Salesforce, Inc. (CRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Salesforce product showcase event. Today, we are excited to not only present our solutions to you, but also showcase a live of how our solutions can help you grow your business efficiently. Today's webinar will cover our flagship solution, Sales Cloud. We will showcase how you can sell faster, smarter and more efficiently with an amalgamation of AI, plus data, plus CRM. We wouldn't want this to be just a one-way conversation. Hence, our chat and Q&A sections will be open for all your comments and questions throughout this webinar. We also have a bunch of poll questions that will pop up on your screen, so please submit your answers accordingly. Before we begin, I'd like to introduce to you myself. I'm Trishla Gupta, and I'm from the sales development team, and I will be the host for your event. Going forward, I'd like to introduce you to Sushmitha, who's our solutions engineer and who will be taking forward this webinar. Over to you, Sushmitha.

Thanks a lot, Trishla. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks a lot for tuning into today's webinar. I'm Sushmitha Vijayaraghavan from the Salesforce team. And today, we're going to be essentially talking about how can you become a customer company with the world's #1 CRM. Before we move ahead, I just want to flash the forward-looking statements for all of you so that you can make your evaluation as well as buying decisions based on the current set of products and services available in our portfolio currently. Before we quickly jump ahead, we do have a couple of questions for you. Trishla, over to you to flash the questions.

Yes. I hope our screen is visible. The first question before we begin this webinar is to understand that currently, how do you manage and view your sales productivity? Option 1 is you use the CRM, but that's not Salesforce. Then option 2 is that you are using a homegrown CRM. Option C, currently using Excel or any other tool. And option D, that internally, you're managing it on yourself. You can click by placing the cursor on any of the options. [Voting]

I hope you've answered the poll so we can move on to the results. So 37% of you voted that you're using a CRM but that's not Salesforce, 25% for homegrown, 12% for Excel and 25% for internal team. Over to you, Sushmitha.

Thanks a lot, everyone, for answering the poll questions. Now let us quickly introduce you to Salesforce, right, which is the world's fastest-growing, 1 of the top 5 enterprise software companies. And we didn't just reach here through hypergrowth and customer success, but by actually having and imbibing a lot of our core values, some of which are trust, customer success, innovation, sustainability as well as equality. We are not just leaders when it comes to hypergrowth and performance, but also leaders when it comes to philanthropy. We've also been quoted as leaders in innovation by Forbes and one of the #1 best workplaces overall. And by actually imbibing our core values during every course of our discussions and journey, we've been able to sort of touch $31 billion over FY '23 as well. So now we would actually want to talk about the paradigm shift that's occurred over the last few years, right? So in the last 23 to 24 years of journey that Salesforce has been in, we've constantly seen our customer needs really evolving over time. And now the latest one we've really come across customers' expectations that are really rising. And 62% of customers really expect companies to anticipate their needs, be it in terms of the solutions that are being recommended, in terms of having a very, very fulfilling discussion and many more. And today, we do come across a lot of companies that aren't able to keep up in sort of meeting customer expectations. And here in between, we are able to actually see what are some of the challenges that companies are ideally facing today. Some of them are inefficient systems, having data spread across a lot of siloed systems and areas, having a lot of manual processes that you would like to automate in terms of increasing your productivity, addressing a large backlog of data that exists today in your system and organizations as well as sort of meeting and bridging the gap with respect to skills and skill sets. So now we are ideally going to talk about how Salesforce can really enable in bridging the gap in terms of addressing customer expectations and how they're rising. And of course, they're only going to continue to rise in future as well. So this entire journey really talks about how an unknown prospect becomes a very well-known customer of your company, right? And they go through multiple different stages and cycles of in this entire journey. So initially, we are talking about how you create awareness to the customer considering your product or services and how Salesforce can completely sort of enable your companies in creating the awareness as well as considers stages. And Salesforce also sort of enables with the entire acquisition process from your lead to cash process automation as well. And now that the unknown prospect has become a customer of your company, how do you really service and retain that customer in terms of increasing credibility as well as stickiness with your company? So this is the entire journey that we are going to be seeing in the form of a live demonstration today as a part of the webinar. But before we actually go there, I would actually want to introduce to the personas of the webinar and the demo today. So Salesforce operates across segments as well as industries, right? So for the sake of example, we've taken IT as an industry today. So without further ado, let me go ahead and introduce the personas for the day. So let's meet Raj, who is the Director of IT at Besant Technologies Private Limited, and he is looking for a billing software for Besant Technologies. Let's quickly meet Ria, who is a sales representative at Cyrus IT, and she's been crushing her quota over the last 2 years and helping customers very, very consultatively with the entire buying process. So the customer journey and story that we're going to see today looks something like this, where Raj is looking for a billing solution for Besant Technologies, goes ahead, does an online search, comes across Cyrus IT's website and pushes in his credentials. Now his inquiry actually comes to Ria, who is a part of the sales team at Cyrus IT. She contacts Raj and gets a complete perspective and understanding of the requirements, challenges, aspirations. Thus, the due diligence for the technical -- the technicalities as well as the negotiation and onboards the customer as well. Now Besant Technologies is a customer of Cyrus IT. We also have another persona called Alex, who is the sales manager. Very similar to Ria, he also handles multiple other sales representatives, helps them with their engagements and also reviews important metrics using reports and dashboards. So ladies and gentlemen, this is the customer journey that we're going to see. Before we deep dive, there is just one other question that we have for you all. Over to you, Trishla.

