10 Best Advertising Stocks to Buy According to Short Sellers

8. Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM)

Short Interest as % of  Shares Outstanding: 1.41%

Number of Hedge Fund Investors In Q2 2024: 117

Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) is another cloud computing company that allows businesses to manage their marketing campaigns across stores, web, social, and other platforms. With more than 70,000 employees and $35.7 billion in trailing twelve month revenue, Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) is one of the biggest players in its industry. This means that unlike smaller SaaS and cloud companies, its story focuses more on customer retention and cost control as opposed to the growth based valuation for other firms. Its primary marketing platform is the Marketing Cloud, and Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) plans to further improve this service through AI via its platform called Data Cloud. Data Cloud relies on more than 8 trillion records to streamline customer experience and provide Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) with a unique leg up over competitors. However, despite its scale, a key weakness of the firm is its inability to land deals with large customers, and the stock could face headwinds on this front later on.

Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM)’s management shared details for its marketing features during the Q1 2025 earnings call:

“Let me give you just one example of a company that is using Salesforce across the entire front office. CrowdStrike, a leading cybersecurity company and a longtime customer of Salesforce added Data Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Revenue Cloud and MuleSoft in the quarter. CrowdStike already relied on Einstein 1 sales and service and Slack, and now they’ll use Data Cloud to pull together new and trap data from data lakes to build a 360 degree view of their customers, helping them align sales and marketing efforts to drive growth. They’re also leveraging MuleSoft with incredible results. MuleSoft has helped CrowdStrike accelerate project delivery by 30% and decreased maintenance costs by 20%. Salesforce is now the backbone of CrowdStrike driving every aspect of CrowdStrike’s operation and limiting the reliance on complex siloed third party applications.”