Salesforce, Inc. (CRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome back, everyone. We're in day 3. We saved one of the best for last. Bill Patterson is with us, EVP and GM of CRM apps, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Essentials at Salesforce. He's leading product innovation growth and success across these pillars. Prior to joining, he spent a short 14 years at Microsoft. He was the GM of Dynamics. Again, underneath that was one of my favorite user conferences, way back when in Fargo, North Dakota from Great Plains, thank you, Doug Burgum.

Bill, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining. And then maybe you can just kind of level set as we enter 2022, top priorities at Salesforce and how you view the world from where you're sitting at this point?

Yes. First, Brent, thank you for having me. I hope you're well. I hope you're safe. I hope wherever you are in your part of the world, family and all are doing well. Yes, it's a pleasure to be here. I think given with where we are and I think where our world is at and on the business horizon, especially in the computing world, like sort of I oversee, yes, what I'm really doing right now is leaning with my customers and listening to exactly where their needs are and how they are seeing and navigating these challenges that they're going through. Across the board, I think businesses are really thinking about this growth moment and how do they reaccelerate growth for their organizations. And why I use growth as such a unifying factor is, in the case of Sales Cloud, we're seeing this real resurgence around helping organizations create more topline revenue growth. And on the case of Service Cloud, it's also about really helping organizations recover relationships and retain those relationships to drive better bottom-line economic performance. And so as we kind of reflect on where our innovation horizon is going, it's really creating these moments and creating these innovation kind of opportunities to help guide our customers back to this vehicle of growth. So that's really where a lot of our priorities are. I think you've seen really incredible kind of momentum around sales and service this last quarter. And that's really kind of deeply entrenched with the success of our customers is leading to great success on these 2 clouds.

The great debate we're having across the last 3 days, and the market is having this debate now is, the great COVID pull forward or maybe it's not a pull forward, maybe we're just pushing demand faster and then the throttle still down. And we've asked everyone and I think everyone's interested to get your perspective on the overall environment, some of our friends on Wall Street are saying the front office is over everyone out of the pool. What are you seeing?

Well, I certainly don't see the front office being over. What I really see is the types of spending and the types of initiatives that customers are investing in are just looking very different. Early in COVID, it was very heavily service-driven kind of moments where imagine, if you will, you have these large-scale contact centers that had to shift to a digital first operation world, that led to a lot of complexion remake of around where does the service operation run from. And in the early COVID cycle, we saw everything related to service automation was the most active kind of part of our portfolio to spend. Later, in the kind of mid wave of the pandemic, what we saw was this reestablished and refortification of field-based sales organizations as businesses were reopening, well, how do they do so safely. And so we saw really kind of this incredible transformation around our field service offerings. Currently and presently, what I'm seeing is a lot of organizations still maintaining their spend and doing a lot of hiring. That's great sort of resignation, relocation, reinvigoration of workforces is causing a lot of new people, the entrants in the workforce. And so we see continued spend around kind of like the rehiring of activities. But I'm also starting to see signs that people are looking at the complexion of the revenue operations in a different way. And this is where our technology, what we have called Revenue Cloud, really helps to really understand the durability of growth. And I think that, that's the beautiful thing about the Salesforce portfolio. All of those technologies are meant to solve these different sort of moments of economic recovery. Moments like put the contact center at home, moments like kind of help reinspire the field in a safe way, moments like rehiring and enabling salespeople, moments like having better revenue kind of durability. Our platform endures no matter what these kind of moments are. And I think that clearly, with where we see the growth of the offerings today, like I said, it's really amassing the growth of the customers. If customers are growing, so is Salesforce. And that's something that we're really, really excited about. But yes, definitely feel very confident about the demand environment that's out there. And I think that part of that is, if we were a one-trick pony, that might have different pause, because of the breadth of our offerings, we sort of have this elasticity to go as these moments go.

So you don't believe in the pull forward and we're going to see a little spike before we climb back up the mountain.

I have no reason to believe that there's a pull forward moment nor do I believe there's going to be a retrenched moment. Like I said, I think that you'll see these different moments of the digital transformation journey shift directions and efforts to different areas. But again, with the strength in the 360 platform that we have, it will endure.

I think you're obviously in the most important quarter, and we can't really talk about the state of the business. But when you think about the kind of the multi-cloud approach, it does feel that companies are realizing like, I can't just commit to one, I got to commit to the platform. And I'm just curious, is there any type of different motion you're seeing from your clients as it relates to how they want to get going with you?