Thank you so much, Sushmitha. I hope our audience got a brief about the presentation today. So thank you so much for patiently waiting. We have another question for all of you. So the question is, what you will look for while using or implementing a CRM? Option A is scalability, that you want to add more users on the go as and when the company grows. Option B is customization. You want to custom build the solution as per your company needs. Option C is integration with existing tools. And option D is you're looking for all of the above. So take your time, and we'll see the results in a couple of seconds. [Voting]

So moving on to the results. We have 82% of all of you mentioning that you require all of the above when you're looking for or implementing a CRM. Great to know that. And post this, we'll be moving on to the demo. And in case you have any questions or doubts, feel free to put it in the chat box.

Good morning, everyone. Now let me quickly deep dive into the solution and quickly showcase a demonstration of what it likes to all of our users. So this is the back end of the Salesforce instance. And during the course of the demo, I would be wearing the hat of the different personas that we just got introduced to during our presentation. So let me quickly wear the hat of Ria, the sales rep in Cyrus IT and talk you through how she starts off with her day and Salesforce, how it's really going to add value to people like Ria and her colleagues, other sales reps. So as I quickly start my day's work and log into the Cyrus IT's Salesforce instance, I'm able to get a quick perspective of what I need to start doing for the day, what are some of my priority tasks and how I need to really plan my day in a very, very optimal manner. So the homepage really helps me get a quick perspective of what are some of the important tasks and activities that I've been doing; what are some of the important deals that I've won and some of them that I've lost and the reasons behind it; what are some important events, meetings and follow-ups that I have for the day; and how do I really need to really go about prioritizing each one of them and completing them. Here on the left-hand side, I'm also able to see a quick dashboard that gives me a perspective of the important metrics that I measured on. So I'm able to see how much business have I brought on to the table, the pipeline that I have for the rest of the month and the quarter, some of the activities that I've been really focusing on and doing, as well as how do I fare with respect to my team leaderboard, right, and how can I really improve and sort of become better at these metrics as well. So this sort of a homepage is very, very relevant for me and other sales reps. At the same time, this could be very, very different and optimal for someone like my manager, Alex, as well, right? Alex might really want to see things like the entire metrics pertaining to his team, right? What is the overall quota like, how much have we closed as a team, what is the deficit that exists as of today and the pipe -- open pipe that we have to really match up and meet the deficit. On the same hand, right, by getting a complete perspective, he also wants to do a quick deep dive into the accounts as well as the white space that exists. Here, from an account perspective, he's able to see all the important accounts as well as white spacing that has been done with respect to these accounts and how is it that the teams are really prioritizing and progressing on these important installed base accounts as well. He's also able to get a quick perspective of how they are segregated in the funnel and where are we with respect to the engagements as well as progressing in the discussions. Here, Alex also gets a quick breakdown of the deals, the product, the activities and other metrics. Quickly, he moves on to really see where the white spaces exist, what are the products that are being sold, what other solutions and products can be upsold or cross-sold, in which city and many other aspects of how can we go about planning in attaining the numbers that have been prescribed for our team as a whole. So this really helps give Alex a complete perspective of how is it that he needs to really plan and prioritize his week and month in the oncoming days. And Alex also is able to see a few items that he needs to approve for his team here such as discount metrics, their time-offs and so on. And he also gets a quick perspective of some of the major high-ticket deals that his team is running currently that are likely to close this quarter. So we were able to really see how this dashboard and the homepage, as we call it, can be very, very relevant to who is really using the system and who is really sort of starting their day and what their role entails them to do. Now as an individual sales rep, as I have already taken a look and taken a take of what I need to get started and how I need to prioritize my day, I also see that some of the new leads have come into my individual bucket, and I quickly move on to start addressing them. This is nothing, but an all leads workspace wherein leads across multiple sources, be it website, be it calls, be it social media, referrals and other sources that come