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

Hey, welcome to our next session. I'm really happy to have Bill Patterson from Salesforce on. Bill, thanks for joining us. Maybe for those of us that haven't met you before or in this format, just maybe talk a little bit about you and your role and then we'll just kind of take it from there.

Wonderful. First off, thank you for having me today. Nice to meet you all. I'm Bill Patterson. I'm the Executive Vice President, General Manager of CRM Applications here at Salesforce. In my purview, I have direct responsibility for the cloud that you may have heard of called Sales Cloud, Service Cloud. And I'm also responsible for some of our focus on customer success with those clouds as well as sort of the innovation strategy that we have behind them. So in many ways, I'm here to kind of share a lot of perspective that we've seen around the success of those offerings, but also here for you, whatever questions you have for us today. So thanks for having me.

Okay. Perfect. Yes, I think maybe to get everyone on the same page, just start a little bit like you just reported like very strong Q1 results and especially the area that you're responsible was even stronger than everyone would have imagined. Talk a little bit about the highlights from your perspective.

Yes. Well, first off, Q1 for us was a strong financial quarter, both top and bottom line. And I think the cash flow outperformed Q1. The core business that I'm responsible for, Service and Sales Cloud as well as in the industries really outperformed a lot of indexes. On Sales Cloud, just exceeded our expectations. We saw a lot of growth happening for businesses around the world to reaccelerate in the sort of post-pandemic way. And we saw that growth accelerate to 18% growth in the quarter and 20% in constant currency, which I think was fantastic around the global growth there. And the big reason why Sales Cloud accelerated, like I said, was businesses were really getting closer to customers, reinvesting in their sales teams and kind of reopening business. Service Cloud also grew quite heavily in the quarter as well. I think it was 70% in the quarter. And at that size and that scale, what really continues to impress me about Service Cloud is it's not just sort of one-trick kind of pony. It works with field service teams, contact center teams, digital service teams to really help businesses transform. So across the board, all of the innovation pipeline that we've been working on is having a material impact for customers today.

Yes. And I mean, I need to see like how close you are then there to the business. But what do you -- if you get involved in customer conversations from -- more from that angle, like what are you seeing in terms of like their understanding of the macro or their kind of thinking about macro and how that will kind of play out in the conversation that you have guys -- have with them?

Yes. Well, let's say to those departments like Sales and Service, for example, and it was our deep conversations we have every day. In the case of sales organizations, they want to know how they can maximize the performance and the revenue contribution, top line growth of every sales team around the world. And there are some where -- regions your business kind of operates in, the complexity of the different societies or different communities or different economies, matters materially to how organizations are kind of stepping up their sales organizations today. So everything from territory optimization to revenue kind of planning kind of opportunities that we're helping customers with, all the way down to everything for how are we driving enablement for sellers in a largely work-from-home, not-in-an-office kind of congregated setting, those are level of conversations that we're having material with customers about just thinking about what comes next in terms of that revenue producing arm for the organization. Service has similar dynamics. We saw some amazing kind of customer transformations in the pandemic. We imagine this contact center went from a large building in cubicles to now your kitchen. And so the kind of digital sort of disruption that the pandemic led to in the business of service, that led to like a lot of resurgence, a lot of reemergence around the service center at large. And today, now we're facing a little bit different kind of economic headwinds around a lot of businesses globally. What they're asking is how do they get -- how do they capitalize on this largely digital wave of service to really provide new scale in a 24/7 kind of operation without incurring huge costs operationally for their business. And so the strategies that they're going through, the transformations that they're going through, when they come to a company like Salesforce, they're really asking not just what can you offer us from a technology standpoint, but how can you guide us to better outcomes for our businesses. And that's something we really pride ourselves on.

