Salesforce insiders say that by wooing back former execs, Marc Benioff may finally feel comfortable enough to loosen his grip

Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff has spent years wooing former executives back to the company. Last week, he told Insider that his new partner to run the company is COO Brian Millham, who has taken more responsibility and is possibly in line to become co-CEO.

Bringing a bunch of people from the old guard back could be really good news for the company, two former executives who worked closely with Benioff and employee No. 13 Millham told Insider. They were granted anonymity because they were not authorized by Salesforce to speak to the press.

Benioff has surrounded himself with people "that know how Salesforce works and know how Benioff works" one former exec explained. And working with Benioff isn't easy, another said.

He's gregarious, the type of leader that likes to sell and wants to bring everyone along with him in agreement. But while he can be a "genius"  at communicating a vision, both sources said, he's less great at telling executives what he wants from them. Employees around him have to read his tea leaves and know him well to know what he wants, these folks said.

On top of that, Salesforce is an enormous and complicated company, with a specific culture modeled after Benioff's personality itself: it's very sales centric but is equal parts collaborate and competitive. The company is known for its cloud customer relationship management software, but also has cloud services for marketing, customer support, and data analysis and beyond that, many other products. And it has massive corporate philanthropy operations, a huge venture capital arm, and a big branch dedicated to non-profits.

After two failed attempts at finding a co-CEO who could eventually convince Benioff to take his fingers out of day-to-day operations, the third try isn't just with a single person, Millham (although he is the official new, heir apparent). Benioff is building an entire cadre of boomerang executives that he trusts to run the show with Millham. 

Benioff just brought back Miguel Milano as chief revenue officer; Ariel Kelman as chief marketing officer; and Kendall Collins as chief of staff. Salesforce's old guard years ago started to return a few years ago, when Benioff brought Steve Fisher back as a technology exec, pulled cofounder Dave Moellenhoff out of retirement, and brought Jim Steele back as a sales exec. Last year, he brought back Clara Shih to lead up all things AI. Salesforce declined comment.

Those who know how best to work with Marc and understand Salesforce's culture may help him loosen his grip because he trusts them to operate the company as he would. So, if Brian Millham becomes a third co-CEO title, he could finally be the one that becomes the next sole CEO — the only one to ever have held that role besides Benioff. And Benioff can go on to focuses on other areas of the company, perhaps like his mentor Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who left the CEO role to become CTO. 

Benioff hinted as much when he talked to Insider last week.

"The key part is that these executives always felt that they were part of Salesforce and now they've gone through what we like to call at Salesforce 'external training,'" Benioff laughed during a recent call with Insider referring to these execs' roles at other companies like Oracle and Amazon. "What's great is when people come back, they can almost start immediately because they hit the ground running."

This particular last round of rebuilding the executive bench with former executives is a big turnaround from eight months ago, when Salesforce was like a building on fire.

Benioff's first co-CEO Keith Block quit in 2019, and his most recent co-CEO Bret Taylor shocked Benioff by resigning on November 30. Soon after, Slack founder Stewart Butterfield, seen internally as a possible heir, also quit, along with Tableau CEO Mark Nelson.

During all of that executive upheaval, activist investors swarmed Salesforce demanding better profits earlier this year, the company cut 10% of its workforce, closed offices, and reversed its stance about remote work — and delivered two great quarters with profit margins rising.

With all of that new blood from aquisitions washed away, Benioff seems to think Salesforce can move forward by going back. And at least some of the people who know the company well agree.

Are you a Salesforce employee or Insider with insight to share? Please reach out to Julie Bort on a non-work device at secure chat app Signal: 970-430-6112, email jbort@insider.com or DM on Twitter @julie188.

Workday hires Salesforce veteran as CMO

Workday has found a new chief marketing officer in Emma Chalwin, who was most recently executive VP of global field marketing at Salesforce.

Chalwin joins Workday, a software platform for finance and human resources functions, as outgoing CMO Pete Schlampp is stepping down after less than a year in the role.

“After nearly seven years, Pete Schlampp has made the decision to leave Workday to return to his entrepreneurial roots,” according to a Workday spokesperson. Schlampp joined Workday when the company acquired his company Platfora in 2016.

At Salesforce, Chalwin was responsible for creating go-to-market plans, driving brand awareness and messaging, and leading demand generation globally. Prior to Salesforce, she held global brand and marketing roles at Macrovision, McAfee, and Adobe. Chalwin departs Salesforce after more than eight years with the company.

“I'm incredibly energized by the opportunity to drive more awareness for such a respected and beloved brand that is so well aligned with my own personal values,” Chalwin said in a statement. “I look forward to bringing my international growth experience to bear as Workday continues to scale and partnering with our clients and partners around the world to thrive in the changing world of work.” 

Chalwin leaves Salesforce at a time when the company has been leaning into AI technology, having recently launched two new products: Marketing GPT, which will aim to help brands deliver advertisements to consumers, and Commerce GPT, which will focus on customizing and unifying brands’ shopping experiences.

In a statement, Carl Eschenbach, Workday’s co-CEO, called Chalwin a “world-class leader with a track record of driving international brand awareness for some of the world’s most respected technology companies,” adding that she “brings deep expertise across all facets of marketing, and has the vision and background to help us achieve our next stage of growth.” 

