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

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's session, Evolving Your Data Strategy in the Era of AI. And thank you all for joining us today. My name is Moya McKay, and I'm the Webinar Manager on the Global Field Marketing team here at Salesforce. And today, we will be going through some wonderful information. But before we kick off, of course, we have a few housekeeping notes that we want to make sure that you are comfortable with. Today's webinar will be available on demand after we wrap up and will be accessible through the URL you are on now. You will all receive a follow-up e-mail with access to the URL to access the recording. Please note the slides will advance automatically throughout the presentation. If you need to enlarge the slides, you can click on the enlarge slides button located in the right-hand corner of your presentation window. If you need any technical assistance, you're welcome to ask a question in the Q&A space or you can click on the help widget located on the bottom left corner of your console. And we've also added some additional resources, which are available through the resources window to the very right of the slides. And there, you can find additional related content, including webinars, white papers, demos, e-books and so much more for you to check out. We absolutely encourage you to submit questions anytime throughout the presentation by using the submit a question widget on your console. Feel free to start adding your questions now, and we will be sure to answer as many as we can at the end of the presentation. But please note that if we do not answer your question during this session, we will be sure to follow up after the webinar ends. So please keep an eye out for your response. Last but not least, let us know what you think of today's presentation by sharing your excitement using the smiley face, thumbs up or heart emoji reactions available in our emoji reactions widget. We have great stuff coming up, so we definitely want to see how you guys like our content. And if you hear a joke or 2, feel free to laugh with us. So with that, I will hand it over to Karen and Brie to get us started.

Thank you so much, Moya, and let's test out that heart emoji. Thank you for that angelic voice. Sorry, you have to listen to us now, but we're so excited to have you here. Before we begin, if you've joined us before, you're very familiar with this slide. We're going to be sharing some exciting innovations. And of course, as a product person, I'm going to talk like it's real life right now, it's GA-ed, but please note that GA might come a little bit later. So if you're making purchasing decisions today, tomorrow or in the next week, please keep only what has GA-ed in mind as you make those. So first of all, thank you for joining us this morning, this evening, this afternoon. My name is Karen Madera, and I can't thank you enough for joining us for this webinar today. I'm joined by the lovely Brie. So Brie, you want to give us a little introduction on who you are, a little background.

Yes. Thank you, Karen. Thanks, everyone, for being here today. I am Brie Partridge. As Karen mentioned, I lead the Tableau Blueprint team under digital customer success here at Salesforce. I've been in the customer experience space for about 16 years. And prior to here, I was at Okta in a customer experience role using data on a day-to-day basis to drive better business outcomes. So I'm so excited. Let's start talking about Evolving Your Data Strategy in the Era of AI. Oops, we went to a poll. Here we go. Think of how far we've come. We're using data in completely new ways, from fighting climate change to optimizing for sports performance to all the amazing ways that Salesforce is leveraging data and AI across our portfolio to bring powerful AI functionality to sales, service, marketing, customer success and so much more. 20 years ago, we were using tabular reports, and Excel was truly our best friend if we take us back to the dinosaur era, right? And now data is everywhere. And that brings us to one of my personal favorite examples, and it's not quite up there with global climate change. But for me, it's pretty important, and that's Netflix. Who here is a fan of Netflix? I want to see some emoji reactions. I've been to the show -- I've been to different shows on occasion. And the last one that I was watching was The Witcher. And we won't talk about how they're replacing Henry Cavill. That's another story. But when that season was over, I really didn't know what to do with myself. So aside from looking at the wall, thankfully Netflix was there and had my back with my data and my viewing trends to tell me what I should watch next. That was the making of The Witcher, but at least Netflix knows me well enough to keep me in my Witcher realm. Every organization is moving towards using AI to drive these personalized and relevant experiences for their customers. And that extends beyond just our external customers, right, but our internal customers as well. How do we use data and AI to drive better business outcomes? So now I will go to that poll. And I have a question for all of you today. So look alive, let's answer this poll. Who's excited to use data and AI to create these amazing experiences to drive better business outcomes? I'm really excited. Again, I'm on the digital customer success team, and AI is the future, and data is at the very heart and soul of that. So let's see. Oh, wow, overwhelmingly positive. Everyone is extremely excited. Good to know. Okay. One more poll, I promise, and then I'll be done with the polls. Do you know where to start with your data strategy to enable these experiences and outcomes? Again, not a lot of...

