Published - September 22, 2022 @ 12:21 PM (EET)
The enterprise software maker, Salesforce (NYSE:CRM), announced a new long-range profitability goal that showed the company's determination to operate more efficiently.
The company revealed targets of $50 billion in revenue for the 2026 fiscal year (representing 17% CAGR) with a non-GAAP operating margin of over 25%.
Moreover, at the Dreamforce conference Wednesday - to keep existing customers and win new ones - Salesforce introduced a host of new products, including "Genie" and "Slack Canvas."
Salesforce, who, to some degree, is acknowledging that its existing systems have gotten somewhat dated, began its move toward Genie in 2019, a tool that will give marketers access to the latest information available through Salesforce's Marketing Cloud.
Co-CEO Bret Taylor, a career technologist, told reporters that Salesforce's big product unveiling is "unabashedly geeky" with modern technology that gives salespeople real-time information at their fingertips.
Elsewhere, Salesforce will bolster the capabilities of Einstein, the company's artificial intelligence model that runs in the Sales cloud and other applications, with the addition of Genie.
Executive Vice President and GM Patrick Stokes at Salesforce said it's probably the biggest news coming out of Dreamforce this week. He said,
"Genie effectively enables the world's first real-time CRM."
WHY IT MATTERS
As a result of complex and disorganized IT estates, businesses have historically struggled to leverage their customer data effectively. In addition, high inflation and rising interest rates have further burdened businesses and put Taylor under pressure from Wall Street.
So far this year, Salesforce shares have dropped 40%, more than double compared with the S&P 500, and are trading near their lowest since April 2020.
But despite the economic pressures, Taylor remains optimistic about demand and added that Salesforce's core products continue to do well as companies look to boost productivity.
"CFOs have a lot of power right now. People are focused not just on top-line growth like they were for the past few years, but also bottom-line growth - It's obviously a more measured environment, but I think technology is the solution," Taylor told Yahoo Finance Live.
