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

Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's session, How to Overcome Customer Indecision and Accelerate Sales Growth with AI plus Data plus CRM. And thank you all so much for joining us today. My name is Arianna, and I'm on the marketing team here at Salesforce. And before we begin, I'd like to cover a few quick notes with you about our webinar platform. Today's webinar will be available on-demand after we wrap up and will be accessible through the URL that you are on right now. Please note the slides will advance automatically throughout today's presentation, and you can enlarge them by clicking the Enlarge Slides button located in the top right-hand corner of your Slides widget. Should you need technical assistance, click on the Help widget located on the bottom left corner of your console. We've also added some additional resources, which are available through the resources window to the right of the slides. There, you can find some additional related content. And lastly, we encourage you to submit your questions at any time throughout the session today using the Ask a Question widget at the bottom of your console. We'll do our best to answer as many questions as we can at the end of the presentation. And with that out of the way, I'll be turning things over to Ketan to get us started.

Good morning. Thank you very much, everybody, for joining us. Really excited to be on the show with you today. We've got a lot of great conversation planned for you. So I hope you get your questions ready. I hope you get your top of mind ready because this is a conversation, and I hope to learn from you also as we tell you what we are up to. But before we do all that, during the course of the presentation, we will be referring to features, capabilities, strategies that are coming soon into our product. A quick note for you, you should sign up for Dreamforce, if you haven't. That's just less than 60 days away. But please make all budgets and decisions based on product and technology available today. You can, of course, find further details about this in our -- on our website. But let's get this going. I mean I'm really excited. My name is Ketan Karkhanis, Executive Vice President and General Manager for Sales Cloud. It's an absolute privilege to be your host today. But it's also an extremely exciting moment for me because I get to introduce you to Matt Dixon. Matt's a founding partner at DCM Insights. He is a noted business researcher. He's a prolific writer. His latest book, The JOLT Effect, How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision, it debuted in September. I have read it. You should take a look at it. It's pretty exciting because it touches upon some critical aspects that we face as sellers every day, is customer indecision and what is the framework to approach it. But Matt does more than that. He is also a contributor to Harvard Business Review. He's got more than 20 in print and holds a PhD in Political Economy. So Matt, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us.

Ketan, it's a pleasure to be with you. Thanks for having me.

All right. So here's what we have lined up for you today. To kind of set the stage, I'm sure everybody has been talking about AI, but what does that really mean? And what should be your thought process and framework? And how should you approach it? What is the first step you take? We'll get into The JOLT Effects and the context and give you the framework for how to approach customer indecision because a lot of AI conversations are going to be where your customers are in an indecision mode because this is so much new, there's so much unknown, there's so much of clarity needed, and you need a framework to guide your customers through that journey. And that's what we'll introduce you to, and then we'll just open it up. We'll -- Matt and I, we'll open up for your questions and go from there. So that's the quick rundown of the show. And I'd like to start here. Look it's the new data in sales. It has never been -- I sometimes say it's the best time to be in sales right now because everything is heading towards how do we make the sales rep the hero first persona in the world, right? It's also how do we liberate sales people from clunky process-oriented workflows to intuitive and conversational. It's completely new. Sales is moving because of AI and data from being intuition-based only to be data-driven and intuition. There's always a big place for intuition, But how do you get data to guide your intuition? How does -- what does that team work look like where data is your team member. It's going from episodic sales stages to guided buying journeys. Buyers are now not necessarily the sequential buying journey. How are you creating that connected buying experience for them? And more importantly, AI is no longer for the few. It's not about having a large data science organization, which is great if you have that, but it's AI for everyone. It's operationalizing AI at scale to drive ROI and value into your business. And to navigate -- as we were getting ready for this, we spoke to a lot of sales professionals across the world. We did a whole state of the sales survey. And we were like, "Okay, how is AI going to help you boost efficiency? What are you doing? What are you not doing? What do you -- where is your head?" I mean, the first part is a very few -- a small percentage is just using AI. There's a large percentage that has not been able to operationalize AI into their day-to-day sales processes. But when you ask them, hey, what impact do you think it can have? Top of mind is forecasting. Top of mind is seller productivity. A fund statistic I'm sure you've read off somewhere is sellers are spending more than 30%, 40% of their time on administrative tasks. And that's a large chunk of time. I mean to be provocative, a question you should ask is how can AI help me give back 5 hours a week to every seller. Now multiply that and see what effect that has on productivity in your organization. It's like adding sales reps without adding headcount. It's -- that's the potential. And the list goes on. And to navigate this world, it's also important to think about, what should be your business formula? How do you bring all this together? And let me kind of give this to you in a simple nutshell. Number one is you need CRM. You need a trusted source, a single source of truth that is visible and actionable across your entire organization that connects sales, service, marketing. That is step one, and that's where we come in with Sales Cloud. But what we have done is now infused it with real-time data that's driving trusted AI and actionable insights in the workflow of your CRM. So this virtuous cycle of technology is a connected cycle because thinking about data on the side or AI on the side is a side show. You have to be within into your CRM. Now as we start talking about this with customers naturally, and I'm sure you are talking about it with your internal teams or your customers, there's a lot of ambiguity. There's a lot of questions. There's a lot of in decision. There's a lot of but wait or what about that. And to do that, so it's not just about having the technology conversation. It's getting the framework to navigate these conversations and accelerate the journey. And that's where, I think, so I want to introduce you to the work Matt has done with The JOLT Effect. And Matt, why don't you take it away and help us get the framework for how do we drive this AI transformation? What is the framework to do that?