Maybe we moved a little bit too fast.

Moved a little bit too fast there, okay. Let's think about this. So we know where to start.

I think this is the biggest question we get from customers in our engagements. Where do I start?

This is the really big one.

I know where I want to end up, but that first step is always the hardest.

Yes, exactly. So no problem, that's what we're here to talk about today. All right. So I think we can all agree that customers want these personalized next-level experiences based on real-time data. And we as a business want to drive these experiences for them. But how have these data innovations changed the rest of the business? Well, employees need all this data to make better business decisions, and our stakeholders, like our investors, our shareholders, our CFOs are demanding these better business outcomes. And the only way to give that to them is to make sure that all of our employees are making data-driven and actionable decisions. But that's easier said than done, right? It's not easy. Data is messy. It's all over the place. We even struggle with this from time to time at Salesforce if we're being really honest, right? It's hard to trust. It's missing context. And if we're being honest, most of our employees don't have the skills that they need to understand the data. In fact, a recent study found that only 30% of employees say their actions are driven by data. And if we want to shrink this number down even further, only 7% of employees fully understand their company's business strategies and what's expected of them to achieve their company goals. There is a gap that's pretty large. There is a gap between data and our people. So what do we do? How do we bridge this gap? We need to create a business strategy that is infused with data. It's not enough anymore for us to just have our lines of business over here on the left-hand side, creating our business strategy with defining their goals and their objectives, and us over here, creating our data strategies with success metrics and what technology capabilities are we going to build to enable these teams but without talking to each other. So I just want to pause on this slide really quickly because I think if you take away anything from this presentation, let it be this. What we heard at Dreamforce, what we're hearing all over the place is this is really difficult to achieve. It's really helping our lines of business come along on this journey to help us evolve our data strategy. And this is what this is going to do. By connecting our business strategy and infusing it with data, that is how we are going to evolve our data strategy. So how do we do this? Well, at Salesforce, our alignment approach revolves around something called the Salesforce Value Map. You may call this an OKR in your company. Here, we call it a Salesforce Value Map. And really, that's just a fancy term to say that this is a one-slide or one-page format to connect business problems with data solutions. And I thought long and hard around the example that I wanted to share with you all today around how to craft one of these. And really what it came down to is we're Salesforce. We should practice what we preach all the time. And while my team prides ourselves on being data-driven, if I'm being very honest, we had never actually crafted one of these for ourselves. So I got my team together. We did about a 2-hour workshop, and we really put kind of pen to paper and crafted what our data strategy, our business strategy infused with data looks like. So I'm going to share that all with you today. And where we started is with this left-hand side for business goals. So what business results are we driving? And when I'm talking about business results, I'm not talking about just my team or my broader customer success team. I'm talking about top company goals. So for us, that goes all the way up to our President of Customer Success, Jim Roth, even up to the very top, Marc Benioff, our CEO. What business goals are we going to have an impact on? And for us, that was pipeline and attrition. Great. How are we going to do this? What does my team have control over to impact these goals? My team is going to create relevant and effective value-based digital solutions. So here's our business side, and now we're starting to infuse it with some data. So how will we know we're successful? We're going to talk some success metrics now. We came up with these 3 success metrics: marketing pipe; customer sentiment scores like NPS, CES and CSAT, that is really important for us to make sure that our customers are having a good, frictionless experience; and looking at monthly activation rates. From there, from the data team, right, this gives them the data sources that are critical to our business. They can start looking at, do we have these data sources? Do we need a way to get them? How do we harmonize them, right? Once we had these 3 columns laid out, we began to formulate our data strategy or, again, our business strategy infused with data. And we documented it using this formula: we contribute to strategic goal for stakeholder X, Y and Z by doing 1, 2, 3. And this is what ours sounded like. We contribute to the increase of marketing pipe and decrease in customer attrition for the digital customer success team by creating relevant and effective value-based digital solutions that drive higher customer sentiment and improved monthly activation rates. Okay. So now if I'm walking down the hall in the office and Marc Benioff comes up to me, as he typically does, right, and he goes, Brie, how is your team contributing to our overall company goals? I have a very well-documented strategy that I can share. Now there is a fourth piece here and arguably, Karen, I think, we'll say is one of the most important pieces, right? How do we bring this to life? What technology capabilities do we need to build to reach our goals? That's a huge part of the framework for me, right?

