Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

That was kind of a version 1 idea of the CDP, and it didn’t exactly work out. The main reason why is customers really wanted an integrated deeply inside Salesforce with our metadata platform. And they wanted it to be a data lake inside Salesforce, and we had built it outside. So we realized, let’s build it back inside the platform, which is what we’ve done. And this data cloud, you can see it now deployed in customers, and I’ll give you a couple of great examples. One is Ford, amazing what they have done with the Data Cloud. Of course, they’re using Sales Cloud and Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud, but it’s all integrated with the Data Cloud, and they deployed their first product this quarter, which is the Mach-E. So if you have a Mach-E — I have one, they’re amazing — and you’re getting text messages from Ford or e-mail messages, you’re getting them from our Data Cloud, and that is incredible to see that.

Boston Scientific, another amazing story that I mentioned, this idea that they were able to use Data Cloud to unify their front office and back office systems together in this really incredible integrated way. Formula 1, I just reviewed last night, how they — only 1% of Formula 1 fans — F1 fans that they’re the only — they come to the races. The other 99% they have to connect with electronically, but they need an intelligent AI-based system. And with Data Cloud, you can bring your own AI model. We ingest it. And then our system automatically is connecting with your customer. And as they’re interfacing in all of our different clouds, the AI-based Data Cloud is doing this incredible heavy lifting. So it’s going to be an amazing organic driver for us.

I mean it’s probably our fastest-growing cloud in the quarter. And I can’t be more excited to show more of what we’re doing there. You’ve seen some of it at Dreamforce. You saw some of it where — we’ve now deeply integrated Tableau into it. So Tableau has a server now finally, but Tableau also is an incredible window onto all of the Salesforce data through the data cloud, really neat work. And our engineering team, a huge call out to them for this great success. .

Brian Millham: And Brad, just another comment quickly on the industry play. A big part of our success in the quarter and a big bet for us in the coming years as we invest heavily in our industry cloud. I think you heard in the commentary, 8 of 13 of our industry clouds grew above 50% in ARR in the quarter. Really a great payoff in the investment we’ve made in the technology there and really having our sales team show up and speaking the customer — the language of our customers to drive the growth of this business, couple that with the strategies around driving international growth, international expansion of all of our products, along with multi-cloud selling, a great opportunity for us going forward. So the industry is a big part of our strategy.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Raimo Lenschow with Barclays.

Raimo Lenschow: Congrats on the tough decisions this quarter and the great quarter. So I think you all be praised for that and the hard work you’ve done. A question for me, more for Brian. Obviously, there were comments out from you guys around sales, sales productivity as we kind of went through the January. If you think about the actions you’re taking now, where do you see that sales productivity that you’re seeing at the moment? And where do you think Salesforce and the setup that you have here?