Yes. And still, like the one thing -- and it's great to have you on now, the one thing I always wanted to dig deeper is in the success of the Sales Cloud because I remember like I've been covering this for a while now. I remember the times where growth kind of every year came down a little bit, and you had like the story of the -- well, it's a law of large numbers. That's what happens. And then when was it, like about 2, 3 years ago, you kind of started rethinking the Sales Cloud. And ever since we've actually been accelerating and the 20% we saw last quarter was like just the main highlight here. Talk -- get us maybe on that journey of what happened in terms of like not giving up on the growth, but kind of reimagining like how do you -- how we have to think about this?

Yes. I think a couple of dimensions sort of changed for us. First off is just focus on Customer 360 as a strategy. And what we know is especially in moments of growth, everybody's job is to work in sales. If you're a part of the marketing organization, you would help your sales team produce. If you're part of the service organization, you want to retain those customers that your sales team sort of just acquired for your organization. And so the Customer 360 strategy for us was this sort of grand unlock for us to rethink the business is selling where it's not just software for the frontline sales team any longer. What it allowed us to do is start to innovate around the core of the sales technology, focusing on things like sales enablement, which is how do marketers create great content for sellers; focusing on sort of higher velocity cadences that are now in this work-from-home area, how do we structure a sales enablement or sales play so that organizations can actually run with consistency across our organization. And that was work that we did really focusing on sales and workloads. And then imagine Slack, again, bringing everyone in, in service of an opportunity so that your legal teams, your finance teams, your service delivery teams, project delivery teams are all working in conjunction with that revenue producing arm. That 360 strategy was that grand unlock for us that really helped us start thinking about more than just role-oriented computing, which is probably kind of the area that I think a lot of our prior conversations were about. Now you're starting to see this real move towards multi-cloud, really helping clients sort of unlock business transformation, not just departmental transformation, is what's fueling that growth for the Sales Cloud team.

Yes, yes. No, it's really exciting. It was like I do hear from the field is now it used to be like a -- the software for a traveling salesperson. And now it's like completely -- yes, it's a much, much broader world, yes.

Well, if my airline miles are any indicator, because I'm not traveling as much as I used to, but I'm having 4x or 5x the amount of customer conversations virtually than it once was. But you need new tools for this moment. You need better tools to understand how to relate to people virtually because you can't sort of always shake the hand to cement the deal any longer. And I think that reinvention and that opportunity to use this digital metaphor to create new innovation that helps customers drive better revenue performance and outcome, that's really the mission that the team has been on.

Yes, yes. Okay. And then you started to talk about Slack a little bit already, like to me, like, look, I covered Slack from before Slack kind of IPO and I was for like, wow, this can really change the world. And then when they announced the connected -- I think it was connected channels where you talk like external partners. I was like, is that not the perfect tool for every sales cycle, et cetera, to do that? It's like talk a little bit about what it means to have that as part of the organization. And where are we on that kind of understanding on the customer side and adoption?

Yes. Great question. And I see the same sort of inspiration and innovation that you do about this potential of the Slack platform. And it turns out that as humans, we like working together to get things done. And I think when the pandemic sort of made it difficult for us to work together, we use Slack really to reform this concept of what we call the digital HQ, the digital water cooler for people to come together and work together even -- no matter where they were around the world. That was probably kind of the early days of how we thought of Slack was just this new way of working together. As you mentioned with Slack Connect, a new way for businesses to open up communication channels and to engage their customers, their partners, their suppliers, their third parties. This new platform for communication now brings the world even closer together because now we can actually take Slack Connect as a secure interchange between companies and their partners and suppliers, et cetera, and now start to really rework that kind of those relationships. And what is so exciting is we have 12 applications that we've built connecting the CRM 360 Strategy to Slack that's going to, again, continue to help organizations now really unveil new ways to interact with their relationships. And so those applications all debuted this quarter. Customers are very excited. Some of the best feedback we've ever gotten in our early release kind of prototyping with customers, it's really, really early days, but we're very, very encouraged from the feedback we're getting there.

And the -- it's more a Slack question than a question on the Sales Cloud or the -- but first of all, how much of a flywheel do you see from Slack because as you kind of communicate with your clients and you use Slack as a demo that's kind of almost kind of seeding Slack in the next organization and the next organization, and they realize what Slack can bring in. Is that kind of flywheel effect that we saw with Zoom in the pandemic already starting to kick in?

