISVs and we wanna go build our ISVs that resell our technology. The GSI is huge leverage for us in the market. All these big global system integrators that can help us go win transactions. But these marketplaces that have emerged are very interesting to us and we're very excited about the relationship we have with AWS where we run our service on AWS.
Mm-hmm.
AWS wants to burn down commitments that their customers have with them.
Mm-hmm.
And they're allowing Salesforce to do that for them. And so we're doing a lot of joint marketing together in an indirect model that says, hey, you can buy Salesforce through the marketplace on AWS. So new channels that are opening up for us, amazing to see sort of the pipeline that's been built there and the acceleration that's happening.
Mm-hmm.
And so those are some of the things that we're doing. There's many others that we're contemplating in our business right now from a growth driver perspective. International would be another example.
Mm-hmm.
You know, the international markets aren't, you know, they're still feeling the same things that we are certainly in Europe.
Mm-hmm.
But if you look at the total, revenue split by region.
Mm-hmm.
We have room to go faster in international markets and we'll make those decisions from an investment perspective to ensure that we've got enough capacity in those markets to go drive the growth from an international perspective. So, you know, it's funny, we continue to do that work, but if the Americas is so big and they have similar growth rates, you're sort of constantly catching up in that and we think we can surge investment there to get better growth out of the international space.
Wonderful. Great to hear. Thank you for that. You mentioned Data Cloud. Before we go to Data Cloud, why don't we just start kinda higher level on AI, the AI question? Where does AI sit in the Salesforce stack? And, how, how are you addressing the opportunity? And then how does Data Cloud fit into that?
Yeah. Great question. AI has been a huge emphasis for us since probably April of last year. We pivoted the entire company to this transformation.
Mm-hmm.
We wanna make sure that we are leading and I think we are right now. We're, I feel in a very enviable position of, most of our customers are coming to us saying, hey, help us go through this transformation with you. We have the privilege of managing a lot of their data today. All their customer interactions are happening on our platform and they're saying, hey, how can I take advantage of AI to drive higher productivity, better efficiencies in the organization, more margins, better customer relationships? And so, we're excited about the opportunity. What we're seeing on the AI front is a lot of small trials, lots of pilots going on right now, people testing the waters to see what's possible out there.
Mm-hmm.
You know, I think there's a demand that says, hey, let's go get all the benefits right now.
Mm-hmm.
I remind people all the time that, hey, this transformation happened less than a year ago, kinda, and we just released our co-pilots in April.
Mm-hmm.
We don't have a lot baked into our financial plans on AI for the year. We think it's sort of a next year and following year phenomenon.
Mm-hmm.
But we are seeing incredible demand for it. You know, customers wanna be using the AI in the flow of work. You know, if I'm a seller, I wanna be augmented with AI every day. I want someone to be helping me be more efficient, higher productivity so it can drive better growth for me as an individual.
Mm-hmm.
If I'm in the call center, I want cases resolved for me so I don't actually have to go do the mundane work that AI can do, on my behalf.
Mm-hmm.
And so we're seeing a lot of demand and a lot of testing. I was with a very large global brand in the retail space. They have 500 pilots going right now on AI.
Mm-hmm.
All small little things. And the CIO said to me, we wanna find the two or three or four that are really gonna have a big impact on our business. And he goes, I'm kinda using my balance sheet to look at this. Like, where are our costs out of whack? And my opinion, how can we leverage AI in each of these areas? Maybe it's in supply chain. Maybe it's in the go-to-market strategies. And so he's getting narrowed down on where are gonna be the use cases that I can go really big on it.
Mm-hmm.
And so, the opportunity is huge. I think we're still early.
Yeah.
On the AI front, but I think there's a massive opportunity in the future.
Yeah. It seems like at this point you're in that stage where customers are kinda getting data ready for AI, you know, get the data into Data Cloud, manipulate the data, integrate the data.
Yep.
And then the applications will come later.
Yep.
Are there any key themes emerging with some of these early, this early traction you're seeing in terms of those applications?
Yeah.
Einstein Copilot is one. You know, CDP seems like another huge opportunity here. So.
Yeah. It's interesting. The theme we're seeing is most companies have really messy data right now.
Mm-hmm.
You know, the saying goes that your AI is only as good as the data that underlies it. And so the demand that you're seeing from our product portfolio right now in that Data Cloud space is how do I go create that golden record of a customer?
Mm-hmm.
The use cases are all over the place. We feel, and McKinsey agrees, they said 75% of the value is gonna happen in the front office around AI.
Mm-hmm.
