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

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's session Start Simple, Grow Fast with Sales Cloud, and thank you all for joining us. Before we begin, I'd like to take a minute to acknowledge the traditional owners. Maddy and I who are your presenters are coming to you from Gadigal land, part of the Eora Nation. Land that is and always was Aboriginal land. I want to take a minute to recognize the continuing connection our indigenous people have to the land, water and culture and recognize and pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging. My name is Cat Prestipino and I am a Marketing Director here at Salesforce working with the small business team. And I'm joined by Maddison Silk, who is an Account Executive here, again, working with our small and medium businesses. Before we kick off today, just a few things about your screen to help enhance your webinar experience. We will be recording today's webinar, and it will be sent to the e-mail that you registered with after we wrap up today. The slides will automatically advance, but you can control what you're looking at on your screen and make things bigger and larger. So Maddy is going to be doing a pretty amazing demo for us. And if you want to make that bigger whole screen so that you can see it, please go right ahead. We've also got some assets for you to download that will relate to things that we talk about in the webinar and help enhance your experience. And one final piece of housekeeping, I do want to give you a quick reminder that Salesforce is a publicly listed company. We will be talking about some future-looking things, but please make all purchasing and buying decisions based on what is currently available in the market. Oh my goodness, I almost forgot the most important thing. There is a Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. So if you do have questions throughout either my presentation at the start or Maddy's demo, please feel free to drop them in there at any time. And at the end, we do have some time for Q&A, and we'll answer all your questions there. So thank you for joining us. So I've spent a lot of my career working with start-ups and scale-ups, but really alongside the sales organizations because marketing and sales always go hand-in-hand. So I understand really well the pressure that sales leaders are under to keep an eye on what is happening at the top of the funnel, but then also the bottom of the funnel. And I know that more than ever, sales leaders are being asked to do more with less. So there are a number of levers at your disposal to help you hit those numbers, both at the top, so increasing lead volume, boosting your conversion rates, increasing forecast accuracy and then to prove efficiency at the bottom. So just stop sales rep wasting time by manually entering data to help them with their route time so that they are more effective quicker and to also stop the multi-screening. So one of the things that we talk about used to be swivel chair, but I definitely think it's clicking into multiple screens, having multiple things that they're dealing with. And all of these things tend to have the one solution, which is creating a CRM, or customer relationship system, to act as a single source of truth for your customer data and to help you automate some of those really manual processes. But we all know that working in small business, it ends up looking a little bit like this with your tech stack because we start by going, we need to solve a problem here. We're going to buy a point solution for that. We need to solve a problem over here. We're going to buy a point solution for that. And what ends up happening is you end up with a tech stack that looks a little bit like this slide, something that's all over the place with increased costs, data silos and disjointed processes on what everyone is doing. We did a survey, a State of Sales survey, in December 2022. And we found that 94% of sales orgs globally plan to consolidate their vendor so they can simplify this tech stack for their teams. But what many people don't realize about Salesforce is that we've spent 20 years actually acquiring, building and integrating a number of those solutions to build sales cloud that helps you create a single tech stack and a single lever to help you impact your sales org. With Salesforce sales cloud platform, AI and automation and real-time data in CRM, they're all combined together to help you achieve efficient and sustainable growth. And what's even better is that we can meet you where you are today, whether you have 5 employees or 5,000 and help you build along that journey because we can grow with you. We're able to help you with engagement tools, productivity and enablement tools to your reps. And one of the biggest things now, generative AI and analytics capabilities to help you really personalize and automate all of those things that are happening in your business. So let's see what this actually looks like. This is core Sales Cloud. And this is where you establish that single source of truth for your customer and account data. You get a complete view of the account details on the slide there, and this is the account detailed page. It highlights all the relevant information that you need to know about the account, the contacts, the opportunities and any relevant service and marketing issues that are happening. And on the right-hand side, you can see all the related activity, Chat Post, intelligent highlights, and this is super meaningful because you've got everything about one account on one page. Now with the fundamentals in place, we can look at how we streamline processes and save rep's time. And this is where automation like Sales Engagement comes into play. Sales Engagement helps your reps connect with customers faster, and it's a pretty powerful tool. It will give you tools and guidance to help your team speed up selling. They can reach out to buyers more effectively, look better in meetings, and they can make call outs that they do every single day. You can guide your team with best practices and set up sales cadences. So the reps know when and where to engage. And these can be tailored to your team or you can use something out of the box like Salesforce started to help you do that. Reps can even build quick cadences themselves and on the fly giving them that much needed best of automation. And because you have this great data foundation in place, you can actually start to look for extractable insights. And here is what we look at a pipeline inspection. So this is a great tool to give you everything you need about your pipeline in one single view. You can do your pipe at a macro level or start to dig into the individual performance. Teams can quickly see the latest changes in opportunities, give relevant account updates and create an action plan to really help them hit their targets. So your team always knows where to focus to drive more revenue for your business. And finally, I said I'd talk about it, generative AI. So AI to help make us all more productive. And we announced a whole heap of new AI-led tools and products that we reinforced earlier this month. And this is just one of them. I signed Conversation Insights to help you scale your manager coaching and help every rep perform at their best. What this does is it automatically logs calls, transcribes them and highlight action items. Not only does this help your reps follow up faster, but it allows managers to hone in on key moment and provide coaching to those that need it. You can also identify core moments that went well and scale them into best practice from top performers to help the team overall overcome injections, displace the competition and close more deals. Generative AI really is in everything these days. But in order to get it to work, you really need the right foundation for your data. So doing things like creating that single source of truth of customer information, collecting rich call data and will help you advance your generative AI use cases when you're ready. Here's another example from Einstein GPT, generating a personalized e-mail. It's as simple as opening the side bar and asking for that information about a particular prospect, understanding who's the best contact to reach out to and then have Einstein generate the great sales e-mail in a matter of seconds. Now enough about the slides. I know I look beautiful, but we don't want to hear from me. What we want to actually hear from is Maddy Silk, who's going to talk us through an incredible demo of how these capabilities actually look like in the day of the sales rep.