Yes, it is definitely starting to kick in right now, but I think it's much more durable than sort of any moment in time because I think in some places, this connection between sort of maybe a hub and spoke or hub and multiple spokes is what the world needs right now. And I think that a lot of -- if you have a challenge with supply chain visibility, Slack can open up kind of all moments of that delivery chain to really help you kind of figure out where inventory might be located or sourced from and procured from around the world. So what we're really starting to see is this new sort of ecosystem approach for businesses to invest in Slack in this way that I think is going to, like you said, become a flywheel for not just Slack and any organization, but slack in all the organizations that they work with through Slack that I think will become really, really powerful for our customers.

And then the -- if you think about it, the -- so Sales Cloud, you kind of brought it all together with the Customer 360. Like what learnings can you take there that you can, for example, bring to the Service Cloud and do things there differently? Or just talk to that a little bit.

Right. When I first came to Salesforce, now 5 years ago, and it's funny to say 5 years, it feels just like yesterday. But it's actually my fifth anniversary today. 5 years, I came to run Service Cloud. And one of the -- one of the things I really noticed about Service Cloud at the time was it was largely focused on business-to-business level support between an organization and its customers. And when you kind of take a zoom-out approach and you understand all the ways in which service gets delivered, all the way from not just sort of the person that you speak to, but maybe the chatbots that you kind of interact with first on the website to all the way to the field where someone might come to your home to perform service delivery on site for you. What we noticed about Service Cloud was it truly became a platform for how organizations sort of optimize their entire delivery chain for delivering service. That was the lesson we brought to Sales Cloud, which was really think about all the different units of delivery whether it was sales and legal and marketing and kind of project teams to work together in service to the customer. So this play that we've been running really is just really leaning in candidly to what our customers are experiencing every day, but having the willingness to kind of zoom out of that kind of perspective and use the platform that the Customer 360 strategy has allowed us to now create and really now bring that platform together in new meaningful ways. So I continue to see us sort of innovating that way. The second kind of dimension that you added a layer on, once you have sort of everyone working together in service of the customer, now becomes a new layer of industry or vertical computing that now gets very specialized for different businesses to optimize their business processes, their practices to really drive that digital transformation. So I think that the first play was really about unifying. The second play was really about verticalizing. And on these 2 tensions, we have really a broad horizontal and a deep vertical strategy that comes together, that really powers a lot of innovation potential and a lot of transformation potential for our clients.

Yes. And you touched, Bill -- you touched already a little bit on vertical like Barclays is obviously like a big customer and kind of we kind of are really focus on our Salesforce deployment and doing more there and getting deeper into it. Like where are we on that journey? Can you maybe just remind us on the vertical side? Where are you at the moment? And where are we in terms of the journey that is still ahead of us in terms of kind of addressing more verticals going deeper into verticals? What can you do there?

Yes. Well, first off, you are a customer and you're a customer of our Financial Services Cloud, and that is 1 of 12 industry purpose clouds that we've built to speak to the needs of different industries. And I think that's incredibly exciting because now, for the first time, we have this innovation that sort of is purpose-built for organization like yourselves. And that means that no longer that you talk about things like customers, you talk about clients and you know your client process which is pretty acute to the full financial services is already modeled and built into the Salesforce environment. And I think that is a big new opportunity for both of our customers to realize more success and for us to add more value to our relationship. One of the things I think is also really fun and fascinating about kind of being in the domain that we're in is we help organizations, like financial services, learn from other industries about how to really think about the next way in which you serve your customers. For example, some of the work that we're doing in high tech and customer adoption utilization technologies is now applying into the world of financial services, which is how to get not just more products per account or products for households to make sure they're the right products for the household. And so it gets into a new layer of value-added services by taking technology from one industry and actually applying it to yours. And so this not only is a great -- about sort of having more relevance for the industry that you're in, but best practices and new innovation potentials coming from other industries that might look at technology slightly different. That I think, unlocks another wave of growth potential for both of us in that regard.

