Salesforce completely reinvents itself – Slack first

Salesforce caused a stir when it bought Slack last year for just under $28 billion. This was certainly a strategic response to the successful Microsoft Teams product. Therefore, the announcement: Salesforce completely reinvents itself – Slack first is by no means surprising

Let’s consider today the interview by Julia La Roche correspondent of Yahoo.Finance with Marc Benioff, CEO and founder of Salesforce, which took place on 10.06.2021

Correspondent’s question: Q1 brought record results. Your comment

Marc Benioff (MB):
Salesforce’s first quarter of 2021 was a record quarter – across all metrics, enthuses Marc Benioff. Just under $6 billion in revenue and over $3 billion in cash flow.

In this context, he and his executives have set a clear goal: Salesforce wants to overtake SAP soon. Salesforce will thus not only become the world market leader for CRM (which they already are), but also the world market leader in the area of enterprise applications.

Excursus

SAP published its figures for Q1 2021 about 6.3 billion euros. At an exchange rate of $1 = €0.84, that’s still about 25% more. But with Salesforce growing faster, Benioff is confident of overtaking SAP soon.

As a supplement, an article from “CloudWars” should be mentioned. There, the author ponders Benioff’s declaration of war: after all, SAP is not a “wallflower,” he writes. In this respect, this expert is also eager to see whether and how quickly Salesforce’s overtaking process will take place.

Salesforce completely reinvents itself – Slack first

One question in the yahoo editor’s interview was:

Some say you paid too much for Slack, others say “a great deal”. Which is true?

MB:
We used the pandemic to completely rebuild the company and now we have our 4th quarter in a row of incredible results.

“We’re going to rebuild all of our technology again to become Slack-first, to help our customers have a harness to work in this new world – where you work at home; you work in the office; you work at events; you work anywhere.” Source: Motley Fool

The whole thing has one goal: We want to help our customers find their way around the new situation better. Regardless of where you work, systems need to work everywhere. And if you want to be successful no matter where you work from, you also need an “incredible platform like slack.”

Slack helped Salesforce Service Cloud improve significantly. The time to close a case has decreased by 26%. Service Cloud performed extremely well last quarter, and the division had extreme growth. The area or product is now the largest customer service product in the world. It is also rated as the best product within the Gartner Magic Quadrants.

Question: What is special about it?

MB:
When a case or issue takes place, all the employees can take care of the case like a swarm. We’ve learned a lot from our Chatter product. But with Slack, we’re taking it to a whole new level. Our customers are even better “connected” with their customers. They’re solving problems much faster. Slack accelerates all of those things.

Question: What about the competition? MS Teams, Google Workspace …?

MB:
Salesforce is unique. We create a 360-degree experience of sales, marketing and service, commerce, platforms, analytics tools like Tableau, and all the integrations.

He cites Sonos as an example, 84% revenue growth. Sonos can be more responsive to its customers.

The thing that makes SFC unique is “focus on the customer.” And Slack helps tremendously with that.

Interim summary: Salesforce is completely transforming the company as well as its products – All about Slack

Editor’s comment:

Typically, a Salesforce speaker does not address the competition. Therefore, as a supplement from the Motley Fool portal: Benioff also doesn’t talk about how much the Salesforce overhaul will cost, but the company has done well in its recent quarterly reports and is clearly benefiting from the overall shift to the cloud.

As the Motley Fool notes, and Benioff also confirms in the interview, the acquisition is not yet complete. It is expected to close in the second quarter.

Question about working: The world is changing and cannot be turned back. It’s all about one thing, “be more collaborative”.

MB:
Salesforce is building a ranch “to onboard the new employees,” families may feel at home.
As usual, SFC-Speaker does not address the competition. One shows self-confidence and thinks of oneself.

Marc takes a vacation break on Twitter until 01.08. Marc understandably wants to “downshift” a bit. This is difficult with the many projects. But he emphasizes: “Let’s be a little less digital”.

Finally, there is the question of his investments. What about your commitment to the topic of space?

MB:
He talks about his investment in Time magazine. Time, on the one hand, does its traditional business in the media environment. But it’s also a VC company (Time Venture) with $1 billion in VC capital and about 200 investments. Among others in the companies Space X, Astra, Swarm, Planet Labs. Marc Benioff is also very pleased about the development of Time Ventures.

Conclusion from my point of view: Salesforce completely reinvents itself Slack first

I heard or saw him speak live for the first time about 10 years ago in Munich. He has lost none of his esprit. He drives his team along with his team and the team pulls the various strings of success in his sense.

Salesforce completely rebuilds the company as well as its products – All about Slack

In terms of type, Christian Klein from SAP and Marc Benioff are already very different. That’s why we’re all curious to see how Christian Klein will implement his latest announcements at the Sapphire conference. SAP does not have a product like Slack or Teams on board. Let’s see how SAP finds an answer to this as well.

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