Yes. Well, look, let me give you some good examples that we sort of found in the pandemic, a company like Zoom, for example. Zoom, which we're doing our kind of session on here today, couldn't hire enough sales people to keep up with market demand during the pandemic. Couldn't keep up with the demand for their services around how do they serve their customers. And it wasn't a sales problem. It wasn't a service problem. It wasn't a marketing problem, it was all of the above problem that they've really had. And so what did they do? They looked at Salesforce. We created some technologies working with Zoom, which is about turning traditional functions that were largely people driving experiences to become more digital-first experiences like, signing up for the service, like picking the products and services I want to subscribe to, like actually subscribing to that service all with an automated way without talking to a human. And I think that these moments, like I said, really become paramount for what we can do at Salesforce with the entire breadth of the 360 that we have, it's a customer problem, not a sales and service and marketing and commerce problem. It's all of the above that we can help you with. And so I just feel like, again, given the state of where we are, companies are looking to us to help them solve the big problems that they have. And everything from revenue growth to customer retention, those are really top-level items for a lot of people today. But yes, definitely multi-cloud is the way that's manifested. And I think that, that's really where we just bring this entire platform together and do what's right for our customers.

Maybe if we can turn to Slack. I think we are a Salesforce.com customer, Jefferies. We run our entire front office on you. In the case studies of, I'm in a client conversation all of a sudden like I just -- I need to have a chat with someone and this ability to use Slack to tie up for the quick head on the sales engagement and service engagement, it just seems like it's going to make your clouds better. And if you could talk to how that unveils? And ultimately, kind of the timing and how long you think it takes to make these integrations get tied in? I know you're close to Stuart.

Yes. So first off, in terms of making our clouds better, that was not the intent of like why we bought Slack was to make our clouds better. Why we bought Slack was to make the lives of our users more seamless and more productive at large. And you think about the more productive, that means that there are times where imagine you're a salesperson, you would traditionally use Salesforce for logging your leads or your opportunities and developing those opportunities to close, where you might use one of our partner solutions exactly to find out how much am I going to get paid for closing that deal. The beautiful thing about Slack is it's a uniform layer to work across applications. And so for all those experiences it used to log into like a Salesforce and provide data. Well, now you're just on Slack and it's going to provide continuity across all this workflow automation, orchestration for the lives of our users. That makes it easy, makes it comfortable, makes it fun to work, engage and access that data and also a way that's really simple that kind of ramp and scale employees to. So back to sort of like the speed in which we're operating now, Slack is one of our fastest integrations we've done in the company. We've launched 4 or 5 different prebuilt integrations. There was already a great Salesforce app for Slack, but now we have great applications for learning with My Trailhead. We've got great applications for data visualization with Tableau. And again, the goal is just making the life of Salesforce employees or just employees in general better because we have this ubiquitous layer to gain access to data and information. So I think that this is one that for the future of our innovation pipeline, it's going to really challenge us to think more about how do we make work easier, not -- and work from anywhere easier and not just think about it by app by app or API by API, if you will.

Just a reminder, clients can ask questions. You're just over 118 being online still. Feel free to jump in with any of your questions, and I'll read them to Bill. When you look at Sales Cloud, running a $6 billion annualized run rate, continues to grow, mid- to high teens. I think 5 years ago, if you said, hey, is it growing in the mid-to high teens or is it growing single digits, high single -- most people would probably guess high single. Why -- what has given this the durability that we've seen?

I think the most relevant conversation that CEOs are having, and I'm with them quite frequently, is how to drive growth again. I talked about this just at the start of our call. That is the #1 thing that companies and leaders are trying to do is reinvigorate that growth coming on the upswing of where this post-pandemic kind of world is thinking. I think the innovation that has really powered that. I mentioned Revenue Cloud, which is really thinking about the durability and revenue anatomy of how your company makes money and making sure revenue quality is established with that growth kind of at the onset. We've created products like our High Velocity Sales. So whatever Cloud really thinks about, kind of the late-stage funnel to the actual revenue that you close, well, we've also created products to help you fill your sales funnel like our High Velocity Sales product. And so everything from filling your funnel to becoming more productive and managing that funnel to looking at the revenue quality of our operations, that High Velocity Sales product is having a huge impact for those organizations that need to kind of get growth growing quickly. And then lastly, I would say that really, it's been material for Sales Cloud is our industry solutions, really thinking about our financial services offerings, our health offerings, our consumer goods offerings, these are technologies that used to be in this custom, homegrown kind of area. Well, companies are learning today that they can't kind of continue to innovate and keep up with the demand of all the changes around the mobile and social and data world. So they rather work with the salesforce to create these last mile experiences by industry and vertical. And I think that those 3 chapters, I think, are truly what are driving the resurgence and reacceleration of Sales Cloud.

When you think about kind of the most exciting thing, I know there's a lot of excitement, but if there's 1 or 2 areas inside Sales Cloud, what -- are there a couple of features that are coming to mind that are really resonating with clients right now that you see that maybe are new? Or hadn't pre-pandemic, does anything stand out?