Yes. And where do you see like in terms of customer engagement with you, do you see like a step-up once they go from like horizontal like the normal Salesforce to like vertical, it's like a deeper marriage, which basically means the commitment level is higher, and there's more to come? Is there a typical pattern that you see?

Yes. The first pattern is multi-cloud. So when you think about kind of expanding the relationship from just your sales or just your service team, to now you're marketing, your commerce, your data platform, that is really kind of horizon kind of one. Horizon 2 is that vertical layer, like I mentioned, which is really thinking about how to help organizations verticalize and align to the best practices of the industries that they're in. And then the third area is this notion of just more adaptive kind of best practices from across industries bringing into experience. And what you should see is one, deeper relationship, which for us turns into more, say, value per customer, also lower attrition, but it also shows that we're kind of walking into the higher level of the organization, where now we've become not just technology, we become a strategic transformation partner to think about what comes next for a company, right? And so I would say that, that is definitely the mindset that we have at Salesforce are not just the products that we serve, but also our responsibility is to help our customers think about new ways to transform their businesses.

Yes, yes. And it's funny because that was kind of my next question here. If you think about it as you do this, you're selling -- you're talking more at the C-suite level. You become more a strategic partner. From your previous organization, that's what they did really well for many years, like it does feel like a Salesforce over the last couple of years and maybe keep block words out of that as well. It did change in terms of like how people communicate with clients, the level of engagement is changing. Is that just -- is that a fair observation?

Absolutely. In fact, one of the things that has been really great to see Salesforce grow in this regard is take a company like Ford, for example, biggest -- one of the biggest automotive manufacturers in the world. They just had a major reset around their strategy really to focus on only a limited subset of product lines that they offer. And we used the new Salesforce to kind of run their frontline operations, serve their customers, do customer service support, et cetera. What they realize is the level of agility that they had within their business process and their in-house was now creating this new demand and this new opportunity to rethink how they deliver their products and services to their customers. And they're no longer thinking about themselves just as an automotive manufacturer. They're thinking about themselves as what is the service that, that truck now provides its clients. It's actually work delivery. So we announced a partnership with Ford called Ford VIIZR, which is not just how we put our software into the truck, it's also about how Ford actually serves their customers differently, which is actually becoming a work delivery platform for the trades progression around the world. And so this is where, again, that conversation starts with being operationally great, getting into the level to help businesses rethink strategically how they run their operation, but then asking deeper, more meaningful questions about their vision and how they want to serve their customers into the future and now co-creating innovation with them to help them transform the business to become a digital economy. And that's the part that I think is just so symbolic around the relationship Salesforce has with our clients is, when you are deeply rooted in customer success like we've been and you're deeply rooted in the trust in that relationship, now we start to explore what comes next together. And I think that's really something that is truly strategic and, ultimately, it's going to create a lot of good for the world.

And where are you in the organization in terms of that maturing of the organization? Because I remember -- take an example that you didn't talk about it at all like someone like Tableau. I remember when they kind of evolved, it used to sell like sales guys in T-shirts going from one department to the other to, all of a sudden, you have to sell at C-Level and you don't even speak the language. Where are you on that journey at Salesforce in terms of like having the right people in the right places to kind of drive this forward?

Well, first, it starts with our leadership team. I mean between Marc and Bret and Amy and Gavin and Brian Millham, our core leadership team, David Schmaier, our Chief Product Officer, really is deeply focused on doing the right things for our customers at all costs. And I think that when you're so deep in really big customer success, that allows you to sort of walk a level of value that, like I said, allows trust to enter the equation. In addition to sort of our senior leadership team, our enterprise selling motion and our enterprise sort of go-to-market teams are some of the best in the industry. I've had the fortune in my career to work with what I thought at the time was an incredible team at Microsoft, but I thought Microsoft really did a great job serving the customer with technology. What we do is serve the customer better business outcomes. And the technology just lives to pursue that outcome. And so that takes an incredible go-to-market motion. That takes an incredible aligned, cohesive team around every operating unit that we have globally around the world. And the thing I would also say is our ability to pivot and our ability to sort of adjust to different needs and different customers, different regions and different industries, it's some of the most athletic that I've seen in my entire time in software which is now I'm dating myself going on 25-plus years. And so again, I'm very, very bullish on the team we've assembled, the maturity that are -- again, you just see it when companies like Ford are trusting you to co-create with the technology that you've now served them with. That's the level of kind of crystallizing that relationship. It's more than just serving from a vendor perspective.