Yes, absolutely, Ketan. I love what you said before, this -- the then and now and this kind of wonderful time it is to be in sales right now, to be a salesperson, to be a sales leader, and so much of what you said, I think, really foots to what I'm going to share with the audience right now. Maybe I'll do this, I'll spend about 15 minutes or so, I'll walk you -- give everyone the Cliff's Notes, drinking from the firehose version of The JOLT Effect. So there's obviously a lot more that we can share with you. If you'd like to pick up the conversation later, connect with me offline, I'd be more than happy to do so. But let me give everyone a quick primer on The JOLT Effect. And then Ketan and I will talk about -- bring back what he brought up earlier about AI, data, CRM, and how technology can actually facilitate and enable a lot of what we see high performers doing just naturally, right, but something that really every salesperson should be doing as a matter of course. So let's get into it. So this is a book. We've written a lot about customer buying behavior. This is about something a bit more nefarious, and so I apologize, we're going to start in a depressing place, which is customer not buying behavior. It's exactly what Ketan said earlier. There seems to be a lot of this going around. Customers kind of going radio silent on us, ghosting us, kind of falling out of our pipeline for reasons that we don't really understand. We found in a recent study -- I'm going to tell everyone more about how we did this research. And I know, Ketan, we're going to dig into this in a little bit more detail in the Q&A in the fireside chat. But in our study, we found that anywhere between 40% and 60% of the average sellers' qualified pipeline will ultimately be lost to no decision. So it will be marked in Salesforce as closed loss, no decision. And think about that, think about the productivity impact. I mean Ketan talked about forecast accuracy, use of sales rep time and productivity, prioritization of leads, right? How do we make sure we're spending our time in the best way against the best fit, highest likely to close opportunities, and then you think about this. Think about all the time that's lost at the individual seller level, but also across the organization to have these deals that just kind of evaporate on us. And what's most frustrating about these, Ketan, is that so many of these customers will tell us, I'm sold, I'm ready to move forward. We want to do business with you. You're the vendor we want to partner with on this transformation journey, and then they go dark on us, and then they go radio silent, they just ghost us, and then we throw up our hands or maybe our manager tells us, that's enough, stop chasing this opportunity, let's spend our time elsewhere, right? So it's a huge productivity loss for us, and it's just getting worse, especially in the current environment. So we actually took a little bit of a different angle on this. And again, we'll dig into this a little bit more detail in the fireside chat. Unlike a lot of the research we've done in the past, this one, we actually use AI and machine learning to power this research study, and have brought a tremendous scale and depth of insight to what we're able to do here in The JOLT Effect. We actually, starting in the spring of 2020, remember when the world of sales went 100% virtual, we thought this was an amazing time to study sales in a completely new way. So we partnered with several dozen companies, and we asked them to send us all of their recorded sales calls. Of course, those calls tied to opportunities in Salesforce, right? So they were dynamically updating over the course of the study. And we knew what was happening with those opportunities, collecting all that unstructured voice data and being able to study it using AI and machine learning. So 2.5 million sales calls that we collected, transcribed into text, studied with machine learning. We looked at 8,300 different variables, all through the lens of why do no decision losses happen? Why are they so prevalent? What is it that causes the customer to do nothing? And then secondly, more importantly, what did the best sales people do differently to avoid that happening to them. Now as Ketan said, we -- there's a lot more about this in the book, The JOLT Effect, and you can read more about what I'm talking about here. But this is a bit of a primer, I'll give you enough to be dangerous around some of these insights. I'm going to tell you what the high performers do differently to avoid spot and avoid no decision losses to dislodge those indecisive customers, again, to move forward. But first, I think it makes sense to talk about what most salespeople do when that customer starts to hesitate. So what you're looking at here is basically a prototypical sales or buying process. It's a sales journey, right? We always engage our customer in their status quo. This is the way they do things today. Maybe they use a competitor's product. Maybe they have a homegrown solution or have a manual process that your solution would take the place of. Maybe they do buy your product, but they use it in a very narrow use case, and you're trying to get them to expand their usage, maybe upgrade to the premium version of your solution or what have you. This first step in the journey is to get the customer to agree that the status quo is no longer acceptable, right? It's insufficient in that they've got to move forward with us as a partner in a new direction. We got to get them to agree on that vision, just to intellectually buy into that. Then the last step in the journey is as salespeople, we got to get them from saying they want it to actually executing the agreement and buying it, okay? Now what we found in our analysis across 2.5 million sales calls is that there's a spot where things often go sideways for salespeople, and that's between the point where the customer expresses their intent, but before the point where they actually buy the solution. This is where the customer starts wringing their hands, they start dredging up objections and concerns that you thought you had addressed long ago, and we have this deer in the headlights moment as salespeople. And so what do we do? Well, what we do is what we've been taught to do for decades now. And most salespeople in our analysis across these 2.5 million sales calls did exactly what they've been taught to do, which is go back and hammer the status quo, because salespeople have grown up in a world believing the only reason the customer is not moving forward, especially as that customer said they want to move forward but is now seeming hesitant, right? They're wringing their hands. They're straddling the fence. They're standing on the sidelines. The only reason that's happening is that they are still in the grips of the status quo. They still believe what they're doing today is good enough. What you're talking about is not a compelling enough reason to change, or this is not a top priority for my business. We have bigger fish to fry, other investment opportunities, things we have to get after, and it's not this. And so you've got to go back and you've got to dial up the fomo, the fear of missing out. Now in our analysis, we found that salespeople do this in 1 of 3 different ways, and it almost always follows it in a 3-step process. Step #1, when you have that hesitant customer is to go back and rearticulate the benefits of your solution, try to reconvince the customer of the ROI of your solution. The benefits that will accrue if they just buy your solution and just say, yes, and move forward. How can you afford to say no and miss out on all this awesomeness that we're going to bring to your organization? If that doesn't work, if it doesn't sway the customer, then step 2 is to use those classic FUD techniques, fear, uncertainty and doubt. And what we're trying to do is help the customer appreciate the cost of inaction, the cost of doing nothing. You know, Ketan, I got to tell you, you were complaining about the status quo and the way you do things today and those problems, you can't wish them away. They're not going to solve themselves. You've got to move forward, right? We've got to move forward in a new direction together. You try to create that burning platform that gives the customer no choice but to leave the status quo and move forward with you as a partner in a new direction. And if those 2 things don't work, step 3 is