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

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

Amazing. Thank you so much, Ariana. Hi to everyone out there, no matter where you are. I'm super, super, super excited to be here today. Yes, I said super that many times. My name is Katie Campbell. I am on the product marketing team here at Salesforce, supporting Sales Cloud. And I am joined with two of my amazing colleagues, Samantha, who's going to take us through a live demo as I go over some content; and we have Tony Kays, who is going to join me for a fireside chat, who is one of our SVPs of Sales, and he's going to talk about all things that are top of mind for him. Let's get started. So first and foremost, I just want to thank each and every one of you online. We truly would not be a successful company without each and every one of you. So thank you. As tech continues to revolutionize the way we do business, it continues to shape the B2B sales, and it's transforming how we achieve growth, which is what is at the top of every revenue leader's mind today. As we shifted to a digital-first world, we cobbled together multiple point solutions on top of our CRM to address those point-in-time needs. As a result, this has become a disjointed rep experience. Disjointed data, siloed data still exists and it's very costly to upkeep. We're also entering into a new era of AI. And it's changing everything from how we do business, how we engage with our customers, how our reps are more productive and how do we use data to drive our business strategies and so much more. Revenue leaders alike are feeling the pressure to set their business up for long-term growth, and they're having to do this with limited funds. That's why sales leaders are reevaluating the tools that drive sales success. Many of us have heard this already. We're looking to simplify. 94% of organizations are looking to simplify their tech stacks. To remove those applications that are driving inefficiencies and taking reps out of what their core selling activities are, which is focusing on building relationships and closing deals, technology needs to make our users more successful, and it needs to come to us. That's why sales leaders are focusing on solutions that are integrated and have automation and AI already built in. And we know AI is going to be a disruptor. It's going to be a disruptor in how we work with our customers, what is our customer experience, how are our reps being productive, how are we growing with AI. It's only going to be a disruptor if we already can use it. And if it's built in to where we already work, which is what we're hearing first and foremost from sales reps today. Sorry, technical difficulties. Sales Cloud -- just wanted to leave you all hanging. Sales Cloud provides the one integrated platform for your entire sales organization. True to the core, it starts with the fundamentals of customer relationship management built in the Sales Cloud, a CRM platform where data, AI and trust are now built in by default. As the most complete sales platform, we power your sales from end to end, so you can engage your buyers, engage your sellers and enable your teams, bring Einstein and sales AI and analytics to the forefront to power your business and extend this all to your channel partners, and even streamline complex billing and manage your sales performance, all on one platform. But I mentioned a new way of selling, one where AI and data are at the forefront, and that's why we need a new sales cloud, because it's so important in this moment of sales that the best way for organizations to accelerate growth is not only with data and AI, but that it's trusted. At Sales Cloud, we have a solution for every business and every industry no matter what stage of growth you're in. At Salesforce, we're focused on being -- on delivering rapid innovations to help you achieve success. But we're also committed to making our solutions easier for you all to try, buy and grow your business. And that is why I am super excited to talk about our newest tier on the right-hand side. Sales Cloud Unlimited+. Sales Cloud Unlimited+ gives you the best of Salesforce for sales in a single offering so that you can reduce costs and get greater value to empower your sales organization. Everything I just mentioned is included except for partners and contracts. So let's dive in. Let's take a closer look. Starting with the blue bar here, the data foundation. I hope everyone on this call knows, your AI is only as good as your data. So before we talk about AI, let's talk about data. In order to power AI and your organization, you need a strong data foundation. It starts with their CRM data like leads and accounts and the vast trove of sales activity data. But we know there's more data out there than just that. And it's critical that we unify your external data with your CRM data, and then turn it all into action. So let's start with that sales data. You need to capture every sales interaction automatically from e-mails to calendars to virtual meetings and events. And you need to capture this across every channel, whether you're in your e-mail, such as Gmail, Outlook, or whether you're on the go in Slack or on your CRM or even LinkedIn, Sales Cloud is there to capture the sales activity automatically and bring it back to your CRM. Sales interactions, though, are only a piece of the data pie. You need to connect your external data like web engagement data, consumption data, your ERP systems. You need to bring them together into your CRM so that you have a complete true view of your customer profile, and Data Cloud can make that all happen. And lastly, the data doesn't mean anything if you can't extract the insights. With robust analytics such as Activity 360 and Revenue Intelligence, get visibility across your entire sales funnel, so you have insight into the core of what drives your sales performance. And all this comes out of the box, so you don't need a data science to pull this all together. You just need to turn it on. But you know what? Enough of me. I want to pass over to Sami to show you this live in action. Sami, over to you.