So, we're trying to help our customers see the areas and create those use cases for them.
Right.
You know, the call center has been the area that I think probably is the nearest term place for transformation. And so, but the Data Cloud piece has been a big winner. You know, we started in the CDP space, which is, hey, how do I personalize.
Mm-hmm.
All of my email campaigns to my customers by segmenting markets and looking at them from a geography perspective.
Mm-hmm.
That's now transformed to sales and service. And so,
Mm-hmm.
We're helping our customers along that line.
Mm-hmm.
You see companies like CrowdStrike making big investments in Data Cloud.
Mm-hmm.
so that they can get better growth, better insights, more forecasting accuracy from data they're pulling from multiple sources. FedEx was a story I think we told on the earnings. I can't remember if it was an earnings call or callbacks that we told the story. They had a problem where they're signing up a ton of customers, but they weren't converting to, you know, ongoing users of their service.
Mm-hmm.
But it was two disconnected systems. The signups versus, hey, where's the transaction happening on the fulfillment of shipping? By bringing those two things together, they're able to identify who are the people who signed up and didn't use and then get very personalized emails that get sent to them with promotions that engage them into to start using the platform more effectively. And so.
Wonderful.
The benefits are awesome. We wanna start to tell stories through the lens of those productivity gains that they're seeing or top line growth or.
Mm-hmm.
Cross takeout, whatever those things are.
Sure.
So we're seeing those benefits today.
That's great. Any metrics you could share on that in terms of where the ROI is? What are some of the benefits that.
Yeah.
In terms of generating here?
You know, we're seeing actually in our own, our own business, not in front office, but we have some AI that's been running in our development organization under Srini Tallapragada.
Mm-hmm.
Who says he's seeing a 20% productivity gain in the dev world and engineers being able to get product to market faster. You see it in all the technology that's coming out right now.
Mm-hmm.
Certainly some gains. We're seeing, in the call centers, you're seeing 20% efficiencies, augmented work productivity that's happening because people are not doing the mundane work.
Mm-hmm.
Actually, that the AI is actually doing the case generation, send out the case resolution, close the case, and then summarize that back into our product. So, the benefits are there. We just need to start to get it to scale.
Wonderful. Industry Clouds. Why don't we go back to that?
Yeah.
I know it's a key focus here and you've seen real traction there. Can you just give us a sense for how does Sales Cloud, Service Cloud? How does it vary from industry to industry?
Yeah.
How specialized is it? So, maybe just a question on just at the product level.
Yeah.
How differentiated is the Platform? How unique is the Salesforce Platform from industry to industry? And then from a go-to-market standpoint, how is that? How does that vary?
Yeah. So, maybe I'll start first with the go-to-market.
Sure.
Since that's where we originally did the design. When we started Salesforce, we're very much a horizontal product. If you had a sales organization, we're gonna sell you Sales Cloud. And we went out and did that. And we were very effective at that for many years. And then we went broadly to the geographies and we sold all the products in every geography and language. In the most mature markets in the world, we started to realize we're hitting the wall on our ability to go close larger banks, for example, without speaking their language and without having product. And so we went to a design model of, hey, we've really gotta make sure that we have AEs that are able to speak that language.
Mm-hmm.
You don't show up to a bank and talk about accounts and contacts and opportunities. You talk about portfolios, or you talk about clients.
Mm-hmm.
You talk about loan processing.
Mm-hmm.
and so as we built product and even through the acquisition of, of Vlocity, we did now probably 10 years ago. That's probably not, it's probably less than 10 years ago, maybe eight years ago.
Mm-hmm.
They were building on top of our core technology, single platform, but building technology on top that actually built those processes for a specific industry, whether it's healthcare.
Sure.
Whether it's financial services, retail, for example, travel and entertainment. We have a lot of product that we're laying on top.
Mm-hmm.
The benefit is, of course, we get to accelerate sales cycles and we're having better conversations with our customers.
Mm-hmm.
It's also faster speed to deployment because we know their industry. We can get them up and running. We're now at 13 Industry Clouds across the organization or product organization. I'm a big believer in going deeper in those 13 versus going to the 14th and 15th. We have a lot of open conversations with the product teams on this.
Okay. Yeah.
but I think it's a big part of our strategy and it's been a home run for us. You see it in the numbers, really, really strong numbers from an industry perspective.
Wonderful. Great. Why don't we shift to SMB?
Yeah.
We think of Salesforce as a large enterprise vendor, but.
Yeah.
Salesforce got started in SMB and then moved up market over time. Now it seems you're kinda focusing back on the down market segment of the industry. So, maybe if you wanna talk a little about the effort there,
Happy to.