in, all flow into a singular workspace so that none of us, be it me or my other sales reps colleagues, are not really missing out on these leads. We are doing a timely reach-outs, follow-ups and due diligence. By this manner, it really ensures that none of these leads are slipping through the cracks and we are not missing out on some of the important business and conversations that we can have with any of these prospects, right, that could ideally become our customers. So now I actually go ahead, quickly go on to my particular view so that I can prioritize on what are the leads that I need to start calling and quickly go and start dialing out each of these leads. I see that Raj, the Director of IT in Besant Technologies, has really reached out to Cyrus IT. I'm also able to see Raj's phone number and e-mail address here, and I quickly go ahead and do a check of what are the details I'm able to get from this entire lead. I go ahead and give Raj a call to really understand what is it that Besant Technologies is looking for. During the course of conversation, I quickly make sure I gather and capture all the important notes right here in the CRM itself. And after the call, I can also go ahead and shoot out Raj an e-mail of all the important offerings that Cyrus IT has to offer right from the CRM with the native integration that we have with the IT client. So here, this entire activity management panel is nothing but a complete chronological sort of record of all the discussions and engagements that a sales rep has had with this particular prospect or lead, be it in terms of calls, your follow-ups, your meetings and so on. So this just makes sure that probably 6 months or 1 year down the line, if anyone has to come back to this lead or the record for that manner and really see what are the engagements that one has had, all of it is pretty much going to be here, right? The information is not going to be lost. There doesn't have to be any sort of a manual knowledge transfer, and it's going to be a complete source of truth be it with respect to discussions, engagements or any sort of progress that has happened with respect to this company or lead. As a rep, on a day-to-day basis, I get multiple leads, right? So it makes it very, very important for me to really classify and progress the leads so that I know which stage I am in respect -- in aspect of really sort of progressing that lead. So I now have had multiple conversations with Raj. And I definitely do think that Besant Technologies can make use of Cyrus IT's billing solution. They definitely do have a great need, right? And I do see promise here. And so I quickly go ahead and convert this lead into a qualified opportunity. And as a part of the opportunity, I'm able to really capture a tentative close date, a tentative value for this opportunity and business as a whole as well as a few other important metrics as well. I'm also able to push in some of the next steps, some important pointers as well as what is the forecast and probability of closure that I see for this opportunity. Here, as a part of opportunity management as well, it makes it very, very important for me to move the stages of the opportunity in a very timely as well as efficient manner. And right here, as a sales rep, I also have the availability to really add in my products and sort of do my entire potential management from the Salesforce CRM right here as well, right? So with -- by actually uploading the entire price book, which really gives me as a sales rep the opportunity to select the products and send out quotations from the CRM itself. Now that I've done all the due diligence with respect to opportunity management, sending out a quotation and so on, I also get signatures from Besant Technologies, and now I'm able to actually market as a closed one deal. So here, we've actually been able to really take a complete look of how a lead comes into the system, how reps from Cyrus IT have been able to engage with the lead, progress them forward until they actually become a customer of Cyrus IT. So this could be just 1 example opportunity that I have been working on. But at the same time, I might be working on multiple such opportunities where I'm able to really see all the opportunities in a Kanban fashion here, right, which really helps me depict and really get a visual representation of where my opportunities are at this particular point of time and in which stage. Just like this view can be very, very helpful for sales reps like me, sales pipeline inspection can be very, very important and helpful for managers like Alex as well, right? So here, a lot of times, managers who have come across this scenario where we have a commit, the entire team has given us a commit for the month. And during the last week of the month, we see that the commit has significantly dropped, right? We don't know which rep has pushed out which deal, by how many months and so on. So pipeline inspection does exactly that, right? It helps my manager, Alex, really get a perspective of which sales rep really dropped which deal, which is sort of what is the value of the deal, and how many months has it been really pushed by, right? All these aspects are really going to be captured and pipeline