Hi, everyone. My name is Maddison Silk, and I am a small business expert here at Salesforce. Today, I'll be showing you how you can start simple and grow fast with Sales Cloud. I'll be running you through my entire day playing the role of an account executive at a small business. I'd like to start my day inside the Salesforce homepage. This has got all of the metrics that I care about, and it's what I call my book of business. We've got my closed business for the quarter, up on the left-hand side, the pipeline that I've got currently, my activities or how many calls and meetings I've done as well as how I'm comparing to the rest of my team. As you can see, I've done quite well in terms of business, but my pipeline, the top of funnel is looking a little bit light on. So a lot of the things that we'll be going through today is a way that I can really beef that up, going through my leads, I've got a prospecting blitz for an hour and scheduling time with a couple of prospects as well. So I'll show you how I'm going to do that today using Salesforce, but I've also got a forecast call this afternoon with my manager that I need to prepare for. First things first, I'm going to check if I've gotten any e-mails overnight from any of my prospects. So everything I show you here today in Gmail can also be done in Outlook. And as you can see on the right-hand side, we have Salesforce connected right into our Gmail. That looks like Carolyn has responded to my e-mail, and has let me know that she's free at a couple of times. On the right-hand side, I can see her profile and I'd be obviously any other information that we have in Salesforce about Carolyn, if we did. Now I'm going to reply to Carolyn, I unfortunately cannot do either of those times. But I'm going to show you an easy way that we can book in a time with her. Now on the right-hand side, we've got things to log this e-mail and send. I'm going to click into the e-mail templates to save a bit of time here. I'm going to go down and click on the set meeting template and then insert that into the e-mail. Great. So now that we've got that inserted, it saved us a bunch of time. Now we just need to insert our availabilities. Now there's a number of ways that we can do availabilities here at Salesforce. So we've got either a scheduling link, preferred times that we want to send or next through available times. Now the good thing about this is that it's dynamic. So if any of those times get taken up in the meantime, they will not be shown. I'm going to click on a scheduling link so that Carolyn can go into my calendar and pick a time that works for her. We can also do things like e-mail tracking as well as send this e-mail later if it was maybe not a good time. But I'm going to send that off now to Carolyn and hope that she books in a meeting shortly. Once that's sent, it's going to prompt me to log that e-mail against Carolyn's record in Salesforce, so I'm just going to click log now. What you just saw was CRM data and automation brought into Gmail or Outlook making me more effective. With Sales Cloud everywhere, we're looking at bringing that functionality into other platforms, such as LinkedIn. Here I am in LinkedIn and Timothy is actually a prospective of mine. So what I'm going to do is reach out to him. But the cool thing is that I don't have to leave LinkedIn to do this even if I want to send him an e-mail. On the right-hand side, I have my Salesforce tab, and it's got all of my tasks that are up and coming. And as you can see, we've actually already got a task with Tim, sent to him through an email. So I'm going to click on this little e-mail icon and that's going to bring up an e-mail builder. Now there's already a template here, but what I'm going to do is draft this with Einstein. So I'm going to use AI to draft a really personalized e-mail to Tim using the information not only in Salesforce, but on his LinkedIn as well. So I'm going to introduce myself. And Einstein asking me for a little bit more context around what I think that Tim would be interested in. Now I think that Tim would be a great fit for our installation services. So I'm going to put that in here. Once that's entered, Einstein is going to produce an e-mail that is completely customized for Tim using generative AI. As always, with AI, it is important to keep the human in the loop, so there are positions where I can actually put in when I'm available. And there's lots of places that we could touch this up and change it if we want it. I'm going to send that through to Tim and cross my fingers that I get a response because I had sent such an amazing prospecting e-mail to him. So I've spent the morning going through my e-mails. I did a bit of prospecting on LinkedIn, and now I want to go back inside Salesforce to have a look at all of my open leads. There are lots of leads here from an event that we had the other week. And as you can see, they're ranked in what's called a lead score. Catherine is at the top with 92. And this is again how AI is baked into our system. This lead score shows us the leads that are most likely to convert based on a number of different requirements. As you can see here, Catherine has a score of 92 because she is a Vice President, and she also has budget. However, she's coming through a lead source that is not as successful for us typically. We now have the choice. We can work through lead by lead and take action one by one, but it may not be the most efficient way. What I'd rather do is put a number of leads into what we call a cadence that ensures us to take a series of steps up into the point that they convert. Let me show you what a sales cadence is. Here are in our sales cadence builder. And as you can see, there is a cadence that has a call, an e-mail, another call. And these can be made as simple or complicated as you want, and they're super easy to make. So we've got 3 options when you click the plus button. We've got an action, a rule or we can listen out for something. I'm going to show you what it looks like if we listen out, click on that. We can listen to either an e-mail open, an e-mail link click or even an e-mail reply. And we can decide how many days we actually want to wait to listen to that. Now when you do