almost always the 10% discount that's only good this quarter, right? We're trying to use some scarcity and some price-based urgency to get that customer to just say yes. He might not be fully bought in but you know you don't want to pay more later so you're just going to say yes today, or that's how I'm going to get you to say yes today. None of this surprised us because this is what salespeople have been talked to do for many, many years. And those of you who are familiar with our previous work in The Challenger Sale, you'll know we say that challengers are very good at showing the customer that the pain of same, the pain of the status quo is actually worse than the pain of change. So this didn't surprise us, but the next finding did, is that for customers who have already expressed their intent to move forward but then become hesitant, those age-old FOMO tactics actually don't just not work, they actively make things worse. They increase the likelihood that the deal will be lost in no decision. This was a huge surprise to us because it flies in the face of everything we've taught salespeople for the past 50 years. It flies in the face or it seem to fly in the face of what we talked about in The Challenger Sale as well. So we do what any good researcher does, which is the first thing is we accuse our data science team of having made a map error, which they did, and then we've loaded more data into the study. The effect actually got worse. And we figured this is real. There's something going on here. So we took a step back and we asked kind of a bigger question of our data set which is, "Why do customers make no decision?" And here's what we found. Sales people have always known that one of the big reasons customers make no decision is that they prefer their status quo. They're stuck in the grips of status quo bias. And look, I don't want to make light of this. Overcoming the status quo is a big deal for salespeople. It's job one. If the customer doesn't believe that what they're doing today is not good enough, if they don't believe your solution represents a compelling enough reason to change, if they don't believe it's a priority, you're never collecting $200 and pass and go, right? That is job #1. You have got to convince them that the status quo is no longer acceptable. But again, sales people had believed for a very long time that hesitant customers are all stuck in their status quo and that their job is to dial up the FOMO to dislodge them from their status quo bias. And so it surprised us to learn that there's actually a second reason that a deal can be lost to no decision. And it actually has nothing to do with the status quo. It is the customer being stuck in a state of indecision which itself stems from their fear of failure. Now a lot of people tell me and say, "Well, a no decision loss," isn't that the customer actually is making a decision, they're deciding to stay with their status quo. And what I tell them is, yes, that's true, but that's only true 44% of the time. 44% of the time, the customer still prefers their status quo. They have not seen enough daylight between what you're selling and what they currently do, right? Or they don't think it's a priority or they -- or for whatever reason, they just, again, they prefer what they do today. That is true, 44% of the time. But 56% of the time, they are stuck in this no man's land, the state of indecision. Indecision, by definition, is not a decision. It is a customer stuck between wanting something and actually buying it, right, between intent and action. They want to buy our solution, but they just can't. And what keeps them from moving forward is their fear of failure. Now this surprises salespeople, I think, especially salespeople who sell to C-level executives, the people who may get paid to make the tough decisions, who manage from their gut to look at data and ROI and dollars and cents. It can be surprising to hear that customers are worried about failing. And actually, it turns out this is true of very senior executives as well. And it has to do with a pretty profound psychological effect. We read about 30 years of social science research. I won't walk you through that on this webinar, but let me give you the one thing you need to know. That when people think about -- we all know people like to avoid loss, and we're all wired to avoid loss more than to maximize gain. But there's a wrinkle to that. Many salespeople are familiar with that concept, but there's a wrinkle to it, which is that in the human mind, there are 2 types of loss that we grapple with. On the one hand, you've got a loss that stems from inaction. This is called an error of omission. This is when you experience a loss because you choose not to act. You chose not to invest in this transformative AI platform, and then you watch all of your competitors outpace you and gain sales productivity, dividends that you are not reaping, right? That is a loss, but it's a loss that happens because you sat on the sidelines and you did nothing. Contrast that with a loss that comes from taking action. That's also called an error of commission. Imagine you buy a solution, and it leads to a loss in that, that loss is directly attributable to the decision you made. So in other words, you are to blame. The shorthand for salespeople, this is called the omission bias. But the shorthand for salespeople is a little bit simpler than that. In the customer's mind, the fear of missing out, all this stuff we've been taught to dial up for years and years and years for customers, actually pales in comparison to the FOMU. What is the FOMU? It's the fear of messing up. Now this is a family-friendly program, but the not safe for work version would be FOFU, but I'll let you figure out your on what that stands for. But your customers care a lot more about being personally blamed for making an investment, advocating for a solution, signing off on a purchase, lobbying for something and having it go sideways on them. They're okay with missing out. They are not okay with messing up. There's an extra wrinkle here, and then we'll talk about what the high performers do. There are 3 sources of indecision, 3 specific things that customers get really worried about. They really start to sweat. The first one is choice overload. This is where we put a lot of options in front of our customers, which by the way, our customers love. They love that we can let 1,000 flowers bloom. We can integrate with anything, hundreds or dozens or hundreds of use cases that we address. They love the imminent configurability of our product and our service. But sometimes that actually works against the salesperson because when everything looks good to the customer, the safest course of action is to not make a decision, is to choose nothing, right? So this is a customer who's worried about making the wrong choice. I know I want to work with you as a vendor, but I don't know if it's configuration A, B or C. And if I choose configuration A and it turns out later that B or C would have been better and we can't revisit that decision for 3 years when the contract comes up for renewal, that's a bad look. The second fear of failure stems from information overload. This is the customer who really worries about information that might come to light after the decision is made. And that information, perhaps, whether it's a Gartner Magic Quadrant report, it's a Forrester Wave report, it's a new vendor that you had overlooked or some customer feedback that you had not collected in advance, that information makes the purchase decision seem like not such a great decision, right? So this is the customer who just engages in, if you will, analysis paralysis, continuing to consume and consume and consume because what they think is it's the next white paper I read that's going to have all the answers, and I've got a leave no stone unturned because if we're surprised after the fact, then fingers get pointed and they get pointed at me because it was my job to run the due diligence on this purchase and leave no stone unturned, and clearly, I failed at that task. The last fear of failure the customer has, the last source of indecision, is what we call expectations overload. This is quite literally where the customer feels like they won't get the full benefit from the purchase. And what's interesting about this is that in these 2.5 million sales calls, I can tell you, I can count on one hand probably the number of customers