After Butterfield’s, Salesforce’s Lidiane Jones will be next Slack CEO

The replacement came after the parent company, Salesforce, saw a change in its top ranks recently. Co-CEO of the company, Bret Taylor, also resigned from the company a week ago. Notably, Bret was the main driving force behind the acquisition of Slack by Salesforce exactly a year ago.

Lidiane Jones recently served as executive vice president of Salesforce’s key departments including experience cloud, commerce cloud, and marketing units. Before joining Salesforce in 2019, she has previously worked with Sonos Inc and Microsoft Corporation.

In his memo, Butterfield appreciated Jones and was ‘instrumental in choosing her as the successor of the company, a company spokesperson told Bloomberg.

Bret’s exit came in tandem with the release of the third-quarter earnings of Salesforce, which reflected the slow growth of the company. This led to a sharp fall in the company’s share prices in stock markets. Salesforce stock hit its lowest closing price since March 2020 after falling by 7.4 per cent to $133.93 in New York. The share price has gone down by 47 per cent this year, reported Bloomberg.

Slowing growth, thinning executive ranks pose challenge for Salesforce in regaining investors’ confidence

Salesforce reported its smallest YoY quarterly revenue growth since its public listing in 2004. The data projected a further decline in its sales gains in the current quarter ending in January 2023.

The tech giant will also see the exit of two more executives, informed Slack on Monday. The reshuffling of the top executives will impact the tech giant which was taken over by Salesforce in July 2021 for more than $ 27 billion in its largest acquisition.

Anurag Rana, a senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence opines that Butterfield’s exit will be a “risk for the company, given other high-profile executive departure in the past few months”. He expressed the top officials’ exit from the company will put additional pressure on CEO and founder Marc Benioff in regaining the confidence of the investors that the company leadership is still able to revive the organic growth of the company.

Just like Slack, Salesforce’s other acquisitions are also witnessing a thinning of its executive ranks. CEO of another acquisition, Tableau, announced his exit from the company. Other officials like Tableau’s Chief Marketing Officer Jackie Yeaney and Chief Data Officer Wendy Turner-Williams exited the company.