The pace of innovation in the sales tech space has been mind-blowing recently.

Recently both HubSpot and Salesforce announced the introduction of chat interfaces for their products and it seems to pave the way for a wave of changes ahead. It was also the FY results announcement for Salesforce and here are my main takeaways.

Benioff spoke of four main axis of action:

1. Restructuring of the team: he spoke of revamping their performance culture and of improving accountability for the sales team.
2. Profitability: nothing new these days, they'll focus on improving operational excellence and automation.
3. Core innovation: this is a crucial point. The engineering team will focus on integrating acquisitions, while they will overall slow down their m&a strategy.
4. Shareholders: they want to tighten shareholder relationships.

A couple of things are especially interesting to me:

• A company like Salesforce - selling CRM and BI tools -  24 years after it was founded, is still struggling to build an infrastructure of accountability and execution for their sales teams. This is both crazy and broken.
• Their new focus away from new acquisitions. It marks the end of an era for them. Big part of their growth has been driven from tableau, slack, mulesoft acquisitions but now they realize their stack is too complex to handle and need to consolidate their offering.

We’re seeing and personally driving this change across the entire industry: consolidation of the go-to-market stack in less tools and the upcoming of the new generation of platforms, more horizontal and better integrated. Hubspot clearly leading the way here.

‍Read the full transcript here.

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