who literally didn't believe the vendor's value proposition. They didn't believe the ROI. They didn't believe the success stories or the case studies. They didn't believe what they were told by reference customers. Almost, I would say, 99.999% of the calls, it was not customers not believing vendors, it was customers not believing in themselves, in not believing in the ability of their own organization to fully capitalize on this purchase they're about to make. And think about this. In the current environment where resources are scarce, there's a lot of budget scrutiny, there are a lot of eyes on even low-level purchases, everything is getting run through the wringer, putting your badge on the table and lobbying for a big investment that doesn't fully pay off, that's not just a bad look, that could mean getting fired. The customer here is looking for a safety net. They want to know that they're in good hands. They want to know that you've got their back as a vendor or a supplier and that they're going to look like a hero, not like a fool. Okay. let's put it all together, and let me tell you a little bit more about this JOLT playbook just at a very high level. So the big takeaway here is not that you want to ignore the status quo. It's not that if you're a challenger shop or any other methodology that you want to stop doing that. Again, that is job one. You've got to convince the customer to change. You have to answer the why change question. But what we learned in this analysis is that, yes, high-performing salespeople are great at beating the status quo. They're world class at that, but that's not all they do. The second phase of the purchase is getting the customer comfortable and confident that they're making a great decision. They've done plenty of research. They're in great hands with you as a trusted adviser, and you as a supplier vendor, you've got their back, they're going to look like a hero, not like a fool. And it's that gear shift from the first phase of selling to the second phase that high-performing salespeople understand that is the core of this idea of The JOLT Effect. Now JOLT is a set of 4 behaviors that we identified in the research that high performers use to get customers to move forward. I'll just hit these at a very high level. Ketan and I are going to talk a little bit more about this, I think, in the fireside, I'm sure you'll have questions in the Q&A. The first step in this is judging the level of indecision. We've got to understand what we're working with. Look, people, especially business people, and I would say especially senior executives, suffer massively from the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect is where we think we're better at things than we really are, like I think I'm a better golfer than I really am, but my handicap says otherwise. So we all think we're decisive. If you ask your customers if they thought they were decisive, they would all raise their hand and say, "Absolutely, yes. I make the tough calls, I look at the ROI, I look at the dollars and cents." But the reality is quite different. And when we look at the data, we find that only 13% of the opportunities out there that we studied are with customers who were very confident, who were purely rational thinkers, who are unencumbered by fear of failure. 87% of those customers, even senior executives, were at least moderately indecisive, if not deeply indecisive. So the first thing we got to do is we've got to understand what is the customer's level of indecision, what's causing them to be indecisive so we can do something about it. And importantly, as Ketan mentioned before, so that we can know how to forecast this opportunity. And even more importantly, is this an opportunity we have any hope of dislodging again to move forward, right? As the old saying goes in sales, we can't afford to chase garbage trucks. Our time is to scarce and precious. We've got to make those tough calls. It all starts with that judging level of indecision. Now the next step, let's imagine where our customers are suffering from choice overload. What we learned from our analysis is that high performers use a number of techniques to go from showing the customer all the possibilities to then chalking the field and advocating for a specific course of action. Put simply, they shift gears from asking, they're asking the customer what they want to buy, to telling them what they should buy, okay? And that is a key moment in sales, and that is how you avoid the customer looking at all these options and saying, "You know what, I'm not going to choose any of these because I'm not 100% sure which is best for our organization." The L, limiting the exploration. Remember, we talked about this idea of information overload and how hard it is for customers to consume all the content out there that they need to, to feel educated like they're making a smart purchase decision. This is all about building trust with your customer. Your customer has to believe that you are not there to oversell them. You are not there to put one over on them, and you are not there to hide the dirty laundry, that you are a truthful arbiter and a straightforward person that they're dealing with, right? And so there are moments that we found that high performers will use to build that bank of trust that they later cash in and earn the right to tell the customer, "You know, I don't think a fifth reference call is going to reveal anything more than you've already learned. And maybe there's something else that's going on here and there might be a better and more efficient way for us to get you the information you're seeking." And then finally, the T, taking risk off the table. This is all about setting proper expectations and then creating a safety net for our customers. They don't feel like a skydiver about to jump out of the plane for the first time worried about what might go wrong, but they've got a tandem skydiving instructor strapped to their back, and all they got to do is give a thumbs up and smile for the camera. They are along for the ride and they are in great hands because we know where the pitfalls and landmines are. We know what could go wrong, and we are going to be a great partner on this journey. We've got a plan for going from signature to value, and we know it's all going to work out. Okay. So that's, at a very high level, our JOLT playbook. And let me show you one last thing, which is the returns on doing this stuff. So we were able to plot win rates by level of customer indecision that was demonstrated. And as you see, for average performing salespeople, they do pretty well where the customer is not afraid of failing. With those opportunities, which remember, are only 13% of the opportunities we studied. So those are -- if you find one of those, well, you should sell them everything you make as soon as possible, but there aren't a lot of them out there. But our average performing sales people do really well. They cover almost 40% of those opportunities. But then things start to fall apart for them as they get to this moderately indecisive and highly indecisive customers. Our JOLT sellers, the sellers doing the 4 things that I gave you the high-level walk-through about just a moment ago, convert orders of magnitude better at every single level of indecision. With those decisive customers, they knock it out of the park, almost a 70% win rate. But look at how well they do and how high a win rate they maintain with those moderately indecisive customers. By the way, that's where most of your opportunities are, nearly a 60% win rate compared to 26% for the average seller. And then with those deeply indecisive customers, they're still converting better than your average performers convert with moderately indecisive customers, 31% win rate, with the most stuck customers in our pipeline. So again, that's a very high-level walk through. I mentioned before, if you'd like to pick up the conversation after the webinar, hopefully, we get a lot of questions here in the remaining 30 minutes, but if you'd like to pick up the conversation with me, lots of different ways to get a hold of me. Certainly LinkedIn. Let me know you heard me on the Sales Cloud webinar today, and you got a question about The JOLT Effect or you just want to be connected, and I'd love to be connected with you as well. So with that, Ketan, that was drinking from the firehose so I'm going back to you. I've got to take a drink on water.