that, it actually splits up your cadence. So we've got -- if they do click the link, we're going to give them a call. And if they don't, we can add something different. I'm going to add an e-mail. It's going to be a manual e-mail. These can also be automated as well and click on here and pick my template. So I'm going to pick that one. And the really cool thing here is that we can add a template variant. So this means that over time, we can A/B test and see which templates work better than others. So our cadence is always improving over time. Now if I save that down the bottom, quick save. You can see that there's 2 different paths that our prospects go on, depending on whether they click that link or not. There are other rules that we can bake into these journeys. So exit on reply or if people are on holidays, we can take them out automatically. So we're not keeping people in the cadence that can't actually respond to us. So now that you know a little bit about what a sales cadence is, I'm going to go back into my leads. Now I want to add some of my hot leads into this cadence. I can do this either one by one or in bulk. But I really want to add Catherine as she's my new prospects. So I'm going to go here and click add to cadence. So I can assign this to either myself or one of my teammates. So I have a BDR that I work really closely with, and I could assign it to them if this was a call I wanted them to do. But for now, I'm going to assign it to myself so that we can see what that looks like to work through the queue. Catherine has now been added to that cadence. So let's start to work through these leads in what we call a work queue. Here is my work queue and you can see once I refresh, Catherine will pop up on the left-hand side. And the first step in that cadence is a call. This page is super powerful because it's got everything that we need to know about Catherine. We've got where she came from, so what company she's from. We've got the campaign history, so what she's looked at. And we've also got every interaction we've ever had with her. So if there's been a call from somebody else, we will know. And we've also got this really cool feature called Guidance for success. So it's excellent for onboarding, making sure that people know what the next step is in the process. I'm going to call Catherine directly out of the platform. So what you're seeing here is my telephony system working within Salesforce. And if you have a look on the right-hand side, my call script has also popped up. So not only can I call Catherine out of the platform, see everything that we need to know about Catherine, I also know exactly what to say on this call as well. So once I end that call, it's going to ask me to pick how the call went. So we connected, it was great. I can add any extra notes that I need to hear and then press save. This means that anybody else who maybe picks up Catherine [ fleet ] off to me, they know exactly what was said and when. In a typical day, this would be part of my prospecting hour, and I will just continue through the leads like that. But today, I need to get ready for my forecast call with my manager. We've made a lot of changes to our forecasting experience recently, and you can see that there's a number of different colors on the screen, indicating whether or not the pipeline is healthy. We've also got another way to visualize data through a chart. So for anybody who's a bit more visual out there, we've got you. This page is really collaborative. I can write notes with my manager. I can change things straight from here. But what I want to show you is how we can use AI to predict what we are forecasting for the month. So if I click on the Einstein Prediction. Einstein predicts I will get $214,000 compared to my $300,000 query. We can see that some of it is going to be from new deals, some of it existing. But Einstein thinks that $42,000 of this is actually going to be pushed out. And you can see down the bottom, the factors as to why he thinks that. The really great thing about this is I can use my intuition, my manager's intuition and also Einstein's intuition so that if there's anything that I need to get on top of, are we made aware of it, and I can change it. Now that we've got a bit of a macro level, I really want to dig into a bit of a micro level and understand opportunity by opportunity, what's coming in this month. In pipeline inspection, I can see the health of my pipeline based on a number of different KPIs. Notice here are visual indicators. So what's dropped in value, what's moved in and out. I can also change the opportunities straight from this view as well. So if I save that, that will update it and will also be that red figure color for moving out. Now Vendor Enterprise is down the bottom is quite a significant deal, and I can see that it's been moved out 28 days ago. This is going to be something that my manager asks me about. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use Einstein to help me understand what has changed. Now if I go into Einstein activity, we can see that objections were raised, next steps are raised and pricing was mentioned in the last video call we had. And maybe this gives us a bit of an idea of what's happened. I'm going to jump into this direct video call to try to get a bit of a deeper understanding of what's happened. We can see here that Einstein is now inside our calls, transcribing the entire thing and pulling out really important insights such as authority was an objection, need was an objection as well as pricing was mentioned in this call. Einstein is also tracking how much I'm talking compared to the customer which is really great for things such as training or even personal development. Now I know this opportunity was moved down due to a number of objections. I can speak to that really clearly in my forecast call with my manager. Today, I've showed you what it would be like being an account executive at a small business using Salesforce. We went through scheduling and time, LinkedIn prospecting, adding our leads to a cadence, going through them and getting ready for my forecast call with my manager. I hope this shows you how you can start simple, but grow fast with the Salesforce. Thank you.

