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

Hi, everyone, and welcome to our Marketing Cloud release webinar. Now I'd like to start with an acknowledgment of country. So in the spirit of reconciliation, Salesforce acknowledges the traditional owners and ongoing custodians of the lands, waterways and skies across Australia. We pay our respects to the elders past and present and recognize the contributions of all First Nations people to the land on which we live, learn, love and play. Now it would not be a Salesforce presentation without this slide. This is a little slide that is asking you to make all of your personal choices based on what is available on the platform today, not what is coming. Now before we get into things, I want to give you just a quick overview of how the Marketing Cloud releases work. So the releases happen 3 times a year, roughly over the span of 3 weeks for each release. So once each release kicks off, they will start to filter the releases and start to filter into your accounts over 3 weeks, depending on the stack that your instance is on. Now the current release that we're talking about, Winter '24, because U.S., kicked off on October 7. So that means everything that we're discussing today is available already. And I want to do one more slide before we jump into things. I thought this slide would be handy because after our last webinar, we had some feedback saying, "Hey, you didn't really cover that much about Marketing Cloud." It was all Marketing Cloud, the last webinar. It's just come a very long way since its exact target days of just e-mail and journeys. So there are multiple things like developments, acquisition. Marketing Cloud has become a whole suite of solutions that you see on this screen here. So just to give you a quick look around of what's under this Marketing Cloud umbrella. On the left, we've got Engagement. This is what we would formerly know as ExactTarget, so it's like your e-mail, your mobile, ads, journeys. After that, you've got Account Engagement. This is what we know as Pardot. We've got Data Cloud for Marketing in the new. That's gone through a number of name changes, so we definitely don't make it easy on you. We've got Personalization, so that is formerly known as Interaction Studio. And lastly, we have Intelligence. You may know this as Datorama. So Marketing Cloud encompass all of these solutions. So these release webinars cover all the features and the enhancements from all of these solutions under the Marketing Cloud umbrella. So with that out of the way, thank you very much to the person that left that feedback. This slide is for you, and thank you to those who take the time to fill out the survey at the end of the webinar. Always looking for ways to improve, so keep that feedback coming, please. Now if you haven't seen me before and this is your first time on webinar, welcome. I am Linda. I'm a lead account engineer based in Sydney, and I'm also an avid cross-fitter. I love weight lifting, hate cardio. I'm also joined by a couple of teammates. I've got Travis, who is with us. He is, by day, a senior account engineer also based in Sydney, and by night, you can find him clubbing. He loves good music, he loves street dance. I asked him what time he gets to clubs, he said he kind of starts around 8 p.m., which is wild. That is my bedtime. [indiscernible] early, Travis. And lastly, we have Alex. He is a lead account engineer based in our Melbourne office. When I asked Alex about his hobbies, one of them is piloting small aircrafts. That is not something I hear often. Turns out in the Yarra Valley, you can hire planes by the hour, which is nuts. Obviously, you have to be a licensed pilot to do this, which Alex is. So that's a great fun fact. And lastly, behind the scenes, we're joined by Rachel and Imogen. They are ready to take on your questions about any of today's features that we'll be discussing. So thank you to this beautiful team for helping bring together this webinar. As they say, teamwork makes the dream work. So today, we are here to take you through some of the highlights from the October release. And the features that we're going to be talking about, they fit into these 2 buckets that you see here. So on the left, we've got the features that are going to help you understand your data. So this includes Segment Intelligence, which is available in Data Cloud for Marketing, and we've also a new marketplace app for Google Analytics 4 available in Marketing Cloud Intelligence. Now, on the right, we have the features that are going to help you activate your data so that we can make your journeys more personalized. And this is going to cover email content creation, which is the generative AI capabilities that are coming to Marketing Cloud Engagement; we've got the Google Analytics 4 integration into Marketing Cloud Engagement; the sandbox-to-production flow, which is Account Engagement; and we'll be finishing on the real-time customer events stream for Marketing Cloud Personalization into the CRM. Now with that, I'm going to pass it over to Travis. He is going to be talking through our first bucket of innovations, which is those that help you understand your data. So Travis, over to you.