Yes. A firehose is one way to put it. No, it's very exciting because the way we think about this, like this webinar, especially, usually, we do webinars which are only tech, like we go deep in the tech, right? But the step one for the tech is also to not just -- if you are a seller, how are you selling your tech to your customers? Or how are you adopting this tech within your organization and selling it internally. So it's a hybrid of sales technology and sales excellence. We all are sellers, either we are selling externally or we are selling internally. So I love the framing coming together. But I have a question. Like, maybe I'm sure you'll start getting some questions. But to warm us up, Matt, first, thank you. That was very enlightening. I learned a few things today. FOMU. I like that. I think I'm going to use it. I see it all the while. But like it's very meta is we believe AI is going to transform the sales rep sellers' experience. We believe that powerful technology like conversational AI and generative sales e-mails and autonomous agents is going to just revolutionize how selling looks like. But to do that, you have used AI to first understand how sellers behave so that we are building the right products and technologies for them. So it's like a meta AI creating better AI products, if you may. But tell me how did your research change? How did you think about this? Like I just want to understand a little bit below the covers.

Yes. It is very meta. We're here talking about AI and data and CRM, and how we can help with this. But we used AI and data and CRM as well to do the research. It's interesting, Ketan, because if I think about the history of sales research and understanding what high performers do because there's this thing we talk a lot about in research, which is we call it the lead steer effect, which is that our very best sellers are always going to spot the changes in the customer buying environment and adapt their behaviors accordingly and innovate and create new approaches without ever being taught to do it in sales training or coached to do it or reading a book about it, they figure it out first. And so this is a methodology. This idea is an approach that's been taken for decades now to understand what great sellers do. If we go all the way back to the '70s and '80s, Neil Rackham's famous book has been selling. I think Neil and his team spent -- his team of 12 people spent 10 years sitting in on -- physically sitting in on 30,000-plus sales conversations. They sat there with clip boards. They're taking notes, right? Very manual. Very expensive undertaking. We fast forward to The Challenger so we wrote that book in 2011, and we collected thousands and thousands of data points using a survey-based methodology, but it was still -- it was a 2-year effort, maybe even 3 years, if I look at the end-to-end life cycle of that research study, probably 30 different researchers involved in that, a lot of data collection, a lot of companies that supply data. So still pretty manual. Certainly a lot faster and more efficient than what Neil Rackham did, but still pretty manual. If you look at The JOLT Effect, it was myself, my co-author, Ted McKenna, and our lead data scientists studying 2.5 million sales calls using conversational or unstructured data analytics, large data modeling and some pretty advanced AI-based research techniques to study this in the span of -- I think we -- from start to finish, it was about 18 months, this project, with like 2.5 people on it. So it's really amazing. It's almost like the Moore's Law. We talk about how processing speed gets -- you know this better than I do, but how it gets faster at every incremental time. And I think that AI and data and CRM, we are -- it's not just a great time to be a salesperson, Ketan. I think it's a great time to be understanding sales. Because it's a little bit like the metaphor I've used for folks is we've all seen those fantastic images from that satellite that's now sitting like 1 million miles past the moon, which is revealing pictures of the greater galaxy that these things have been for billions of years but we never have the technology to understand them or to study them. And I think AI and data and CRM as a kind of trifecta is that for sales, right? We now have the ability to understand what the best salespeople do much faster at massive scale, much more accurately and deeply than ever before. So I'm like a kid in a candy store with this stuff because I think this is just a great time to be doing what I do, and I think it's a great time to be a sales leader as well or to lead Sales Cloud, right, and be pioneering these technologies for sales organizations. So it's primarily good time.