Right.

I want to empower my teams. I want to bring this data within their flow of work and have them make actionable decisions based off of it. So Karen, please show us how we can do this with our Salesforce technology.

And you hit the nail on the head. Usually myself and others, we tend to jump to technology to fix all our problems, but I love this framework because you really think things through and you're able to confidently say this is exactly what I need to achieve. And there's no doubt about why you're going to be onboarding a technology. So I think this, from an adoption and making the case to your leadership, this is so key and especially now as innovations are just taking off, AI, I think, is just the tip of the iceberg. This is going to be crucial for strategies moving forward. So like I mentioned, today's AI revolution, this is also a data revolution. At the end of the day, businesses, to capitalize on all of these benefits that AI is bringing, from productivity all the way to cost savings, you need to bring in these tools to help you see and understand your data. And of course, that's the data foundation that we've all been working towards for the past several decades, and now it's more crucial than ever before. So delivering that right data to fuel this business impact, you're going to need to bring in these tools that automate data discovery and management, elevate the right context at the right time and, of course, support that trusted self-service experience across your entire organization. And this is really where Salesforce can help. Our platform and approach gives you all of these tools that you need to reach data maturity at a faster rate and make those better decisions overall. And through all of this, I think one of our latest innovations has been the introduction of Einstein and just the revamping of the entire platform to really help you accelerate those insights and give you access to predictive and generative AI out of the box. So let's get a little bit deeper with what our stack really looks like. Starting with Salesforce Data Cloud or as we like to call it, that intelligent heart of customer engagement. It starts by helping our customers connect to all of their data from any app, device or real-time screen, like I mentioned, out of the box, which is huge. After that all happens, we harmonize all of the data. Doesn't matter what format or what type, it all gets converted into a common data model. Once that data is harmonized, we unify all this data and empower everyone across your teams with unified customer profiles. We are still that customer data platform at the end of the day. So these profiles really help all of your teams know and understand their customer's activity, preferences and all of the needs as they continue to interact in their business capacity. On top of that is where Tableau, my lovely Tableau lives on top. And that's our data visualization and business intelligence layer. This allows you to see, understand and discover real-time insights across your live customer data. More importantly, it drives consumption of data, and I know that everyone on this call is eagerly awaiting these tools that really drive up adoption to, again, engage people in your data programs. So Tableau is going to help really make those critical use cases that just show your program's value, whether it's accurately forecasting revenue growth or transforming customer experiences by surfacing real-time customer preferences. On top of that, of course, is our extended ecosystem. Slack lets your companies stay on the same page and make decisions by bringing all of your work communication into one place. And throughout that entire platform experience comes the power of MuleSoft, which helps scale workflows quickly and securely across all your organization with connected data from apps and different tools. It also has come out with automation that's baked in and helps you reduce context switching by building multistep and guided automations in Salesforce and the ecosystem. Now the newest critical piece is going to come out of the Einstein portfolio. And that's the Einstein Trust Layer, which now builds the foundation for all of our clouds. The Einstein Trust layer, really its mission is to elevate security of generative AI and the future of AI throughout your stack through data and privacy controls. And this is all, of course, in an effort to create that seamless experience for every data user. So in its simplest form, this trust layer is a sequence of gateways and retrieval mechanisms that enable trusted and open generative AI. So just to walk you through a couple of the steps, when a request to the trust layer is made from any of the Salesforce apps, a prompt template is called and orchestrated by the trust layer through a standardized internal API. A number of security measures are then employed and ensure that the data is not compromised when interacting with AI models. And the result is generation from whatever AI model you choose, and then it scans for toxicity and logged in our audit trail before it's finally rendered back to the end user where they can select to either accept the generation, run it again or put a red flag on it to note any bias. So that is our platform, really robust, really excited about the future as it comes together. And as we look at this, we're seeing, again, a single vendor through Salesforce, a single consolidated platform. The average company today has about 976 apps and tools in their stack, which is an outrageous amount. Just imagine the support and budget you need to actually run those tools. A couple -- in the center here of this image, you see all of the vendors kind of functioning at different capability levels. But when you engage Data Cloud, Tableau, Einstein, and just the power of Salesforce, you get it all within one stack. So to me, that's true end-to-end capabilities as you're looking to kind of revamp your architecture and really decide what tools to bring in. All right. So talking about all these capabilities is one thing, but seeing it in product, that, to me, is really where the magic is because it's showing you how it's coming to life in your day-to-day, you can imagine yourself clicking the buttons. So let's jump into what I think should be the right tool for Brie's team, and that's Tableau Pulse. If you haven't heard about Pulse yet, it's a reimagined data experience for business users, much like Brie, that will empower everyone on her team with smart, personalized and contextual insights delivered directly in their flow of work. All right, Brie, so let's get started to see how this thing can help you access, share and collaborate on data. So let's start with your day. What's your tool of choice when communicating with your team?

