Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) Trading Down 2% – Should You Sell?

Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM)’s stock price was down 2% during mid-day trading on Wednesday . The stock traded as low as $249.60 and last traded at $250.6360. 9,302,059 shares changed hands during trading, a decline of 34% from the average session volume of 13,999,767 shares. The stock had previously closed at $255.65.

Salesforce News Roundup

Here are the key news stories impacting Salesforce this week:

• Positive Sentiment: Analyst upgrade: Mizuho raised its price target from $265 to $280 and assigned an “outperform” rating, citing a more favorable 2026 setup following Dreamforce. Salesforce gets fresh target hike from Mizuho after Dreamforce
• Positive Sentiment: AI product momentum: Salesforce unveiled Koa, a CRM reasoning model developed with NVIDIA and built on NVIDIA Nemotron, to support complex Agentforce workflows. The company also introduced AIforce and announced expanded partnerships with OpenAI, AWS, Siemens and other vendors. These initiatives could improve AI adoption and strengthen Salesforce’s enterprise distribution advantage. Announcing Koa
• Positive Sentiment: Buyback support: Jim Cramer said Salesforce’s $25 billion share-repurchase program is looking increasingly attractive and argued that the issues weighing on investor sentiment have largely passed. Salesforce’s $25 Billion Buyback
• Positive Sentiment: Usage growth: Slackbot users reportedly rose more than 150% sequentially, suggesting growing customer engagement with Salesforce’s AI tools and potential support for future bookings. Slackbot Users Jump 150%
• Neutral Sentiment: Salesforce’s strong recent earnings, including better-than-expected profit and roughly 11% year-over-year revenue growth, provide financial support, but investors remain focused on whether AI products can accelerate growth and cash flow.
• Negative Sentiment: Service disruption: A widespread outage caused severe delays, intermittent errors or inability to access parts of Salesforce’s cloud suite during Dreamforce. The timing raises concerns about platform reliability, customer satisfaction and execution, making it the clearest immediate pressure on CRM shares. Salesforce Service Outages Strike on Day 2 of Dreamforce
• Negative Sentiment: Some analysts question whether Salesforce’s elevated valuation is justified while free-cash-flow growth slows and most sales and service customers have not yet upgraded to premium AI-enabled editions.

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

Several equities research analysts recently issued reports on the company. Wall Street Zen lowered Salesforce from a “buy” rating to a “hold” rating in a research note on Saturday, August 1st. BTIG Research restated a “buy” rating and issued a $300.00 target price on shares of Salesforce in a research note on Wednesday, September 2nd. Weiss Ratings raised Salesforce from a “sell (d+)” rating to a “hold (c-)” rating in a report on Wednesday, August 12th. Macquarie Infrastructure dropped their price target on Salesforce from $200.00 to $190.00 and set a “neutral” rating for the company in a research report on Thursday, May 28th. Finally, Wolfe Research raised Salesforce from a “hold” rating to a “strong-buy” rating in a report on Thursday, August 27th. Three equities research analysts have rated the stock with a Strong Buy rating, twenty-eight have issued a Buy rating, fourteen have given a Hold rating and three have given a Sell rating to the company’s stock. According to data from MarketBeat, the stock has an average rating of “Moderate Buy” and an average target price of $267.50.

Salesforce Stock Down 2.0%

The company has a quick ratio of 0.84, a current ratio of 0.84 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.02. The stock has a 50-day simple moving average of $204.13 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $188.20. The firm has a market cap of $206.27 billion, a PE ratio of 22.85, a P/E/G ratio of 1.18 and a beta of 1.20.

Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, August 26th. The CRM provider reported $5.90 earnings per share for the quarter, topping analysts’ consensus estimates of $3.27 by $2.63. Salesforce had a net margin of 21.99% and a return on equity of 24.90%. The firm had revenue of $11.35 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $11.33 billion. During the same period in the previous year, the business posted $2.91 EPS. The business’s quarterly revenue was up 10.8% on a year-over-year basis. Salesforce has set its FY 2027 guidance at 16.670-16.710 EPS and its Q3 2027 guidance at 3.420-3.440 EPS. Analysts expect that Salesforce Inc. will post 12.83 earnings per share for the current year.

Salesforce Announces Dividend

The company also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, October 8th. Investors of record on Thursday, September 17th will be issued a dividend of $0.44 per share. This represents a $1.76 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 0.7%. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, September 17th. Salesforce’s dividend payout ratio is currently 16.04%.

Insider Activity

In other news, Director Craig Conway sold 4,500 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction dated Friday, September 4th. The shares were sold at an average price of $260.61, for a total transaction of $1,172,745.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the director directly owned 5,437 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $1,416,936.57. This represents a 45.29% decrease in their ownership of the stock. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is accessible through this hyperlink. Insiders own 3.50% of the company’s stock.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Salesforce

Hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the business. Temasek Holdings Private Ltd raised its position in shares of Salesforce by 3.7% in the 4th quarter. Temasek Holdings Private Ltd now owns 683,790 shares of the CRM provider’s stock worth $181,143,000 after buying an additional 24,332 shares during the period. Fluent Financial LLC purchased a new stake in Salesforce during the second quarter valued at about $2,265,000. Secured Retirement Advisors LLC acquired a new stake in Salesforce during the first quarter worth about $1,004,000. TAM Capital Management Inc. acquired a new stake in Salesforce during the first quarter worth about $40,945,000. Finally, Janus Henderson Group PLC raised its holdings in shares of Salesforce by 2.5% in the 1st quarter. Janus Henderson Group PLC now owns 127,739 shares of the CRM provider’s stock worth $23,846,000 after purchasing an additional 3,125 shares during the period. 80.43% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

Salesforce Company Profile

Salesforce, Inc is a cloud-based software company that provides customer relationship management (CRM) technology and related enterprise applications. Its platform helps organizations manage sales, customer service, marketing, commerce, data analytics and business operations through subscription-based software and cloud services.

The company’s product portfolio includes Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud and the Salesforce Platform. Salesforce also offers Slack for workplace collaboration, Tableau for data visualization and analytics, MuleSoft for application integration, and artificial intelligence capabilities, including its Agentforce platform for building and deploying AI agents.

Founded in 1999, Salesforce is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and serves businesses and organizations across a broad range of industries and geographic markets worldwide.