inspection is going to give even a pictorial representation of this to my manager. And this is going to really help him get a complete picture of what is the right discussion that I can have with each and every sales rep so that we are able to really capture the deficit and sort of also pull back the right opportunities in time so that we're actually able to meet the target that has been set for the particular month. Having said that, it becomes very, very important that when the customer comes back to us for any sort of questions, queries, additional opportunities, the right person servicing the customer or talking to the customer has a complete picture of who the customer is and what is their history with us. So this is one of Salesforce's biggest USP, which is Customer 360, which provides a complete 360-degree holistic view of the customer, which is Besant Technologies in this particular case. So here, as a rep, I'm able to get a complete holistic understanding of who Besant Technologies is as a customer. I'm able to see what are the different products we've sold them, what is the discount that they have been provided for the different solutions, do we have any open opportunities with them and what is it worth, what is the LTV and the total sales that they have with us today, as well as are there any sort of queries and complaints that they raised with us in terms of cases. So I'm able to actually see a lot of different metrics, a lot of different details with respect to my customer here, right? I'm also able to see things like who are the SPOCs from the different teams that we are engaged with, what are some of the important opportunities that we are driving today, and are there any invoices that have not been paid for and so on. And we are also able to pull in the right set of details from other external systems as well as in-house systems as well so that the entire picture of what's happening with respect to this customer can actually be seen under a single roof itself. I don't have to toggle between multiple systems and gather different pieces of information in a very siloed manner. So this completely gives me a picture of what's happening between sales and service. And if I want to really extrapolate it even to marketing and post-sale support, I can do that as a part of Customer 360 as well. So this really is the power of the system in providing a wow experience to Besant Technologies, in terms of really increasing their credibility and the wow factor that they get from Cyrus IT as a provider. This is not only going to sort of increase the stickiness, but of course, the word is going to spread and sort of the name of the company is going to get better and company is going to move forward. So having spoken about the power of the entire Customer 360, I would quickly want to move and divert us to sort of the last portion of the demo, which is very, very important, that is reports and dashboards. This is nothing but a very, very pictorial and powerful representation of the metrics. So when we started off with the demonstration during -- while I showcased the homepage to all of you, we were able to see how it is very, very relevant and very, very specific to an individual sales rep or an individual service rep or a manager that is managing a set of -- a team of probably 10 people and so on. Dashboards, you can build dashboards to -- for even the management view. Here, we are able to really see a dashboard, which is very, very relevant for someone in the management, right? So let's say I am somebody from the management who wants to see what's happening across my marketing, sales and service team. I'm just able to do that here, right? I'm able to see what has the marketing spend been and what is the ROI that I'm completely getting out of this, right? And how can I really optimize my spends. And I'm -- here, I'm also able to see what is the overall sales that has happened within the company and what is the pipeline like to really meet the deficit that exists today. Plus, I'm also able to see how happy are my customers. Are we really being SLA compliant today or does there have to be a slight change in sort of meeting up to those compliance metrics, what is my month-on-month or my annual growth that I'm able to see, right? So these are just some example metrics that exist that I wanted to sort of flash on the dashboard today. But of course, we would be able to really pull in each and every metric that pertains and is important to each of you because, of course, we understand and we do work with multiple sort of companies across industries and segments. And understand that the KPIs and metrics that you would want to track could completely differ, right? So this was just an example and a very high-level demo of Salesforce. And ladies and gentlemen, we'll be more than happy to really have a one-on-one discussion with you to really see how Salesforce can add value to your business individually. Probably, of course, we'd be happy to connect after this webinar so that we can schedule some time for the same. But thanks a lot to each and every one of you to really sort of sit through this webinar and demo patiently, and we look forward to connecting with you very soon. Have a great day.

