Salesforce was founded in 1999 by Marc Benioff, Frank Dominguez, Dave Moellenhoff, and Parker Harris. In a relatively short time, the corporate powerhouse of enterprise software has made numerous acquisitions as part of its broader growthstrategy โ as explored in the emerging fifth paradigm of scaling โ to become a SaaS giant!
How Salesforce makes money, FY2026: the income statement as a flow, to scale. Subscriptions bring in 95% of Salesforce's $41.5B fiscal 2026 revenue.. Source: Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE: CRM) Form 10-K for fiscal 2026 (filed 2026-03-02). Gross profit, margins and shares calculated. Full analysis: how Salesforce makes money.Watch (67 seconds): Salesforce: where the money comes from, step by step, with captions. Figures from the filing named at the end.
So who are these companies? Letโs take a look at a few of them below.
Slack follows a freemium model, where a free version is offered, and users can convert in paying customers if they want more usage or advanced functionalities. Slack combines the free model with a direct sales force to acquire enterprise customers with yearly recurring revenue of over 100K. Those customers were 575 in 2019, and they accounted for 40% of its revenues.
As part of the deal, Slack’s messaging app would be incorporated into the Salesforce enterprise software without any change in the formerโs branding, leadership, or functionality.
The Slack purchase also enabled Salesforce to further the remote working trend and create a powerful platform for the work anywhere, digital-first world.
By incorporating MuleSoftโs integrative features, Salesforce could become a market leader since its functionality could more easily be incorporated into existing business systems.
One such feature was an API platform/library known as Anypoint that does not require custom integration code.
MuleSoftโs client list was also impressive, including corporate clients such as eBay, Netflix, Wells Fargo, Barclays, Coca-Cola, and Target.
Many pundits considered the move to be a key component of Salesforceโs strategy to obtain a 360-degree view of the customer and become an enterprise data stack.
Prior to the deal, more than 86,000 organizations used Tableauโs visual analytics platform to view their data and use it to solve problems. Some of these included Southwest Airlines, Verizon, Schwab, and Schneider Electric.
ExactTarget
ExactTarget is a provider of email marketing services that are one-to-one and on-demand.
Like the purchase of Vlocity โ which weโll explain below โ the purchase of ExactTarget furthered SalesForceโs mission to transform how companies connected with their customers via sales, service, and marketing.
Vlocity
Before being purchased by Salesforce for $1.33 billion in early 2020, Vlocity had already built six separate CRMs in media and entertainment, insurance and financial services, health, energy and utilities, communications, and government and non-profits.
Some saw the deal coming since Salesforce Ventures was a key investor in the company, but it nevertheless enabled the company to bolster its industry-specific CRM solutions, develop strategic partnerships, and add more functionality to its platform.
The deal, which occurred two months after the one involving Tableau, ostensibly allowed Salesforce to improve its field service products for mobile workforces.
A secondary but no-less-important consideration was ClickSoftware’s 15,400 clients such as Ericsson, Unisys, Bosch, and Deutsche Telekom.
Key takeaways:
Salesforce has made a number of significant acquisitions in a relatively short period. The deals involving Tableau and Slack, for example, both exceeded $15 billion.
Salesforce acquired email marketer ExactTarget in 2013 and related firm Vlocity in 2020. Both deals enabled Salesforce to bolster its CRM offering and develop strategic industry relationships.
Other notable purchases include MuleSoft for $6.5 billion in 2018 and FSM provider ClickSoftware the following year.
Key Highlights
Slack:
Salesforce’s largest acquisition at $27.7 billion.
Slack’s freemium model combined with a direct sales force to acquire enterprise customers.
Slack’s messaging app integrated into Salesforce’s software while maintaining its branding and functionality.
Strengthened Salesforce’s remote work and digital-first platform.
MuleSoft:
Acquired for $6.5 billion in 2018.
MuleSoft’s integrative features allowed easier incorporation of Salesforce into existing business systems.
Access to MuleSoft’s API platform/library, Anypoint, for seamless integration.
Benefitted from MuleSoft’s impressive client list, including eBay, Netflix, and Wells Fargo.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
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Salesforce Business Model →Salesforce follows a SaaS business model, offering four main categories of cloud CRM (Customer Relationship Management) services spanning the sales cloud to the marketingSalesforce Revenue →In 2024, Salesforce generated $32.54 billion from subscriptions and $2.32 billion in professional services, compared to $29 billion in subscriptions in 2023 and $2.33 bilSalesforce Employees →Salesforce had 72,682 employees by 2024, compared to 79,390 employees in 2023, 73,541 employees in 2022, and 56,606 employees in 2021.Salesforce Marketing Expenses →By 2024, Salesforce spent 37% of its total revenues on marketing and sales expenses, compared to 43% of its total revenue in 2023, 45% in 2022, and 45% in 2021.Salesforce Cost Structure →Professional services are run at negative gross margins.Salesforce Revenue Per Employee →Salesforce revenue per employee in 2024 was almost $479,582, compared to over $394,911 in 2023, $360,234 in 2022 and $375,437 in 2021.Salesforce Competitors →Salesforce is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) provider, allowing businesses to build meaningful and sustained relationships with their customers.Salesforce Mission Statement →Salesforce's mission is to build bridges between companies and customers.