Yes. Okay. No, that's really helpful. And -- the -- I wanted to shift gear a little bit, Bill, and talk a little bit about the next step in the evolution for the Sales Cloud, the Service Cloud, we hear a lot from other people in the industry that Salesforce is that system of record, but there needs to be like more like a guided system of engagement, et cetera, and there's like a lot of start-ups in that space, to kind of do that. Like how do you think about the evolution of Sales Cloud in terms of like in terms of what you offer today and there's a lot and versus like what else can be done there? And it does look like there's -- using AI/ML slightly differently, there looks like there's a lot of opportunity still there.

Yes. I think people in our industry like to provide a lot of labels on things. And I've seen this in a lot of different kind of areas of enterprise software. First, it was a system of record, then it was system of engagement. Then it was -- the next one is a system of intelligence. What's really fascinating to me is you actually can't get to that journey of intelligence without really having solid engagement and without having solid record management kind of behind the scenes. And the 2 products that I'm most excited with, obviously, you see the resurgence of what we've done around sales and really thinking about the Customer 360 strategy. But you also see us focusing on the sales for CDP technologies, which is around this ability to really have a great engagement and great intelligence sort of at the moment of an interaction occurs. Oftentimes, you see that in marketing, but I'll tell you in service, it's just as relevant just as valuable in those interactions. When you think about a business and how they want to transform, the ability to have a great historical understanding of your relationship and a great behavior of understanding of your relationship, which is what the CDP prides, that's what makes Salesforce unique. It's the only technology that brings the system of history with a system of behavior in a way that allows an organization to ultimately get a better view of their customer. And what's also beautiful, things like MuleSoft, we can connect the data and that's not even part of that fabric of information, assemble it in a way that helps you drives better outcomes of understanding. And so I think when you look around the horizon set of whether it is any one of those labels, if anyone just isn't in one of those things, they're probably not seeing the world the way a customer needs them to. When you actually look at it in a more holistic sense, you say, "How do I bring this together in a way that helps the customer really get better outcome?" And that's ultimately the vision that we have here is help clients get better success that way.

And on that note, like, that's really clear. That's really helpful. And so it's more -- I mean do you see those ankle biters or these point solutions that are coming up, saying, like, that's a Salesforce, but I do this now, and this is like very different. Does that come up in your conversation? Or are you higher up in the organization that, that doesn't kind of show up?

Well, I don't like to refer them as ankle biters. I actually refer to them as partners because in a lot of ways, they're part of our app exchange. In a lot of ways, they are serving an acute focused need for, say, a distinct set of users. But our job at Salesforce is not just to focus on a small subset of users in an organization, our job is really to think about the organization. And so of course, we see them in use but what we often see is the first product that they're interacting to is a Salesforce. And it's not just to dump the data into Salesforce, it's they need the insights on the Salesforce to actually make those products work. And so that's where -- back to your question, being an ecosystem provider like we are, we're going to see some of those sort of products sort of rise. Some of them are going to go by the wayside. Our job is really to help customers get to the better outcome that they're looking to do.

Yes. Okay. So it's much more comprehensive, yes. Okay. Perfect. And then the -- shifting gear a little bit on the Services Cloud, like over the pandemic, that's probably the area that saw one of the biggest changes and you kind of mentioned it already around not having these big call centers, people need to be flexible in terms of where they're working. If you think about the Service Cloud of the future and the capabilities that it needs to provide, like where are we on that journey?