Yes, there's 2 that are on my mind. The first is Revenue Intelligence. So really looking at the complexion of your revenue and revenue curve and really doing the analysis to inspect those routes of revenue, whether that be through your direct channels, your indirect channels, even your self-service channels, in helping you really look at the complexion of how you drive revenue so you can make better decisions as a sales organization. Revenue Intelligence is a new product that we've built in partnership with our Tableau team. And I think that listening to our customers, this is a big unlock to really help make better, more strategic decisions for how to set up and standardize your sales practices. And the second one is a product that I alluded to with the Zoom example, which is something we call self-service subscription management. Yes, long are the days where you actually really want to pick up the phone and talk to a salesperson, if you don't have to. And I think that more we can put innovation directly into the hands of customers, our mission at Salesforce has really helped companies and customers connect in new ways. This is a great example of how you can take your subscription management, your configuration capabilities, your revenue renewal functions and make them completely automated. And so I think that both from with human side really helping to look to understand the complexion of where revenue is going or how it kind of comes to the organization, and then customer side, really -- and buyer side, really thinking about how you can create these great experiences for customers themselves to do business with your organization, that's the combination, I think, of incredible innovation that we're doing at Salesforce that's going to power a great, great opportunity for our customers.

There's been a lot of talk about some of the up incomers and Revenue Intelligence and this ability to listen to the call and give you advice, and Joe said he's going to close at $1 million, but he's really closing at $200,000. There's companies like Gong and others that are coming up. What are your thoughts about what's happening there? Is that some of your partnering is it feature set? How do you think about what's happening? And seems like there's a lot of emerging stories that seem to be approaching us.

Well, first off, there's no question that more data to assist the seller is really, I think, where a lot of the maximum innovation potential comes in. Listening to TQs, helping you to use the digital canvases that we're all sort of still doing business on right now to make it a real, just-in-time experience. Like if there's an objection that's being put forward to me, and maybe I'm not the most kind of quickest on my feet to be able to answer that objection. Well, the system can sort of be there to help you kind of respond in that moment and avoid kind of pausing that calling or we may switch to next call. So I think this assisted technology is certainly something to monitor. We have great technology with Einstein that did help our customers with that. The one that I'm less excited about is more of the enforcement or the not trusting your people kind of piece, where it's maybe a little bit more Carrot-and-stick. I think CRM had a long history with carrot-and-stick back in the early days. And we've just always chosen to be on the side of users and to empower them to get better results and yield. So I'm less working on things that are like, you said it was $100,000, it was really $1 million. I'm more working on things like, let's actually become a value-add to the salesperson so that's trusted. That will become more durable. What I have found is that today, users reject those technologies that are kind of doing the user a disservice. And so we'd rather be of service with the users that we offer.

Yes, very clear. Thanks for that color. When you look at Service Cloud, you got a good foot race between these 2 clouds, one is at $6.5 million, one is at $6 million. When you think about Service Cloud now running in the low 20s percent of growth, just talk to us about this new modern contact center? And how this is shifting? And ultimately, are we ever going back to the normal days? Or is this gone?

First off, thank you for the recognition. I have a hard job between caring for my 2 children between sales and service, which are now competing with one another at sort of that eclipted there and performing at. Back to your question, I don't think we're going back. I don't think we're going back to a world in which service is not always on and which service is always on the terms that the customer set, not that the company set. And I think that was the big learning during COVID is, you had this moment of time where there was a lot of empathy in the customer world, which is they would understand the companies we're probably dealing with the pandemic just like we all were. And so there was a very small moment where there was an understanding that things are changing and aren't going to be great. Well, we're out of that comment now. We're roughly 2 years into the pandemic no matter where you are in the world. The expectation is that customers still want things on their terms. They want to be communicated on their terms. They want to not have the business hours that you set. They want to make sure that, again, they have the ability to sort of arbitrate what is right because if you don't offer kind of a better offering for them, they're going to go elsewhere. So I think this world of service is really changed forever. And I think that not only is about way of service is sort of delivered. It's also how it gets delivered. And I think that's really the part that's exciting to see with Service Cloud is incredibly digitally digitizing around the service functions, bringing data into the experience, but also more importantly, most importantly, having great experiences for self-service for customers. And that's really been the magic playbook for us.

Bill, we got a lot of questions, so I'll go through them and kind of read them verbatim, so you get to hear the spirit of the question. And we do have a guest appearance from George Clooney's stunt double. This comes, as it relates to -- the question is, is the nascent -- how nascent is the CDP opportunity? How is the competitive landscape evolving? And how are you differentiating yourself?