Maddy, thank you for that awesome demo. I really love particularly getting ready for that forecast call because you can really go in deep and understand what is happening with your pipeline. So before we get to the Q&A, I do just want to share our customer case study. I don't know how many of you are familiar with the perfume brand "Who is Elijah" but they're a local small business based here in Australia. And the team experienced really rapid growth in early 2020, but that is increasingly difficult to keep up with managing everything out of spreadsheets. There is also a business that got into it to make an amazing perfume. They weren't really interested in having a huge employee workforce. So they really looked at how technology could help you to do. These are a couple of different options that ultimately decided on Salesforce because we could help them manage both their wholesale and their retail parts of that business from one platform. On the wholesale side of the business, orders now come in via email -- that used to come in via e-mail are now done through their portal. And what that's actually done is give their customers more visibility into what is actually happening with that order. Retail orders come in via Zapier and an IDA connection. And then Salesforce field service helps orchestrate the order inventory management alongside Arcturious who is the implementation partners order management accelerator. So the result of Who is Elijah is there's been a lot more transparency and accuracy in their sales forecasting. It's helping control their inventory better, and it's actually given them happier customers because there are less errors in the warehouse, less administrative errors and it's ended up saving the business about $6,000 per month due to that increased accuracy. We've also helped them scale overseas into New Zealand, the U.S., the U.K. and Europe without having to open overseas offices. So that is how we've worked with one business that was small and helped them really accelerate fast. So if you want to learn more and engage, I definitely recommend checking out our full set of Sales Cloud demos that are available on our website and join our Salesblazer community. There's a lot of people who will be happy to chat with you, who are like-minded sales reps. But now I'm going to invite Maddy to come back in, and we're going to answer some of the questions that we've got. Maddy, how is it going?

