111–120 of 355 posts
Last time they did this, it was _right_ after the window that they had grandstanded and asked other companies to pledge no pandemic layoffs. Benioff did a whole media tour talking about how Salesforce would do no pandemic layoffs to set some kind of example, and said that they didn't expect other companies to follow their example, but asked them to just pledge no layoffs for 90 days, even though Salesforce was going…
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When this collapse in workforce population occurs perhaps firms will learn that they can survive and even thrive with much less "fluff staff" who mostly sit idle or contribute very little to the overall success of any given project. I continuously see a decent amount of what I consider staffing excess in a large fraction of the companies I've worked with. (My personal philosophy here is that companies/projects/etc ar…
Companies without slack can’t respond effectively to emergencies. see: Southwest.
With 50 same emojis attached.
SW was a systemic failure
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> Co-heads is always a subtext for executive disfunction It's actually worked quite well at Oracle over the decades. Benioff, who is former Oracle, hasn't perfected it like Larry has.
Every rule has an exception, and maybe Larry has perfected something there or has a very well managed ego. Most Co-head situations I see are either higher-ups setting up a power struggle between 2 newly appointed co-heads, or an existing head pretending to step back by appointing someone as their co-head who they can sabotage in real-time.
Larry is still the largest single stockholder of Oracle (~27%). So everyone knows he still runs the company at the end of the day.
Benioff only owns ~2% of Salesforce. There's institutional investors who own more of Salesforce than even Marc.
I propose the title should be changed to “Salesforce decimates staff as part of restructuring”. :)
makes sense given their employee to revenue ratio for Salesforce. They had 73,000 employees with just ~31B/year of revenue. That’s just 424k of revenue per employee. Such a ratio only makes sense with high growth rates.
Whenever I look at client’s Salesforce setups, I always wonder in the back of my mind what they will do if Salesforce has a significant down-turn? The lock-in to the platform appears to be very fierce. Are there viable routes to exit Salesforce if anyone ever needed to? (Note: I’m not saying Salesforce is doomed or anything, just the layoffs got me thinking in that direction theorically).
For data in Salesforce my company (GRAX) offers a backup product that will write data to your data lake in standard formats like Parquet. This offers a strategy to read old SFDC data BI tools or in parallel with using a new CRM. However the real SFDC lock-in is around business process. If your global Sales or Support team lives in SFDC it’s not easy to retrain them to another system.
Not my area, but I was under the impression Salesforce was trying to pinch continual-export by jacking up prices on bulk data exports.
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What I like about Hubspot is it doesn't try to eat half your org. Salesforce is the ERP of the product world.
I agree, but Salesforce didn't start out that way, and I'm willing to bet that Hubspot wants to be like Salesforce when they grow up.
There are many things I admire about Salesforce.
But, we decidedly don't want to become like Salesforce when we grow up. We have been committed to SMBs for 16+ years now, and not planning to change that anytime soon.
They have grown through a lot of M&A, we built our platform from the ground-up for SMBs.
There is room in the market for both Salesforce and HubSpot to succeed. Salesforce for large enterprises (the Fortune 1000) and HubSpot for SMBs.
How about their future prospects? From the 4 implementations I've seen all are desperately trying to leave the platform. One succeeded so far. Is the enterprise Salesforce craze over?
Whenever I look at client’s Salesforce setups, I always wonder in the back of my mind what they will do if Salesforce has a significant down-turn? The lock-in to the platform appears to be very fierce. Are there viable routes to exit Salesforce if anyone ever needed to? (Note: I’m not saying Salesforce is doomed or anything, just the layoffs got me thinking in that direction theorically).
I forget which podcast I heard it on (so forgive me if my memory is sloppy), but after their latest quarterly report didn't CAC payback go from 24 months to something wild like 10 years? Meaning their new ARR add rapidly fell off so quickly, before they adjusted their Sales and Marketing salaries and spending, that it immediately put their unit economics way way way way underwater. So I'd expect at least a big chunk…
Many many software companies end up spending more money to acquire a customer than a customer will ever pay them. I tend to think this is because the demand and need for many tools is not significant enough to justify the amount of capital allocated to promote them. Finance spreadsheet alchemists last 10 years saw big gross margins in software (overinflated by not taking into account cost to acquire user), bought int…