Thanks, Katie. Really excited to jump in and start with the data foundation, so I'll share my screen. Right. So in order to have a strong data foundation, we need to be able to capture data across all channels. Now as a seller, I usually have multiple tabs and applications open every day, sometimes more than I would like to admit. LinkedIn for research, e-mail, Salesforce and more. This can make for an incredibly busy work experience, but now Salesforce is here with me everywhere that I work, including LinkedIn where I'm currently researching a prospect named Lauren Bailey. Now I can easily look up Lauren's record and see all activity that we have with her without leaving LinkedIn. Now I've got up to speed where we left things a few months ago and can understand any upcoming to-dos. From here, if I reach out to Lauren directly from this page, that activity will be automatically captured in sales platforming. Whatever I do, it will follow me and be automatically logged back into Salesforce to help build that strong data foundation. Now with Activity 360, we can get visibility into all sales activities within one place, not just LinkedIn, and are provided with this view out of the box. As a sales leader, I'd like to spot trends in action on them quickly as the quarter is rapidly coming to a close. With this dashboard, I can view all of that unified activity across my entire team and dig into specific areas to see what's working or what's not. So my team needs to spend time reaching out to the right executives. That's really important to me. I can see that my team is spending plenty of time with technology leaders, which is good, but activity is definitely lacking with CFOs. And in this climate, I know they need to spend more time there. I'll work with our sales programs team to build out better templates and talk tracks for CFOs to enable my team. Now tasks, events and e-mails are great, but what if I want to bring in external data into Salesforce. With Data Cloud, as Katie mentioned, this is now possible. With a simple drag-and-drop interface, I can connect to a variety of data streams. I actually can't wait to tell my marketing team about this. However, stay focused, my #1 priority is to take my company's vast amount of product usage data that lives in AWS and bring it into Salesforce to make it actionable for my sellers. Here, I can choose my data source and then harmonize all that data back into my Salesforce project model. Using this drag-and-drop interface to map my data sources, I can bring that product telemetry data easily into Salesforce. I simply choose a field from my external AWS data set and map it to the corresponding Salesforce field on the right to ultimately create a complete customer profile. So now for example, Nolan Bailey, his contact record is robust and enriched with his interaction data from multiple different sources. I can see his usage data from our product -- I can see his usage from our product trial and the cases he submitted and how he's engaged with our marketing materials. With this information, we could automate and inform outreach to him to sign up for a yearly contract. Now from LinkedIn, e-mails, activities, external data sources, building that strong data foundation has allowed us to get a better view of our customer and accelerate productivity. This sets us up really well to effectively leverage AI and automation. Back to you, Katie.

Thank you so much, Sami. Now that we've covered the data foundation, let's see how we can unleash AI for our sellers. Sellers' new superpower is AI, which is why we're bringing AI to you in the flow of work across your entire sales process. Selling is a team sport. In order for teams to be successful, teams need a centralized hub to collaborate. And everyone here today needs more pipe, and they need it fast. Let AI do the heavy lifting for you so you can accelerate your pipeline. And reps need to be efficient, yes, but more importantly, they need to be effective. Let AI help your sellers work smarter. Starting with your centralized hub, boost your team selling productivity by bringing real-time CRM data and insights across your entire company. Set up automated workflows and keep everyone up to speed and in the loop from finance to sales to your sales leadership. Keep them all together and keep them in the know on those top key accounts. And let your website be your sales rep, be your best sales rep. Meet buyers where they are and let Einstein do the heavy lift -- heavy lifting, so he can handle the qualifying and scheduling for you. Then when your reps are ready, give them a centralized work hub with built-in engagement tools so they know where to focus, the right actions to take with those accounts and what to say so they can accelerate your pipeline. And lastly, everyone's top of mind, AI is built in this entire process that I've been mentioning and so much more, but let's talk specifically how AI, predictive and generative, can help your reps work smarter, improve those decisions and deliver exceptional personalized customer experiences, focus on the right deals, unlock insights, track trends across your accounts and compose personalized data-rich e-mails in Clicks. But enough to talk about it. I want Sami to show you this live in action to show how all of your reps can use AI every step of the way. Over to you, Sami.