How you're addressing the SMB?
Yeah. It's interesting for me. I've been at the company 25 years now. And, you know, we started selling two seats to small companies that were SMBs back then. And then you fast forward and people are like, oh, you're just an enterprise player. I'm like, no, no, we, we still sell to the, the, SMB. It still represents a big part of our business today. But what we found over time is we've, as we solve the needs of our large enterprises, the complexity of our product went up dramatically. And, and, you know, selling a behemoth that's difficult to get up and running to a 15-person sales team.
Sure.
Just isn't working as well. And so, some energy around how do we go rebuild and simplify that product. Simple, easy, fast used to be a mantra at Salesforce so we could get people up and running. It's how we won the market, from our friends at Siebel. They weren't even serving that market and say, okay, let's just make it easier to get up and running.
Mm-hmm.
Let's get back to those roots. Let's get back to how we can get customers, taking full advantage of our product portfolio on a single platform, by the way. It's simple and easy across sales and service and marketing and commerce. Now we can start to feed in some of the capabilities of Data Cloud and AI as well on a single platform.
Mm-hmm.
Some exciting things that we're doing where you can just turn on new technology. You don't have to buy it. You can easily self-serve and turn on that product.
Mm-hmm.
We've got some learning to do in that market. We're, you know, we're getting some good feedback from SMBs that, hey, you're not, you're not as easy as you once were.
Mm-hmm.
What we've done in a very short amount of time is very exciting. A new product called Starter that's in the market and then an advancement to that called Pro.
Mm-hmm.
with a sort of a lot of new energy around the SMB business.
Wonderful. Why don't we shift to some of the offerings outside of the core clouds: Tableau, MuleSoft, Slack? If you wanna just touch on each one.
Yeah.
Where's the focus on driving incremental growth and.
Yep.
You know, what, what are some of the initiatives?
I'll start with MuleSoft if I can.
Mm-hmm.
Obviously a big part of our strategy. Data is at our core right now.
Mm-hmm.
We think about how do we bring data from every source around a business that can help influence the success of, either the selling efforts that you're in or the supporting efforts that you're in or the marketing efforts that you're in. And so.
Mm-hmm.
At the center of that is moving data around, moving into Data Cloud and getting that golden record that then influences a lot of our AI.
Yeah.
It's been a huge success for us. It's been a big driver of our growth. We're a big believer in MuleSoft and we'll continue to do that. In this new data and AI world, it becomes a hub for us to go talk to our customers about. And the nice thing about it is we're even, you know, it's crazy to think about people running big IBM mainframes and, and systems that you don't really think about integrating and bringing data in. Those now become rich sources of data that we can bring into Data Cloud and then leverage going forward.
Mm-hmm.
On the Tableau side, some great innovations that you're seeing: Tableau Pulse. We're doing a copilot for Tableau as well. The market is big and we wanna make sure that we're in the space called analytics and make sure that we're dominating the TAM there. So AI will be infused into everything that we're doing there. We also are bringing that technology closer to our core as well. So it's easier to use the analytics with our core technology. And so we'll get more lift from our core sellers as we get better integrations of that technology.
Mm-hmm.
And then, did you ask about Slack? Was that the.
Yes.
Yeah. So Slack has been a, you know, a great success story for us in the quarter. I mentioned the go-to-market change that we created, where we're, we're putting it in the hands of more of our sellers so that we can go sell it. As we think about the future there, we think Slack may become the conversational interface of our AI technology.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Across all of our core products.
Mm-hmm.
We see the love of the technology across so many companies out there. They love using it. We need to better integrate that Slack product into Salesforce technology. And that's the effort that we're on right now.
Mm-hmm.
We've introduced Slack AI, which is an incredible way to summarize your channels.
Mm-hmm.
If you use Slack, I don't know if you guys are Slack users, but it can be a little noisy through the channels. And.
Mm-hmm.
Slack AI does a great job of summarizing all that's gone on within a channel, very quickly so you don't have to read through all the.
Yeah.
All the posts that are out there. We're excited about the future of Slack. Maybe taking a little bit longer than we would like to integrate it, but we're very excited about what we see there as an overall platform, the layer across the top of all of our core technology.
Wonderful. Thank you. You mentioned a comment that struck me: putting Slack in the hands of more sellers. And I think that's an initiative that's kinda more broad-based across the.
Correct.
Sales organization. That's part of, you know, key to this effort to drive,
Even the Einstein 1, if you think about the technology, it's not necessarily just let's bundle and charge more for our products.
