Salesforce gets more direct about rivals and more vocal about customers

Even for a company known for taking digs at competitors and name-dropping clients, Salesforce’s latest earnings call was a standout.

A review of the past 10 years of the workplace software company’s earnings transcripts suggests a shift from indirectly knocking old, siloed “legacy” competitors like Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle to directly attacking newer, more niche upstarts.

Here’s CEO Marc Benioff:

“I especially loved five customers who get to leave the purgatory of ServiceNow. Like Sunrun, Cornerstone, CoolSys, and there’s others too that we’re not allowed to mention, but I might mention them anyway, who are leaving ServiceNow now for the new Salesforce IT service product, which is about apps and agents, helping you manage all your ITSM.

But don’t just think it’s just that. We built an amazing new life sciences product this year: Agentforce for Life Sciences. And since we launched so many of the global pharma companies, and I’ve met with so many of the CEOs myself, they’re leaving Veeva — the purgatory of Veeva — including AstraZeneca, Novartis, Takeda, and, of course, Albert [Bourla] at Pfizer. They’re all saying that they are going to Salesforce Life Sciences, which is a product that has apps and agents. And this is amazing. They are the most regulated businesses in the world. And they’re choosing Salesforce.”

So not only did he criticize competitors ServiceNow and Veeva as “purgatory,” but he also named specific customers Salesforce claims to have taken from them.

That’s far more direct than many of Salesforce’s historical digs, which involved highlighting competitors as “old,” “legacy,” “siloed,” and structurally non-cloud-native.

“If you go look at some of these legacy companies that are trying to get in the game of the front office and say that they’re now CRM companies, it’s not in their DNA,” Benioff’s then co-CEO Keith Block said in 2017.

The latest earnings call also marks a departure from simply listing all its happy customers, which Benioff did in spades, per usual.

This time Salesforce invited three of them — the CEOs of Wyndham Hotels and SharkNinja, as well as the founder of SaaStr — on the call itself, in what looked like a cross between a YouTube podcast and an infomercial.

Benioff didn’t have to say how great he thinks his products were. His guests delivered testimonials for him.

What should we make of these earnings call changes? Certainly one could argue they’re a sign of either strength or weakness, which likely depends on whether you interpreted the company’s earnings as positive (revenue beat expectations and is growing faster than it had been!) or negative (part of that growth came from the acquisition of Informatica!).

Investors themselves seem unsure: the stock was down 5% after the market closed yesterday but is currently up around 3% as traders continue to digest the earnings.

But perhaps the biggest beneficiaries are ServiceNow and Veeva. By naming them directly, Salesforce elevated them — and signaled that it considers them serious competition.