Yes. I think we're still early innings in the world of service modernization. And I'll give you some perspective that we see. Today, a lot of the organizations are trying to kind of, because of the technology shift that the pandemic drove, digitize their operations. And that means things like moving their telephony infrastructure from largely server resident-based computing experiences to the cloud. And we have a product that we go to market with our partner in Amazon with. We call it Service Cloud Voice. It's been one incredible product that has really accelerated for clients wanting to digitize the phone. The last non-digital channel has been kind of digitized in this moment. So this moment in digitization, I think, is kind of the moment that companies found themselves in during the pandemic. The next moment, though, is how do I optimize my service delivery functions, and it can't just simply be about add more people because the labor forces are hard to come by today. In fact, we see a lot of people exiting the labor force, in the world of service. And so the inflection point is how do we automate more, how do we use more virtual technologies? How do we provide better self-service experiences? Because ultimately, the goal of a service organization is to increase your quality of service while decreasing the cost of service. And for many customers, that quality of service starts and ends with let me start with a self-service experience I can do myself. And let me only call you when it's needed. That's forcing a lot of that digital world to now turn into self-service and automation world, and I think that's going to be a big opportunity for business is to rethink the way in which they serve their customers in this time.

Yes, yes. I mean on that note, like if you look at the world, in the last year, the biggest M&A drive was probably around natural language processing, AI/ML. Is that -- how do you see that area evolving as part of the overall broader ecosystem?

I think it is very early in the sort of adoption of a lot of those technologies. We do a great survey every year. We surveyed a number of service leaders and sales leaders as well where something in the neighborhood of, in service, 95% of service organizations had interest in using NLP and AI technologies, and yet only 15% had actually done anything with them at this point in time. So there is a big divide still between the interest, but the application is still yet -- trails, I think that the consumer set their higher customer sentiment there. Where I see a lot of innovation in that area is in the area of self-service technologies like chatbots, for example. Those are the areas where I think that technology is not meaning to sort of replace a human agent, but is really meant to augment the experience to do enough of the curation and enough of the salt that maybe you've got kind of the -- some of the symptoms here, when you really want to talk to a human individual when it's a deeper, more personal issue. And so I think in general -- or service organizations today are probably those that are on the frontline of doing a lot more with automation, not constructs. What I do see in the area of sales, though, I see a lot of recommendation technologies like our NextBus action technology that is really doing intelligent product optimization when you're building an opportunity or pricing optimization, when you're building it both. Those services, I think, are going to become very meaningful here and a very -- kind of the next horizon of opportunity for sales teams.

And then I had a question from the audience on the one before. So I'm sorry, I'm jumping back to the Service Cloud. There's been -- and the question was there's been a lot of evolution on the back end of the Service Cloud with kind of new players like cloud figures like Five9, et cetera, like coming up and just kind of doing more meaningful stuff in the cloud. How does -- how -- is Salesforce opinionated there in terms of the changes there? Or is that not a factor for you? That was the question.

My sentiment, first off, is that organizations want to have choices. And choices of technology partners that they work with, that they want to work with, maybe different entities or different players regionally just due to the way that the strengths of maybe the telephony providers the cloud can offer. What we built at Salesforce is something we call bring your own telephony. Again, we're a platform. Our job is to sort of manifest great service experiences no matter what your choice of interaction channels have come from. And that bring your own telephony strategy for us has allowed our partners, and our customers to be served no matter what that choice has been for them. In some cases, it's something we do ourselves with our Service Cloud Voice product. In other cases Five9, in other cases Avaya, another case is Genesis. They're great partners. And at the end of the day, what we know is that if you just swap that technology, it doesn't get you great customer service. That just means you have great connectivity. And so the combination of what we do with them is binding that connectivity to a great process, to great customer information, to great service level kind of modeling, to great recommendations that ultimately drives better outcomes. And so that's why it's not just a one size, let me replace the telephony, I've got a better service operation as part of it, but it's so much more.

