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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I dissect Salesforce’s fiscal outlook and the critical questions it poses for Marc Benioff’s leadership.
Highlights
00:19 — Interesting times for Salesforce. At the recent fiscal Q1 earnings call, the company revealed that for the full 2025 fiscal year, which will end January 31, it’s expecting growth of only 8% to 9%.
01:02 — This is highly unusual for any company in the Cloud Wars Top 10, certainly for Salesforce. As a result, investors hammered Salesforce’s market cap right after that announcement, shaving off $49 billion in value — from $272 billion to about $223 billion.
02:09 — I raised seven questions for Marc Benioff in a lengthy article that’ll be out later today. Benioff has been extremely bullish on the AI revolution. So where’s the AI boost? In a similar way, Benioff has talked very excitedly about the company’s new Data Cloud. Where is the boost in Salesforce’s numbers from this?
Ask Cloud Wars AI Agent about this analysis
03:21 — What’s happening with some of its existing traditional products? Specifically what I call the legacy cloud sales, cloud service, cloud marketing, cloud commerce, and cloud things that have been the core of Salesforce’s business for so long. Their growth must be flat at best, or very low, perhaps even declining.
04:08 — Has there been a shift in the market from CRM to CX (customer experience) that Salesforce has missed? We see Oracle, Microsoft, and particularly SAP being very bullish in this CX area. Did Salesforce and Benioff stick with the CRM category for too long?
05:00 — Also, how much has Benioff’s big shift from being a growth company to a profits company eaten into Salesforce’s competitive capabilities against big competitors? He definitely wants to shift Salesforce to be a data company. Will that shift revive revenue growth?
06:10 — These are interesting, challenging times for Salesforce and Benioff. He’s shown over the years that he can meet any challenge. We’ll see how he does with this latest one.
