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

Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's session, How to Accelerate Your Top of Funnel with Sales Engagement, 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 are 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 the 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 our presentation. And with that, I will be turning things over to Spencer to get us started.

Thank you so much. Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the webinar. I'm super excited to have you all here talking about a topic very near and very dear to my heart on How to Accelerate Your Top of Funnel with Sales Engagement. Before we do anything, though, thank you all for being here, for giving us your time, your attention, your energy, it really does -- it means the world. And it's things like this and conversations with all of you today via Q&A, that really help us be better, help us make better products and help us better serve you. So genuinely, thank you so much for being here. And of course, our forward-looking statement, please make purchasing decisions based on what's in market today rather than what you're about to see. I bring this up because I'm really excited today, we have Victor on the line. He's a Director of Product, and he's going to show us some amazing new innovation, which is coming out, which is going to be really, really fun. So please, again, what is currently in market rather than what you're about to see. As Ariana mentioned, I'm Spencer Grover, I'm the Product Marketing Manager here at Salesforce, who's lucky enough to work on the sales engagement product. And I mean like I do a lot of presentations, I do a lot of webinars, but -- and normally, I skip over this full interest like who cares who I am, let's get to some -- get some interesting things, right? But I want to pause for half a second here. I've been in Salesforce for 2 years now. And before that, I worked in startups. And the name of the game in startups is trying to figure out how to get to product market-fit as quickly as possible, trying to figure out who's going to love your product, who's going to be really into it and how that's going to translate into revenue. And what I learned from years of doing this, is really the enormous importance of the top-of-funnel world, BDRs, ADRs, SDRs, whatever you're calling them, it is such a critical function. It helps you innovate quickly, helps you iterate quickly. It's where you get customer feedback the most and the [ shop is ]. It really helps you find and define that product market-fit, figure out the people who love your stuff and are willing to pay for it. So over the years, I've worked very, very closely with a number of top-of-funnel sales teams. And it really is something I'm incredibly passionate about. So really, really excited to be here, really excited to be talking about this topic with all of you. I don't actually want to start with selling though, like we all know that selling is really, really challenging, but buying isn't easy. There's this stat, 77% of buyers say the last thing they bought was very complex or difficult. And we're not talking about the thing, right? We're not talking about people who are buying deep sea drilling equipment or something really complex. The actual process of purchasing, they said was very complex and difficult. I mean buying committees are getting bigger. There's more and more levels of approvals required right now. Brent Adamson, distinguished VP and Advisory at Gartner, he's saying that it has become much more difficult to buy, and this is the single biggest challenge of selling today. It's not actually selling, we're very good at selling, but it's just our customers, all of our customers are struggling to buy. And this is -- this means that it's really, really difficult for our sellers just to keep up, right? So buyer expectations are changing. They're trying to navigate this new world as they're trying to figure out how to buy stuff. And I don't know how many of you on the line today, there's a good chunk here. I'm sure some of you have tried to buy anything at a business and it's really, really challenging. And so we're now in a situation where most of the buyers of stuff are saying that their experience is falling short of where they want it to be, right? It's just important. We're really struggling to meet that expectation. And at the same time, our top-of-funnel sellers, again, ADRs, BDRs, SDRs, whatever you're calling them, they're just completely overwhelmed. We're presenting them with all this data, and I had to describe to me recently, and I thought this was phrased so beautifully, I had to describe this wall of data, this impregnable wall of information that was just overwhelming all of our teams with. And it's not really connected. It's really hard to use. And we said, look at all those cool stuff, you should be -- we should be able to prospect super effectively. But that's really, really challenging because it's all disconnected and it is kind of all over the show. Our BDRs, our SDRs, our ADRs, they have all these manual tasks that really -- all these building blocks that make up their role. And I think the most heartbreaking thing is that even when these sellers know that something can be automated, oftentimes, they're unable to do that. So they know a task can be automated. They know there's ways to do it, but they end up doing it manually anyways because they just can't -- because again, they just can't quite get these pieces to work together, can't quite get the data to talk, can't quite get the tooling to talk together. And speaking of tooling, the tools we have are incredibly complex. I don't know if there's another part of the sales funnel, all the way from prospecting through to quoting and closed one. I don't know if there's another