Yes. Well, I think first off, the CDP opportunity was a relatively newer offering for us. We're not unfamiliar to the world of customer computing and customer data. And I think the thing that is really freeing about the CDP kind of experience is rather than going to this role of persisted data, which is where a lot of enterprise applications has sort of been from. CDP really provides you this just-in-time dynamic profile that can be created so that you can actually become more real time in a way at which you create these innovation interactions for customers. And back to the question about like CDP as a market, I think, is still emerging. But you think about where Salesforce differentiates versus, say, just a raw CDP technology provider, is we have all the customer history in addition to the behavioral data to bring together to really help manifest a better relationship. If you think you know me based on my click history on your website versus the years of relationship we've had, you've only seen part of it if you're just looking at that digital footprint that I'm creating. And so I actually think that the union of those 2 really becomes that magic that can get assembled together, so that you can combine both behavioral data and relational data together. And that's how we kind of think about it.

If this works, and it seems like it is, I mean, this is pretty magical for a client. And I assume, it's magical for Amy's top drawers as the cash comes in because I would assume the deals are a lot bigger, if you can get this attached.

The big thing that we -- like the big barrier is helping organizations with their data posture. What's really kind of I think the reality today is, data is everywhere. And so the first format that we really need to help with is helping understand the right way that data needs to sort of be kind of shaped in a consistent way. The second is really thinking about the timing. And then the third, which is always the tension is, that we have data privacy that's sort of going on. So yes, it really does become an opportunity for innovation, but so has to be done with care. And that's where I think this notion of industry-specific ways of looking at data or whether it's regulated or nonregulated industries, that's all going to, I think, really become part of the strategy that we think about from the growth side of what CDP can offer.

You don't have to comment on this, but we did have a big system integrator at the conference this week. And he said, your win rate has gone dramatically up against Adobe. So observation from the big SI.

That's a -- I'll make sure I talk to the team about that.

The next question is around demand on international relative to the U.S., has recovery lagged there.

Not recovery lagging. I think you just see different kind of moments. And I wouldn't say it's necessarily followed kind of the COVID news. I mean there's other macroeconomic things going on around the world that maybe has different accelerants or different drags associated with them. We've seen great kind of recovery in our European markets around our offerings. We see a lot of kind of larger-sized transactions sort of occurring there as well. And I think part of that is just the buying kind of moments right now for companies are really thinking about not just investing for today but like what comes next. And so I definitely see, again, a broad distribution around our markets. Yes, I don't think we're any longer in a place of really watching the daily news or daily headlines to see where COVID's outbreak is and then comparing that with our sales pipeline. I think that, we're past that.

There was a question, how do you counter the narrative that Salesforce has all the pieces to sell a broad solution for the enterprise but has failed to provide a cohesive integrated solution? Do you need to turn inward and innovate rather than continuing to make acquisitions? Again, I'm reading the questions verbatim. So I just want to hear the spirit of the question, what the clients asks here.

Yes, of course. First off, I appreciate the question. I think first and foremost, part of it is also making sure we're making the necessary investments ourselves to help our customers with those problems. We had, last year, I think it was last year, the acquisition of Acumen, the professional services organization. It actually takes accountability for these deployments for customers so that we can actually create the innovation needed to work across these clouds to make sure that they become accretive and not competing with one another from a deployment notion. A lot of our own innovation is really thinking about not just cloud by cloud innovation, we talked about with Slack but it's around how do we sort of make it easy to work across these clouds in a seamless life of our user. So certainly have the -- I think the sentiment of the question of transformation with multiple departments can be hard. But I think a lot of the work that we've done, both on the Slack platform as well as in our native clouds to make them easy to work together certainly what we've been focused on.

There was a question around government, federal, just how things are going there? Any observations?

Yes. I think there's no question and no secret that kind of federal spending is maybe have a degree of grid lock after big decisions to be made. We don't see that in the state and local level. We'd actually see states sort of being able to respond and have more autonomy in their own purchase decisions. I think a good example of that is what we saw with Vaccine Management solutions. Good or bad, vaccines were really left to the states to sort of stand up and administer their own decision-making and their own agility to get new shots in the arms of our citizens. And thank goodness that happened, because while the federal government was still trying to figure out how do they distribute vaccines and work with the operational work speed back when prior administration was in office. The states had to move faster and they had to kind of be, like I said, more autonomous decisions that they were creating. So I certainly see more activity at the state level and at the local level. And I think that our strategy is not to kind of put all regs into federal versus states. And so that's certainly been what's helping us on continuing to drive growth there.

There was a question around Bret and the impact that he's having across development.

