What Do Salesforce Look for in Acquisitions?
Salesforce has been on an M&A spree this year, acquiring as many as nine companies in a bid to boost its own capabilities. Just this week, the acquisition of AI marketing business Qualified was announced, as part of an eventful 2025 which also saw it sign deals to take over Convergence.ai, Regrello, Spindle AI, and, perhaps most importantly, Informatica, in an $8B deal.
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) might see a Salesforce acquisition as a viable exit strategy – but certainly not one to be taken lightly. AI and data-platform ISVs that consider themselves a good fit for Salesforce, with a decent footprint in the ecosystem, have a better shot than others. But it’s still worth knowing what exactly the CRM giant is looking for in a potential acquisition.
We spoke to Brent Hayward, Head of Competitive Intelligence at Salesforce, at Dreamforce 2025 about what factors the tech giant looks for in a business when thinking about acquisitions. We asked what factors go into Salesforce’s decision-making process when it comes to acquiring SMBs – and whether there was a “checklist” of factors that need to be met, beyond obvious things like revenue. Here are those insights.
Powering Agentforce
It will come as no surprise to ecosystem veterans: Salesforce wants to make Agentforce as comprehensive an AI solution as possible – and acquisitions go some way towards achieving that goal.
Brent said:“In terms of what Salesforce is looking for, we would like to have these capabilities to roll into Agentforce, and if some small/medium business happened to be out there making it, we’d take an interest, I think.”
In November 2025, Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire agentic enterprise search company Doti – representing the eighth acquisition by the CRM giant this year. The move was intended to bring the global talent of Doti to Salesforce and strengthen Salesforce’s AI R&D hub in Israel.
Earlier that same month, Salesforce agreed to take over agentic analytics platform Spindle AI, which forecasts future business outcomes. Salesforce expects Spindle to join the Agentforce effort as soon as the deal is concluded. Strengthening Agentfore is clearly a common theme.
Boost Data Foundations
Beyond just agentic capabilities to boost the functionality of Agentforce, Brent said that the ability to enrich CRM data with other data sources was also a priority for Salesforce. This is exemplified by the recent acquisition of Informatica.
This $8B acquisition is particularly noteworthy, not just because of its hefty price tag, but because it signals how the CRM giant wants to strengthen its data foundations, which are the bedrock of its AI ventures.
Informatica – which provides a suite of data integration, governance, quality, and management tools for data – was a perfect candidate for this, making it a clear candidate for takeover.
An AI’s output is only really as good as the data fed into it, so this is really part two of the first subsection about boosting Agentforce. All of Salesforce’s metaphorical roads to acquisition lead to the conceptual Rome of powering Agentforce.
Specific Solutions Which Can Be Broadened
The folks over at Salesforce headquarters are well aware that their company is a titan of the business world – and this comes with a number of advantages.
Small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) might have a particularly innovative and ingenious solution for one very particular use case, but:
- They lack the impressive resources to market and produce it that Salesforce has.
- The solution could, and arguably should, be broadened out more generally, rather than being consigned to one overly specific use case.
Brent said: “I think what’s really interesting right now about a lot of these upstarts is they’re looking for a very specific pattern of a customer. It’ll be something as easy as, you’re an air conditioning company, you sell tens of thousands of units of air conditioning, and they have problems that 50% of the time, the customer could self-serve if they have this agentic interface and explain to them exactly what to do, and so they’ll build a company around that, they’ll build a set of technologies, a set of agents.
“I think we tend to, when we’re looking at those companies, say, ‘Look, is this effectively a feature that would be extremely valuable, and that we could take to market far faster and put far more effect within our platform?’”
Brent added that Salesforce often considers businesses that solve a very specific problem, bringing domain expertise – which can be “extremely valuable”, not just in the specific technology.
He said: “These are founders that maybe were at software companies that just did this specific thing, and now we’re doing it with AI, and so I think we look at the skill set that comes with, especially the early stage that comes with the acquisition, and the excitement to scale it.”
Is It Complimentary?
Brent said that another aspect Salesforce considers is the technology a company has built on, and whether it’s complementary to Salesforce.
He added: “One of the most expensive things is to acquire something and then have to code the tool – it’s a little easier in the AI world, but we want to make sure the technologies are complementary, or it just becomes a speed to market problem.”
Fitting into Salesforce’s existing architecture is a big plus. Even if a solution is notable by itself, it becomes something of a headache if it needs to be re-platformed or rewritten, so having something that can seamlessly slot into Salesforce’s stack is a big plus.
The CRM giant has an enormous customer base, and speed to market is very important. The faster Salesforce can integrate and distribute a new capability, the better.
Do You Share Values?
Salesforce famously has five core values – those being Trust, Customer Success, Innovation, Equality, and Sustainability.
Acquisitions are about the product, certainly, but they’re also about people. A potential acquisition doesn’t necessarily have to have the same precise core values as a written policy, but embodying them is important for Salesforce.
Integrating a team of people who already operate in a similar way to Salesforce will mean greater success for both the company being integrated and for Salesforce itself.
Brent said: “Values are important. When you buy an early-stage company, you’re not just buying their tech, you’re buying their people, and you want to know that you’re going to be complemented, that they see value in the Salesforce values and that those values are complemented.”
Final Thoughts
There is no one silver bullet for being taken aboard the mothership, but it’s nonetheless good to know the key areas that Salesforce looks for in a potential acquisition.
The company is no stranger to big M&A deals – with this year being particularly notable – so ISVs which feel like they can power Agentforce, boost Salesforce’s data capabilities, have a specific solution which can be broadened, compliment Salesforce’s own tech, and fits in with the company’s values might consider whether they would be a good fit for a 2026 acquisition.