Yes, yes. Okay. Perfect. That makes sense. And last couple of sets of questions for me, then I have a couple from the audience. The margins, it was always like a discussion point. And I know it's corporate level now, but margin was always a discussion point for like Salesforce investors. Like it does feel like over the last good few quarters, there seems to be a slightly bigger focus on that one. Like how are you experiencing that within the organization? Is there a shift that you've noticed? And you saw that Microsoft with Amy now, you have Amy as your boss there. Like what are you noticing, what's similar, what's different here as well?

Well, first off, yes, I think it starts with our management team really getting completely -- not just setting that margin kind of target for the company, but also really driving that operationally into everything that we do across Salesforce and not only are we being more strategic around the hiring that we make in this time since you sort of have a lot of capacity to fuel our growth today, but also at the front end on the areas like products that I work on, making sure that the margin of every product and every good that we put out into the marketplace is optimized for the moment in time that it's in. And one of the things that we've done on Sales and Service, for example, is we brought more value into our core products that others may be charged for as a different kind of optimization play because what we know is by packaging things together, we allow a better, more economic unit to occur that allows every organization to sort of benefit from that statement. So we're just being smarter about the operational kind of way that we're manifesting some of those strategies. And it also allows us really to think deeply about as product leaders, as sort of innovators, as go-to-market teams really focusing in on what matters most at this time.

Yes, yes. So do you -- like on your -- in your 5 years at Salesforce, survived with the pandemic and everything, did you notice like a slight different change in terms of -- did you notice a change when you came on from Microsoft? Because I do remember, Amy, Microsoft, there was a lot of discussion about dynamic budgeting and you had to kind of prove your ROI or your investment philosophy before you got your budget. And that's something that I think, Amy and Salesforce tries to kind of ingrain in the organization or the whole leadership team kind of pricing rate in the organization. So have you seen that journey?

I wouldn't say pandemic caused any degree of sort of a different strategy for us. I just think it is the strength of our management team sort of infusing that. And the trust that our management has and team has with every leader like myself and the organization, to act kind of with responsibility in mind. And I think that, that has been not in any one level per se. It's just been something that we've operationalized that I think is really about creating better long-term value for our customers. And the beautiful thing is I think that the team has put that trust in people like myself to make sure we become stewards of that metric that we've committed to.

Yes. Okay, Yes, makes sense. And I had a couple of questions from the audience before I let you go. Like one was -- someone kind of saying like, let's go back to that 15%, 20% growth on the Sales Cloud that we talked earlier about but just more -- can you help us understand a little bit how that -- a couple of growth drivers there? Because by now, a lot of the enterprises or the majority of enterprise will have sales, they will have sales automation. So how do you achieve that 15%, 20% growth that you're kind of printing at the moment?

There's probably 3 strategies I would think about, and I don't mean to be so alliterative in this sense, but one is internationalization. I think they're growing internationally and expanding Sales Cloud to teams that are now have more regional autonomy in their global operations, is one dimension. I think that the second would be industry in expanding the platform, so it has higher value across the industries. We have 12 industry clouds that are purpose-built now that allow customers to realize more value for us. I think that the intelligence, what we do with Tableau and how we unlock better data and better signals and some of the organic innovation we've built with Tableau now it's part of Salesforce. We have a product we call Revenue Intelligence, for example. It's about better pipeline inspection and better sales coaching technology so that organizations can predict revenue outcomes better. That would be the third. And if I would think of a fourth, I can't really think of another I word. I would just think it's category expansion. We have a product which we call Revenue Cloud, for example, which when you think about the fullness of revenue operations, Sales Cloud has been about the sales professions. Revenue Cloud has been about how organizations realize that revenue, plan that revenue, predict that revenue for the future. And that's a new product that we kind of bring out right out to the market, starting with a little bit of foundation from a company we acquired called SteelBrick a few years back. But now we've really built upon that platform and expanded on it to be a full revenue life cycle management solution that allows organizations to become more thoughtful for durable revenue for their future. And I think that's ultimately what's better, not just top line growth, bottom line performance. And so I think the Sales Cloud innovation train, a lot of that organically driven from the group that we have working on it is some of the most exciting innovation we have that's fueling that growth that we talked about.