Cool. Thank you, Linda. So let's dive into our Winter '24 release product updates to help you better understand your data, and we'll start off with Data Cloud. So one thing that we commonly hear from our customers is that segmenting customer data can be very difficult. A large part of that is because marketers have more data than ever before to manage, and companies often use multiple tools in the tech stack, creating volumes of data that exist in disparate systems. So imagine that customer data being propagated across channels, campaigns, devices and more. It's extremely complex and it's rarely, if ever, in one place. So this actually makes it hard to segment intelligently because you have to mislodge the data and apply it to each customer or profile, and this is where Data Cloud comes in, right? So Data Cloud provides you with the ability to harmonize all your data, and that includes contact information, interactions, affinity, loyalty data and more into one single location. It keeps all data in one place regardless of whether it's online or off-line, anonymous or known, Salesforce or third-party. And overall, it provides a single source of truth so that you can have a unified customer profile, which is the first critical step to defining audiences to activate in your cross-channel marketing communications. So Data Cloud now simplifies and makes it faster than ever to intelligently optimize your audience segments and gather learnings and performance. With that said, we're pleased to announce the launch of Segment Intelligence for Data Cloud. So with Segment Intelligence, this helps you to link your customer data up with your marketing performance data so that you can then understand how your segments are interacting with your marketing efforts. So this works by taking your -- all your data, so think revenue, first-party as well as [indiscernible] data and harmonizing it so that you can then understand segment performance using out-the-box dashboards. It enables you to see how segments are performing across channels and provides a macro view of your most valuable segments broken down by variables such as campaign, touch point, geography and more. With all that centralized data, this enables marketers to have a more holistic view of the customer without necessarily being bogged down by the time-consuming data management and data reconciliation challenges. It also enables marketers to view how their marketing activities are performing with customers so that they can then optimize channel performance by segment, right, and ultimately have a better visibility of marketing ROI with more impactful and relevant marketing campaigns that are built specifically for their intended audiences. What's also worth noting is that the built-in dashboard and connections also means that marketers can get started right away. So now let's cut this over to Linda, who will take us through a demo of Segment Intelligence in a bit.

Segment Intelligence comes included for any marketers using Data Cloud to segment and activate their data. It's set up by our self-serve installation process, and once you've completed this, the data will start falling into this prebuilt dashboard so you can start analyzing immediately. It's built [indiscernible] analyze segment activation performance across major channels. So this includes the likes of Google Ads, that's Search, Display and Video; Meta ads, which is Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network and Messenger; e-mail from Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud. [Presentation]

So that, my friends, is Segment Intelligence. Again, this is completely prebuilt and is included for all Data Cloud for Marketing customers.