Yes. Well, first off, Bret has been the author and champion of our 360 strategy. So a prior question that was asked about kind of this unlock between our clouds and complexity between our clouds. Bret has challenged all of us, myself and all of the other senior leaders in the company to think differently about this accretive nature to what the 360 sort of unlocks. And I think a good example of that, Brent, is really what we talked about with CDP. I mean in a classic sense, a lot of CDP technologies has only been really in the marketing function. Well, I'll tell you, from a service side, personalized service has been long a journey that many organizations have strived for, and I think that CDP will be a great platform to make that come together. So Bret, I think from a challenging and integration standpoint and challenging status quo, I think that's the motivation he provides all of us. And I think also from an innovation perspective, what I love about working with Bret is, he can elevate all the way to the 50,000-foot view and all the way get down to recorrecting one of our engineers to line items of code. We tried to make Bret not write code, but he can do that if he needs to, and it really allows us to have more thoughtfulness around all of the conversations we have at all levels of the company.

There were a lot of questions and Evan may need to turn his video on here for this one. But there's a lot of questions around MuleSoft. And we can move on in pun, but I do want to make sure we address it because it did come out in lot of the questions. If you can address kind of what's happening? Doesn't seem like it's a product issue, it just seems like maybe some consumption and go-to-market, things you're ironing out and that will come back to show improvement over time. But any thoughts you can just give to what's happening there. And the question is asked, too, is that consuming you in your time because this does have a big impact on a lot of the parts of the other parts of the business?

Yes. Well, first, I guess I'm not responsible of MuleSoft. I'm more -- that's a different part of our business line. But I will tell you, it's been an incredible strategy for sales and service to have the MuleSoft connection and connective tissue. I think specifically, when you ask me the kind of transformation that service teams go under, today, the average customer service interaction requires oftentimes assembly of an age and experience with like 13 different systems to get an access to data to resolve a particular kind of issue. And -- but prior to MuleSoft, Salesforce was sort of immune or agnostic to how that problem gets solved. With MuleSoft, we're helping solve those deeper, more meaningful challenges to improve the service operation life of an agent. And I think that's really sort of too material. Same thing in revenue. You talked about self-service subscription management, a lot of the policies and systems that maybe offer a product entitlement or inventory, those are not oftentimes running on a Salesforce platform. They exist in another system. Well, now we have access to that data of MuleSoft or sort of manifest better experiences for customers. So I think this is sort of huge. That being said, MuleSoft did decelerate last quarter, and I think that was driven largely from what we believe are the right long-term changes but was short-term disruption. The long-term changes really were about realigning territories to make sure that we have the right coverage with our core sales reps. Sales reps who sell sales and service today we want to drive better synergy with the Mule team going forward. And it's also -- it's a different type of sale. It requires kind of more capacity to sell it. It's a complex sale that people are really thinking about reimagining their technology infrastructure, along with the need to go fast. And so I think what you're finding is those conversations are active and definitely still very current for all the different products that we have. So I do think even though we had some slowed down here in our FY '22, we've made the right changes to come back strong in FY '23. And back to your question about does it distract me? No, it doesn't. It doesn't distract me at all. In fact, what I really think about it is an obligation as a partner to the MuleSoft team, which is to help really drive the deeper connection between sales, service and our integration value.

There was another question about CDP and what Twilio is doing with Segment.io and the claim that CRM is a system of record with data at rest but those systems need to run on real time. Can you talk to what Twilio is doing? And then any overlap there?

Sure. First, hello to your dog. Your mind is probably running around here as well. But...

That was Oracle at the door.

Look, I think that whenever you take such a definitive stance and you say it's this kind of technology or that kind of technology, it's typically because you only occupy one of those lands, if you will. And I think when you talk to customers, no customer I talk to says, we want CDP, we don't want a CRM. And what we want is more of the best of both those worlds coming together. And I think specifically, at Salesforce, what we're focused on is how do we drive the better union between the real-time data and the historical data to manifest a better relationship for kind of companies to do better business with their customers. The #1 question that you get where service interaction is, let's say, you actually pick up the phone after trying to solve a problem yourself. One, you want to know that have context for where I've been, but also you want to know who I am and what I've represented to be over time. And so I actually think the best experiences are going to come from the union of these 2 worlds, not 1 role versus the other.

There was a question and a few questions just around hiring and retaining and what's going on? It's great -- I exited as I guess 60 minutes, called it Sunday. When you think about the culture you've built is one that is, I think, super unique and -- give us a sense of what's happening? And how you're managing through this? Everyone seems to be having some issue with this. And what's been successful for you guys to ensure that maintaining that culture as you guys get bigger?

