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

Yes. I think you're so right there, Craig. And it's really at the end of the day, creating a better customer experience for that buyer. And from a metrics tracking perspective, an interesting way I've heard it described is really increasing that velocity from marketing-qualified leads to sales-qualified leads, right? So if you're tracking metrics, that's a good one to track. Well, let's keep going, Craig and Kristyn. I just wanted to do a quick preview here -- or summary rather, of what we just reviewed with Kristyn's wonderful demo. And as you can see, we -- Buyer Assistant is GA now and is available in the sales engagement SKU, and the ability to take advantage of licenses for Slack and Sales Elevate is also available right now. And coming soon, you saw a little bit of a preview here around Einstein Prospecting Center and that auto prospecting and qualifying capabilities. So let's jump into how to supercharge selling next. And so here's a little bit of the quick tour we're hoping to give you. But again, if it's too fast or you have questions, I encourage you to take a look at our full keynote reporting on Salesforce+ with items like Copilot, GPT, Einstein Conversational Insights, to call a few out in here. I know you all can't wait to see this in action. My favorite, Einstein Conversational Insights, is super, super cool to take a look at. So let's jump into a little bit of an intro that I've got for you. So to set the stage, remember that our #1 stakeholder is you, right? And we're on a mission to reimagine Sales Cloud. We're also thinking about sellers. And we're thinking about how we can improve the experience if you're a seller on this call from the ground up. And so to do that, we've really thought about, well, what are the goals of sellers, what are you trying to do to meet those goals day-to-day. And we've got a little bit of a penchant for making the complex and powerful technology you see every day beautiful and a little bit delightful even. So we want to show and really demonstrate what we mean by that. At the end of the day, a really great experience can help your CRM give your sellers superpowers and remove the need for manual data entry, all those manual tasks and no more relying on gut too for forecasting and making those important predictions. So we want to show how AI can really supercharge that day-to-day for sellers and how that experience is so much more delightful now. So without further ado, Kristyn, if you would mind doing your screen share, we'd love to see a look at that.