You hit upon conversational AI and how it radically changes the seller because you analyzed 2.5 million calls, what they meant, right? But on a day-to-day basis, every seller is having conversations with their customers. There's tremendous insights they can get out of it every step of the way. We've got a very exciting conversational AI product. Maybe I'll show it a bit in a minute to all of you. Or maybe I can just -- let's first see how many questions we have and tee up for the questions from the team. And in the meanwhile, let me just show you all our conversational AI and what Matt was saying and how you can use that in your day to day. So I'm sharing my screen. Hopefully, you all are seeing it. But let's look at this. This is the conversational AI product. It's like Einstein joins you on your meeting. Of course, there's a full transcript of the call auto recorded for you. But look at the left, it's auto detecting insights for you. This is the power of conversational AI. Now you can scale back and look at it across your entire organization, across all your calls, and across all your calls, what were some of the intents coming up. And you can drill into it and get really good coaching sales practice, best practice moments into each call. So not to belaboring with the demo, but I wanted to be sure if the audience understood that the technology Matt was referring to is not science fiction. It's here today, and it's accessible. That's what we mean by AI for everyone, not AI for the few. But let's go to questions. And so I'm going to tee up questions for you, Matt. One question is what are some ways to recognize indecision in the sales process?

Yes. That's a great question. So this is -- if we go back to that, J, judging the indecision. It's interesting because the way it's drawn on that slide, the J-O-L-T, people think of it as like a linear process. But I think the better way to think about it is everything starts with that J. Depending on what you learn, you may go to any number of different steps as your next step. And then you might fill -- you might backtrack a bit, right, because customers can be a little bit slippery. So you might put one source of indecision to bed and then they kind of dredge it back up a little bit later, and you've got to deal with it again. So a couple of things I talked about. We like to talk about judging indecision in -- I'm going to give you a lens through what you think about it and then a very tactical piece of guidance, something you can go do tomorrow or today after the webinar with your sellers. The first thing is if you think about indecision, there's really 3 layers of that. The first is who your customer is as a person. And the research is very clear that some of us are more decisive than others, right? And there are different decisive or indecisive personality types. Now I share that. There's a lot more about that in the book. There's not a lot you can do about that as a salesperson but there -- it's critical that you understand that because if you're dealing with a deeply indecisive person, your probability of getting them over the fence is a lot lower than if you're dealing with somebody who is maybe moderately indecisive. The second thing is we've got to understand what about this purchase is causing hesitation and indecision? Is it that they don't know what to choose? Is it that they feel like they're still coming down the learning curve and they're still a bit in the dark and they're still doing homework and research? Is it that they're just worried about the risk of implementation and maybe not seeing the ROI or the benefits? Where is it coming from, right? And then the third lens you want to think about is what else is going on in the environment. So obviously, right now, we're in this -- are we prerecession? Nobody knows. We've been talking about this for like 1.5 years. But certainly, a lot of geopolitical upheaval, there's just a lot going on in the world, right? Those external factors can amplify. If I'm normally not very indecisive, it can amplify those low levels of indecision, make me quite indecisive. So a simple example, think about a purchase that maybe 2 years ago, 3 years ago, I would have just signed off, no problem. We're going to try this out, see how it works, see if we see the benefits. But now that same purchase, a lot of eyes on that purchase, a lot of scrutiny, and that's amping up my level of indecision. Now the technique. Here's a technique I'll share with you. Getting customers to talk about indecision is hard and fear of failure because it's embarrassing. They don't like talking about this. And the last thing I would recommend to any of you as salespeople or sales leaders is to ask your customer if they're worried they're going to get fired for buying your product or service. It's not a great technique. But what high performers do to get fear of failure on the table, they use a technique that derives from -- actually derives from submarine warfare. So forgive the militaristic reference. They use a technique we call pings and echoes. So just like a surface ship trying to find an enemy submarine in the water will send a sound, literally a ping into the water, and they are listening for the reflection back. That's exactly what our study of these sales calls told us high performers are doing. They are trying to articulate the fear of the customer they think the customer is struggling with, but in a way that doesn't embarrass the customer, doesn't out them, doesn't create confusion, right? So Ketan...

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That's exactly right. You're exactly right. So it might be something like, hey, Ketan, we've been talking for a month or so now. I mean, the demos you've done with the team are great. I think you -- sounds like you're really excited about the reference calls we set up for you. We put a lot in front of you, and I think maybe just to be a bit self-critical, I may have done you with disservice in that process. We're very proud of what we do, and we can do a lot, right? But I know you told me very early on, budgets are tight, you've got to make the right first investment. You can always expand from there, but you've got to make sure that first configuration, the first piece of business you do with us is configured exactly right for your organization. And I wonder, do you think you and the team are very clear now on what's nice to have and what's need to have? What's the stuff you need today and what's the stuff you can wait for, for later? And what you want to say back to me is, "Actually, it's a really good question. I don't know that we could. Everything you've shown us is great, and we can't have it all. So we could use some help there." Or you might say, "No, no, no, madam. Sorry, I wasn't clear about that. We know what we want. We were just being polite. We -- but there's some stuff we really want and there's some stuff we can wait for later. What we're worried about is this ROI. Like our CFO will laugh us out of her office if we walk in with that projection because we've never seen that kind of benefit from any investment we've ever made." So it's a great way to get that fear failure on the table so we can size it, and we can then do something about it, have a conversation about it with our customer.

Right, right. Well, that's exciting. I mean, we see this every day, right, indecision, but it's also -- it's not indecision because you don't want to change, there is legitimate parts concerns, and you need to kind of build that road map for your customer to overcome all of that. That's a great answer. Let's keep the questions coming, quite a few coming in. Did -- well, actually a lot coming in. Did your team discover what average -- actually, you know what, let's look at this more closely. Oh, this is a great one. Did you -- like when you were doing all this research, did your team discover any thoughts around the average time line is from the first customer interaction to the close date using JOLT? And is there a right answer of when to move from an indecisive customer -- when to move on, I beg your pardon, from an indecisive customer?

Yes. So let me answer the second part first. So the second -- the answer to the second piece was that you remember what I showed that framework before about beating the status quo and then overcoming indecision with that...