Thanks, Katie. I couldn't find that unmute button fast enough. All right. So as Katie had mentioned, we have a lot of prospects. And here, we can see one of my many customers has come to the website. Thankfully, in the bottom right-hand corner, Einstein has instantly personalized the conversation and given my customer options to guide her experience. My customer shares what they're looking for, lets them know that we want to learn more about a product. And Einstein suggests products to explore and can even schedule a follow up with our sales team. While this seems simple, across thousands of customers and prospects, Einstein is helping me personalize their experience at scale. We can now meet this buyer where they are and save my sales team precious time when prospecting. Speaking of prospecting, how that Einstein has handled my inbound meetings, thankfully, my sales reps can switch gears to nurture these and other leads. Here, we have an intelligent view that helps my reps spend the right time on the right people and hold themselves accountable. As you can see here with Einstein lead scoring integrated into their workflow, they don't have to guess where to focus. AI gives them precise guidance on the best leads to contact based on historical data. Now on the column to the right, I can see who has already been added to a cadence, whether automatically or I did that on my own. Sales cadences are like my autopilot, guiding me on the right next steps. Now because my high score leads are at the top, I can see I need to reach out to George Kewo. He is not attached to any cadences right now, so let's drill in. I see that I have zero activity with him and nonscheduled. That doesn't look too good. I may get this lead removed from me from leadership, so let's get to work here. Thankfully, I can take action and e-mail right from this page. But what am I going to say to George to get him to agree to a meeting. Now with Einstein GPT, I can take my outreach to the next level with AI-generated e-mails that are personalized for each individual prospect using my CRM data. So here, I can easily tell Einstein what product I think George will be interested in and my sentiment. And boom, within a matter of seconds, Einstein has done all the work for me. No more generic one-size-fits-all e-mails. With Einstein doing this work, I'm personalizing at scale while saving time. Now we'll fast forward a bit. We successfully booked that call with George's extended team. Because Zoom, what we use for video conferencing, is integrated here, during the call we didn't have to frantically write down notes. I was able to focus on customer pain points and be that trusted adviser. This is because Einstein Conversation Insights will automatically highlight the most important moments for me through insights on the left, like budget and competition and take me right to that point of the call. Now we have this transcript, but what's even better is that with a click of a button, as a rep or a sales leader, Einstein is giving me a summary of this call so that I don't need to listen back to the entire recording, I can see all of the most important things and next steps here. Now as a seller, we're clearly balancing a lot of different workloads. Thankfully, I have Slack to boost my productivity. As we can see here, as we know, are going to take a step back really quickly, sorry for the technical difficulty. All right. So as we can see here, Slack is deeply embedded into my flow of work. I have all my CRM data and insights at my fingertips, like these important metrics up at the top, giving me that quick thorough check. Now based on the call we just reviewed a minute ago, I know we have a strategic motion. So let's hop back into this top account. Here, I can streamline all knowledge sharing and strategizing for this account into one dedicated channel. Canvas, on the right, makes it easy to organize and share information with my large 127-person extended team. From here, I can even automate through workflows, if I need something like support from our finance team. While this seems simple, this asynchronous communication is lucrative from my remote global team. Now we just saw how Einstein helps Supercharge Selling, let's hand it back to Katie to see how Einstein can help sales ops to activate more growth.

