Name: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on the company's record first quarter and Slack acquisition
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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on the company's record first quarter and Slack acquisition

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Read full articleMarc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, joined Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the company's record quarter, Salesforce's Slack acquisition, and his thoughts on the future of work. We want to turn our focus to Salesforce. Now, this is a stock that has outperformed over the past month with shares up just around 9%, recently reporting a record quarter. We want to head to Julia La Roche, who is joined by a very special guest. Julia? Well, thank you so much, Seana. And I'm pleased to bring in this conversation with Salesforce founder and CEO, Marc Benioff. Marc, always great to have you on the program. And, as Seana was mentioning, a record quarter for you all, that first quarter, strong results, raising guidance as well. And you all are already the number one CRM and you have been for many years.And I heard you on that call, talking about that you all are poised to pass SAP as the largest enterprise applications company, and that's imminent. So my question for you, Marc, is, what's next? You're right, Julia. We just had the best quarter, I think, the company has ever had. And you can see it across all of the metrics, whether it was the revenue, basically getting to about $6 billion, cash flow over $3 billion. I think it was $3.1 billion. The operating margin growth, customer win, success, and you're right, the really exciting story here is that Salesforce is very imminent, will pass SAP. And Salesforce will become the number one enterprise applications company in the world, not just number one CRM, but also number one enterprise applications company. And we're very proud of our team for accomplishing this goal. And I have to imagine that the Slack acquisition, that $27.7 billion acquisition, might help you get there, when it comes to the enterprise applications, I guess the endeavors there. So I want to raise a question for you. There seems to be kind of some mixed reviews out there. A lot of folks think it's a great deal. Others think that maybe Salesforce overpaid for Slack. So what are folks missing when it comes to this acquisition?Story continues Well, I think the first thing I want to hit is, take a look at our raw organic growth. It's pretty epic. And you can see it in this quarter. But you can really see it in the last four quarters. Starting in the second quarter of last year, really, as we adjusted for the new at-home work pandemic environment, we pivoted our whole company. And now we've had four sequential quarters in a row of just incredible numbers. So this is our fourth quarter of really just raw organic growth.But look, the world is changing. We can all see that. The pandemic has caused all of us to change. And we're creating a new work environment. We're going to be working more at home. We're going to be working also at the office. Look, we used to have 20% at-home workers. It's probably going to increase a half. But there are still going to be a large percentage in the office.We're also doing off-sites and events and programs. I'm actually at a major off-site right now with our top members of our team. And also we're going to build a large training facility as well. But we're going to do one more important and exciting thing, is what you're saying, is we're going to rebuild all of our technology once again to become Slack first, to help our customers have a harness to work in this new world, where you're working at home. You're working in the office. You're working at events. You're working anywhere.Well, if you're going to be successful from anywhere, you're going to need an incredible platform like Slack. And it's a great product. I think you use it, if I remember our last conversation, Julia. I'm using it right now as we have this conversation, Marc. So I imagine Stewart Butterfield and Bret Taylor, the president and COO at Salesforce, who's an incredible name when it comes to products, they showed you something that really sparked your interest in this deal. And I found what I think might be an Easter egg in your annual letter, Marc. And you were talking about, using Slack has helped Salesforce Service Cloud improve its case time close by 26%. So at scale, I suppose, what could this look like? Well Julia, you are right. And you can take a look at that Service Cloud, which was just a phenomenal performer in the quarter. It just had tremendous growth. It's become the largest customer service product in the world. It's the highest and most well ranked in Gartner. But there's one other key thing. Its integration with Slack lets those cases be swarmed.What does that mean? Swarm means, oh, we have a problem. There's an issue, you can bring the whole team together and kind of swarm around a case or an escalation. We learned a lot about that with our core technology chatter. With Slack it's a whole other level. We're really able to help customers be more connected with their customers in a new way, but also resolve customer service issues even faster. Slack accelerates all of those things. And Marc, how do you think about the competition in this space? I think of Microsoft Teams. Also, at the Google Developers' IO conference they did debut some new features for workspaces that could be more collaborative. How do you think about the competition? Salesforce is really unique in that we're singularly focused to help our customers connect with their customers in new, exciting ways. We've built our Customer 360, which is sales, service, marketing, commerce, our platform, our integration, our analytics with Tableau, that you can probably look at a customer that we have this quarter has had a great success. Sonos-- look at 84% revenue growth at Sonos since they converted and went direct to consumer using our Customer 360 suite. That idea of now augmenting that suite with Slack, that makes Sonos even more competitive and more exciting in their marketplace.But the key thing is, we're really able to differentiate ourselves by just doing one thing at Salesforce, which is focused on the customer. And that's an exciting transformation for Slack as well, really helping them to have a strong differentiation with us, with our Customer 360 Platform. Mm-hmm. Well, we'll look for that deal to close in the second quarter. I believe that's what you said on the call. I want to talk about the future of work and what that might look like and how you all at Salesforce are thinking about it, specifically maybe from the real estate footprint and where you want to be. What does the future look like, Marc? Well, I alluded it to a little bit. And