Yes. I mean, first off, it's a unique time. I don't think any of us have sort of seen this not just a resignation to then go somewhere else. You actually see a lot of people sort of just exiting the workplace in general right now. And I think, first off, there needs to be more that, we, as a society do for mental health, especially given this prolonged state of work from home, where we are. And I'm proud to share that I think Salesforce is doing a lot for employees of all levels and all kind of geographies to make that kind of a mission. What is unique about Salesforce? And this is what brought me here. It's what keeps me here. It's what keeps me energized is our values. And we always talk about Salesforce being a platform for change, which means that even the work that we do on the products and the innovation, we sort of -- features that we create, it doesn't really mean much to us unless it's having a positive impact for our companies, our employees, our societies at large. And I think the values that we stand for uniquely and have done so since day 1 of trust, of customer success, of innovation, of quality and more importantly, sustainability. These are the reasons why someone chooses to come to Salesforce, the reasons why someone chooses to stay at Salesforce. And as leaders, it's the reason that we sort of put our hearts on the line every day is to know that, our job is not done until we make an impact on those 5 dimensions. So I think while we've seen different people come and go and some just exit work all together, those that stay and those that we're bringing to the company are doing so for the base of those 5 levels. And this is where -- look, I just think Salesforce is a different kind of company. I think we stand for a higher purpose that way. Whereas other places at work, like you mentioned my time in Microsoft, I think Microsoft is incredible organization, but they're just very mission driven. And they want to help people achieve more. We want to be a platform for change. And I think that our value sort of speak for itself in that regard. I think that what I would -- when I talk to new employees that have come into our organization, they always tell us that's the reason why they've come. And that Salesforce is unique place on that plane of opportunity.

There was a lot of -- there was a few questions about not only having the platform but having the actual data and the infill. And a couple of clients ask questions about ZoomInfo and making sure you have the right data to populate. Can you just talk through not only having the technology but the data and ultimately the information? And how you're balancing that mix?

Yes. Well, first off, I think we're not a data company that is generating data like that. Early in our days, we had some work that we did with a product called Data.com. It was a partnership with Dun & Bradstreet. We sort of exited that business that was not a strategic one for us. What we chose is to work with partners. Partners like ZoomInfo, partners like InsideU. There's a lot of technology kind of aggregators and data aggregates, LinkedIn, great partner. Those would be the partners that we want to continue investing for data kind of collection, aggregation. And we want to only process data from those partners, if it's done, collected in a fair and meaningful way. And so that's where I really think that while those businesses have purpose and they will always have sort of their own business models and practices, we're only going to work with those in our ecosystem that do so that don't violate our processes of trust and responsible data collection.

Again, maybe more of an appropriate question for Amy, but I'll let you act as interim CFO here. When we looked at fiscal '26 revenue guidance of $50 billion, what are the key drivers that you're most excited about?

Can you repeat the question? I'm sorry, maybe my Internet cut out. It just...

Yes. When we look to the fiscal '26 revenue guidance of $50 billion, what are the key drivers that you're most excited by to get to that target?

Sure. I can defer to long-term kind of elements like to Evan and team, but I'll tell you from the innovation side, what I'm most excited about that I think will fuel growth, the industry side of computing. I think that there's a lot of industry-specific spending that goes on around our ecosystem that as we bring that more in-house, I think will certainly become an opportunity for us to capitalize on spend that is maybe in the services market or spend that's in the custom market or spend that is in the kind of, like I said, a homegrown markets that may actually manifest growth there. The second is probably international and really the international expansion. You asked a question about it prior. I still think we have a large runway ahead of us in terms of growing and bringing the cloud to all countries and all sovereignties that are out there. And I think that the third is, look, the existing businesses that we're in are also not solving or not slowing. Service continues to grow at a clip of like 13%. Sales continues to grow at a clip of like 11%. We're growing faster than those markets are growing. So we'll continue to kind of take share from competition. But we'll also be smart about getting into the adjacencies around our world. Today, Sales Cloud, even at the $6 billion clip is not in markets like Sales Enablement. It's not in markets like Sales Intelligence. And I think there's great synergies, great adjacencies that are around our core that allow us to sort of become that opportunity for expansion. Yes. Really, you can ask Amy this. You delighted me by calling me the ad-hoc CFO. I'm more of the innovation person. The innovation, I think, is what's going to fuel our growth.

That's great. There were a few questions just around, if we stay in this environment for a while that none of us want to, but if we do this, can your development team keep up? Or if they just adapted now to this new world and this just -- it really is no big issue, I had one executive tell me his best developer was living in an RV. So I don't know if a location really matters for development talent.

