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

Hello, and welcome to the Spring Release for Marketing Cloud 2024. We've got a jam-packed session today where we'll walk you through what's coming to Marketing Cloud this month. My name is Lisa-Marie Long, or LM, and I'm a Marketing Cloud Solution Engineer here at Salesforce, and I'm incredibly excited to be your host today. Now given a few of us are based in Australia, I'd like to start with an acknowledgment of country. Salesforce acknowledges the Traditional Owners and ongoing custodians of land, waterways and skies across Australia. We pay our respects to their elders, past and present, and recognize the contributions of all First Nations people to the land on which we live, learn, love and play. And before I begin, I just want to give a quick reminder that customers should base their purchasing decisions on products and services that are currently available. Now you've already met me, but I'm also joined today by my fellow Marketing Cloud Solution engineers, Jessica Lee and Stephane With, who are our product experts who will be taking us through this latest release. Now if you have any questions along the way, do feel free to use the question widget at the bottom of the console to submit those because we are also joined behind the scenes by Cindy Hoang and Linda Nguyen who are ready to take your questions throughout this webinar. Now today, we have around 45 minutes together. So first off, in our agenda, I'll be giving a quick overview of Marketing Cloud and our releases and how they work, then we'll dive into our spring release highlights across data, AI and activation and see a couple of short demos. And finally, we'll round out with some of the top questions from the chart from everyone that's logged in today. Now before we get going, I do want to do a little bit of a pulse check and just see who we've got in the room today. Have you ever been to a Salesforce release webinar? So you should be able to answer that question in your console there. And we'd love to know who's in the room, whether it's your first time, whether this is definitely not your first rodeo. I'll give everyone a few seconds to fill out that. So my next slide is filled with results. So let us know. Have you been to a webinar releases before? Or is this your first time? Getting a thumbs up or I feel like that's probably enough time. Let's have a look while cross your fingers. Okay. All right. So we've got a bit of a split quite almost down the middle there. So a lot of first timers or 58% first timers, and some people who never miss our webinars. All right. So that leads me quite nicely on to my next slide. With a 58.1% for this as your first time, I'll let you know how it works. So some of you already know, our releases at Salesforce happen 3 times a year. And once the release kicks off, these features will filter into your accounts over the course of about 3 weeks, depending on what stack your instance is on. Our current release, Spring '24, kicked off in February. So everything that we discuss today is either in your marketing cloud instance already or will be very soon. Now the Spring '24 release, it's a big one with several innovations across the platform. So because of the short time that we have together today, we're going to focus on the top 5 highlights that you can see on the screen there. And these are the ones that we think will give you the most value to discuss here and now, but obviously, definitely encourage you to go and check out the release notes that are available online for the full breadth of everything that's being released. Now before we dive into our first innovation, I want to take a moment and share the framework for how our marketing platform works, and it really comes down to 3 key things, right? First, your data strategy, then your AI strategy and your activation strategy. And this is how we really make every moment count across the entire customer journey. So whether you're trying to attract, engage or retain customers, the first step is to get to know them, right? And this is done through data. So this starts off with anonymous data, right? So for example, when a person clicks on an ad and browses your website, and through each moment of engagement, you gather more information about this person. And over time, you can vote them into a customer. So this is where you start capturing different types of known data, like identity data, so an e-mail or phone number; historical data, so past events or behaviors like past transactions or purchases; and real-time data. So for example, a site session where someone views a video. Now the key is that you want to be able to stitch together both anonymous and known data so you have the complete context of each customer's journey with your brand and therefore, you can take action. And this is where we can help by making it easy to connect your data from any source, whether that's in Salesforce or an external data lake like Snowflake, Google, Amazon or Azure or a connected app. So once you've unified all that data, that brings us quite nicely to where AI plays a role. So this is how you can leverage that data and make sense of all that data. So for example, marketers can gain insights through data visualizations, AI recommendations to help you do things like planned campaigns. So we're talking things like campaign brief, identifying the right audiences, creating segments, building customer journeys and of course, personalizing recommendations for customers. We're also talking about things like generating content at scale, whether that's images or copy. And with our latest generative AI innovations, our Einstein 1 platform can help unlock human potential as well, meaning that you can do all of these things with greater productivity. Now with marketing being natively built on CRM, you'll be able to easily activate your data and use trusted AI to personalize moments across e-mail, ads, mobile, web as well as your digital and your physical shopping channels, social platforms, loyalty programs and sales communications and service cases. And this is unique to Salesforce. So now that we've had a quick overview of the framework and just before I hand over to Jess to go through our very first highlight, I do have one more question for you. I might call this an ad break. Quick ad break. Now of course, we've been talking a whole lot about data and how important it is to understand your customers. And obviously, that's what we want to do today as well. We want to understand you. We've booked you in this webinar for 2:30 on a Wednesday. But we want to know what time of day you prefer to have these webinars in for. Let us know if there's a better time that we should be doing them or whether you prefer to watch the recording back on your own. So this is some of our data that we're going to be getting today to make sure we're doing the right thing by you and personalizing your experience. I'll give everyone a couple of seconds to fill that out. Perfect. All right. Any last calls? And we're away. Okay. Okay. So I guess we've got quite a few from the morning and the afternoon which makes it 53%. Okay. Afternoon's looking good. We're on track, I think. Perfect. What I'll do now for our very first highlight, I'll hand over to Jess, who will be covering that often for you.