All right. Let's take a look. All right. And while this is loading, I'll ask anybody in the chat to feel free and raise your virtual hand if you use LinkedIn. I know this is something that I use all the time. So this is really where we're going to start. For this demo, I'm going to be working in the role as a sales rep, who starts their morning with a cup of coffee and their laptop starting with LinkedIn. Now when I log in, it looks like one of my customers, Lauren, just recently got promoted. So I'm going to go ahead and open Sales Cloud Everywhere to update Lauren's details. Now instead of logging into Salesforce, it gives me instant access to her contact record. Now let's ask Einstein to be my Copilot, one of the new and really exciting innovations that is coming out of Dreamforce. In this case, I want to update my customer's title. And instead of manually updating her details in CRM, I can do this just with a click of a button, thanks to Einstein Copilot, where I can hit Save and her new title of Category Director was automatically saved for me. Now while we're at it, Einstein can help me get caught up on this account with a summary. Einstein can take those actions for me like creating a summary, which saves me time and eliminates any swivel sharing between systems. Now since Lauren has more purchasing authority, one of our opportunities may become a larger deal. So updating opportunities in this account is easy, right from the workspace. I can ask to show me my open opportunities in the workspace, and I'm able to be taken there by Einstein Copilot directly. Now my Einstein Copilot follows me into the workspace and gives me this really seamless experience. Here, I can view and I can update information quickly outside of CRM. I'm going to go ahead and increase the opportunity amount here from 250 over to 1,500. Now once that's updated, let's see how we can also bring our CRM right where we're already working and Outlook for many events. Now when I open up my inbox, on the right-hand side of my screen here, I can see some key details that are coming in from Salesforce. When it comes to this e-mail, I can see the folks that are associated in Salesforce, which accounts they are associated to and if they're tied to any key opportunities. Now in this case, we want to keep that contact really tight with our customer, Lauren, to make sure we're closing this opportunity as quickly as possible. So let's go ahead and send a new e-mail to our customer, Lauren. Now I no longer need to stare at this blank screen and think about what I want to type out. Instead, Einstein can write my draft for me. I can go ahead and I can select from one of the predefined prompts, which is going to help me have a starting place to go from and pull in key CRM data, making this a usable relevant e-mail for my customer, not just any e-mail that's going to be dis weighted and not something she is interested in. Now I can look over my e-mail and make any changes that I see fit. But in this case, this looks great. So let's go ahead and insert this into the e-mail. And with just a click, it is ready to send. And this is really game-changing for me as a seller because it quickly generated an e-mail that was personalized to my style and not only to my style, it's personalized to the customer. It's specific to what they want to see. So with Einstein, I'm able to leverage AI plus data plus CRM on the go. So let's send this off. But you might be thinking, well, what about Sales Cloud? I spend a lot of my time in Sales Cloud. So let's look at the brand's new seller home that was talked about during Dreamforce and introduced. Here, you can see that we have taken extra care to make those details easier to find than ever before, things like My Closed Deals, My Planned Accounts, Which Relationships Have Grown. Now I do notice that a sales program has been deployed to me to help me close bigger deals. So let's drill into this. Now when I do so, Enablement automatically tracks my progress and provides guidance to me as I work. Plus, as you can see here, Salesblazer content ensures that I'm leveraging industry best practices as I sell. Now speaking of selling, it's time to see if I can close more deals even faster. So when I come in here to My Growing Relationships, I can see my contacts and I want to know which of my contacts are most likely to convert so I can hit my quota. So let's drill directly into Contacts here. Now can you believe that this is my new Contact List view? It's even hard for me to imagine because it's so much more streamlined than I have ever seen before. Now with Contact intelligence, data, insights, actionability, all of these things help transform the way that I work as a seller. And this is incredibly powerful data that's arranged in a way that makes it easier for me to quickly understand the person that I'm going to reach out to. Now let's stick with our example. I want to reach out to the prospect that we've been targeting through the start of this demo, who is Lauren Bailey. Now when I click into her contact, it shows me insights about our past engagements and tells me the best time to reach out and not only that, but her preferred channel. I can even see the activities that I as a seller have logged with her to make sure that I'm healthy in terms of the activities that have been going out. Now let's review our last call so I can send over exactly what she needs and there is no mistakes, so she's getting the right information and I am closing my opportunity faster than ever. Now Geshri, I love that you're excited about Einstein Conversation Insights because I think this is one of the most powerful tools we have as a seller. Here, I can see the transcript of this call. So rather than listening back to this 30-minute conversation, I can view the key insights. But what if I don't want to listen back to that 30-minute call? I can go faster than ever, thanks to Einstein Call Summaries, where with the click of a button, Einstein is able to generate a call summary to give me the customer impressions, the summary and the next steps to move fast and to get the customer exactly what they want. So I'm not spending my time taking notes during the meeting. I can focus on deep listening to the customer and get follow-ups out faster than ever. Geshri, I'll hand it back over to you.

Amazing. Thank you, Kristyn. And I feel like Einstein Conversation Insight is one of those things that's just going to revolutionize the way we work. If you're guilty as charged for listening to recorded meetings on 2x speed or trying to read through a long transcript with all the uhs and uhms, this is going to just completely change the way we work. I'm so so excited about this. All right. Let's just do a quick review here of what we saw. As you can see, Sales Cloud connections with Outlook and Google are all available now as a sales GPT and sales programs and Einstein Conversational Insights, my personal favorite. Coming soon, we'll give you access to Einstein Copilot for sales and that new Seller Home that you saw in Kristyn's demo. Now Craig, as a Director of Sales, you are on the front line of this AI supercharged seller experience, my friend. What aspects of AI are you most excited about to bring to your sellers on the team?