Yeah.
We're bundling together many, many products into that one suite of technology. So we sell it once.
Right.
We don't sell it with 15 people showing up. So this move to sort of put more not only in the hands of the core sellers, but also to bundle your technology in a way that allows us easier capability of selling at a higher price point.
Sure.
Clear strategy for us.
Sure. Wonderful. Great. Let's talk about multi-cloud deals. That's been an area where you've seen some uptick in recent quarters. What's behind that?
Yeah.
I know it's a big focus. You mentioned, you know, selling bundled solutions and, you know, offerings that.
Yeah.
Fit together and have natural synergies. What's behind the strength you've seen over the last several quarters in multi-cloud deals?
Yeah. It's interesting. We're seeing multiple people want a single platform.
Mm-hmm.
I think in this new AI world, I think they're gonna move more that direction of, "Hey, I don't want a separate system for my service, then my sales, then my marketing, single platform so I can leverage all that data that sits underneath.
Yep.
Those customer interactions. You also see in a constrained environment that you see app consolidation. You see CIOs saying, hey, I don't want this huge stack. I'd rather be on a single vendor.
Yep.
A big opportunity for us to go have that conversation. I feel very privileged that we have such a broad portfolio of technology that we can sell to our customers.
Mm-hmm.
There's also an underlying benefit you get in a multi-cloud strategy, which is our attrition rates go down dramatically.
Mm-hmm.
Once you've gone from four to five, six to seven.
Mm-hmm.
The attrition rates are in low, low, low single digits when you're at six or seven of our clouds.
Mm-hmm.
And so this multi-pronged approach of, hey, go sell more ACV or bookings on.
Yeah.
Multiple clouds.
Yeah.
The ongoing effect that we have on our attrition numbers is significant.
Mm-hmm.
We also have a big base. You, you know, after 25 years, we had a lot of customers out there.
Mm-hmm.
And so as you think about this growth strategy for us, it's sort of a natural drive success for your customers, make sure they're getting a lot of value, and then go sell them the next product and the next product, and make sure that you're delivering for them. And so, it's been a long-time strategy for us. But as you get more and more product in the portfolio, it becomes even more important that you go sell these products from a growth perspective.
Wonderful. Why don't we shift to the partner channel?
Yeah.
How do they fit into this, all these efforts here with AI and all the go-to-markets here with some of the bundled solutions that you're talking about?
It's a challenge, I think, at the velocity at which we're moving in the technology world right now. How do you even keep your own people up to speed on everything that's going on and enable them and get them out talking to customers in the right, right way?
Mm-hmm.
The effort to go make sure all your partners are up to speed on your technology is significant.
Mm-hmm.
But it's work that needs to get done because we get tremendous leverage from them. The GSI community needs to be educated on our AI and Data Cloud strategy, and we're doing that work right now.
Mm-hmm.
We believe there's a tremendous amount of work that can be done.
Mm-hmm.
It's not, you probably know that the data work is not all that fun. To clean up data in a big enterprise is not the easiest thing to do. These GSIs have big practices that do that work. And that's the demand that we're seeing from them is, hey, I wanna use Data Cloud to go do all the work that's out there and then feed that into.
Mm-hmm.
Into your technology. On the ISV front, we're trying to reinvent ourselves there a little bit. I would say that maybe it got a little stale over time. It was a big differentiator for us for a long time, the AppExchange. And we wanna make bigger investments in the same way that Microsoft and Amazon have built these great marketplaces. Why don't we have a marketplace? Why aren't we getting all the ISVs to build on our platform and then leverage our technology?
Mm-hmm.
and so that's a, that's a big effort for us right now. And then I mentioned sort of the go-to-market. We think there are, there's spots in the world that we could be reaching faster.
Mm-hmm.
With more success through an indirect channel.
Mm-hmm.
For whatever reason, we think, hey, hire more AEs and go drive growth is a good strategy. It has been. But there's some markets, particularly in Asia.
Mm-hmm.
There's some geographies like Germany that is sort of more, it's not as centralized that we could be leveraging more indirect channels to go sell our technology. And so, a big emphasis on the partner channel right now to go drive success. The final piece there is, as I hit the success notion, we wanna make sure our partners are driving the outcomes our customers are expecting. And so we're doing more to ensure that they're seeing how the implementations that they have done are working for our customers.
Mm-hmm.
A growth strategy that I didn't hit earlier is drive more success for your customers. You'll see more growth on the booking side. So, we wanna make sure our partners are living that value for us as well.
