Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff turned his earnings call into a vodcast. Why other Fortune 500 CEOs might follow

All the world’s a stage. Now that’s even true of the usually dull quarterly earnings call. In February, Salesforce founder and co-CEO Marc Benioff turned his routine fourth-quarter earnings call into an influencer-style production. Clad in a black leather jacket and seated high above San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower, Benioff streamed his financial updates like a podcaster, complete with a broadcast-quality microphone, a You Tube livestream, and interviews with special guests, including customers of the cloud-software company such as SharkNinja CEO Mark Barrocas and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts CEO Geoff Ballotti. “We’re so thrilled to be here with everybody,” Benioff said, seated at a conference table with his colleagues. “It is a gorgeous day, 70 degrees, the AI capital of the world, and we’re coming here to you live.” Before diving into the numbers, Benioff also made a brief live appearance on TBPN, the daily live podcast about tech that was recently acquired by OpenAI, to tout record revenues and downplay fears of a “SaaSpocalypse,” the selloff that had clobbered the market value of a slew of software companies. Afterward, Salesforce’s social media team sliced the show into a short clip for LinkedIn, extending what used to be a dry, hour-long phone call into snackable content. “Marc challenged us to try something new and speak to a bigger audience,” Patrick Stokes, president and chief marketing officer at Salesforce, tells Fortune via email, adding that the team wanted to bring some of the “vibe and energy” of its massive annual Dreamforce conference to a standard financial update. The software giant says it plans to use the format again for its first-quarter fiscal year 2027 call in May. Salesforce’s revamped earnings format comes as companies and boards are increasingly pushing CEOs to be more active on social media. Research from Weber Shandwick found that 81% of executives believe a visible public CEO profile is essential to a company&