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In conversation with Marie Petitcuénot, Head of Impact @Salesforce France
by Coral Movasseli, Founder, All In Tech July 8, 2022
I was delighted to have the opportunity to sit down with Marie Petitcuénot, Head of Impact @ Salesforce France at Vivatech 2022 in Paris. She was recently appointed to lead the Salesforce impact initiatives focusing on equality, diversity, philanthropic commitment of employees and development of the employability of digital talents.
If you don’t know who Salesforce is yet, let’s bring you up to speed. They were established in 1999 by their socially conscious and charismatic CEO, Marc Benioff. With 75,000 employees, they are the global leaders in customer relationship management (CRM) software and are one of the world’s fastest-growing enterprise software companies.
Marie explained to us that it is “truly in Salesforce DNA to be a purpose driven company, we are a platform for change”. Her mission is to focus on three main pillars: Employability, Equality, Philanthropy. Salesforce wants to focus on “narrowing the technology divide in society”, because you have
“I want to see how many people in those underserved backgrounds I can get to have a job and stay in the job. I love that!”
“the tech sector desperately looking for talent” and “people far from employment”. Salesforce is currently working with NGO’s and other stakeholders to build a talent factory over the next five years in France, in order to have 200k jobs in the salesforce economy.
They are confident they can achieve this ambitious target. Salesforce is targeting people who need technical training, who may have dropped out of school, or need a chance, like refugees. Marie happily smiles when she tells me of a 45 year old women who had never worked a day in her life and is a mother to four children: she studied on the Salesforce trailhead university to get certification, and subsequently got a job in the tech workforce.
Salesforce was at Vivatech Paris this year to launch a new initiative, 1000 Women in Tech, which aims to encourage women to move towards tech sector jobs, in the Salesforce ecosystem. It is part of the wider initiative to building the global tech talent factory. They have 40 partner and clients, such as Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte, who have signed up to support this initiative by sharing resources, training, and tool. To become a corporate partner you need to be in the Salesforce economy – which means either using or deploying the salesforce cloud software.
Salesforce is no stranger to spearheading social causes. Salesforce operates a philanthropic model called the 1-1-1, that’s: 1% of the company’s capital
given to society, and they’ve allocated up to half a billion dollars to date; 1% of the working time of its employees are dedicated to charitable causes, amounting to 7 millions hours clocked to date (that’s volunteer time off hours); and lastly by giving away free software licenses to NGO’s and societies – in France alone they have helped 1,500 organisations. Salesforce is looking to work with super partners to help them grow within this model.
Along with these socially driven initiatives, Salesforce has ambitious Diversity and Inclusion targets to have 50% of their workforce be female, and hire a greater number of underrepresented workforce (women, people of colour, disabilities). In France the laws are not simple in terms of measuring such targets. From what Marie was able to share, in France they have 30% women in their workforce, which is not their target and something they are actively working on; and they have an average age of 35 years old (which is older than a typical tech company).
Marie ends our conversation by talking passionately about how the “best thing [she] could do in her point of view is to help someone find a job” and developing people who are on the fringes; who didn’t go to school, who were unemployed for a long time, and are refugees. She boasts that her job is to “see how many people in those underserved backgrounds I can get to have a job and stay in the job. I love that!”
