Looking for that optimal balance between growth and profitability is the ideal but of course if a tech firm in that state is also leaning towards driving growth...
That company is Salesforce (CRM) and it looks attractive now after pulling back from its peak.
Investing in growth, especially in this insatiable demand environment, is simply the best thing a tech firm can do for a company.
That said, I am also a staunch believer that a focus on discipline makes for a stronger and more durable company.
Over the long term, I believe tech firms need to be able to deliver both revenue acceleration and versatility in its revenue acceleration.
That shows up for Salesforce in the $3.2 billion in cash flow on $5.96 billion in revenue which adds up to being up 74% year over year.
CRM’s numbers reflect a strong performance since the onset of the public health situation and their operating margin is producing almost as if it was completely redesigned from the bottom up.
CRM has raised its operating margin to 18% and they are on track to doing $50 billion by 2025.
Then there are unbelievable stories to digest that make readers understand the true power of CRM.
The Sonos (SONO) story is just one to absorb — they just had this 84% growth when they went to consumer using CRM products.
More importantly, how to integrate operations with a cloud platform is at the forefront of every CEO’s thinking.
This takes looking at the trends of this past year and again, the individual stories where CRM has made that big difference, like the Honeywell (HON) story when they shifted 7,000 salespeople from in-person to virtual customer meetings — customer meetings aren't going back to conference rooms only.
Then when the business environment dictates that CRM is helping through the Service Cloud, together with Field Service and Experience Cloud to enable Honeywell to seamlessly dispatch technicians for on-site product maintenance and proactive asset management, connected service partner experiences, and customer experience for scheduling appointments and instantly solving troubleshooting problems.
It’s field service capability that helped CRM to amplify an already close-knit relationship with Honeywell, and that's when management started to collaborate and say, wow, we could bring this to the aviation business in Honeywell to transform and streamline the work they do via the cloud.
To succeed in the all-digital work-anywhere world enabling you to digitize your entire customer experience and get back to growth is the overarching goal in this incredible 2021 economy.
The outperformance really stretches across the portfolio. When we talk about the fact that of the seven-figure deals, they, on average, included more than four of CRM cloud services, meaning they are not selling individual products.
CRM’s AI Einstein started doing over 100 billion predictions per day. And it's a great example of these platform investments that CRM did multiple years ago that customers and the whole economy go digital are benefiting from.
It means every email is more personalized and every e-commerce you paid for is suited to your interest and your needs, driving growth and success for customers.
MuleSoft is now doing 4.86 billion integration transactions every day. That is up 28% quarter over quarter.
Integrating these legacy systems so customers can move faster in the face of an economy that’s shifting more rapidly than ever before shows the importance of CRM’s acquisitions as it relates to the overall value proposition of Customer 360.
Total revenue for the first quarter was $5.96 billion, up 23% year over year and CRM’s vertical strategy continues to align products to strategic industries.
In particular, we saw strength in the public sector, which continues to accelerate as governments around the world turn to Salesforce Solutions. Service Cloud demonstrated another quarter of incredible growth at scale with Q1 revenue of $1.5 billion, growing 20% year over year, and Tableau continues to perform well.
In Q1, Tableau was in eight of CRM’s top 10 deals for the company and in more than 60% of seven-figure plus deals.
The company expects Q2 revenue of $6.23 billion or approximately 21% growth year over year and CRM even raised annual revenue guidance by $250 million.
They are about to pass SAP as the largest enterprise applications company in the world. And all the analysts have their models. I know they track SAP and Salesforce.
It really shows the whole world is going digital, and customers are connecting with their customers in a new way, and everyone needs CRM to do it or get left behind.
They also need CRM’s analytics — they need integration and CRM just happens to be the leader in that area.
CRM has undergone an M&A consolidation after heavily paying for acquisitions. This earnings report signaled to investors to expect these headwinds to drop off towards the end of the year and since the stock market is forward-looking, CRM will start to transform into the buy the dip tech firm it was once before these expensive acquisitions took place.
Readers should keep an eye out for Salesforce for really any substantial pullback and long-term, this software company is a reliable revenue accumulator with a strong brand name.