Well, Kristyn hit the nail in the head that -- when the first thing you do is jump in LinkedIn to in the morning. That's something that we -- I do every day. And being able to see how seamlessly going from LinkedIn into our single source of truth that we talk about all the time and have that seamless experience is huge that you're not going back and forth through different platforms. And that's obviously a theme with everything that we're talking about today is being able to reduce our other systems, other tech stack and really continue to leverage this wonderful system Salesforce that we have. A couple of things that really stood out were -- that was one of them, but another one is how the prompts help you so much. In anything, getting started is often the biggest challenge. Once you get started doing something, you're usually pretty good. The prompts get you started immediately and give you a launching point where you click the button, and you've got a prompt and the e-mail is ready to go. And you obviously can customize and change it to whatever you want. But that prompt is useful. It gets you started immediately. So there's less, okay, where do I want to start this. That takes time. That takes brainpower, which we only have so much of it in a day sometimes. But to me, the prompts are huge because it just gets you going. It takes action immediately. And it gets the brain -- gets you thinking immediately of how I can change this, I can change that. But to me, the prompts are huge. And the other part that I'm really excited about is how we can use this to more fine-tune prospecting. Prospecting is never an exact science. So being able to have all of the data and being able to use AI to better forecast is something I'm very excited about as well for our team.

Out of that. So getting over that writer's block of, ugh, gosh, how do I get started with writing this e-mail and then -- and just better forecasting, right -- prospecting, sorry, excuse me, better prospecting the heart of all good sales. Well, thank you, Craig, for sharing those insights. We'll keep going, and we have one last chapter to cover here to recap for you all. And this was all about how to turn SalesOps into AIOps. And this is for many of our customers or many of our attendees at Dreamforce, many of you are coming from that world of sales operations. And what you're probably seeing is AI is really going to play a big part in many of those day-to-day business workflows. Today, we are going to do our best to try to cover these 3 big areas here and really complete that walk of the fan. And as -- just to give you a little bit of context here as we get started, I want to set that stage for what sales operations looks like today. And so if you're in the audience, this is preaching to the choir. But you all should know, sales operations is about doing it all. You're driving strategy and planning. On top of that, you're probably fielding hundreds of questions every single day from different stakeholders across the business, questions like how healthy is the business, where are there opportunities to grow, where are there blockers or obstacles; and in a universe of possibilities, what's the most efficient way to hit our sales goals given the teams we have, given the territories we've carved out. And so this is the life of SalesOps. And so when you've got all these questions coming your way, what we would love to offer up is that the best part is that your CRM system can have those answers in place. But let me pose one more question to the mix here: how do you discover answers to all of these questions fast? And we now live in a world where you don't have to rely on a team of data scientists. You just need our good friend Einstein here working on your behalf. Because when you unlock that story behind your data, you're able to get from all these questions insights to get those insights to action even faster than ever before. So that's what we're going to take a look at as we dive into the world of SalesOps. Kristyn, I -- no rest for the weary here, Kristyn. I'm going to hand the mic back over to you and would love for you to give us a little bit of that tour.

