Already the dominant player in the business of customer relationship management, or CRM, Salesforce.com (CRM 5.57%) is capitalizing on its acquisition of Slack to position itself as indispensable as companies further move from physical offices to digital spaces.
In this episode of "Beat & Raise" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on Sept. 27, Millionacres editor Deidre Woollard and Fool.com contributor Brian Withers discuss how Salesforce plans to use Slack as a key component in its growth plan -- and how the cloud company itself used Slack to get to this point.
Deidre Woollard: You'd look at this slide and you think, "Well that doesn't sound very optimistic," [laughs] but it's a little deceptive because what they were actually talking about really is positioning Salesforce as a growth company right now. You'd think of Salesforce as relatively mature company but what they're saying is that so much has shifted in the digital world and that were all pivoting to the digital office, digital landscape, and that Salesforce is really perfectly positioned for that with Slack at the top of that. Let's go down another slide. Let's do one more. They're talking about the new world as this massive opportunity. This idea that all companies will be on this journey over the next three to four years of trying to scale into the digital landscape, moving from physical offices to digital, they kept referring to it. Amy Weaver, who's their CFO and President, former Chief Legal Officer, kept referring to that over and over as this opportunity digital transformation, the new office. That is really where they're headed and they see themselves as being in the business of digital transformations. One of the things that they talked about too is all of the different clouds and the way the different clouds within Salesforce all contribute with each other, and I keep thinking the next slide's a total investible market and it's not. [laughs] Let's go back because this is an important one, too. The way that Salesforce, and we talked about this on last time with Upgrade or Topgrade, Slack, it's a new acquisition, but they see it as the front door. It's how your first interaction with your customers, with your employees, with everyone, is Slack and they're putting it at the center of their universe. That's a really important part of how Salesforce is going to move forward. Amy Weaver talked about they did the deal for Slack on Slack. She talked about what that was like. They did their diligence on Slack. They did all of the parts of a deal like this, which, my goodness, is a very large deal, took place on Slack and so that's just an example of how they see this. This is how the future of business is going to be done. We're not going to be traveling all over the place and shaking hands over a piece of paper and in a conference room, that's not how we'll be doing the future of business. We'll be doing it starting with Slack and then connecting all of these other clouds.
Brian Withers: It was interesting to me, Deidre, how I learned through the Investor Day that Salesforce wasn't an enterprisewide Slack company before the acquisition.
Deidre Woollard: Right. [laughs]
Brian Withers: They bought in, even though that they hadn't used it across our enterprise. I think that says a lot for how important this acquisition was.
