Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) Stock Price Down 2% – Time to Sell?

Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) shares dropped 2% during mid-day trading on Wednesday . The company traded as low as $249.60 and last traded at $250.6360. Approximately 9,302,059 shares were traded during trading, a decline of 34% from the average daily volume of 13,999,767 shares. The stock had previously closed at $255.65.

Trending Headlines about Salesforce

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 have issued reports on the stock. Weiss Ratings upgraded shares of Salesforce from a “sell (d+)” rating to a “hold (c-)” rating in a research note on Wednesday, August 12th. HSBC raised their target price on shares of Salesforce from $350.00 to $356.00 and gave the company a “buy” rating in a research note on Friday, May 29th. Monness Crespi & Hardt upped their price target on shares of Salesforce from $222.00 to $266.00 and gave the stock a “buy” rating in a research report on Thursday, August 27th. Evercore reiterated an “outperform” rating on shares of Salesforce in a report on Thursday, August 27th. Finally, Wolfe Research raised Salesforce from a “hold” rating to a “strong-buy” rating in a research report on Thursday, August 27th. Three analysts have rated the stock with a Strong Buy rating, twenty-eight have given a Buy rating, fourteen have issued a Hold rating and three have issued a Sell rating to the company’s stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has a consensus rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus target price of $267.50.

Salesforce Stock Down 2.0%

The company has a market capitalization of $206.27 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 22.85, a P/E/G ratio of 1.18 and a beta of 1.20. 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 firm has a 50 day moving average price of $204.13 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $188.20.

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

Salesforce Dividend Announcement

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

Insider Transactions at Salesforce

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

Institutional Investors Weigh In On Salesforce

Hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of the stock. Anchor Investment Management LLC increased its holdings in shares of Salesforce by 184.5% in the 2nd quarter. Anchor Investment Management LLC now owns 17,983 shares of the CRM provider’s stock valued at $2,817,000 after acquiring an additional 11,663 shares during the last quarter. Marathon Wealth Advisors LLC lifted its stake in Salesforce by 1.2% during the second quarter. Marathon Wealth Advisors LLC now owns 21,267 shares of the CRM provider’s stock worth $3,332,000 after purchasing an additional 260 shares during the last quarter. ABS Direct Equity Fund LLC bought a new position in Salesforce during the second quarter worth $25,000. Van Hulzen Asset Management LLC boosted its holdings in Salesforce by 73.0% in the second quarter. Van Hulzen Asset Management LLC now owns 2,136 shares of the CRM provider’s stock worth $335,000 after purchasing an additional 901 shares during the period. Finally, MCF Advisors LLC increased its stake in Salesforce by 35.4% during the second quarter. MCF Advisors LLC now owns 3,486 shares of the CRM provider’s stock valued at $547,000 after purchasing an additional 912 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors own 80.43% of the company’s stock.

About Salesforce

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.