Thank you so much, Sushmitha, for taking us through the demo. I hope the audience found the demo quite insightful and they were able to understand how the solution works and how they will be deriving value out of it for their organization. Moving on, we have one last poll question for all of you. So the question is, are you considering switching to Salesforce solution? A, of course, yes, I'm interested. B, yes, but we need more information, and we'll be more than happy to help you out. C, not at the moment, but maybe in the next 3 to 6 months. And D, not interested. So quickly, just answer your questions, and then we'll be moving on to the Q&A round. [Voting]

So here are the results for the poll. So 12% of you say that they are interested. And we'll -- of course, we are looking forward to connecting with all of you. 37% of you all say that, yes, but they need more information. Of course, we'll reach out to you, help you understand more about our solution and what all we offer. And 50% of you said that we need to reach out to them in the next 3 to 6 months. Of course, we will keep an eye on all of these organizations and response, and of course, we'll reach out to them. So moving on to the Q&A section.

So we see a couple of questions. So keep them coming. As and when we answer, you can, of course, put your question on the chat box. So Sushmitha, we have a question -- we have 2 questions from Mr. Prashant. First question is in the cloud solution, what is data security for the organization? Because the customer and all the sales-related data is very, very important for the company.

Thanks, Mr. Prashant, for the question, right? So talking about cloud security ideally, right? So I want to take up 2 important aspects here. So one would be our Hyperforce, which is Salesforce's renewed infrastructure -- architecture. So based on consumption of public cloud services, right? So this is pretty much designed to actually offer customers a very powerful, very secure and a very, very easily scalable platform, right? So we would be happy to share links on Hyperforce. And one more aspect that I would really want to mention here is trust.salesforce.com, right? So feel free to refer to this website, trust.salesforce.com, which has all the aspects when it comes to timely server updates, compliances and all the other security details of the system as such, right? So it is bifurcated based on products, industries and many more as well. So I hope this helps. These sites as well as documents would really help to get a sort of elaborate perspective on the security that Salesforce provides. Thanks, Trishla.

Thanks, Sushmitha. So we have 1 more question from Mr. Prashant. So he's asking that can Salesforce CRM and data and analytics tool integrate with each other and also provide integration with SAP S/4 HANA?

Got it. So let me just break this question, right? So as far as Salesforce's integration capabilities are concerned, right? So Salesforce pretty much integrates with almost any and every solution out there in the market provided they sort of give us their open APIs, right? They provide open API access. Number 2 would be we have our AppExchange portal, which has -- which is one of the biggest marketplaces out there in the world. There are thousands of apps that provide additional capability on top of Salesforce's native capabilities that customers can utilize, which already have prebuilt connectors on the Salesforce platform, right? So yes, to quickly answer if we can connect with SAP and so on, yes, we have done multiple such integrations, and it is possible.

Thanks, Sushmitha. Mr. Prashant, in case you have any further questions, you can reach out to us on e-mail or on our toll free number. See, we have 1 question from Mr. Nagresh. He's asking that he wants to execute our Salesforce program in his institute. So how can he start and whom should he contact?

So I think best one to answer that would be Trishla, right? So I think we have an entire team here, Mr. Nagresh, right? So we cater across segments, right? So there is a perception that Salesforce as a company caters to a particular segment. But we have been catering across industries, be it manufacturing, retail, education or Edutech, health or hospitals as such, right? So we cater across industries and across segments. So right after this session, Trishla would reach out to you to really understand how is it that sort of we can understand more about your requirements, do a deep dive and sort of take you through the journey of onboarding and sort of evaluation as well. So we'll keep you posted on that for sure.

Thanks, Sushmitha. I'll personally reach out to you, Mr. Nagresh and I'll help you implement Salesforce program in your institute. We also have Trailhead and that can give you a gamut of courses that can help your students and employees learn about Salesforce and its solution. So we've one question from Mr. Chaturanga. He's asking that please explain the AI and data part of it. And he's put a link for Salesforce Genie.

Sure. I am unable to process the link here, right? So what I would be doing, Mr. Chaturanga, is I would be sharing quite some documents with respect to how AI and ML are an integral part of Genie and sort of sharing it with you so that you are able to see the nitty-gritty of how sort of the latest products and the solutions that are coming out there in the market have AI as well as ML and all the latest technologies incorporated as is in the solutions, right? So we have a lot of documentations as well as published articles on the same. So we would like to send to you right after the webinar.

Thank you, Sushmitha. And I think that will be all for our Q&A session. I hope you enjoyed the webinar. Thank you, everyone, for joining us and taking time out of your day. We really appreciate it, and we hope you found this session informative and insightful. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us on our website or on our toll free number. We look forward to hosting you on our next Salesforce webinar super soon. Thank you, everyone. Thank you so much. Thank you, Sushmitha.

Thanks a lot, everyone.