Salesforce has released its Q3 earnings results, recording an 11 percent year-over-year (YoY) growth in revenues.
Fueling this is an 80 percent (YoY) increase in the average size of deals over $1MN.
Moreover, nine of its 13 industry clouds have an annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth rate above 50 percent.
Reeling off many more impressive statistics during the vendor’s Q3 earnings call, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, said:
We’ve delivered in this unbelievable quarter and in this unbelievable year.
Yet, that “unbelievable” year didn’t begin on a bed of roses, with mass layoffs, activist investor pressure, and concerns for its “Ohana” culture.
Since the sentiment swirling Salesforce has improved considerably with a layoff U-turn, the celebrated release of its Einstein 1 platform, and sustained revenue growth.
The latter has helped its stock rise by 94.13 percent year to date, an anomaly at a time when B2B software vendors are experiencing the trend in reverse.
Of course, there have been bumps and bruises along the way, including price hikes and a not-so-healthy-looking leaked employee survey.
Nonetheless, the overall mood remained upbeat during the earnings call, as the following five takeaways underline.
Service Cloud Solves 3.7BN Cases During Cyber Week
“During Cyber Week… Service Cloud helped our customers field and resolve 3.7 billion cases,” boasted Benioff.
The statistic underlines how more service teams are leveraging the CRM as their core contact center platform instead of a pure-play CCaaS offering.
That said, Salesforce has teamed up with two of the biggest providers of such solutions – Genesys and AWS – and pulled their capabilities into Service Cloud rather than taking them on directly.
Such steps underline Salesforce’s cautious approach to CCaaS.
After all, it has close partnerships with many contact center vendors, which support its CRM market leadership. Salesforce doesn’t want those partners to start prioritizing rival offerings.
Benioff on GenAI: 2024 Will Be a Big Year
Salesforce has announced many ingenious generative AI (GenAI) solutions this year.
In Service Cloud alone, these include auto-generating knowledge articles, customer responses, and conversation summaries – alongside several others.
Benioff promises many more throughout 2024. Indeed, he stated:
In September ’24, what we’ll see is nothing we could have possibly imagined 24 months earlier before these breakthroughs in generative AI took hold of the whole industry.
The CEO highlights the open-source nature of AI development as a critical driver, becoming highly federated across thousands of companies and engineering teams, enabling rapid innovation.
17 Percent of Fortune 100 Companies Are Einstein Copilot Customers
The Einstein GPT Copilot is a conversational AI assistant that sits inside Salesforce apps, assisting employees as they complete tasks and spotlighting helpful information.
According to Benioff, it’s catching the eye of many large enterprises. He said: “Einstein, with predictive and generative AI combined, is doing a trillion transactions a week, that’s amazing.”
But, more amazing is 17 percent of the Fortune 100 are now Einstein GPT Copilot customers.
While this is promising, the new Einstein 1 Copilot – native to the Einstein 1 platform – will potentially drive further value by supporting cross-platform insight generation and workflows.
Yet, even without the entire ecosystem, companies can pair Copilot with Data Cloud to tap data from Salesforce apps and – with Mulesoft too – other enterprise platforms.
MuleSoft Becomes the “Heart and Soul” of Customer Transformations
“Every customer transformation and customer AI transformation will begin and end with data,” claimed Benioff.
In this environment, the Einstein 1 platform is well-placed, allowing businesses to leverage the combined intelligence of various Salesforce apps and connect them with a cross-function data fabric.
Data Cloud and the Einstein 1 metadata framework are critical here. Yet, for many, so is MuleSoft, which allows businesses to pull in data outside of Salesforce.
Noting this, Benioff describes MuleSoft as the “heart and soul” of many customer transformations and another prominent differentiator as a “completely unique product”.
Salesforce Fights to Revive Its Ohana Culture
The job cuts and subsequent leaked employee survey shot across the bows of Salesforce’s Ohana culture – which supposedly represents family and support.
Yet, now Salesforce is back on the up, the CEO is revamping his Ohana messaging.
“We’ve focused on this Ohana 2.0 culture, which has really taken shape in the middle of this year,” noted Benioff.
In doing so, he highlighted how Great Place To Work ranked Salesforce eighth in its list of the best Fortune 100 companies to work for.
Moreover, it remains an attractive place to work. Indeed, Benioff concluded:
We continue to hire selectively across key growth areas, especially in data cloud and AI, and we’ve seen the highest demand to join Salesforce in our history with the largest volume of applications in any quarter ever.
Eager to catch up on all the latest innovations from Salesforce? If so, check out our article: All the Highlights from Salesforce’s Winter ‘24 Release