I really have a strong feeling for the future of work, is quite different than it was a year and a half ago when this craziness with the pandemic started. And I would say that-- well, I actually remember, Julia, we were in Davos together, at the World Economic Forum. And there were only rumors of this pandemic about to start. And then just a few short weeks later here we were. We're all at home. And we're all working at home and being successful at home. And the world has changed. And the world has not really changed back.I think about the suffering that's going on right now with my brothers and sisters in India and my employees there. And I think about all the suffering they are still going through. So this pandemic, I know it's over in Miami where you are, Julia, but it's not over everywhere in the world. The virus is still out there. So the world has changed. So what does that mean?Number one, people are going to be working more at home. And you can see that in a lot of countries today, that are locked down. Parts of Australia, parts of Japan, parts of Thailand, Vietnam, and yes, parts of India and other places are still struggling with this virus. And we're still going to continue to see variants and other things emerge. And changes can continue to happen. So working from home and being successful from home is very important.Being at work and being successful in the office, that's also important. But it might be in a new way more collaborative. It has to be a safe environment, of course. And, as I said, you also have to understand we're going to have, probably, have more events, more programs, you know, where we get people together. We still need to be looking at people in the eye and seeing how they're doing and having human connection and connecting with our humanity.And the fourth piece is, to that point, we're building a new Salesforce ranch, which will be kind of an incredible facility to onboard our employees. And their families are going to be welcome. And we're going to have a great cultural immersion capability and training capability, kind of like in the old days of Crotonville with General Electric. So I'm very excited about the future and the future of work.I think Slack will be a key part of it. I think Salesforce Customer 360 will be a key part of it, Tableau, the analytics, MuleSoft. That's why, I think, Salesforce is so well positioned and wants to be a key leader and, I think, is becoming a key leader in the future of work. Well, I'm looking forward to Dreamforce. And I'm also looking forward to visiting that ranch. Marc, I am a little surprised we're having this conversation. And for our viewers watching, I noticed on your Twitter bio that you said you are intentionally offline until August 1. So what was the decision behind that move to stay off of social media this summer? And what are your plans there? I am trying to break my digital connectivity down a little bit right now and try to get into a summer vacation mode. It's a little bit hard when great projects like Yahoo News with Julia want to talk about our outstanding quarter. It's a temptation I cannot hold myself back from. I need to talk about how great Salesforce is doing.But I'll tell you that, you know, I think there's a moment where we all need to kind of disconnect, to cultivate our beginner's mind. So much has happened to so many of us over the last 18 months. We do need to disconnect and kind of give our brains a little relaxation. I'm going to try to have a really solid vacation.I actually took a couple of really high quality days off last week, which was great. And I hope I'll be able to take a few more really high quality days off this summer as well. And that's what it is. And I think that that's my message right now, which is we needed a little less digital. And then we'll hit it again in the third and fourth quarter, as hard as we possibly can. Got it. Well, for folks also watching, started Salesforce in 1999. You were the pioneer behind cloud software as a service. And so-- Thank you. --you made a comment on CNBC this week around space. You revealed that you're an investor in SpaceX, Astra, Swarm, Planet Labs. And you said, quote, "it reminds me a lot of cloud computing 20 years ago." Can we talk about that? Tell us what your thesis is for space. Well, I think you know I'm the COO and chairman of Salesforce, but I also own Time. And Time is an amazing magazine. We all know that. We've all grew up with Time. I did. Time's an amazing website. Time is also an amazing studios company. We were doing some amazing movies. We're even doing Inspiration4, that is documenting those four citizen astronauts who are going to space on the International Space Station. We just did an amazing documentary with Sesame Street.But Time is also a Venture Capital company. And we manage over a billion dollars in Venture Capital. We have probably over 200 investments. And one of the categories that Time Ventures has invested aggressively has been space. And one of those companies has been SpaceX, another one Astra, another one's Swarm, which is an amazing new satellite company. Sara Spangelo, who's an incredible CEO, doing an amazing communications satellite technology company. And Planet Labs, who's building that new carbon mapper technology so we can understand what kind of things we need to do to get our head around climate change and what's really happening on the planet.So these are the things that are exciting to me with Time Ventures. I think Time Ventures has done an incredible job. It's probably one of the most successful Venture Capital companies in Silicon Valley. And they are doing a great job. Very proud of them. And space is a category they've done a fantastic job in. Well, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, I want to have you back on to talk about those investments in that portfolio. Thank you so much for your time. Seana, I'm going to hand things back over to you now.SymbolLast PriceChange% ChangeSalesforce, Inc.160.60Microsoft Corporation257.36Twitter, Inc.40.62Technology Select Sector SPDR&nbsp;Fund135.09

Read full articleMarc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, joined Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the company's record quarter, Salesforce's Slack acquisition, and his thoughts on the future of work. We want to turn our focus to Salesforce. Now, this is a stock that has outperformed over the past month with shares up just around 9%, recently reporting a record quarter. We want to head to Julia La Roche, who is joined by a very special guest. Julia? Well, thank you so much, Seana. And I'm pleased to bring in this conversation with Salesforce founder and CEO, Marc Benioff. Marc, always great to have you...

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on the company's record first quarter and Slack acquisition

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