💃 Salesforce 2024Q4 (FY2025Q4) Earnings Call 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Near the end of the earnings call, Marc proclaimed 🗣️

The person who built the platform you owe your livelihood to has spoken - learn to build on Agentforce or become obsolete 😳.

OR, just buy this and you should be covered 😎!

Anyway…Salesforce missed Q4 revenue and lowered their FY26 guidance 🙁, but had a beat on earnings per share and continued to increase operating margin 😀.

But the most interesting thing about the call? Read on 👇

All of your Salesforce 2024Q4 (FY2025Q4) Earnings Call highlights wrapped into a 4 minute burrito 🌯.

THE NUMBERS

Salesforce FY2025Q4 Earnings

Revenue | $9.99 billion actual vs $10.04 billion expected, and an 8% YoY increase. This revenue miss drove a 5% drop (as of this writing) in the afterhours stock price.

Earnings | $2.78 per share vs $2.61 expected 👊

Furthermore, Salesforce adjusted guidance for the FY26 from analyst’s expectations of $41.37 billion to $40.9 billion

🙁

Operating Margin for FY25 came in at an impressive 33%, up 250bps YoY, showing continuous improvement in efficiencies.

How much did the recent layoffs and AI agent augmentation have to do with this?

Honestly, not much.

Layoffs have an initial expense (severance packages 💰) and the AI agents haven’t been around long enough to be as impactful as a 2.5% increase in profit margins. So not only are these legit efficiencies, but there is room to run in regards to further margin increases 📈.

Marc reliably tweeted the historical growth and FY26 targets-

THE VIBE

Salesforce, v.YAWN 🥱 

The whole vibe of the earnings call was….measured 🥱.

This call was all about balance.

🤔 Salesforce beat EPS, but missed on revenue.

🤔 The future-golden-goose, Agentforce, had 3000+ deals won in Q4, but FY26 guidance was lowered.

🤔 Salesforce’s new COFO is the accomplished Robin Washington, but they’re losing CFO Amy Weaver and COO Brian Millham.

Every time they raise their fist in victory, they get punched in the gut 😖.

The biggest surprise may have been the news that wasn’t announced, that in any other scenario would’ve been the headliner. Maybe touting the $2.5BB power handshake with Google was shelved because it’s currently vaporware?

Or perhaps they couldn’t trumpet that news and also getaway with sweeping the ill-timed Slack outage under the rug (are you kidding? On earnings day?!?! Someone is getting fired…), so they elected to acknowledge neither? A good decision…

This call had such a different vibe.

In late-2022, you saw Marc fight like young Obi-Wan when the street turned on him. And you saw him zealously collect his flowers when the market showed him love in 2023.

In yesterday’s call, you saw him be measured, humble, and, most impressively for a powerful CEO, avoid hubris. He could’ve puffed his chest and extrapolated Salesforce’s 3000+ Q4 Agentforce deals into bold revenue forecasts 📈.

Instead, he chose patience and humility - lowering FY26 guidance 📉.

This is a masterclass in setting Salesforce up for success. Underpromise, overdeliver. All they have to do is NOT have their worst growth numbers ever, and they’ll beat their guidance 🧠.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Marc and Salesforce are showing incredible patience.

They haven’t booked any future-proofed wins with AI, even though they’ve invested a ton of time, resources, and most of all - REPUTATION.

They’ve transformed their SaaS CRM company into an AI company, when nobody asked them to 😐.

It’s an incredibly tough makeover, especially as a $295,000,000,000 public company!

Hubspot, at $38 billion, isn’t transforming into an AI company.

Microsoft, at $3 trillion, isn’t transforming into an AI company.

Salesforce is a self-proclaimed AI company, despite inventing and dominating SaaS CRM. And this is one of those valleys in the journey that you have to shut up, put your head down, and do hard stuff.

Then, if you come out the other side with wins, you can rollback some humility 😉.

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

Twitter won the Slack outage commentary

🤣 ^read the comments in that one!