I agree with the sentiment. I think -- I'll tell you what -- I choose to look at it in a very optimistic sense. I think first off, the question around productivity, we have been able to manifest, if not better productivity, but just more efficiency in our development model because we actually look at the data, our developers are able to set work on their terms and work on their kind of area where here in the Bay Area where a lot of our developers are located, maybe community time has been sort of eradicated from some of this world. So actually, for all the negativity, I think there's actually some benefit there. The part that I choose to actually look a little bit more opportunistically, a little bit more responsibly on is the access to talent. If you really believe in this work from anywhere, digital HQ culture like we do, we at Salesforce are going to be able to attract talent, not just in the Bay Area, not just in the areas that we have hub locations, but really anywhere in the planet. And I think that does wonders for diversity. I think that does wonders for creating economic opportunity and maybe locales that we haven't yet had a firm kind of established presence yet. But as I mentioned about our platform for growth really coming from international expansion, well, I'd love to bring more people into our company, our culture in a developing community that are sitting in those locations that we want to expand to. So I think this is actually one that we've leaned into as a strategy and really been intentional about kind of our statement of work from anywhere as a core key foundation for how we do our jobs. And yes, we don't miss either productivity charges, maybe others are today.

This is a good question from a client, and I think it ties into this conversation, which is, Amy has been very clear that the company wants to drive at a higher operating margin. And the question was, can you tell us about the increased discipline she's brought to expense control from your perspective? What have you heard, seen, felt, is it created issues for your team? Or are you just learning to cope? I would assume remote development, if you can hire developers in these other countries, it's at a lower cost perhaps, and you don't need the facilities. They can -- there's a lot of different ways to explore it. So I'll leave it to you.

Yes. First, I think what I love about Amy coming into the CFO role is: one, she brings a degree of rigor and a degree of structure and the degree of kind of recognition of the external environments, obviously, coming in prior to our Chief Legal Officer. Just that the world is not as black and white as maybe you might think it would have been prior. And so I think that she certainly brings a world view into this world that I think is quite energizing and inspiring for leaders like me. What we've really seen Amy kind of do is challenge us all and put a lot of the responsibility of better operating margin and better operating fabric into leaders like myself. And if you look at areas where you optimize margin performance, you can look into our Service Cloud family, for example, I used to have an OEM relationship with a company called ClickSoftware. The cost of my dollar for every dollar I took in on field service had a high margin cost to go through a royalty third party. And we ran the numbers and did the economics, and we thought it would be a better option to actually acquire that entity because it was such a deep component of our technology to get a better margin performance around that cloud itself. It was a fast-growing cloud and had fast expenses to go along with it. And we now, because of Amy's leadership, really went deeply and analyze the functions to make sure that, that had better operating margin performance. I think that's where you see Amy's leadership really shine, is not just accepting kind of the status quo. But really challenging us all as shareholders and more importantly, stakeholders, is owners of the business to have that better operating margin sort of manifest for us. And the other thing just as you said it, when we talk about globalizing our talent, it's not globalized like our development to hire engineers and maybe "perceive lower cost locations." Our strategy is not to kind of shift dollars that way. It's really to use on a more strategic basis where we create fair market opportunity. And if we're saving money while doing so, that's kind of, I think, the way that we look at that part of our equation. But yes, I think Amy has been an incredible leader for discipline and an incredible leader for really asking hard questions for leaders like me to respond to.

There are a lot of questions around elephant, honey versus antelopes. And you get a lot of antelopes to get volume, but you guys have been really good at elephant hunters and you're a kind of when you capture them, by the way. So the point is, when you look at, name your favorite large customer, you got a lot. Is this -- everyone is asking how the structure is changing. Is that ingrained in the fabric you have to? Or do you feel like there's enough volume out there where you can just continue on the volume side to continue to hit these longer-term targets?

I think one of the beautiful things about Salesforce is we haven't overly relied on one of those functions or one of those segments really to drive our growth. You've heard us talk a lot about enterprise and enterprise has been an incredible kind of growth motion for us. But I'll just remind us that 10 years ago, Uber was not an enterprise customer, right? And yet there they started as a small customer. And so our strategy really to think about segment optimization and think about the complexion of our business as it relates to -- I'm not going to use the word antelope versus elephant, but kind of small and midsize, small to midsize to enterprise. We really want to think about kind of more allowing all those growth tactics and growth engines to become more efficient for us. And I think that that's where -- again, as for every investment we've made in enterprise selling, we're doing just as much on the digital side for activation for us as well. So I think you're just going to see us continue to think about well positioned kind of coverage for to bring all people in. And yes, there's enough entities out there in the world today that aren't using Salesforce, that could be. And I think that we can certainly keep that growth engine humming along in the low end as well.

There is another good add-on question to my bad question, which is, is there an opportunity to sell in a more touchless way. Meaning, I'm in Salesforce, all of a sudden, a new feature comes out. I get Einstein Voice, which I'd love to have more of, by the way, because I'm tired of typing things into the system and rather have the voice text. So maybe we can talk about voice too, at some point. But when you think about this touchless process, how are you embedding that? Because many of us in these consumer apps see it, right -- you're in Strava. You're not paying for Strava to log your bike ride, but all of a sudden, they're like, oh, by the way, you should pay for this because you're going to get all these other features. Are you embedding more of that into the product or not?