Thank you, Linda. So sticking with the theme of understanding your data, let's now talk about Marketing Cloud Intelligence or MCI for short. As many of you are aware, Google introduced the GA4 app and web properties a while ago, and we get a lot of marketers who are trying to marry that engagement data up with UTM data. We help our customers get that info so they can then ultimately report on it. Getting the info in a place where marketers can report on it with the other data is the biggest challenge because everyone wants all the data consolidated into a single location. So now within Marketing Cloud Intelligence, we're pleased to announce that since October, we've had GA4 support for marketplace apps. What does this mean? This enables you to ingest and make sense of all GA4 data across your e-mail and web campaigns. And how this works beneath the hood is that when you set your streaming up, you will find the GA4 properties under the website dropdown, and these new properties will also be supported across our HR connectors as well as marketplace apps. This is particularly relevant for those using e-mail to web app in the intelligence marketplace. Any apps that have previously used Universal Analytics [indiscernible] websites now support the new GA4 web properties, mentions and other fields for data retrieval. Note that due to the differences between GA4 and UA properties, the new connector will pull similar yet very different datasets into the platform when the GA4 property is correct. Of course, with the deprecation of UA 360 next year, we think it's going to be an absolute game changer for marketers, right? So we want to ensure that our customers are ready for this transition and that they can continue to use the amazing suite of apps in the marketplace. A key thing to note here is that marketers can now join e-mail data up with GA4 data more easily, track end-to-end e-mail to websites. Because this is prebuilt connector, the set up of data streams can be done easily without much configuration and without worrying about breakdowns in that connection, offering a reliable data stream of your GA4 data. So we've updated and we'll actively continue to maintain this connection, and it's especially important, given that the primary purpose of Marketing Cloud Intelligence is to help you understand ROI across all your channels uninterrupted. Now that we've developed a better understanding of what's performing and which customer segments to leverage, let's now delve into the features that will help you activate your data and customer journeys. So how do we put your data to good use? We'll start off by looking at our [ client ] engagements. So this is a good segue as we shift from understanding of data through to activating it. One of the biggest challenges we hear from marketers is that they struggle with not only understanding their GA4 data but also activating it in customer journeys. Marketers want to be able to create journeys or send messages based on how people are interacting with their digital properties, such as website or mobile apps. The lack of a seamless option for loading this information into Marketing Cloud Engagement presents a challenge for marketers looking to build journeys for this. So on that note, thrilled to announce that the GA4 analytics integration for Marketing Cloud Engagement is now available and enables you to activate journeys based on GA4 segments and events. So with the GA4 integration in Engagement, marketers now have access to digital dashboards embedded within engagement reporting so that they can view real-time impact on revenue, average order value, conversion metrics and more. The second is audience activation, which enables marketers to create engagement and reengagement campaigns based on customer interactions leveraging that GA4 data. Let's say, for instance, if you have a customer that viewed a page and proceeded to leave, you can now use audience activation to trigger an abandoned browser journey. In addition, this provides you with cross-channel insights across mobile, web and e-mail. It's worth noting that there are 2 separate offerings with this. There is a free version that will feature the reporting aspect only, and a fully paid version, which includes audience activation and builder. And to recap, the key benefits of this new integration provides, number one, marketers with the ability to set up [ talent ] campaigns that can be triggered from web behavior. So for instance, going back to that prior example, if a customer had recently visited a specific product page, you can then send them on a journey to offer them information relevant to the products that they viewed. This level of intelligence will better support sending highly personalized communications to provide a seamless experience in [ large ] customers all the way through to conversion, so provide better tracking and actionable conversions resulting from campaigns across your digital properties. So with that said, I'll now hand it over to my teammate, Alejandro, Alex, to take you through our latest set of GenAI capabilities and how it can empower marketers to work more efficiently. Over to you, Alex.