Amazing. Thank you so much, Sami. We just saw so much AI in such a short period of time. But as Sami mentioned, we cannot forget about our amazing partners, sales operations. So let's see how Einstein can help power operations. From driving strategy to planning, let data and intelligence guide you. Discover answers in your data, streamline those processes and guide your reps, empower teams with enablement programs built into the flow of work. No more swivel chairing, and use CRM data to build and deploy and refine your sales plans. So let's start with finding those answers, discover answers in your data using analytics, embedded directly within your CRM so that you can make more informed decisions. And create adaptable AI models. All of our businesses are pivoting, and we are pivoting and staying agile and adjusting and so should our AI models. So create those adaptable AI models and process intelligence with no technical expertise. Everyone can now be an expert there. And say goodbye to manual task. This is something we talk about all the time, but it's something that each and every one of us can do with Sales Cloud. Build scalable processes and workflows that fit your specific business model, and guide your reps through the sales process so they can focus on those high-value activities, and you can capture that key information that you need. And top of mind right now for so many of us, in this hybrid world, is how do we keep our sellers always learning, how do we onboard reps faster. Now you can connect your sales enablement programs and those sales plays to data. Tie them to performance. Programmatically deliver and track assigned sales plays and onboard new reps faster with embedded and tested high-impact programs. And last but definitely not least, say goodbye to spreadsheets. Say no more to doing manual sales planning. Build and create your data-driven sales plans directly within your CRM using your CRM data. Create equitable territories, optimize rep time in the field and accelerate those planning cycles and streamline collaboration by unifying all your teams in real-time. I know we're covering a lot, but I can't leave you hanging without a final demo on this last chapter to show how we can bring the power of intelligence to operations. So Sami, back over to you.

Thanks, Katie. Okay. So taking the seat of sales ops, one of the first questions that I ask myself is what's happening in my business today, both as a leader and in operations. This is incredibly important. What you're seeing here is Revenue Intelligence right out of the box. As soon as I open the page, I can see how my team is doing and if we're pacing to hit our goals. It looks like we're off track. You can also see how sales are trending over time. If I drill in a bit further, I can see some of our most important metrics like win rate or average days to close. But I'm noticing here that our average days to close has gone up quite a bit. It looks like we're doing pretty well in the other categories, though. But what do I do if I have deeper questions about this data? Maybe I want to understand why my sales cycles are getting longer. I'd also like to know proactively where we're getting stuck. Thankfully, Einstein can now help me by generating discovery insights to help me answer exactly those questions. Now let's dig in. Here, I'm able to see all the drivers behind our closed time. On the right-hand side, when stage -- time in stage was the highest, I see a standout here, our product Electra. Now what's that all about? Thankfully, I can once again, dig in a bit deeper and see that we're spending a lot of time when selling this product in the demonstration phase of the sales cycle. And when I compare it to our other products, this is when I have that big a-ha moment. Deals are getting stuck here and reps are having a hard time pitching value. This is the story that my data was trying to tell me. And in just a few seconds, I got my own intelligence briefing without having to hack a bunch of reports together. But now what will I do about this? How can I take it into action? After a quick sip of coffee, I see an opportunity here. Thankfully, now on the right-hand side, we can turn this insight into action with sales enablement. With enablement, it's easy for me to create sales programs at scale just like this. How can we accelerate deals by mastering negotiation tactics. I can give my reps tailored insights and outcomes to help them achieve those goals. This is baked right in the Salesforce, where my reps do their work and automatically track -- and it will automatically track their progress. Using -- so we use those insights to get this sales program launched. Now we're going fast forward after launch, and I need to switch gears. Now that I have enablement program in place, I need to start to think ahead as we approach the end of our fiscal year. And guess what? I can do my sales planning with my team without ever leaving Sales Cloud through Sales Planning. We can use this tool to carve out and train a group of specialists to sell that newly launched product we were just speaking about, Electra, within our U.S.A. or Ameri-territory. Now what you're seeing here is a hierarchy for our org structure, Midwest, Northeast, Southeast, West. But now I want to quickly spin up a new team with 5 people to sell that Electra product. So now that I have that team established, I need to determine how I can split the U.S. across my 5 reps. Now in a second, forgive my Internet today, with just a few clicks, we'll be able to select that Ameri-territory, and start to assign this out to those Electra reps. Here, I'm able to create equitable territories that will allow those Electra reps to really hit the ground running. Now last but not least, one of my favorite pieces, allocation. Once those territories are in place, how are we going to distribute quota targets? Well, we're going to do that, once again, directly here in Salesforce. So we'll select all of our territories here on the right and then start to allocate. I'm able to easily select a metric here. You have our quota and then each of those nodes we established earlier. I can easily have the system generate that target for me. I can also break down their quotas relative to a specific field that we may have in Salesforce. For now, we'll have this set equally across those nodes. Now you were able to see, over here on the left, that quota auto populate right down the hierarchy. Now all that we have left to do is publish the changes. I'll spend a little bit of time reviewing with my team first. But in a matter of seconds, I can push this live. Now looking at all that we've just accomplished right here in Sales Cloud. We've developed that brand-new data-driven sales plan. And as you may remember, when looking at those sales stages, this started with Einstein's AI-powered insight about my sales process. So we just went through advanced analytics, telling a deeper story off our data to creating sales programs and then lastly, allocating quota without leaving Sales Cloud. Now back to you, Katie.

