Taking a 16% cut in pay in response to shareholder angst would seem a prudent move by any CEO, which is what salesforce.com's (CRM -2.77%) Marc Benioff shared in a recently filed proxy statement. Make no mistake, Benioff wasn't exactly living on rice and beans in fiscal 2016 -- he still took home a hefty paycheck.

The question raised by a disturbingly high number of Salesforce shareholders is "Why would so many raise concerns given the stellar returns Benioff and team have generated?" The answer to that question likely has less to do with Salesforce's revenue growth -- which continues to be stellar -- and more about why a company that has been publicly traded for 12 years continues to deliver little, if anything, to its bottomline.

Image source: Salesforce.com.

A few specs
In fiscal 2015, Benioff earned just shy of $40 million, thanks in large part to a bevy of Salesforce stock options equal to 86% of his total compensation. Benioff's base salary was $1.59 million in fiscal 2015, which rose slightly -- to $1.67 million -- last year, and will remain "frozen" this year.

Benioff's pay package in fiscal 2016 down 16% to $34.4 million. Going forward, Benioff's salary will stay the same (at least for this calendar year), with more performance-based compensation rather than options, though his annual bonus increased from 7% to 10% last fiscal year.

Will the 16% decline in pay to "just" $33.4 million appease shareholders at this year's meeting, tentatively scheduled for June 3? If the prior year's gathering is any indication, it could prove to a rough sell for Benioff and team.

Things are great, right?
At 2015's annual shareholder meeting, nearly 47% of attendees voted against the executive compensation structure, a surprising total particularly since Salesforce.com's stock price was near an all-time high at the time. For a shareholder vote of that magnitude, particularly one in which most attendees were enjoying stellar returns, that is an alarmingly high percentage of disgruntled owners.

Benioff is quick to point out that Salesforce is growing by leaps and bounds however, and it did again last year. Revenue was up 25% $1.81 billion in Q4, and climbed 24% for the year to $6.67 billion. Salesforce expects to crack the $8 billion annual revenue plateau this year on its way to its objective of reaching $10 billion in sales.

Where's the beef?
This year's shareholder meeting may end up looking a lot like the previous one for one reason: Salesforce continues to lose money. At virtually every quarterly earnings call Salesforce says it's beating up on longtime rival Oracle (ORCL -5.06%) in its fight for cloud market share. For his part, Oracle co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison usually gets a dig at Salesforce, too.

Ellison got his "shot" in last quarter saying, "In absolute dollar terms, Oracle is already selling more enterprise SaaS and PaaS new cloud revenue than any other company in the world -- including Salesforce.com." The banter aside, where Oracle puts Salesforce to shame is that it's actually profitable.

Though down from the prior year's earnings per share (EPS) of $0.56, Oracle reported GAAP (including one-time items) of $0.50 per diluted share last quarter. Oracle also offers its shareholders a decent, if not spectacular, dividend yield of about 1.5%.

By comparison, in a recurring theme, Salesforce lost $0.07 per share last year and will likely be in the red again for fiscal 2017. One reason Salesforce continues to lose money is its sales and marketing expenses. At $3.24 billion in fiscal 2016, sales and marketing overhead was equal to nearly half its total revenue and up almost $1.2 billion year over year.

On the whole, pundits are fairly bullish on Salesforce due to its ongoing revenue growth. Toss in the development of new solutions including analytics cloud, among others, and Salesforce's position in one of the fastest-growing markets around, and there's a lot to like. However, Salesforce shareholders may not enjoy seeing Benioff's name on the short list of 11 execs who made over $30 million last year, 16% pay cut or not.