The Billionaire Move Nobody Saw Coming: Why Starboard Value Abandoned CRM For ...

Salesforce just got dumped by one of Wall Street's sharpest activist investors — and not because the product failed.

Starboard Value's Jeff Smith spent years pushing Salesforce to get its house in order: cut costs, buy back stock, hit its numbers. Salesforce delivered. So Starboard cashed out, took the win, and moved on to the next distressed opportunity.

That's how Wall Street works. You, running operations in a mid-market company, are not Wall Street.

Here's what that move actually signals for you: the biggest players in enterprise software are optimized for shareholder returns, not for whether your sales team can pull a clean account history in under 30 seconds. Buybacks and EPS beats have nothing to do with whether your CRM maps to how your pipeline actually moves.

You've already learned this the hard way — through the consultants, the migrations, the workarounds your team built just to survive the tool that was supposed to help them. Every platform you've tried was built for someone else's business model, then sold to yours.

The investors who build these platforms will keep rotating out when the numbers are good enough. You're the one left holding the system.

The gap between what enterprise CRM promises and what it delivers to operators running real businesses isn't a bug — it's baked into who these platforms are actually built for.

#CRM #SalesOperations #MidMarket #RevOps #OperationsLeadership

Original Source

Jeff Smith exited CRM after activist pressure delivered a $25 billion buyback and strong EPS beats, then pivoted into distressed LW and KMX. · Riot ...