Salesforce cuts staff amid acquisition spree and $50 billion share buyback - The Register

Salesforce is laying off staff while spending $50 billion buying back its own stock and acquiring companies you've never heard of.

Here's what actually happened: Salesforce just picked up Contentful as part of a push toward "headless" CRM — a technical architecture shift that sounds impressive in a press release and means almost nothing to you on a Tuesday when your team can't pull a clean customer history. Meanwhile, the people who knew your account, your implementation, your workarounds — some of them are gone now.

If you're running ops or marketing at a mid-market company, this is the pattern you already know. The platform you're on is busy getting bigger, not better — for you. Every acquisition adds complexity to a product that already fights you. Every layoff round reshuffles the support team you finally trained to understand your setup. The roadmap moves further from your actual problems, not closer.

You've been through enough CRM cycles to know that a vendor's growth story and your team's daily experience are two completely different things. The companies absorbing other companies aren't doing it to solve your workflow — they're doing it to protect market share and satisfy shareholders.

The gap between what enterprise CRM vendors promise and what ops teams actually need isn't closing. It's getting wider.

#CRM #SalesOperations #MidMarket #Salesforce #BusinessOperations

Original Source

Just last week, Salesforce announced that it would acquire Contentful, which is part of the outfit's plunge into a “headless” CRM where users can ...