Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff thanked ‘boomerang’ employees for the company’s turnaround

• Salesforce profit margins exceeded 30% in the second quarter, earlier than expected.
• CEO Marc Benioff thanked “boomerangs,” employees who left and came back, for the fast-tracked growth.
• Existing employees also played a big part, Benioff said.

Salesforce exceeded its profit margin targets in the second quarter, ahead of schedule, and CEO Marc Benioff attributes the success to “boomerang” employees.

“A lot of folks felt the desire to come back and help us,” Benioff said on the cloud software company’s second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday. “It’s been an incredible pleasure to welcome them back.”

A “boomerang” employee is one who works for a company, leaves for a period of time, and then returns.

In recent months, three high-profile Salesforce boomerangs have returned to the company: president and chief revenue officer Miguel Milano, chief marketing officer Ariel Kelman, and Kendall Collins, chief business officer and chief of staff to Marc Benioff.

Milano served as the president of Salesforce International until 2019, when he left to join Celonis, a German data mining company. Kelman was the top marketing executive at Oracle until last year, following several years as the CMO of Amazon Web Services. He spent seven years in product marketing leadership roles at Salesforce before leaving for AWS. Collins was an executive vice president of Salesforce Cloud from 2004 to 2012. He has spent the last decade in various roles in the tech industry, most recently as Okta’s chief marketing officer.

According to Benioff, Milano, Kelman, and Collins aren’t the only Salesforce veterans returning to the company. “This is quite a long list,” he admitted. “I can’t even tell you how many people are returning.”

Benioff was so happy to have these executives back on his team that he invited one of them to speak on the company’s earnings call on Wednesday, seemingly on the spur of the moment. In the middle of his question-and-answer session with investment analysts, he introduced Kelman and began his own impromptu Q&A with the new CMO, asking him to talk about his experience returning to Salesforce.

According to Benioff, the advantage of boomerangs is that they are “proven winners” who can hit the ground running.

“They have an immediate effect.” They are familiar with the culture. They are familiar with the products. “They can execute with incredible agility,” he said. “And so I’ve got the siren sound going out there for all of them to come back and join us.”

He stated that “the line is long, out the door, of people who want to come back to Salesforce” and stated that he is ready to welcome them.But this is a long list, and I can’t even begin to count how many people are returning.

His emphasis on boomerangs prompted one analyst to ask Benioff if he thought the company had finally right-sized its headcount after a pandemic hiring spree followed by mass layoffs earlier in the year, as well as about future layoffs.

Benioff stated that he has no plans for future layoffs.

“We hope that is one and done and behind us,” he said, recalling the company’s decision earlier this year to lay off 10% of its workforce.