E-mail, yes, I'm still using e-mail, and Slack for sure.

Yes. The e-mail piece is kind of our most popular, right? If we don't see it in our inbox, sometimes we don't see it at all. So it's definitely good to start there. Here, we got Brie's inbox. And just think about it. Put yourself in the shoes. It's Monday morning, you've had a really good weekend, but you still need to lead your 9 a.m. weekly team meeting. Your team is counting on you to really set those priorities for the week, and what better way to do that than with data. Right here in your inbox, you can see that Pulse is proactive. It's bringing data and insights to you where you need it and where you're already working on that Monday morning. You can see that those critical insights are already highlighted for you and summarized. So you're ready to jump into that meeting. If we look at the Pulse dashboard itself, you get personalized home pages and digests of the metrics that you follow. So it shows you the data that you actually care about upfront. When you were walking us through your strategy, Brie, I think you had 3 main KPIs, right, monthly active users, pipeline, and customer satisfaction ratings. That's right...

That's right.

All right. Well, that's something you can easily track here. If you look at the 3 boxes, each one of those is your core KPIs. You get those insight summaries and headlines about what's happening across those metrics, and it's all in natural language. You don't have to deduce trends on your own to get those summaries. It's right there, which is super valuable. You can get your team's attention quickly, and you're all rallying around those core metrics. There's no discussion on what's important anymore, right? And the best thing is that everyone on your team is looking at these numbers. So again, you're not arguing about, hey, I saw this number over here, this number over here. No, you have this trusted single source of truth with these summaries. So when you click into 1 of those 3 core KPIs, I clicked on monthly active users, Tableau Pulse helps me understand that specific metric by giving me all of the details that correspond to it and trends. On the back end, all of the metadata from Tableau is here, so you have that trust. It's working with your information architecture, and you can trust the data that you're seeing. From this standpoint, I can see that I have 2 options. I can either take Einstein's guidance on relevant questions, which you can see at the bottom beneath the graph in blue or I can ask my own question in the search bar. So what I prefer is asking my own question, right, specifically around what events are driving this upward trend in monthly active users. So you can easily type it up top in the search bar. When you hit enter, we immediately see the answer in plain language and with the visualization, which has always been Tableau's strong point. With this new insight, I can see that the increase in monthly active users is driven by Dreamforce. No surprise there, right? A marketing campaign that I can further explore and a couple of recent changes to website traffic. So with your team, Brie, you can start identifying which of these channels are going to be areas of further investment to reach those CSAT goals for this year and really activate the channels that will work for you. So by having done the homework that you did, thinking thoughtfully about goals, needs, success metrics around your data strategy, you're now able to introduce them into this simple, easy-to-use solution that works with you. And again, I'm harping on it again, adoption. This is so easy to adopt. Everyone can use it, and it just makes it more realistic for your team to actually be data-driven and take all this data with them when it comes to decision-making. And of course, I couldn't leave here without showing you that the integration between Tableau and Slack is still there. So even with this new Pulse capability, you'll still be able to see visits and pushes from Pulse right on Slack. So Brie, what do you think? Is this easy? Is this focused? What do you think about the product?

I love it. I love it. It puts that data right in their hands, and I'm counting on you to help me get it set up, right, Karen?

