Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has revealed that five companies have recently migrated from one of its biggest competitors, ServiceNow, over to the CRM giant. This announcement was made as part of the company’s latest earnings call, which took place on Wednesday.
These customers have moved to Salesforce’s competing ITSM product, Benioff said.
Who Are These Companies?
In Salesforce’s Q4 and Fiscal 2026 earnings call, Marc Benioff spoke on Salesforce’s recent developments within the ITSM space, highlighting the launch of Salesforce IT Service in October, which has now garnered over 180 customers.
As part of this, Benioff also mentioned that five customers have left ServiceNow to use Salesforce’s competing ITSM product.
“I especially loved five customers who got to leave the purgatory of ServiceNow, like Sunrun, Cornerstone, CoolSys, and there’s others, too, that we’re not allowed to mention,” he revealed.
“But I might mention them anyway. [They’re] leaving ServiceNow now for the new Salesforce IT service product, which is about apps and agents helping you manage all your ITSM.”
The companies that were mentioned by name, Sunrun, Cornerstone, and CoolSys, operate in multiple sectors, including energy, HR, and HVAC, and operate in complex SaaS or field-heavy service environments.
Why Is This Significant?
Marc Benioff has never been one to shy away from discussing Salesforce’s competitive edge – he publicly spoke out about scoring a top US Army Contract over Palantir at the end of last year – and this new statement arguably suggests that within the enterprise space, Salesforce has still got that ‘it’ factor.
It signals that Salesforce aims to replace ServiceNow across industries, not just CRM-adjacent use cases, and adds fuel to the blazing fire that is the Salesforce/ServiceNow rivalry.
It also comes after ServiceNow’s own Q4 and FY25 earnings results in January, where, although the results were better than expected, ServiceNow’s stock dropped by 11%, contributing to a 50% decline over the last year.
Not only that, but this can be seen as a mirroring of ServiceNow’s own “poaching” strategy in relation to Salesforce.
Last year, Bloomberg’s piece titled “ServiceNow’s New Hiring Strategy: Poach From Salesforce” pointed the spotlight at how ServiceNow had been increasing its workforce and expansion by hiring directly from Salesforce, with more of ServiceNow’s new employees coming from Salesforce than any other company in 2025.
So, is this perhaps a case of ServiceNow getting Salesforce’s talent, and Salesforce getting ServiceNow’s customers… Will this continue as a symbiotic relationship?
Summary
Marc Benioff is clearly happy to rescue a handful of companies from ServiceNow’s “purgatory”, but is this a one-time deal, or will we see more of this in the future?
Whatever happens, the competition between ServiceNow and Salesforce is still high, and we will likely see the two in each other’s space much more this year.