Awesome. Thanks very much, LM. So when looking across the marketing platform, let's take a look at the ways that we are innovating on that first section that LM showed, which was data. And this brings me to the first piece of innovation that we'll be seeing. It's personally one that I'm most excited about, and it is segment creation in Data Cloud. So for those who have attended Connections or Dreamforce last year, this innovation should look familiar to you. And this feature, which is available on Data Cloud for marketing and supporting marketing cloud products that integrate with Data Cloud, will enable marketers to create complex segment logic from a descriptive prompt to target a specific audience. Now all your marketer will need to do is to describe the segment that they are looking for using natural language. And when I say natural language, that's basically the human language as we write and speak. And this is going to reduce the technical barrier that is needed for the ability to pull segments, and it lets anyone in your team do this no matter the technical skill set because it doesn't require any specialized knowledge. Your marketer can also edit or regenerate segments with additional fields, which ensures that they can pull the perfect segment each time. And this helps your marketing team save precious hours. It reduces the dependencies on your IT, your data science or your analytics team and it frees up time for your teams overall to focus on other efforts that require more attention. So what a way to start off our list of releases? And it's amazing to see the ways that we work around data, but the innovations definitely don't stop there. So let's take a look at some of the ways that we will innovate with AI, specifically within our account engagement product. And the particular feature that I want to highlight today is how we've been innovating on content creation within account engagement. Now this is in addition to our existing Einstein feature set, and it's available for all of our account engagement advanced and premium customers. We introduced this feature because we heard from our customers the painful challenges of optimizing and personalizing the content that they are creating to better engage with their accounts and different customers and buyers, which is currently a manual step in the campaign life cycle. But by infusing Einstein Gen AI into your existing account engagement landing page, forms and e-mail creation flows, your marketers can intelligently create personalized campaign content using natural language prompts. Marketers will be able to use generative AI to create subject lines, to build e-mail copy and generate forms and landing pages. You can train models and oversee outputs by uploading, downloading and editing Einstein generated content, and you'll be able to save hours of work, and it makes it easy for anyone to create a landing page. So let's see how all of this will come together with a product demonstration. [Presentation]

Amazing. How useful is that? I hope that you can see the really great uses and the really cool things that you'll be able to do within your account engagement platform. Now going back to taking a quick look at our platform. We've seen how we can unify data, then leverage our trusted AI to make sense of all of this data. Once this is done, it's time to activate on content and provide personalized moments. So let's take a look at some more releases. Now last year, we announced several partnerships with Google Ads, with Amazon Ads and Meta Ads that allow marketers to succeed in a cookieless future by harnessing first-party data for personalized ad campaigns. Now I'm excited to say that we've expanded these partnerships even further to include both LinkedIn and Google Display and Video 360, which are all available today. Marketers can use this to personalize their advertising for efficiency and effectiveness using unified data that has been natively consented by the customers across marketing, commerce, service, sales plus any other touch points. Plus, marketers can take control of their marketing strategy by using the Data Cloud, marketer-friendly segmentation and activation tools and immediately activate to advertising partners as well as include touch points across e-mail, SMS, WhatsApp, web, app and connected devices to ensure that your customers are receiving a holistic personalized experience. They can also get unique aggregate-level audience insights within Data Cloud from Google to provide additional understanding of consumer interests, demographics and in-market research trends. Data Cloud users can also activate and send audiences to Google for Google to match against their own data and then send back the segment-level insights into Data Cloud to further optimize campaign planning. An example of this is if an automotive company was gaining deeper insight into a new vehicle campaign launch and they wanted to gain deeper insight into the segments to understand the demographics, lifestyle affinities and in-market research trends to optimize advertising creatives and messaging strategies. So all in all, it's a very, very powerful part of our release, especially because there is an increase in that privacy-focused web standard, and there's now a need for marketers to move to first-party data use for advertising. Awesome. Now we know how important it is to make sure you are connecting all of your different customer engagements. So we're also announcing unified messaging for WhatsApp with marketing and service. This uses connected marketing and service data pulling in from Data Cloud, and our customers can be guided through a seamless promotion-to-purchase experience or be connected to a live service agent all from the exact same WhatsApp conversation. Data Cloud unified customer profile means that all of your service and marketing team can be given the same context to ensure a consistent, great customer experience across every point of their journey. And embedded AI features deliver efficiency across every step, all from journey orchestration to service agent next best action. So it's super, super powerful. Finally, to add to the many ways that we continue to expand our Marketing Cloud capabilities, Marketing Cloud Intelligence now offers out-of-the-box dashboards, reports and pivot tables that let your users view and analyze on WhatsApp deliverability and engagement for their journeys in Marketing Cloud. Your team is able to see trends and patterns in your data at a glance and then use this to measure the effectiveness of their WhatsApp campaigns and demonstrate the value across more of your touch points. So all really powerful releases. I'm now going to pass it over to Steph, who will be taking us through the last part of loyalty management.