Right, right, right.

With this vertical line -- or the diagonal line to it. The reason it's designed that way is that we actually found that high performers, when they first start engaging the customer, again, the first order of business is to convince them what they're doing today is not good enough. You've got to answer the why change question. You've got to show them the pain of same is worse than the pain of change as we say in The Challenger Sale, but it doesn't mean you're ignoring sources of indecision. High performers are trying to pick up on that in the very first interaction with the customer. Over time, as they get the sense of, I think the customer is sold on the value. I think they're very convinced that what they're doing today is not good enough. By the way, the surest tell here is when the customer says that to you. That doesn't always happen, of course, but we know customers have said, "Hey, Ketan, you can stop selling me. I'm sold. Like we're good. I love it." That's a surefire indicator. But high performers kind of know that they're at that point already. Like I can stop hammering the value, you're convinced.

Learn to dig yes for an answer.

That's right. And now I need to shift gears into risk mitigation, right, into dealing with your fear of failure because I know that's the next battlefront, right? That's the next. So it's more of an ebb of one playbook and then a flow into the next playbook rather than a clear point in time where you stop doing one thing, you start doing something else. Now as far as the average time, we were looking primarily win rates, and collected data from a lot of companies selling more transactional solutions, so low dollar value, fast sales cycle, and then larger multimillion dollar, many months sales cycles, if not year-plus sales cycles. What we can tell you is that the main impact would be on win rates, but we did see some impact as well on speed. And I think, Ketan, that comes with the fact that when JOLT -- one of the big things JOLT sellers do is they disqualify aggressively. So it's a little bit like Jerry McGuire movie, right? Like fewer clients, more money or bigger returns. And so your high performers, when you look at the shape of their funnel, if you look at an average performer's pipeline or funnel and you kind of do a graphical representation about opportunity at every stage, it looks like the classic funnel shape, right? A lot of opportunities early, slowly becoming smaller and you have a small -- a very small set that you're working to close. High performer funnel shape looks very different. It looks like a nail tilted on its side. So they've got a lot of opportunities. The same number of opportunities as an average performer, but they disqualify very aggressively and then they work a smaller number of opportunities really stepping on the gas with those opportunities upfront. So I think that disqualification piece, which we've seen in other research, speaks to the fact that, yes, they are more focused, they're more focused on their own time spend, right? They don't chase garbage trucks. They don't waste their time on opportunities they don't think are going to go anywhere. They disqualify aggressively, and then allows them to move those opportunities more quickly through the funnel.

I mean that's such an important point. And then you are also giving more qualitative insights and inputs to the opportunities and the customers you are focused on and actually doing them a better service versus peanut butter spreading your efforts everywhere. Okay. The next question, maybe I'll take a stab at it, and Matt, I'll bring you in for it is, what are some of the ways to build customers' confidence in themselves? I mean that's a fantastic question. And I'll tell you, the way we think through it, and there's always differences and nuances, especially as you look across different regions and cultures, there is a different way of reacting to this. But I'll tell you one thing that works universally is momentum breeds momentum. I think so you want to put quick wins on the board, quick wins in terms of -- and they are not just small purchases, but how are you truly investing in making your customer look like a hero. If you start with that mindset versus I want to sell my stuff to that customer. I think so the dynamic of the conversation changes and the confidence building happens. This is also a great way for you to use technology and to drive AI and knowing everything about your customer so that they understand that you truly get them, having a complete view of your customer, having all the insights around the issues they're facing, having powerful AI like our sales assistant guiding you on what is happening in their industry and how they understand more, using predictive analytics to understand what the future utilization of certain products and technologies might be. And bringing it all together with this high level of complete awareness also builds a lot of confidence. But Matt, I want to bring you in and see if you have some thoughts on that.

Yes. I think your -- the question itself is really well stated. It is a lot about building the customers' confidence in themselves. I think that I'm going to -- I'll use a metaphor here, and I apologize, or analogy. I've mentioned this before. I play golf, not particularly well. But I do look at the way I learned how to play golf, which I went out and I got a set of clubs from a garage sale and I went out and tried to play a course, and I lost a lot of golf balls, and it was very frustrating, and it was for a really long time. But I was trying to play the full course. The way they teach golf now is the same way they teach languages is they break it down into just manageable difficulty, bite-sized steps that become a series of things you can build upon. Its Ketan's point about the quick wins, become the bigger wins, become the transformational wins, but we don't start trying to go for the huge transformational project, if you will, huge transformational win. We start small. So in golf, it's -- I'm going to learn to chip and put, and I'm going to play the course from a few yards off the green. Then I'm going to back up a little bit. Once I've mastered that, I'm going to add some more clubs to that. Then I'm going to go all the way back to the tee box to play the full course. Again, no different from trying -- the difference between learning languages by memorizing vocabulary, learning all the verb conjugation versus teach somebody how to order in a restaurant or how to ask for directions. Get them to be just manageable difficulties, get the quick wins. And I think great salespeople really understand that. They -- the old adage of underpromise and overdeliver really does ring true. If you look at what average salespeople do, they are very like, look, if your customer comes to you and they say, boy, Ketan, I saw this case study at Dreamforce, or I saw this case on the website, it's amazing what this company was able to accomplish with your technology. Like we want that, too. Average -- the high -- average performer say, "Well, that's exciting to you. I'm not going to talk you out of it, by all means." Your high performer is always likely to temper expectations. They know that, that's absolutely possible that otherwise wouldn't be a case study. We'd talk about it with our customers. We stand by it. It's absolutely possible. Now I want to set you up for quick wins because if you come out of the gates expecting this massive transformational return, you might be putting undue pressure on yourself. And even more importantly, that is a recipe for a customer whose hand hesitates over the contract in the 11th hour. It starts to wring their hands about my name is on this contract. And I promise outsized returns. Much better to -- we talk about land and expand, much better to do the crawl, walk, run, right? How do we path our customers to victory and instill that confidence. I think a lot of that confidence, Ketan, you hit the nail on the head, it comes from those quick wins and those bite-sized wins that then become the bigger ones that we build upon with the customer.