Wow, thank you so much, Sami. If I could do a virtual, if there's a way to applause, I ask you all to do applause. Those are fantastic 3 demos in this short period of time. And I know I'm excited, and I can't wait to use all of these tools some of them I'm already using. But the next thing I want to do is bring up Tony Kays and invite him to my virtual stage in my glorious fake apartment background and talk to what is top of mind for sales leaders today. What he's hearing from customers, all the goodness. So I am going to, first, T.K., welcome. It's kind of weird. It's virtual. I can't really see you, but I'm going to try to do my best here. Welcome to the virtual stage. We are so, so, so excited to have you be here. I'm pretty sure everyone has probably, like, stopping saying so. Tell us a little bit about yourself, introduce yourself.

Yes, I'm here. Can you hear me and can you see me? Yes?

I mean I can.

Okay. Perfect. That's all we need. First off, kudos to you and Sami. That was awesome, to see how much you all just accomplished in a short amount of time. So validation to your virtual applause request. Nice work. And I'm grateful to be here. Thanks for having me. I think a lot of that is really cool to see. But as a revenue leader, we got to figure out how to bring that to life. And so I'm excited to have that conversation with everyone today. Now look, I've been at Salesforce for 15 years. And 15 years ago, technology was nowhere near where it is today. So it's pretty awesome to be a revenue leader during this time frame of everything we're going through, when it comes to technology and the market shift that we're facing. Throughout my career at Salesforce, I've covered every segment. So from small business to commercial to enterprise and have also been across every vertical. So whether it be health care or life sciences, technology, professional services, et cetera. I'm currently running our technology vertical, so I'm responsible for revenue growth and customer success. And here's what I'll say. I think as a revenue leader during this time frame, especially over the past 1.5 years or so, there's been a lot of growing pains over the past 15 years, but none may be as challenging and as interesting or oddly rewarding as what we're facing now. And so there's a lot of things we got to go solve. And that's what I'm going to be talking about today.

I love that T.K. And it sounds like some would qualify you as a lifer for being at Salesforce that long. So I hope you're excited. We are excited to have you here, of course. And it sounds like you just juggle a few small things, nothing too crazy. What are 2 to 3 things that keep you up at night? What keeps T.K. up at night right now in this moment in time?

Yes. I'm definitely very passionate about Salesforce. So I'll take the lifer comment. Look, I think we're -- the way I think about current state and this concept of efficient growth is it's a really cool dilemma that we all face. And that dilemma, in its most simple form, if we look at some of the industry stats, right, 80% of companies are growing, but only 43% are growing their teams. And so if targets are growing, but there's sort of less people to do it with, we, as revenue leaders, have to be that much more efficient in what we do. So when I think about what's top of mind for me, there are really 3 buckets: starts with the people. It's all about the process after that. And then ideally, if you get the people and the process right, we can really create a productive environment. When I think about the people, right, every employee, every seller at any company right now wants to be elevated from a skill set perspective and wants to be empowered to do their jobs. Everyone wants to be great. It's our job, as revenue leaders, to help them be great. And I'll talk a little bit about how we're doing that in a minute on some of the tools that we're using. And then from a process perspective, it's all about systems and tools, right? If you have the right behaviors in place and the right tools to go drive those behaviors, you can really create an amazing environment where people are going to see a lot of success without having to just pump a bunch of heads into the go-to-market plan. And then productivity, it's all about making sure you're executing flawlessly. And obviously, the demo showed a number of things of how we can do that, but I'll certainly talk a little bit about how we can use some of those different tools to drive that in action.

So three very, very keen things. I know that I've also been hearing top of mind, so I'm sure much of the audience is definitely relating to you right now. Of those three things, people, process and productivity, you mentioned them all, they all work, right? They need to work intertwined and they need to work together. What tools does your team use internally? And how do you, as a sales leader, stay aligned with what's happening with the field, especially if we think about today's hybrid world, right, you're not always in the office. You and I are virtual right now, so I know that's very top of mind for a lot of us.