Of course, I'm happy to. And I'm really excited about the announcements that we unveiled at Dreamforce, specifically for folks in SalesOps because it's one of the most common conversations that I have with my customers is how can I stop swivel sharing working in all these different systems, and I really want to work in one system and be able to share those insights directly with sellers in that single system where everyone's already working. So let's jump into the demo to see how we can empower SalesOps with AI. Now here in a single view, I have access to all of the data I need to be on track and to get complete visibility into my forecast and into my pipeline, all within that one single screen. Now I can drill into my team in order to get more granular insights and to see specifics into my territory. I can custom slice and dice my forecast to match my sales process and my revenue model as well. So I can forecast in this case with my new business, but I can also forecast by renewals. This has been huge for the customers that I've talked to is being able to forecast not just by new business but by renewals as well. I can forecast from external sources as well, such as my order data or my consumption revenue, again, being able to segment down in this case to see my different territories and where they are falling on their forecast and their quota attainment as well. But what if we want a little bit more of a visual view of my forecast? Well, we have that too. We can see that when we come into charts. Here, I can see visual indicators that tell me things like my key metrics and whether they're moving up or down. So in this case, we see those visual indicators telling me that my commit forecast has gone up 8.3% and that my gap to quota has gone up 2.3%, and we see the time frame in which these are defined in the last 7 days. Now this is so critical because it leaves very little room for ambiguity. It's very direct in terms of the data that we're getting, the time frame where it's mentioned, and we can always have her over to see more information as well. So here, I can see the time frame that's being measured, and I can see the forecast that's trending compared to historicals and easily track my key forecast and my pipeline metrics. Now if I come over here back into my grid view, I can drill down into a specific opportunity, which I'll see as I drill past my forecast into those individualized opportunities. Now in this case, I want to focus on Formula One Media. In this case, it's going to drill up and go into the deal insights that is pulled into this by Einstein Deal Insights. Now this is not just showing sales data. It's also talking about service information, marketing information, highlighting relevant details to me as a seller that I need to know, such as are there open service cases or has a customer or a prospect connected with marketing material. Now what if I want to take out all of these signals and insights and I want to play with my forecast and think a little bit more about what it could look like now that I know what it looks like, where my opportunities are and where I'm tracking? So let's do that. Let's see what it could look like, which we will do in our calculator. Now this calculator is so exciting because what we're about to do used to take hours or even days. Now this is where I can think about all the signals and insights, and I have a built-in scratch pad to model the forecast scenarios. So let's do it. For example, if I push out some deals, which we'll see over on the left-hand side, and if I pull in some deals, which I'll have over on the right-hand side, I can see this waterfall chart that is updating automatically above me and showing what the forecast would look like hypothetically. Now again, I'll repeat this because I think it's so important that normally this exercise would require importing data into a spreadsheet and manually conducting the analysis in hours or even days. I promise you, I've talked to customers who have told me this, that it has taken them days or hours in the past. This is faster than we have ever seen it before. Now with tools like this, all the data and the insights that you've just seen, you're ready to forecast with confidence, whether either data that you're working with today or in this commitment calculator. When you're thinking towards the future, you're able to forecast with confidence. Geshri, for the last time, I will hand it back over to you.

Amazing, Kristyn. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was truly inspiring, especially this idea of forecasting no longer on gut or feeling or manually putting this together over days. You can really get the seamless information all in one place. So very, very cool to see. Well, let's do a quick recap again of what you saw. You saw Kristyn really jump into this chapter around AI-driven sales operations and really also thinking about simplifying the tech stack. Craig, as you think about your team and simplifying the tech stack across the fin, how do you think about that?

So in watching what Kristyn was just showing, which is fantastic. It's taking a lot of the gut feel out of forecasting is huge. And in terms of reducing all that data in the single view that she was showing, that's able to be shared across our company, our executive team, our management team, we all have access to that which helps us cut down on having spreadsheets or anything else outside of Salesforce. So it gives us real-time visibility that we can all share and see in real time. It also does it in a way where we're all speaking the same language, we're all looking at the same things, we're all having common vocabulary around what deals are. And that increases all of our communication internally. Our customer service team can see forecasting so they can be prepared to see what's coming. So it helps that communication as well. It's not -- it's the forecasting for revenue as it work, but it's also forecasting for what resources are needed internally for what's coming up. So it helps across various department -- all of our departments by being able to have this all in one source of truth as opposed to different disparate systems.

It's so interesting. So you're really drawing this parallel between simplifying the tech stack, but also gaining a lot of efficiencies with all that intra-departmental collaboration that needs to happen every day at any company.