Exactly. I'll be over to your house in December when it does.

No, this is amazing. This is awesome.

No, but we're super excited about this. So definitely happy to share it with you today. All right. So now that we're energized around data maps, Tableau Pulse and really kicking off our journey with AI, we have a couple of next steps for you. Brie, tell us a little bit more about Blueprint.

Yes. So I love that demo. Thank you so much, Karen. It's amazing stuff that we're working towards, right? But still, we have to continue to evolve our data strategy and our data culture to make it happen. So again, I lead the Tableau Blueprint team, and Tableau knows a little thing or 2 about data, I think. And they created Tableau Blueprint. And this is really a curation of the best of the best practices from our customers and our partners on how to broaden, deepen, scale the use of data and really build and foster that data-driven culture that you need in order to deploy a data and analytics program. So this is the Blueprint framework. It goes over things like trusted and governed -- and governance, data culture, right, agility, proficiency and community, fostering that community within your organization. So it's a little weird. If you scan that QR code, hopefully, you're not on your phone, and you can scan it. But if not, we have a resource for it on the link to the right-hand side of your screen, I believe, to go to tableaublueprint.com. You can learn all about the methodology, and there is an assessment. This all comes with a high, high, high price tag of absolutely free. So this assessment is going to go over where you are today in terms of maturity on all of these pillars and the next best steps you need to take to mature your analytics program forward. Again, this is all free to you. So please make use of this resource. It's really going to help you on your data journey.

You can't argue with free, right?

I know.

All right. Well, thank you, everyone, for joining us. We're going to look into the Q&A box and answer a couple of questions. But let me put it back on that Blueprint slide just in case, give you a little bit of content to look at.

All right. Brie, I think this one's for you. Can Salesforce help my team get started with value maps?

Definitely, that's a good question. So if you are a Salesforce or Tableau customer and you have a customer success manager, you can definitely reach out to your account team and actually complete an engagement around value mapping. Another resource for you, of course, we have the Blueprint help documentation. So again, if you go to the Tableau Blueprint page and you scroll down to the bottom, you'll see a link to our documentation, and we have documentation around analytics strategy, analytics vision, et cetera. And then the third resource, I think it's in the -- we've included in the resources is the Salesforce Business Value Map app on the AppExchange. So if you are a Salesforce customer, feel free to download that app.

Awesome. And I'm seeing a lot of excitement around product. Here's a question. So what are the system requirements for Tableau Pulse? Also a great question. So Pulse is actually going to be included in the standard licensing for Tableau Cloud. So in Brie's vein of absolutely free, if you already have Tableau Cloud, you will get that introductory version of Pulse that launches in December included already as part of Tableau Cloud. If you don't have Tableau Cloud in your stack yet, it is a Tableau-hosted site and really the fastest way to get started with Tableau, and it's usually the best option for most enterprises moving forward to be on Tableau Cloud. And let me bundle that. I see another question. Are all of these technologies included with our Salesforce account? So like I mentioned, Tableau itself does require separate licensing, but you can get it within -- unified within your contract. So each one of the applications do come with its own set of licensing. But again, if you're looking at your contracts, you can unify it all and bundle it together. Let's take another question. Does Salesforce have master data management capabilities? So while Salesforce does offer capabilities that help manage master data management programs, the short answer is going to be no. Salesforce is hyper focused on providing that customer data platform. So depending on the strategy that you need to employ for your organization's use cases, Salesforce does bring in data modeling, identity resolution and that golden records via the different clouds, MuleSoft and Tableau. So if you need a traditional MDM system, we do have several MDM ecosystem partners that integrate seamlessly with Salesforce, but it's not going to come traditionally within Salesforce. All right. And then some questions around, how do we get training for Tableau Pulse? So that's to come. Our GA month is in December. So definitely keep your eyes out on tableau.com for future enablement around that. There are demos on tableau.com. We have a link within the resources to get you there if you're interested in exploring it a little bit more, but definitely more to come in December. If you have an account with Salesforce, contact your account representative, and we can give you the scoop a little bit earlier than December. All right. And I think we covered most of the questions we have time for today. Thank you for staying 2 minutes over, and have a wonderful rest of the day. Thank you, everyone.

All right. Have a good day.