Salesforce bosses are happy with Slack deal — here's why it makes the company stronger

Published Thu, Jun 23 20226:45 PM EDT

Kevin Stankiewicz @in/kevinstankiewicz @kevin_stank

The co-CEOs of Salesforce (CRM) told Jim Cramer they've been pleased with their purchase of Slack Technologies, arguing the company's flagship customer relationship management platform, Customer 360, is even more valuable to clients now that it owns the chat software maker. Why we care Salesforce completed its roughly $27 billion deal for Slack in July 2021 — its largest acquisition to date, following multi-billion dollar deals for MuleSoft in 2018 and then Tableau a year later. We recognized and supported the rationale behind Salesforce's move: using the messaging app as a thread to better stitch together its entire enterprise software suite. It also helped enhance their position against fellow Club holding Microsoft (MSFT) and its Office 365 offering. The price Salesforce paid, though, was likely a bit steep, valuing Slack at more than 24 times estimated revenue for the next year when it was announced in December 2020 . For that reason, it's especially important to watch how it plays out now that the two companies are under the same (digital) roof. Management made a big bet, and shareholders need them to deliver on it. We have a 1 rating on Salesforce shares, meaning we'd be buyers here. The stock has been completely out of favor on Wall Street since November, when the Federal Reserve adopted an aggressive policy stance that's bad news for growth-oriented names like Salesforce. That said, we're believers in the company for the long haul as the business world moves to the cloud. Companies like Salesforce are integral players in that digitized world. We think owning Slack makes Salesforce even more essential. What they're saying now In an interview at Salesforce's "World Tour NYC" event Thursday, co-CEOs Marc Benioff and Bret Taylor said Slack has, so far, surpassed internal forecasts and made the case it will keep thriving as remote work sticks around past the pandemic. "Slack is your digital headquarters. ... It's exceed our revenue expectations every quarter since we've owned it," Taylor told Cramer. "I was just in Europe last week. Talked to 15, 20 different CEOs. You know what they wanted to talk about Slack? Because they're all trying to figure out what to do with their workplaces." While the most extreme predictions made during the height of the Covid pandemic about "the office being dead forever" haven't panned out, it's rather safe to say remote work will be more commonplace in the years ahead than it was in, say, 2018 or 2019. Of course, some corporate employees still go the office five days a week. But on Thursday, we also got news from Yelp that it was going fully remote and shuttering underutilized offices in New York, Chicago and Washington. The point is, it's a mixed bag depending on the company, but it creates opportunities for enterprise software firms like Salesforce now that collaboration may occur more frequently among colleagues at different locations. Tools to easily communicate with everyone, no matter where they are working, are essential in that environment. To that end, Slack announced a few new features for video chats Wednesday. Salesforce has for years made applications that salespeople use across all stages of a potential deal and that customer service reps use to manage and resolve inquiries. There's way more to it than that, but those are just two examples. Now, Salesforce has integrated Slack into Customer 360. If you're a company that already used Customer 360 and Slack before the acquisition, that may be especially good news for you. Your digital workplace is that much more connected. Benioff, also co-founder of Salesforce, explained how he sees Slack fitting into what he called "a new world of work," and how it complements its other recent acquisitions: "It's a flexible work environment. We have people working at home; we have people in the office; we have people at this trade show; we have people all over the world. They're on Slack. They're on Salesforce. It has to be able to work everywhere, we have to pull all the information together. That's also why we bought Tableau; at that point, we have to go from that data to decisions. That's also why we bought MuleSoft because have to integrate it all together. That's why our Customer 360 is so much better than it was just a couple of years ago because we've been able to extend it with these critical technologies." Slack is not a huge chunk of Salesforce's total revenue, which it projects to be between $31.7 billion and $31.8 billion in its fiscal 2023. Slack is expected to contribute around $1.5 billion of that, which is less than 5%. However, we consider Slack to be important to Salesforce in the context of its entire panoply of software products. We see it making Customer 360 even more valuable than it had been, helping to keep existing clients on board and bringing new ones in the door, too. (Jim Cramer's Charitable Trust is long CRM and MFST. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust's portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . 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Dado Ruvic | Reuters

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