Brian Millham: Raimo, I’m not exactly sure — you’re cutting out a little bit there. So I’ll try to deduce what your question was around productivity. Productivity is a big component of our growth strategy going forward. How do we get our account executives to sell more each and every month, each and every quarter to our customers? We’ve got some great strategy around that. Enablement is a big component of that. . You heard in my commentary earlier that we’re very focused on ensuring that we’re enabling our entire sales teams around our entire product portfolio and bringing people back to the office to drive that productivity, that learning that is so important for us as we think about the growth going forward. I also mentioned an opportunity we have to bring our products together around a buyer, how do we put some bundles together to drive higher ASPs for all of our sellers and solve more problems for our customers with a single selling motion versus today, maybe several selling motions to go win those deals.
And so productivity, a big driver of our growth strategy going forward, an effort, frankly, that we’ve always kept productivity flat and hired more AEs to drive our growth. We’re going to inverse that equation going forward and think about productivity as our driver going forward. So really appreciate the question and hope I got it because your line was breaking up.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Kash Rangan with Goldman Sachs. .
Kasthuri Rangan: What an amazing end of fiscal year. Congratulations to the team. Much much much better than expected, brighter days ahead. Question for Marc. And maybe, Brian, you can chime in here. So Marc, we went through the 2008, 2009 recession, 2010 rebound, back then, the company was a smaller company, but you still were able to get profitability up. We went through a bit of a downturn, and we came out of it. So are there pyramids to be drawn in this cycle? Because there’s certainly uncertainty about recession, whatnot, that’s damping spending. If we take that as a fact, the growth rate that you guided to, should that be the aspirational long-term growth rate of the company? Or do you think if and when the recession clears that there should be a rebound in spending?
And we understand that all the go-to-market rationalization that you and Brian and Amy you’re all working on should allow you to gain share. So help us think about the recovery curve of Salesforce in the next economic cycle.
Marc Benioff: To understand what we’re going through, I really did go back and looked at all the numbers in ’01, ’02 and ’08, ’09. And what you said, Kash, is quite enlightened in that. Of course, we saw in ’08, ’09 ACV fall off dramatically. And of course, we hit the break on spending, and we accelerated margin, I think, 6 points during that time. I don’t know the exact numbers, but it was a moment where you see sales and marketing companies, marketing spend — when these things happen, CEOs, they stop hiring salespeople. They stop spending on marketing, right? Everybody knows the methodology of what, how CEOs behave in a recession. As soon as the stock market implodes CEOs, they hit the brakes. So I think that, that’s what we saw in ’08, ’09.
