Salesforce has laid off 50 more employees in Ireland, taking its total job cuts beyond the ten percent announced in January.
Bloomberg first broke the news, suggesting that the cuts will impact customer success and sales teams – trimming Salesforce’s employee base in Ireland by five percent.
A Salesforce spokesperson reaffirmed that the layoffs are separate from those announced in January, with staff notified on Wednesday.
However, like the January layoffs, Salesforce has attributed the cuts to its renewed profitability focus.
Indeed, the spokesperson told Bloomberg:
[The layoffs are] part of an ongoing effort to ensure we always have the right resources in place.
Salesforce has double-down on this motif since CEO Marc Benioff’s admission the company grew too fast during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Indeed, during that time, Salesforce reportedly quadrupled its global staff – from 17,000 to 73,000 people worldwide.
Yet, with the CRM vendor recently reporting its quarter of slowest revenue growth in 13 years and activist investors making their presence felt, cutbacks may have proven a necessary evil.
Body Blows to the “Ohana” Company Culture
Some may worry about how the continued job cuts may influence Salesforce’s Ohana culture – alongside the “orders” some employees have faced to return to the office.
These concerns appear justified as the first cracks in the culture appeared after the “abysmal” results of an internal survey leaked online, completed by 57,000 employees.
Now, verified employees are taking to public forums and speaking out.
Consider Blind, a verified employee community for large tech companies. There, a current Salesforce team member wrote:
Culture has changed greatly in the past two years. Some of the people who are left are bad managers, and leaders and this has changed the core of the company and the culture.
Other comments from the past couple of weeks include: “Company has changed since layoffs,” “Salesforce is changing,” and “Terrible culture.”
Nonetheless, some would argue that such responses come with the territory for a company of Salesforce’s size – and note that its employer score of 3.9 stars out of five remains reasonable.
Indeed, some of its CRM rivals fall below that, with the likes of Oracle, Zendesk, and Zoho scoring 3.3, 3.5, and 3.7, respectively.
Yet, negative comments are seemingly on the rise, with stories such as Matthew McConaughey’s $10MN “creative advisor” paycheck likely stoking the fire.
Elsewhere at Salesforce…
Despite its ongoing cultural concerns, Salesforce has announced solutions at a rate of knots across the first half of the year and beyond.
Perhaps the most noteworthy is its new product suite AI Cloud, which houses its GPT-inspired innovations that augment the cloud portfolio.
In addition, the vendor has expanded its contact center toolkit and just yesterday announced Slack Sales Elevate – which pulls its Sales Cloud CRM closer to the UCaaS platform.
Also, expect its revenues to pick up again as the CRM leader announced price hikes across its portfolio for the first time in seven years.
Again, this will contribute to its march towards profitability, an objective that many CX vendors are striving toward – including Twilio, which has sold software and cut its workforce by 17 percent.
Cisco also made layoffs just last week, although these are a continuation of its cuts first announced in November 2022.