Great. Thank you, Travis. So the next challenge that our customers face is that they often ask to do more with less. And this is a recurring problem in the marketer space. They're being asked to cut costs and drive efficiencies, but they're also being asked to scale their work. And no matter how big the team is, no matter if I'm talking to a very small or large team, the story is always the same. So one of the ways that Salesforce is trying to help marketers increase their productivity and scale their work is through content creation, which will allow marketers to use generative AI to help jump start that email drafting process. So this is a part of the suite of generative AI features that we're releasing in Contact Builder in this release, with the goal of helping marketers save time and scale their work. And important to note that this is available in the Enterprise and Corporate editions. So we know that the hardest part of getting -- doing anything or getting started with anything is the part of getting started. And it's a lot easier, for example, to pull a copy that you drafted a few months ago and just make some edits than it is to actually start from scratch. So the point of e-mail content creation is to give you that draft. So you have -- the only thing you have to do is go in, make edits on whatever you need to edit and use generative AI in order to get you to that starting point. So how it works is you go into your e-mail [indiscernible] copy, where you will see an option to select Einstein content creation. From there, you can use the natural language to describe what you're looking for in the prompt. So let's say you want to craft an offer for term life insurance for a specific segment. You just type in the specifics of what you're looking for, and Einstein will generate the copy for you. And according -- that will be according to the audience, the tone and even the offer that you specified. And because Salesforce generative AI is pioneering the human in the loop technology, as a marketer, you can guide that AI model. So you're leaving feedback on what is good and what is not. And it improves overall output over time as well. AI is a tool. It doesn't know if it's good or bad. So always need that human in the loop in order to train the model. As you can see in the screenshot, you can upvote and downvote, so it doesn't know that actually if everything is bad or good. And of course, you can go and make any edits at any time before you send that content. So similarly, we are also releasing subject line creation, which allows marketers to create subject lines using generative AI. And of course, it has a similar principle to content creation. So you type in what you're looking for into the prompt, and then you can upvote, downvote subject lines depending on what you're looking for, and you can also make edits, again, available in Enterprise and Corporate editions. In addition to content creation and subject line creation, at Dreamforce, we also announced our partnership with Typeface to use generative AI to create unique images for your emails. So again, this is the same principle as we saw before. You just type in what you're looking for and the generative AI does the rest. Something important to highlight here is that you do need a Typeface account for this, but this is something that you definitely can leverage and take advantage of. Again, available for Enterprise and Corporate editions. And last but not least, we have brand identity center. The brand identity center allows marketing teams to set the brand's tone of voice, which can be used when you are creating copy with subject line creation or content creation. But this really helps ensure that all the AI outputs are aligned to your brand's unique personality. Brand identity center includes 2 out-of-the-box personalities, and marketing teams can set up to 10 custom brand personalities to help ground the AI and customize output to ensure it's compliant with your brand guidelines. And marketers can adjust the brand personalities in the setup section of the platform. So when marketers use content creation and subject line creation, they will have an option to select the most appropriate brand personality at that point. So just to wrap things up, here are some of the key benefits from the generative AI features that we just discussed. First, it helps teams of all sizes not just save time but also to scale how they work. It is easier for you to actually create these personalized assets that you're using -- if you are using the AI as your starting point. And of course, it has that human in the loop technology. So you can improve the models over time by upvoting or downvoting what is relevant and what is not to you, but you also are overseeing the entire process all the time. You can go in and make edits. And as I mentioned before, the AI tool, it's a tool, and it's only as good as the people using the tool. So even though we just spoke quite a lot around these generative AI features that are available in Marketing Cloud Engagement, I do want to quickly note that these generative AI features that we discussed today will be available in Account Engagement in the upcoming release next February. So from my Account Engagement users in the audience, do not worry that this will be available in the next release. So we just talked about some of these exciting features of this release, and I'm really -- I'm sure that you really want to -- looking forward to see this in action, so I will hand it over to Linda now to -- for a demo. Over to you, Linda.

High-performing subject lines help boost our chances of engagement. And in this release, Einstein is going to help us to do just that. With subject line creator featured here in Content Builder, we can quickly pick between a few options rather than risking writer's block. [Presentation]