Awesome. Thanks, Jess. So yes, now on to our final set of features for today. Let's look at some of the highlights around loyalty management that are launching in our Spring '24 release. First up, global promotion management. This enables marketers to coordinate pricing and loyalty rewards seamlessly, all in one place for more strategic promotion planning, execution and analysis. Now marketers can quickly define, launch and distribute omnichannel promotions in a guided setup, managing all of their promotions with a single view to understand what promotions are running, who they are targeting, credit performance and optimize accordingly. And at Salesforce, we're all about making life easy for marketers. So within global promotions management, we've created predefined promotion templates to help marketers quickly build and deploy promotions using clicks, not code, to define the promotion parameters. Global Promotion Studio is your one-stop shop to manage promotions for both loyalty and non-loyalty members using predictive capabilities to strategically map promotions to your retention goals. All right. Now let's see what this looks like in our product demo. [Presentation]

Now I might be biased, but I think that's pretty cool. Now on to our next release highlight. Who doesn't like to play games? With the spring release, you can now make your loyalty program more engaging and fun with games. You can offer games like spin the wheel and scratch card as program rewards for your members. These gains offer members a chance to win points, vouchers, entries in raffle contests or customer rewards that your brand wants to offer members. You can decide the validity period of the games, the time out duration for members and the color, branding image and the win probability of each game reward. And to ensure that the games don't cross the allocated budget, you can also set limits for each game reward. On top of gamification, there is another way to drive member engagement and enhance member experience. You can now integrate loyalty management with a receipt scanning app that uses optical character recognition to read and interpret receipts. With this solution, members can upload receipts of the products purchased at third-party stores and get rewards for eligible purchases. And this is available on both iOS or Android mobile apps. And as a marketer, you can use data from these receipts to track member behavior and analyze purchasing patterns to design the best promotions for your brand. Now that was only just a few of the highlights that are available as part of loyalty management. So make sure you dive deeper into the release notes to learn more about all the other new features that are available as part of the Spring '24 release. LM, back to you.

Perfect. Thanks, Jessica and Stephane, for those great highlights. What we've come to now is the time for Q&A. Now I'm saying there are quite a few questions in the chart. There's a few to sift through there. And obviously, we've had Cindy and Linda -- Cinda and Lindy, who knows -- answering them as best I can in the background. But what we'd like to do is just pick out a few so we can answer them live here for you today. So let me just have a little sift because I get nothing close to my laptop here. Okay. All right. First one, I think this might be a Jess question, so get ready. How is Salesforce ensuring that all the AI features in Marketing Cloud are secure?