Wonderful. Maybe back to multi-cloud deals. It's hard to do multi-cloud deals when the product isn't integrated. And I know you that's a bit, a big effort.
Yeah.
commerce and marketing in particular.
That's right.
I know over the last couple of years it's been a big focus of getting those integrated with the core sales and service. So how does that play into this?
Yeah.
Where are we on that effort? And, how do you feel about this?
Yeah. You're well educated on our product strategy. I like it.
Yes.
Well done. This is, you know, when you do acquisitions, one is difficult to integrate them just from a, you know, hey, bring them into the company and figure out how to go make them successful. The multiple platforms has been a frustration for us from a maintenance perspective. It's hard to maintain all these various platforms.
Mm-hmm.
It's also been a frustration for our customers. You know, we talk about a, we call a Customer 360 fully integrated.
Mm-hmm.
They haven't felt that as much when you're buying different platforms and there's systems sitting in different areas.
Mm-hmm.
And so it's been a concerted effort for us to get to a single platform. We want a sort of a mantra of one platform, multiple clouds.
Mm-hmm.
The effort has gone well. I, of course, would like it to go faster. I tell my friends on the product side, let's go.
Yeah.
but it's a great strategy for us.
Mm-hmm.
Particularly in this new data and AI world. Everybody wants their data in a single place. They want a single platform and they wanna be able to leverage it. And so, making great strides on both Marketing Cloud and our commerce technology. There are others like Slack that we're looking at right now. We're trying to figure out ways to bring Tableau in as a future.
Mm-hmm.
We wanna everything on a single platform. We think the benefits are significant from a multi-cloud strategy, from our customer success perspective.
Yeah.
And the acceleration of Multi-cloud.
Wonderful. And, maybe on that same topic, are there any, you know, key trends or clouds that you're seeing more, more momentum in these multi-cloud deals? Any, any common,
Yeah. You tend to get more momentum on the non-sales and service because those are the anchors, right?
Of course.
And so, you know, certainly Data Cloud has been a—that's really where we've seen a lot of acceleration. Customers leveraging so much data that exists there, but wanting to bring more data through that. And so, and even, you know, it's sort of interesting. We, and it's a little bit of our selling motion, you can have 15 instances of Salesforce within a particular enterprise.
Mm-hmm.
Leveraging Data Cloud to bring all those instances together in a single view of the customer is a great story for us. You know, customers have said for us, well, how do I bring it all together? I don't want one instance. Well, with Data Cloud, you can have a single view of a customer across 15 different instances.
Mm-hmm.
And so Data Cloud's certainly been an accelerator. A lot of the add-on products that we've introduced, Revenue Cloud as an example.
Mm-hmm.
A great add-on from a multi-cloud perspective for Sales Cloud. So it's been Field Service in the Service Cloud world too.
Wonderful.
Yep.
I mean, why don't we just end with one last one on.
Yep.
of the one of the key focus areas for Salesforce, which again is operational efficiency. If I think it'd be helpful just to provide a little bit of color on kind of where you are with the go-to-market effort.
Yeah.
In rationalizing the organization, putting the product, more products in more hands of sellers, maybe kinda where are you today?
Yep.
Going forward, you know, just from a qualitative standpoint, you know, where do you see opportunities for improvement?
So, I would say we're a long way along the path to get to more efficiencies in the way that we're going. I'll also tell you that you only get kinda one time a year to do this work. We just did it in Q1. You don't wanna be creating disruption all the way along.
Sure.
There's also, I mentioned earlier, we wanna be in the analytics space. I'll give you an example of Tableau.
Mm-hmm.
What I don't wanna do is move it in and say, now we're just selling Tableau to just the CRM buyer.
Mm-hmm.
I actually wanna own the TAM for all of analytics. So we have to be careful that we don't move too fast in a way that sort of says, hey, let's move it into the core reps, but those, those reps aren't selling to.
Right.
The head of finance or wherever they might, you know, the data buyer or whatever for Tableau.
Mm-hmm.
So we're very thoughtful about how we do these things. The good news is we test a lot of it. So in certain markets that aren't as big or we won't have as big of an impact, we'll say, hey, can that seller really go out and sell Tableau to the finance person? Or are they only gonna be oriented to the CRM buyer?
Mm-hmm.
And so we'll do some work around to make sure that we're accelerating the integration where we get the efficiencies and we're selling at a higher price point, but we don't wanna break something broader, which is we walk away from a TAM that's significant in our business. And so those are the balances we're trying to reach there.
Makes a lot of sense. Brian, this is great, great conversation. Learned a lot here. Thank you so much for joining.
Brad, thank you. I really hope.