CRM giant Salesforce's focus on margins sees sales growth slip

Salesforce has disappointed the markets as it failed to lift its revenue forecast and saw professional services projects stall. The CRM giant reported revenue of $8.25 billion for the first quarter ended 30 April, up 11 percent year-on-year and a little higher than market expectations of $8.18 billion. Meanwhile, the San …

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this expected?

An awful lot of projects were impacted by Covid, from delays to outright cancellations. During this at least from my experience management has lost sight of IT as a potential enabler and fallen back on old patterns of thought, seeing it as an unfortunate weight to be borne. At the same time, paradoxically, they are looking to IT to move out of troubled waters and back into a new normal with greater resilience to future disruption built into our processes. It seems that the benefits of technology adoption have been remembered, but the associated cost and planning requirements forgotten. This has led, with the organisations I am involved with, IT departments having to chase quick wins and low hanging fruit wherever possible to rebuild the case for IT investment.

The market pressures facing Sales Force do not to me seem remotely unexpected as a result. Long term project engagements are just not realistic when an organisation is recovering from a high impact multiyear event that has pressured margins and operating budgets to breaking point.

As an aside, we are also currently evaluating our sales processes and Sales Force is being considered as a part of this change. We are approaching this with a great deal of trepidation, entirely expecting the proposal price to be something astronomical and in need of several reviews before we are back close to reality.