That is a really great question, LM. And thanks for asking that. It's definitely a common question that we get, and we understand completely because businesses are continuing to invest more time and energy into AI and artificial intelligence, so we need to make sure that from Salesforce's side, our features are safe and secure. So the first thing I'm going to note is that trust is Salesforce's #1 value. It's the foundation of everything that we do, and it's not something that we're ever going to compromise. So going a little bit deeper into that trust value, I do want to mention 3 things that Salesforce is doing, and it's applicable for all generative AI features across Salesforce, and we do it to strengthen that trust. So the first thing is what we call a human-in-the-loop approach, which is that the marketer is always going to be in the loop and across the loop, across the whole process. So they are always going to be there to monitor and make adjustments to any AI processes should there be a need. The second thing is that Salesforce will not use and does not use your customer data in training AI models. So your customer data should only be used for your business and nothing else. So the data that we get, it's safe, it's secure, it's not pushed out into anything else. And it brings me into that third point, which is that at Salesforce, we have something called a zero retention policy. It means that no customer data is stored outside of Salesforce, prompts and outputs they're not stored in the language learning model, and they're not learned by them as well, so they just simply disappear. So just to recap that answer. Trust being our #1 value at Salesforce. There's always going to be a human in the loop across all processes. Salesforce does not use customer data to train AI models. And we have what we call a zero retention policy. So hopefully, that answers the question, give some assurance. I'll throw it back to you, LM.

Great. Thanks, Jess. That gave me plenty of time to go sifting for another question. So thank you for that. And thank you for the question as well to the participant. I also found one that says sort of in line with what you were just saying. So I thought it might be good just to cover that off while we were on topic. What makes Einstein different to, say, ChatGPT or like other AI essentially? And that's a really good question. And what I wanted to highlight here, the first thing to consider is that AI is really only as good as your data foundation, right? So the difference is that Einstein is grounded by your existing customer data. So if you think about everything in your CRM, any of your databases, all of that's being used to inform its insights and its responses. So if you don't have that foundation in place, you're less likely to get responses that are as relevant and personalized based on your customers and what they need. And as Jess was saying as well, Einstein AI is protected by our trust layer, and your data doesn't leave the platform. So it's not sent out into the Ether like it would be if you copy pasted it onto OpenAI, which we already know, putting sensitive customer data into open platforms like that or that aren't Salesforce, represent kind of a massive security risk. All right. Now Steph, I feel like we've left you out here. So I'm going -- I've got to go and find your question in the chat here. Okay. Loyalty management looks good. It's interesting. Could you confirm that it's available on Hyperforce?

Yes, I agree. It does look good. So thanks for your question. So loyalty management is on the co-instance. So if you have sales, service or hosted on Hyperforce, loyalty data will reside on the same org. So if we're looking at the APAC lens, which should be most of the people in the audience today, in APAC Hyperforce, we're looking at Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore and South Korea. Hopefully, I haven't -- that's all the countries, I haven't forgotten anyone. But yes, that's all the countries where Hyperforce is available for our core orgs.

Perfect. Thank you very much, Steph. I think we've done quite good time. So I think that's all the questions we'll do today. Again, I know that Cindy and Linda are still probably answering in the background there. But what will leave you with -- and I'll change the slide over. What we'll leave you with is just in case you're wanting to learn more, we've got a couple of things that you can go and do or download. So I'll let you know what's out there. Now first thing I'll say is, in your console, in the Resources tab, there's a whole lot of links in there and goodies so definitely check those out. If you want to read more about the 2024 spring release, those release notes and product demos that you've seen today plus a few extra as well are available in that resources library widget. Now on top of that, the other ways that you can learn about Marketing Cloud and the first of which is registering for connections. And now that's our leading event for marketers, commerce and customer experience professionals, and it's hosted in Chicago. Now I was lucky enough to go to that last year. I would highly recommend if that's something you're able to do, go and do it. It's an incredible event. It's super exciting, lots to say, lots of incredible people to hear, speak as well. And what I'll draw your attention to is there is a discount code on the screen there. So take some time, take a screenshot, make sure you grab that so that you can secure a 35% off tickets with that discount code. Now the second thing you can do, you can download our latest e-book. And that's all about the latest trends in generative AI. Obviously, a very hot topic at the moment, specifically around marketing. And again, that is available in your resources widget as well as a short link on the screen there, you can note down. And lastly, see how we measure up, check out how we do compared to other vendors in the market. And by looking at Gartner's 2024 Magic Quadrant for customer data platforms. So again, that's a link in the console. Now as I said, all links in the console or feel free to take that screenshot now. I'll give everyone a chance to do that so that you can get that juicy discount code before I move on. All right. Now that brings us to the end of our webinar today. I want to thank our speakers today. But most importantly, I want to thank everyone who has tuned in for our webinar. Now we hope that you enjoyed these release highlights. And of course, for any more information, check out those links I mentioned or get in touch with your Salesforce account executive. We hope you have an incredible rest of the week, and we'll see you again for our next release webinar in a few months' time. Thank you so much, and goodbye, everyone.