Very simply, yes. The technology that's powering that for us is our Revenue Cloud. And we're actually using our Revenue Cloud ourselves to sort of really understand the user journey. And it's not so much about kind of trying to charge you more for access to things that maybe would make your life better. It's to help you, one, be aware of these offerings; and two, make it easy and to facilitate and deploy them inside your offering. So here we have a big kind of thought right now around self-service, around product-led activation as ways to sort of unlock new growth opportunity, just like we're also talking about resellers and how like we can create new reseller relationships to take this offering out with that simplicity in mind. So I think from a distribution opportunity perspective, again, it's sort of dovetailing with my last response to is, classic way is to just thinking enterprise or mid-market or small business, like that's just where companies fall. The tactics of how you sort of address those offerings, self-service is just as much an affinity in the enterprise as it does in the small business, and I think that's where we'll just continue to see us reinvent ourselves on a lot of those bases there.

You've got 1 or 2 -- you popped the hood. You got 1 or 2 things to point to underneath the hood that you're excited about this and up and coming kind of game changer that maybe we -- the world hasn't fully seen yet, but it's out in the wild. You're selling it. Is there 1 or 2 feature sets that have really kind of been an eye-opener for your clients that you would point to? And again, I know there are many, but 1 or 2 to point out, the jump to the top of the list.

Yes. I think one of the biggest areas of transformation -- that's been holding transformation -- digital transformation back has been kind of the opportunity cost to modernize legacy software. And I think one of the areas -- and this is in the MuleSoft family that I'm very passionate of. And I think it creates an opportunity for incredible expansion is, we have a technology we acquired called Servicetrace, which is robotic process automation. Robotic process automation allows us really to bring more of a modernization layer to legacy technology for our world. And why I'm so passionate about it is, one, I actually think a lot of business processes today are kind of still as to mundane based on the systems that were defined of our past, not really defined for strategic value of our future. And so I think that Servicetrace kind of acquisition allows us to really help companies modernize their legacy in a big, meaningful way. And then more importantly, companies that use this in connection with our sales and service clouds are going to really allow us to sort of more streamline the overarching experiences behind those business processes. So to me, I think that's a real kind of opportunity for incredible acceleration for not just Mule, but in partnership with Mule and sales and service teams. And that's an area I think is well positioned to help our companies get more out of the platform that they're running from us.

It's pretty wild to think the pushback you guys got when you acquired the SaaS, Sydney including for me and others that were part of the Mule IPO process, and we knew it was a very well-run, consistent business, but the fact that what you guys have been able to do it, it's pretty incredible.

Yes. And look, like I said, we talked about like we imagined the reinvigoration of the GTM model behind it. The innovation pipeline in MuleSoft is incredible. And I think that's where -- again, where we see things going next in deeper connection with the 360, I think it's going to be really outstanding. So yes, that would be the one under the hood kind of area that you asked about and one that my team I know is really excited to partner with MuleSoft on .

Yes. There is a quick follow-up, and we're running out of time, but I -- what are the integrations or enhancements that the Work acquisition gives to service in Sales Cloud? What are the tangible ones that have come to mind? You mentioned there's a handful of connectors already. But...

Yes. Just for simplicity because I think that's really a long response, but maybe I'll just give 3 examples. The first one in the case of selling, especially with the technology from Slack Connect is really to allow organizations to work across organizational boundaries. For sales teams, what that means is, using Slack to kind of manage better customer relationships as part of a sales process where you're directly communicating with your customers in a dedicated channel, whether that is channel selling to work with your channel providers and maybe routing leads between 2 entities in a channel organization. Maybe that is in sales, in a kind of channel incentives way, which our channel development and marketing way where you're actually collaborating around the co-creation of a campaign. Slack is, again, this technology with Slack Connect that allows organization not just work together inside the walls but across organizations in a safe secure mentor, I think, is really exciting. That's number one. And then maybe the second one is, just this better connective tissue between kind of prompting and alerting in the service function for things like service degradation. While we were on this call, and we experienced at one time, my Internet sort of went down and came back upon, well, that should have been a proactive or preventive measure for my cable provider to know that I had a degradation on it. And that connection not get posted to slack. As system events are sort of going, you actually can now create proactive or preventative break-fix moments in the line of business as a service. So my sentiment, I think, Slack just really allows us to break down these application boundaries in ways that are all about better continuity of process and experience. And I think that's -- those are the areas you'll see us continue to light up with some of the innovational [indiscernible] this year.

Bill, pleasure having you. Thanks so much for sharing the story. Congrats on all the success and looking forward to staying in touch. Happy New Year. Thank you, Evan, [ Parmett ] for hosting as well on the other side.

Excellent, Brent. Thank you.