Excellent. Thanks, Linda. Let's chat now about Account Engagement. And I know you're going to have some exciting generative AI features come in February, but I just want to talk now what is actually new now. So as we know that -- we know that some of the key challenges for B2B marketers is moving things over from sandbox to production. With the previous release of Summer '23, we saw the ability to move -- now available to move assets between business units, which was fantastic. But that leave us a little bit of gap with these sandboxes, and people are used to building and promoting configurations from sandboxes. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible with Account Engagement sandboxes, which was a little bit of a painful workaround. So any assets built in sandboxes had to previously to be built, again, in production which is, of course, time-consuming and also prone to error if something is missed. So the great news is that Winter '24 release, this release, marketers now can copy assets from sandbox to production used in Salesforce workflow. So once you have installed this flow on your campaign, all you need to do is to select your sandbox environment and your production environment, select your assets and then copy them over. And this supports 8 asset types, including e-mail templates, dynamic content, form handlers, custom redirects, custom fields, landing pages and more. So ultimately, this will give users a more useful account engagement sandbox to perform all asset testings and avoid conflicts and with all that test data when trying to build in production. So it saves time, because you are not having to build assets multiple times and reduces the potential errors when attempting to recreate access in production again. So last but certainly not least, I want to talk a little bit about Marketing Cloud Personalization. So one of the things that we hear from -- one of the most common things that we hear from our marketing [indiscernible] is that the colleagues -- our colleagues in sales and services really want to get more increased visibility into marketing interactions. So if sales and service don't have this visibility, it can lead to a disjoint experience from customer as they interact with different teams. And this is also a missed opportunity. When a service rep is stuck -- is trying to solve an issue with the customer or a sales rep is speaking to the customer to understand what's top of mind of that customer based on the website behavior in their clicks to capitalize on your interests is that -- definitely, that will be a missed opportunity. So as you might know, we already have some great Marketing Cloud Personalization features available in Sales and Service Cloud. For example, customer affinities and Next Best Action, next best products. But now I'm excited to share with you that in this release, we're also launching real-time customer stream -- event stream in Personalization. And this allows teams to pull real-time customer event streams in Sales and Service Cloud. This will appear as a feed in the Sales and Service Cloud on the customer record, and it will allow service and sales agents to drill into how a particular customer is interacting with the web, the e-mail, the apps and more across all customer touch points. And of course, this will allow sales and services teams to have better conversations and ensure that the customers are having a seamless experience across all touch points. No longer you need to worry about customers needing to reexplain themselves when they are passed over to service, for example. So it democratizes this information so that the customer can have a better experience, and it also allows for upsell, cross-sell opportunities since all teams get that visibility into customer interactions. And again, I want to now to hand it over back to Linda, who will show some of these features in actions.

The real-time customer event stream is a new two-way connection between Marketing Cloud Personalization and CRM. It gives sales reps, service agents, marketers, the insights they need to do their jobs better. [Presentation]

Well, thank you for that, past Linda, for those great demos, and thank you, Travis and Alex for all those updates.

We had some great questions come through, so I'm going to take the look at some of them, throw some of them to the speakers. I think I've had my favorite ever question on the webinar come through, and it was from Calvin. And he asks, what happens if we set up a brand identity personality of Yoda? Does this result in words back to front? That is a good question, Calvin, and that, I actually don't have the answer to. There's one way to find out. Log in, set it up, test it out. So again, thank you very much for your questions. There was another one that came in just asking around Account Engagement and getting the generative AI capabilities. I think that was asked before Alex covered it. As he said, don't worry to the Account Engagement users. Generative AI is coming in the February release. So it is just a few short months away. Let's see what else we got coming through. There was one for Segment Intelligence. So Travis, I'll throw this one to you. Someone asked what's the difference between Segment Intelligence and the other analytics solutions that Salesforce has, like Tableau, Marketing Cloud Intelligence. There's a lot going on. Break it down for us.

So I'd say that's a commonly asked question, Linda. So if we first talk about Marketing Cloud Intelligence in comparison to Tableau, so Marketing Cloud Intelligence is geared towards marketing analytics. So it enables marketers to optimize spend through the unification, harmonization of your marketing performance data across the different channels that you have. Whereas if you think about Tableau, on the other hand, Tableau is geared more towards handling other data types. So it makes it more of a business intelligence platform with the data visualization capabilities. Now if we bring Segment Intelligence into the mix, think of this as an in-platform intelligence tool for Data Cloud for Marketing. It sounds like a mouthful. It helps marketers prove and improve the impact of the segments and activations. So it helps to basically introduce that functionality and have it embedded directly within the platform so that customers can then create dashboards within Data Cloud instead of having to create -- need a Tableau or Marketing Cloud Intelligence. So overall, with Segment Intelligence customers are now able to close that loop of segmentation and activation use case without really requiring any additional licenses or stepping out of Data Cloud. So I hope that answers the question.

