All the world’s a stage. Now that’s even true of the usually dull quarterly earnings call.
In February, Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff turned his routine fourth-quarter earnings call into an influencer-style production. Clad in a black leather jacket and seated high above San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower, Benioff streamed his financial updates like a podcaster, complete with a broadcast-quality microphone, a YouTube livestream, and interviews with special guests, including customers of the cloud-software company such as SharkNinja CEO Mark Barrocas and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts CEO Geoff Ballotti.
“We’re so thrilled to be here with everybody,” Benioff said, seated at a conference table with his colleagues. “It is a gorgeous day, 70 degrees, the AI capital of the world, and we’re coming here to you live.”
Before diving into the numbers, Benioff also made a brief live appearance on TBPN, the daily live podcast about tech that was recently acquired by OpenAI, to tout record revenues and downplay fears of a “SaaSpocalypse,” the selloff that had clobbered the market value of a slew of software companies. Afterward, Salesforce’s social media team sliced the show into a short clip for LinkedIn, extending what used to be a dry, hour-long phone call into snackable content.
