Salesforce Business Strategy

Salesforce is hiring 3300 people across the departments. In January, it cut 10% of its workforce, i.e. 8000 people.  At the company’s annual conference on 9/14/23, CEO Marc Benioff shared in an interview with Bloomberg, “Our job is to grow the company and to continue to achieve great margins.”

We may see the trend of hiring when tech companies realize that they need resources to achieve great margins after cutting too much earlier. How much does it take to hire, train, and ramp up an employee? Was cutting a strategic move?

Let’s consider a definition of strategy with Salesforce.

Strategy is an organization’s unique way of sustainable value creation ~ per Jeroen Kraaijenbrink, in the Certified Strategy and Implementation Consultant program.

Using Salesforce as an example

• Value creation – CRM (Customer Relationship Management) with extensive out-of-box functionality and customized capability
• Uniqueness –  the first cloud-based CRM
• Sustainable –  integrate AI with Data Cloud Products to help customers organize information from multiple sources and to make it difficult to copy
• Way –  Leadership vision to continue enhancing the platform and its eco-system with the tech trend, maybe including rehiring the laid-off employees to speed up the training time.