That's awesome. That's awesome. Questions keep coming in. Let's do at least one more. And Matt, maybe you can start off, and then I'll bring it home is -- but the question is, it's a simple question but I -- it's a great question, is how can we predict the customer decisions related to purchasing our product?

Yes. So I know you're -- I think you're the expert here, but I will share my point of view on this one.

Yes, please.

So before I mentioned judging the indecision and I think I spoke about it from a salesperson still perspective. But I think the reality is, it is unfair for us to ask our salespeople to do that on their own. And this is where AI and data and CRM becomes such a powerful ally and supporter of the salesperson in that effort. So what we know from companies who really embrace this and they said, look, I'm going to teach my salespeople to do the pings and echoes thing, to use their active listening, the skills they need to have. But what I'm also going to do is use AI and data and CRM as a -- it's almost like Jarvis to the salesperson is Iron Man, right? It's this supercomputer, this powerful suit of armor that's going to warn them about what's going on and interpret data that just people don't have the capacity to interpret and to consume, and they can't draw those -- the pattern recognition out of it. So I'll give you some tactical examples. Some companies we've been talking to are using Salesforce and they're saying, "Look, what we are doing is we are trying to pattern recognize about what are the markers of a future no decision loss? And how do we pick up on these things early when there's still time for the salesperson to do something about it and to get this deal on a better path. So these might be things -- some of the things they found, obviously, when deals are past their due date. So we know our average sales cycle is 3 months. This deal is out like 4.5 months. It's starting to age out, right? That's kind of an obvious one. But they also found some pretty interesting things, leveraging AI, data and CRM to do some pretty sophisticated analysis. And they learned that when the deal is resized in terms of projected deal value multiple times, that is a marker of future indecision. Then this customer also use unstructured data and they started to look at the things customers were saying in conversations. And customers, again, they don't say I'm indecisive or I'm worried about getting fired, but they display emotions like confusion and frustration and skepticism and hesitation that we can study, and those things become indicators of a future no decision loss or here's the last one, this company also found that when you look at an increasing lag in customer communication, so when you go from communicating with your customer on multiple times per week with in-depth e-mails or Slack messages or what have you to more sporadic, shorter communications, that was also a predictor of a no decision loss. So they're stuff that is an individual salesperson could never consume all that data and figure out on their own, and so they have this now copilot there to tell the salesperson, this deal is starting to show markers that make it look like that -- those other deals that end up getting marked as closed loss no decision, here are some things you might want to do about it now to get that customer on a better path.

You're absolutely right. And the thing you mentioned there, I think, so I want to make it a point to this, like there is a ton of data trying to tell you the story. You need to help unlock that story. The problem is we, as humans, are deciphering intelligence out of millions of data points or sometimes billions of data points in sub second speeds, our brains are not wired for that. That's the job of machine learning, computers and all of that. Our brains are wired better for intuition, judgment, emotion and stuff like that. And that's why I think -- so it might be fun for me to show you something, Matt. I don't know if I've shown this to you but it might be great for the team to see the question about how do we predict where the customer is going to be. And you talked through so many patterns and signals that can actually give you that insight. So in Sales Cloud, you've got this amazing forecasting and pipe inspection used by millions of people. But what you also get is an opportunity level score. Now all the things Matt talked about, imagine if somebody did that on the fly for you for every opportunity, and all you had to do was click a button and show you where this opportunity might land. Most of machine learning is probabilistic. It's not deterministic. But this is an example of how -- see AI is not scary. It's like right here in the flow of work. You're working on an opportunity. How does that -- where does Einstein think this might land? And you can scale it up to not just look at the opportunity, you're looking at your beautiful forecast. You can click on each opportunity and also help Einstein predict where -- not just whether it will close or not, what range it might close in. I think so this starts bringing home the point Matt mentioned is there's tons of signals and data available out there. How do you bring data AI in the heart of your CRM to do the couple of things I showed you in a second. But Matt, this conversation is so exciting. I just realized we are almost at time. And I first want to apologize for people whose questions we couldn't get to. But at the same time, I want to kind of bring this home to give you some resources to go forward. Go check out the state of the sales report. It's pretty simple. The URL is out there, sfdc.co/SoS23, more than 8,500 sales professionals worldwide were surveyed around where this all is going. So I would love for you to check that. But I also want to invite you to go log in to salesblazer.com. Because remember, today's webinar was not just about the tech, it was about sales excellence. And salesblazer.com is your place to achieve sales excellence. It's the largest community of sales professionals worldwide. I invite you to go out there. And with that, I just want to kind of bring it home and say thank you. Let me check in with our organizers if we have completed all those things. But Matt, you've been a wonderful, wonderful author. I have learned so much from you today. I'm sure our audience has, too. Thank you so much, everybody, for joining us. I know there were some questions around recording and all that. Maybe the team can chime in and let everybody know. Jillian, if you can tell folks what's the logistics around the recording and all that.

Yes, this session is being recorded. It will be e-mailed out to everyone tomorrow, and you can also access it at the same URL that you've used today. Thinks, everyone.

Thanks you very much.

Thanks, everyone.

Thank you very much, everybody. Have a fantastic week. And Matt, let's do this again.

Let's do it again. Thank you, Ketan.

All right. Bye.

Bye.