Salesforce CEO Benioff shakes up executive team with new hires

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has made a number of changes to the company’s management team, six months after the company’s co-CEO Bret Taylor announced he was leaving the organization.

The roles of chief revenue officer, chief marketing officer, chief operating officer, and chief of staff are among the jobs that are undergoing a personnel or responsibility change, all of which have been confirmed by Benioff on Twitter.

Miguel Milano, chief revenue officer and co-owner of execution-management software company Celonis, is set to take over the position of CFO at Salesforce. Before joining Celonis in 2020, Milano held the role of president of Salesforce in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

Ariel Kelman, who most recently was chief marketing officer at Fireblocks, and has also been CMO at at Amazon Web Services and Oracle, will be the new CMO of Salesforce, while Okta and AppDymanics alumnus Kendall Collins took over the role of chief business officer and chief of staff in April. Like Milano, Collins and Kelman were also Salesforce employees in the past.

Brian Millham, who was appointed as Salesforce’s COO in August 2022, will be assuming a number of new duties. This will include taking on responsibilities for marketing, employee success, and business technology.

The shakeup comes five months after the cloud-based CRM software provider announced it would be cutting around 950 jobs, about 10% of its global workforce.

In a letter sent by Benioff to employees at the time of the layoffs, he said:  “the environment remains challenging, and our customers are taking a more measured approach to their purchasing decisions. With this in mind, we’ve made the very difficult decision to reduce our workforce by about 10 percent, mostly over the coming weeks.”

He added that as Salesforce’s revenue accelerated through the pandemic, the company over-hired and could no longer sustain its current workforce size due to the ongoing economic downturn.

Last week, Salesforce reported an 11% increase in revenue for the first quarter of 2024. However, capital expenditures were 36% higher than anticipated, causing the company’s stock to drop as much as 7%.

Meanwhile, the company has also attempted to lure employees back to the office in recent months, after Benioff doubled down on a debate he sparked late last year when he questioned why the company’s new hires were seemingly less productive than their predecessors. In March 2022, he told podcast host Kara Swisher that new hires perform better “if they’re in the office, meeting people, being onboarded, being trained.”

This week, news outlet Fortune reported that between June 12-23, for each day an employee comes into the office, Salesforce will donate $10 to a local charity. Donations made via the scheme, dubbed Connect for Good, will be capped at $2.5 million according to an internal document viewed by Fortune.

Salesforce did not immediately respond to a request for comment.