Good, how are you?

I'm good. All right.

So our first question is, is it possible to make phone calls and utilize Einstein scripting from a mobile or is only through voice calls?

It's a great question. So Einstein scripting can be used in phone calls as well as video, but it just depends on the -- what you're making the phone calls through. So whatever you're calling system on Salesforce is and how it's integrated. So it really depends, but it is possible, yes.

So it's something that you need to talk about with your implementation partner or Salesforce rep just to check your system is able to be integrated. Awesome. Can you integrate Salesforce with Xero? I know this one comes up a lot. Xero is the champion of small business, what's the answer?

I work with small businesses every day, and I would say 90% of my customers is Xero. You can definitely integrate with Salesforce. It's one of the most common integrations we have. There are a number of different ways. We have our own tool called [indiscernible] that has already a setup that is pretty much plug and play with Xero and Salesforce. So very easy to integrate this and we highly recommend it.

Yes. And Who is Elijah actually did that integration as well to help them with that invoicing. So it's definitely something we've seen small and scaling businesses do. Speaking of scaling though, how easy is it to upgrade using Salesforce? So say you want to start really small, but things start happening. How easy is it for you to keep going?

It's incredibly easy. The way that Salesforce is built is that you -- in the platform, and you're getting the features and functions that enterprises are getting at a small business, scale and price, et cetera. And then from there, you pretty much are just turning on and off features as and when you need them. So essentially, when it gets to a point that you're feeling like you're outgrowing that certain addition, you can talk to a Salesforce account executive. And it's as easy as 1, 2, 3. It will be upgraded the next day, that's what you needed. So super simple, are really easy to do.

Nice. And we're almost out of time. So I've just got 2 more questions here. This one close to my heart. We looked at how sales could set up the cadence. But is there an option to do automated marketing e-mails in Salesforce helping nurture leads that might not be ready to talk to a sales rep yet?

Definitely. We have a number of different marketing tools here at Salesforce that help specifically small businesses, nurture leads before they're ready to talk to a sales rep. Definitely, if you're interested in that, speak to someone at Salesforce, we've got plenty of tools that can help with that.

Definitely one that I love. Right. We've got 2 minutes to go, Maddy. So I'm going to ask you a question you -- like we at Salesforce, we do encourage Champagne. Salesforce is our CRM. So I wanted to ask, what is your favorite dashboard?

It's a great question, Cat. I use dashboards all the time, every day, every forecast call. My favorite dashboard though is a little bit niche. I work with the team of BDR. So often, there are people in my team who are calling my customers and converting leads into my accounts and things like that. So the report I use daily and my favorite one is to look at what leads have been converted into my account. So from a high level, I can see exactly what's happening in my territory, even if I'm not the one actually doing those actions. So that one is my favorite.

All right. Yes, I really love. I've got a dashboard that I've built. We do a lot of top-of-funnel activity here at Salesforce's marketing, and we want to make sure that those leads are going to the right places and that then they're being followed up on and are they actually generating money for the business. So I have a beautiful lead dashboard that I've set up. That tells me what's come in, what's not had activity on it, what has created an opportunity and then what's closed from our marketing activity. So it's a really good one for me to go to see our ROI. Well, that's all we've got time for today. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. Thank you so much, Maddy. That was an awesome demo. And we'll see you at the next Salesforce event. Bye.