Yes, so the days are going reckon the hallway to my SalesOps manager and tell them what's coming in next week that I need him to deal with. With our remote workforce and everything, things like that are huge. With people in different time zones and all over the world really, it just allows that kind of asynchronous work to happen where people can have access to the data, access to what's happening and be able to work on it with the most relevant up-to-date data that we have.

Yes. That's so true. I love that analogy of yelling down the hall. No longer possible, but maybe we can -- we don't need that anymore either. I love that, Craig. Thank you. Well, we are rounding the corner here as we come to the end of our webinar. A few more bits of information for you all. But I want to encourage you all if you have questions, go ahead and put them in the Q&A. But let's keep going here because 1 of the other big announcements we made at Dreamforce was on top of all of these amazing capability innovations, product innovations, we've also committed to making it easier for our customers to buy, try and grow their business with our offerings. And so we started this journey way back when we relaunched Unlimited Edition last year. And now with our newly announced UE Plus offering, customers can get the best of Salesforce for sales in that single package so you can simplify your tech stack and get greater value today. So just to go a little bit more into Unlimited Plus, you get all the goodness of Sales Cloud Unlimited Edition, as you can see here, plus that sales planning, plus the maps, enablement, revenue intelligence, Slack and even more Einstein and Data Cloud, some of which we didn't even have time to cover today so that customers have everything needed to drive selling success and accelerating that revenue growth right now. So we will continue to go. Now as we go into the end, I do want to leave you all with some last steps here. First of all, don't forget you can go deeper on all of the capabilities you saw today on Salesforce+. And my apologies for the weird formatting. I think our platform is not loving the fonts we used here, but definitely go deeper on Salesforce+ with our recordings from both the Salesforce Sales Cloud keynote as well as our individual sessions. I go deeper into AI and other topics. You can learn more about Einstein 1, which is where we started our webinar today as well on our website, salesforce.com. And you can join the Salesblazer community, and we would love for you to join us and join Craig. You heard me talk about the Salesblazer community. It's the largest and most successful group of sellers that are looking to learn, connect and grow. Craig, you're wearing a Salesblazer hoodie. I would love for us to round out our webinar here. What's your pitch on joining the Salesblazer community? What are you [indiscernible]?

My first thought would be if you're a seller and you're thinking about joining the Salesblazer community, stop thinking about it, just do it. Just do it, you won't be disappointed. This -- joining the community has -- it's growing so fast. The number of people that are joining is really just kind of amazing. It's -- the word community is -- the community word by itself doesn't need anything. It's what the community does that gives it something. And the people that are in the community, the people that have founded it, that are starting it, just the level of excellence and support that everybody is giving each other is just incredible. And we're -- as a small ISV partner, I've got the support of my team all the time, but being part of the Salesblazer community gives me support like on a much greater level. You really do feel part of the community. There's -- you can ask questions. Everybody is super supportive. There's people that are joining there that aren't even really doing anything with Salesforce yet, but they found it. And they're wanting to learn. Hey, should I get into this industry? Should I get into this ecosystem? All the way to people that have been in sales like myself for a long time. So there's no shortage of information. There's no shortage of support. There's more information and support than you'll probably ever need by joining the community. So I would just say, if anybody is listening and they haven't joined the Salesblazer community yet, do yourself a favor, stop thinking about it, just do it. And you get a cool hoodie too. But it's amazing. It just really does make you feel like you -- even though we're a Salesforce partner, it really makes you feel like you're part of the entire Salesforce community, and the support there is just incredible.

I can definitely hear the passion in your voice, Craig. Thank you so much for sharing that. And it's so easy to join everyone. You just go to salesblazer.com, start reading some of that amazing content and then sign up. It's extremely, extremely easy to do. Well, we've covered our Q&A in the chat. If we didn't get to your Q&A, you can sneak it in, and we'll try to get to those after our webinar today. Again, check out more on salesforce.com or Salesforce+ as well. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining, and I wish you all a wonderful end to your weeks. Thank you. And thank you again, Kristyn and Craig.

Thank you so much.