Workday’s last big marketing push came earlier this year with the company’s first-ever Super Bowl ad, which focused on rockstars. The 60-second spot from Ogilvy featured Paul Stanley of Kiss, Ozzy Osbourne, Joan Jett, Billy Idol and Gary Clark Jr. The ad centered on how these real-life rockstars were annoyed by the increasingly casual use of the term when referring to overachievers in the workplace.

The ad came at a slightly uncomfortable time, just a few weeks after Workday announced it would lay off 3% of its workforce.

Last month, Workday reported first-quarter revenue of $1.68 billion, up 17.4% from a year earlier, and appointed Zane Rowe as chief financial officer.

L&T Electrical & Automation leverages Salesforce to win more customers with smarter sales and faster service

Naresh Kumar, Head, ESP says that ESP embodies the core value of ‘daring to disrupt’ not just in its products, but also in the processes. The Digital Innovation & Technology team, is constantly innovating to improve processes through automation, analytics, and AI. In 2020, our team started digitally transforming customer and employee experiences using Salesforce.

It was time for a change.We started our CRM transformation journey by bringing together stakeholders from sales, service, and marketing to articulate our CRM needs. Consultants then shadowed customer-facing teams to identify the unsaid requirements and followed it up with a design thinking workshop to lay the foundation for a new CRM.

Selling smarter and growing revenue faster through automationWith Salesforce Sales Cloud, we have automated sales processes, from lead and opportunity management, to order creation and reporting. Over 129 hours have been saved through this automation. The email campaigns are easily built and sent out through Salesforce’s marketing automation software - Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. Leads generated from these campaigns are then automatically assigned to the right sales branch based on the pin code.

At the branch, our field sales reps use the Salesforce mobile app to identify new opportunities, capture customer information, and manage customer lists on the go.

Reps can also forecast opportunity scores and win probability through Salesforce Einstein. With Salesforce, our sales reps have complete visibility into sales targets and customer data, which helps them sell faster and smarter.

All the financials associated with sales activity – be it sales budgets or spend approvals – are also streamlined for efficiency. Orders are automatically pushed to a third-party system for processing, while sales invoice data flows back in for performance tracking. Our finance team is delighted that all sales financials are now in one place.

We also use Salesforce Event Monitoring to track sales user activities such as logins, logouts, and reports. In one year, the volume of sales activities conducted through our CRM has quadrupled. So have the average number of sales calls, with each rep now making over 100 calls per month.

Innovating for better sales efficiencyESP has built multiple innovative features on Salesforce to make the lives of both its customers and sales reps easier. One such feature tracks the usage of field sales vans. When a sales rep books a van to visit customers, all the activities conducted through the van are tracked on Salesforce. This way, we can monitor the utilization of our assets every month, optimizing both van usage and sales efficiency.

We have built a rich knowledge portal for our customers to access product brochures and manuals. If the customer wants to purchase a solution, sales reps can generate a quote on the spot.

Another innovative feature is the ‘CACO’ or ‘comprehensive analysis of competitor offerings’ module. Through it, our sales reps can easily capture data on competitor product prices and discounts. The tool then automatically calculates how much of a discount can be offered to customers to match competitor prices. Earlier, those calculations would take us 2-3 hours. But with automation, they can now be done in just 15 minutes.

For our channel partners, we have built a tool to simplify partner onboarding, agreements, certification, and discontinuation. Meanwhile, powerful reports deliver real-time visibility into sales trends, KPIs, and metrics like coverage ratio and success ratio. We’ve created wonderful dashboards and prediction models with Salesforce CRM Analytics which help us easily visualise and improve sales performance.

Boosting service productivity with a single-agent workspaceWe have transformed our service function too. Through Salesforce Service Cloud, our contact center agents can swiftly capture all customer service requests, and assign them to the right field service engineers based on pin code. The streamlining and automation of service requests have resulted in a 26% reduction in case resolution time. Having a seamless platform like Salesforce helps us improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our service processes.

At the service site, engineers use the Field Service mobile app to record service details, capture the customer’s digital signature, and submit a report on the spot. Customers are thrilled with the speed and quality of our digital service reports. Overall, our customer net satisfaction scores have improved from 84% to 96%. Meanwhile, service managers can use rich customer service analytics to understand why a service issue occurred, and how to prevent it.

Improving CRM processes and user adoptionESP’s Salesforce implementation journey was ably supported by PwC. PwC helped us benchmark and refine many of our processes based on industry best practices. With their insights, we’ve made our CRM truly effective and efficient. The total login percentage or TLP of our CRM has shot up to 95%, thanks to the user benefits of Salesforce.

We now want to connect other stakeholders like channel partners and even customers on Salesforce. Our goal is to predict and proactively fulfill customer needs. We also want to pursue the right customers and opportunities using automatic recommendations from Salesforce. And finally, build a sustainable ecosystem aligned with customer expectations. We’re excited to keep innovating around these goals on Salesforce.

Note: This article has been drafted as part of ETCIO's Brand Connect Initiative

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