Salesforce (CRM) Earnings Aug 26: Consensus Sits Above the Guide

TL;DR

• Salesforce reports fiscal Q2 2027 after the close on Wednesday, August 26, with the call at 2:00pm PT / 5:00pm ET. The company confirmed the date in June.
• Reported growth of 13% last quarter included $444m from Informatica. Back that out and the rest of Salesforce grew about 9%, against a year-ago quarter that carried none of it.
• Consensus revenue of $11.33bn sits near the top of the guided $11.27bn to $11.35bn, and consensus EPS of $3.28 sits a cent above the guided $3.25 to $3.27. Same shape as the Walmart setup this week.
• Cash is growing far slower than revenue. Operating cash flow rose 3% last quarter on 13% revenue growth, and the full-year guide asks for 4-5% cash growth on 11% revenue growth.
• CRM closed Friday at $196.21, roughly 13.9x the midpoint of its own FY27 non-GAAP EPS guide and 27% below its 52-week high.

The Board

Where the growth came from last quarter, and where the bar sits for this one.

When Does Salesforce Report Earnings?

Salesforce releases fiscal Q2 2027 results for the quarter ended July 31, 2026 after the US market closes on Wednesday, August 26, 2026, with a live broadcast at 2:00pm PT / 5:00pm ET. Both come from Salesforce's own scheduling announcement.

That is the same hour as CrowdStrike's call and the same afternoon Nvidia reports. Three of the most-watched software and semiconductor names in the market are releasing into one evening, and Nvidia will take most of the oxygen. The earnings calendar has the rest of it.

Strip Out Informatica and Growth Is About 9%

Salesforce's Q1 FY27 release led with revenue of $11,133m, up 13%. The same release discloses that $444m of it came from Informatica, which Salesforce acquired and which contributed nothing to the year-ago base.

Take the acquisition out and you are left with $10,689m against a year-ago quarter near $9.85bn. That is growth of roughly 9%. The subscription line tells the same story: $10,593m, up 14%, of which $428m was Informatica, leaving about 9.4%. Both of those figures are my arithmetic off Salesforce's own disclosures, not numbers the company published.

I am not calling this a trick. Salesforce disclosed the contribution plainly and acquisitions are a legitimate way to grow. But the difference between a 13% grower and a 9% grower is most of the argument about what this business is worth, and only one of those numbers is in the headline.

Management also flagged where the softness is: marketing and commerce, plus what it described as increased softness in Tableau bookings and renewals. Those are the parts nobody is buying the stock for, which is either reassuring or the beginning of a pattern.

Q2 update (August 27). The same subtraction on the quarter just reported goes the wrong way. Q2 revenue of $11,345m included $456m of Informatica, disclosed in the release, against a year-ago $10,236m that carried none. That leaves $10,889m, or 6.4% growth. Subscription and support was $10,820m including $440m of Informatica, which leaves about 7.1%. This section warned about a slide toward 8%. It went through 8% in a single quarter, and the market bought the stock anyway. Both figures are my arithmetic off Salesforce's disclosures, as above.

Consensus Is Already Above the Guide

Here is the setup that decides the 26th. Salesforce guided Q2 revenue to $11.27bn to $11.35bn and non-GAAP EPS to $3.25 to $3.27. Street consensus, across 53 analysts, sits at $11.33bn and $3.28.

So the revenue bar is near the top of the range and the EPS bar is a cent above it. Salesforce has to beat its own guide just to meet expectations, and a print that lands mid-range reads as a miss even though the company will have done what it said.

This is the same structure the week-ahead flagged for Walmart, where consensus has parked at the top of the guide and the last occurrence produced a 4% drop. It is a recurring feature of names the market has stopped granting the benefit of the doubt.

Q2 update (August 27): the full-year raise was bought rather than earned. Salesforce lifted FY27 revenue guidance by $200m at both ends, and breaks that figure down itself: $200 million of it is the pending Contentful and Fin acquisitions, $100m is organic growth, and a $100m FX headwind comes off the total. Deals that have not closed yet account for the whole raise. The EPS guide moved up about $2.60 at the midpoint while the first half had already banked $2.98 per share of gains on strategic investments, so on an operating basis the year is guided slightly lower than it was in May.

The Cash Flow Nobody Is Discussing

Operating cash flow grew 3% last quarter. Free cash flow grew 4%. Revenue grew 13%.

For the full year Salesforce guides operating and free cash flow growth of about 4-5%, against revenue growth of 11% and a non-GAAP operating margin of 34.3%. A software company converting revenue growth into cash at less than half the rate is worth a question on the call, and I have not seen a satisfying answer to it yet. Some of the gap is Informatica integration and the cash cost of buying that revenue. How much is the thing to press on.

Meanwhile Agentforce, the product the entire bull and bear case turns on, reached $1.2bn of ARR, up 205%. Real growth, and against a $46bn full-year revenue guide it is about 2.6% of the company. A line that small cannot move consolidated revenue for years yet, however good the percentage looks.

Q2 update (August 27). Cash flow jumped, on Salesforce's smallest cash quarter of the year, and the full-year guide for operating and free cash flow stayed at 4-5% growth, exactly where May left it. So the question in this section is still open rather than answered. Agentforce ARR passed $1.5bn, up over 240%, and Agentforce with Data 360 together reached nearly $3.9bn. Against the raised revenue guide, Agentforce alone is about 3.3% of the company, up from 2.6% when this was written.

What the Multiple Assumes

Salesforce is reported to be the worst-performing Dow component of 2026. Friday's $196.21 close is 27% below its 52-week high of $269.11 and 34% above the low.

On its own guidance that is about 13.9x forward non-GAAP EPS and 3.5x forward revenue. For a business compounding low double digits with a 34% operating margin, those are not the multiples of a company anyone expects to keep growing, and that is the whole opportunity if the fear about AI eating seat-based software is overdone.

My read: the valuation is doing the work here, and the quarter probably is not what breaks the deadlock. The number that would is cRPO, guided to about 14% growth. If that comes in at 14% with Informatica inside it and the organic figure keeps sliding toward 8%, cheap gets cheaper.

Claudeforce Landed the Same Afternoon

Salesforce and Anthropic announced an expanded partnership hours after the release. The first product is Salesforce in Claude, a plugin carrying 37 prebuilt sales skills that lets a seller read live pipeline data, check deal health and update records without opening Salesforce, per the joint announcement. It is with pilot customers now, with open beta planned for September and further skills late in the year.

Keep it separate from the quarter when weighing the move. Claudeforce ships no revenue in these numbers, and Anthropic is also the holding whose revaluation produced the equity gain in the EPS line. One company accounts for most of the reported earnings beat and for the product announcement that arrived alongside it, which is worth naming rather than reading as two independent pieces of good news. The bear argument this piece described, that agents erode seat-based software, is not settled by putting the CRM inside somebody else's assistant. It is a plausible answer to it, and it is now testable against next quarter's cRPO.

The One-Line Read

Salesforce is priced at 13.9x forward earnings because the market thinks 9% organic growth is heading lower. Consensus above the guide means a good quarter still gets sold. The cRPO line decides it.