Salesforce fired back. The business software maker on Wednesday unveiled an optimistic multi-year financial roadmap that refutes the slow-growth narrative that has plagued its stock price. “This is the old Salesforce. I was waiting for the old Salesforce,” Jim Cramer said on CNBC Thursday morning. Salesforce stock rose more than 4% on Thursday on the news. At this week’s influential Dreamforce conference, Salesforce projected annual revenue of $60 billion for fiscal year 2030, excluding the pending Informatica acquisition. This beats the LSEG consensus of $58.4 billion. And importantly, Salesforce says its outlook translates into average annual organic revenue growth of at least 10% from 2026 to 2030. This is an expansion pace the company has struggled to achieve in recent quarters. Salesforce last month reported financial results for the second quarter of fiscal 2026. Salesforce also developed long-term plans for adjusted operating margin and constant currency subscription revenue growth. The company expects these two indicators to reach 50 combined by the end of fiscal 2030. This follows the “Rule of 50” used by tech investors to value software companies. When the activist push against Salesforce began in the fall of 2022, the company didn’t even meet the “Rule of 40,” a more modest version of the same rubric. Having reached that milestone, the company is now preparing to reach 50 companies. “We do the math: We’re only a few years away from our 40s, and we’re going to move quickly into our 50s,” CEO Marc Benioff said at an investor day Wednesday night. Salesforce desperately needed this boost to recover from a nearly 30% decline this year and restore investor confidence. The idea that AI is a threat to the software-as-a-service business model has weighed on Salesforce stock for much of this year. In addition to this, there have been criticisms that Salesforce has focused too much on its agent-based AI service, Agentforce, while neglecting the core business applications used by marketing teams, customer service representatives, and sales reps. Salesforce executives have repeatedly disputed these claims, but the market had doubts. So were the clubs. And despite the optimistic guidance, there are still skeptics. “While we believe the FY30 goals are ambitious, it is difficult to see how they can be achieved without significant improvements in the external spending environment,” Davidson Attorney Gil Luria wrote in an email to CNBC on Thursday. “Some dramatic changes will be needed for the company to reaccelerate growth while most of its business is still slowing,” argued Luria, who has a hold-equivalent rating on the stock. But the new goal eased Jim’s concerns. “What we hear is that the old business is doing well,” Jim said. “People aren’t canceling products. The new (Agentforce) business is just starting to take effect over the next 12 to 18 months, and we’re going to get back to double digits. So we’re going to get back to the growth potential we had.” Jim, who was in San Francisco this week to attend Dreamforce, added, “That’s why we’re seeing a move as strong as this (stock) move, because it really breaks the bear case.” In its mission to prove the naysayers wrong, Dreamforce has introduced a string of high-profile customers, including Dell, Williams-Sonoma, and FedEx, all of whom speak positively of Salesforce’s Agentforce technology. Agentforce enables customers to build AI applications that can perform actions and accomplish tasks with minimal human oversight. Salesforce charges Agentforce on a pay-as-you-go model for seat-based licenses for traditional applications. “People aren’t canceling. They want both. They want the option to continue doing their old business and pay the same prices, and they want this new consumer business without compromising their old business,” Jim said Wednesday night, citing comments from Salesforce Chief Revenue Officer Miguel Milano. Dreamforce appears to be just what the company needs to turn things around again. The conference last year at which Salesforce introduced Agentforce was the beginning of a months-long stock rally, with the stock hitting a series of all-time highs before peaking at about $368 per share in early December. In response to this year’s Dreamforce, analysts at Barclays and Goldman Sachs reiterated buy ratings on the stock. “Through one year of iterations since Agentforce’s initial launch in September 2024, we believe Salesforce’s latest innovations have reaffirmed our technological readiness to accelerate widespread AI and agent adoption at enterprise scale,” Goldman wrote to clients. Jim joined this week to help clarify the outlook for Salesforce. Based on everything he’s heard in the Bay Area, he said he believes the bears will ultimately be proven wrong now that Salesforce has had time to refine its AI strategy. “The numbers are coming in. They’re changing in the time frame that we want to reflect in the stock price.” (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is a long CRM. See here for a complete list of stocks.) As a subscriber to Jim Cramer’s CNBC Investing Club, you’ll receive trade alerts from Jim Cramer before he makes a trade. After Jim sends a trade alert, he waits 45 minutes before buying or selling stocks in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim talks about a stock on CNBC TV, he will issue a trade alert and then wait 72 hours before executing the trade. The above investment club information is subject to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, along with our disclaimer. 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