That is perfect. Thank you very much, Travis. Alex, let me find a question for you. And I think there was one that I spotted around the generative AI capabilities coming to Engagements. And someone that asked, can I just use ChatGPT to generate the content from e-mails? Like what's the difference?

Thanks, No, actually, that's a really good point. I think we mentioned that Account Engagement, first of all, will be available in February on generative AI. And the difference -- the initial difference with Account Engagement is that will include landing pages as part of the content creation, as part of campaigns as well, so -- which is -- that's really exciting. It's no longer only e-mails. So from a Marketing Cloud Engagement, that's also in our road map. So stay tuned because cloud pages will be able to leverage these features as well in the near future. Does answer your question?

I think the question was more around the -- like what's the difference between using the Einstein content creation versus ChatGPT.

Okay. Sorry, I think I was thinking of different -- so that's -- actually, that's something really good to cover and we probably haven't covered here, but Salesforce has a unique approach to Einstein, so the way we leverage generative AI. So when you use ChatGPT, basically, you're really open on your data, right, in terms of where you pull it from, from a security perspective. At Salesforce, we have an Einstein Trust Layer, and we saw some brand identity insights as well. And this gives security in terms of when you do -- when you use your privacy controls from the end-user perspective. So there's a sequence, and it's a quite interesting approach that I recommend everyone to go to the Salesforce website of how we handle use cases. But there's a lot of gateways and retrievable mechanisms to enable trusted and open generative AI. So basically, your first-party data is always secure and is not copied anywhere. So quite different. I mean we're using your first-party data in combination with multiple services in terms of generative AI, but none of your data leaves a secure trusted layer within Salesforce, which is quite important, obviously, being trust, our #1 value in Salesforce. Hopefully that answers the question. Sorry, I was following up on Account Engagement previously as well.

All good. Thank you very much, Alex. That does make a lot of sense. It is that trust layer, making sure that your data is secure, your information is secure. And also just going back to that brand entity center as well, just grounding it in your first-party data and make sure that you've got that tone right with the personalities that you set up. So sometimes you might -- I think we've all experienced this. So we jump into ChatGPT, we ask it something, and we want to use it for a response like an e-mail. And like the tone is just not right, and you just have to reword everything. It's like, I don't sound like that. So that would be the other differentiator as well. So the trust and also having that brand identity center to ensure that the tone is in your brand's tone. Well, thank you very much to everyone who sent in a question. Thank you, Alex and Travis, for answering them as well as Rachel and Imogen for helping in the background as well throughout the webinar. Before we finish up today, we do have some resources to share with you. You don't need to get out your phone, you don't need to scan the QR code. All of the links are available in the Related Content widget. I mean I don't really know where I'm pointing. It's somewhere in the webinar platform. So first up, we have the release slides. So these aren't actually the slides that we presented today, it's actually slides covering all of the features from this latest release. There were over 40 features that came out in the winter release, and we only covered a handful, so if you check out any of the resources, check out that one because that will give you an overview of everything that has come out in this release. Secondly, we've got the Marketing Cloud keynote from Dreamforce. So if you weren't one of the lucky ones to be there in person, I know I wasn't, maybe one day, you can catch up on all the action on Salesforce+. The third one that you see on the screen, this is the release notes and the documentation. And then lastly, we have a couple of bonus freebies. They're not on this slide, but again, you'll find them in the Related Content widgets. You can see who is leading the way in terms of the Gartner Magic Quadrants for Multichannel Marketing Hubs and B2B Marketing Automation Platforms. Spoiler alert, Salesforce is in both of them. And you can also get our report for trends on ethical marketing as well. So that is it from us for the year. We will be back next year to take you through all the highlights from the February release. So until then, thank you very much for tuning in. Have a wonderful day, have a wonderful holiday break, and we will see you in the new year. Bye, everyone.