Yes. Okay. Yes, makes sense. And next question from me on this was around if you think about the cohort dynamics within Sales and Service Cloud, has -- if you think about like the aging cohorts, have you seen any changes in terms of kind of churn deal size, et cetera? Has something changed over the years? If you think about a different cohort, like customers that are no longer on the platform or like new to the platform.

You mean cohort by tenure?

Yes. Yes. Sorry, yes.

Yes. I wouldn't say that, that has a dynamic or not. What I would say is that customers that probably have maybe come to us in the last, say, 3 years are probably doing so with the perspective of they are Customer 360 organizations as opposed to maybe a cloud or a singular cloud or in that case, multi-cloud, if they have sales and service. So I think that over the last couple of years, the identity of our customers really think more of themselves as Customer 360 clients. And I think those that we had served prior than 3 years ago are on that transformation journey for themselves. And oftentimes, I'll give you an example, customer of ours like Honeywell, which was a long-standing Sales Cloud customer, expanded into field service and expanded into Marketing Cloud with us that allowed them to really think about themselves as going from that singular customer or singular cloud now to a Customer 360 client. So that's probably, I think, the transformation, I would say that most of our customers are on is not just thinking by cloud, but really thinking about kind of how they bring the entire organization and service the customer.

Yes. Okay. Perfect. And then last question and I will let you go. It was around like, well, I still have people trying to get the macro question in slightly differently. So that's something that you will see with investors quite a lot. If you think about the Sales Cloud and its potential behavior in slower times, like how would you compare the Sales Cloud with, for example -- and the setup and how -- where you're kind of positioned in the organization compared to, for example, 2008, 2009? And I appreciate you were not there, but like it's more maturity. Does that mean -- of the offering, broadness of the offering? Does that mean you are more or less resilient to kind of swings?

Well, when you think about Sales Cloud, for example, prior to us having Revenue Cloud, and I always think about moments of high growth tends to be heavy focused on sales and in areas of sort of maybe more thoughtfulness into strategies that are less growth at all costs, it's how do we ensure the right durable growth moment. That's where our Revenue Cloud sort of has a great interplay with it. And I think that, that kind of ebb and flow between high growth at all cost moments and then how do you create better durable cost moments, that's why the combination of Sales Cloud and Revenue Cloud makes so much sense for organizations to think about these in concert with one another. I still see clients, when I go talk to around the world, in sales teams that want to figure out not just how do they take a dollar in, but how do they actually drive bottom line performance out. And they don't know that by putting the right products into an opportunity, you can have a real material impact on the margin proposition that's there because a lot of sales teams are just measured on top line growth metrics only. And so that's what we're really inspired by at Salesforce is this combination of using high growth with high optimization kind of technologies that allows organizations to weather these moments. And I think all of that exists in the Sales Cloud family. And so Sales Cloud won't sort of have these big ebbs and flows. You just see more predictable growth because it's served by these 2 technologies as well. My sentiment is also that's what really brings, I think, back to the concept of the 360 is you often see different -- in different moments where businesses have to become more resilient, a focus on different department of gains. Service is another great example. In the case of kind of moments where maybe acquisition, that we have to repeal back some of the marketing spend with you for events or whatever, we're going to focus on retaining your customers at that time, and that's where Service Cloud tends to lead the way. So I just think, again, the 360 strategy because we're helping businesses optimize their go-to-market, optimize their relationship with customers, that's why this is a great category of technology to be in because we are there to serve the most urgent and important needs of our clients no matter what department they sort of originate from.

Yes. Perfect. Bill, that was a great closing statement as well. I know I need to let you run and kind of manage 2 of the most important business units for Salesforce. So I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed our conversation. It's nice to learn more about it. Thank you, and kind of all the best. Thank you.

Wonderful. Thank you for having me and talk to you guys soon.

Thank you.