sliver that has had as much technology invested into it at top of funnel. I mean we're talking like CMSs, LMSs, CRMs, of course, but also sales engagement technology, conversational intelligence technology, data intelligence technology, market intelligence technology, competitive intel. There is so much information and so many tools all of which are requiring different log-ins, all of which are requiring switching between different interfaces, different screens. It's incredibly challenging, which is why most of the reps are saying they're overwhelmed. So we said, here's all this cool stuff to help you. Here's all these data. Here's all these tools. Here's all these automation. And still, reps are just overwhelmed. And still, as we've seen, we're not able to deliver the buying experience that our customers want. So we sort of started thinking about this and trying to figure out, well, what if we did this in a different way, right? What if we could transform how these sellers work? What if instead of that wall of data, which inevitably kind of gets ignored and people work off their gut in sync. What have instead of that, we could transform that outreach to something that's really hyper data-driven because we've got the data. We all have the data, right? What if we could transform that to something that was really driven, use that data, leveraging that data, leveraging those insights to really effectively drive that outreach? What if we could transform our top of funnel wraps day-to-day? I mean when I worked with BDRs, I would say about half of them start their day every day by either writing down a to-do list or opening a spreadsheet that they have. And they track like I need to do this, this, this. And they work through it. What if we could transform it from that manual process into something that was way more automated, way more powered by AI, way easier for our sellers to use. And what if we could transform the experience, right, transform it from something that is built for tech, it's something that's built for our sellers. And what I mean is that -- and I'm sure, again, if anyone on the line has purchased or worked with technology before, I'm 100% sure that you said, "Oh, we can get our sellers to do this. We can get our top of funnel to do this." And you definitely can. You can get them to use whatever technology you want. But what if we could transform that thinking from something that's very tech-centric to something that's really focused on where reps are working, focused on the person because we know where top of funnel happens, right? Sales is fundamentally this external facing world. So prospecting and top of funnel takes place in e-mail, takes place online, takes place in LinkedIn, takes place all these other places. So what if we could transform it from this very insular technology focus, this technology-centric approach, transform that experience into something that actually works for reps where reps are working. And there's kind of a couple of things that we came up with, thinking about how to do this, there's a few key pieces. And really, if we want to accelerate our top of funnel with sales engagement, there are really 2 things that we can do. First off, we can simplify the process. Right now, we know -- we absolutely know that if we follow a process, if we can define a process, we can really effectively drive revenue. And so we -- if we can simplify that and make it easier for folks to follow, this is going to be really critical. So there's a couple of ways that we can do this. First off, we can optimize that outreach, so help reps understand what to do. Then make it easy for them to do it from their tools that they already have. They're working out of e-mail. They're working out of Gmail. They're working out of Chrome or out of Outlook. So take that step-by-step guidance and give it to them in the tools they're working from. And mostly, bring it all together, bring everything together into a single list to say, "Here are the tasks you need to do. Here are the tasks that are going to get you where you need to go. Crack through these, work the process, trust the process, make the process easy to follow." That's what's going to drive revenue. The second major thing we can do is we can automate it, right? We can automate a lot of this work, we can automate in a few different ways. So number one, we can automate it for reps. Every -- we want our sellers, we want our top-of-funnel folks who trust that process because the trusting the process and working the process is what is going to ultimately drive that value. I'm super excited because you also have Charlie on the line. I know that he's really, really passionate about process. So I'm excited to hear from him in a little bit. But we can -- we want our sellers to work the process, but we also want our sellers to have the autonomy to say, "Okay, this is -- I know that this is what's going to drive, this is what's going to help." And it's small things because, again, we want that human in the loop. This isn't a completely robotic automated thing. We want that person to use their intuition, to use their creativity. So help them automate little steps, help them automate little wins to make their job a little bit easier. We also want to automate at a higher level. We want to automate manager at an admin level, at an organizational level, because again, we know the process. We have the data. We have all the information. We notice that if we do these steps in this order, this is what's going to drive revenue. So let's automate some of that. Let's say, "Well, maybe we can make this a little bit easier and give our top-of-funnel sellers time back in their day to really build those connections, to build those relationships that they need in order to progress those deals." And finally, we can automate a lot of the data capture. Top of funnel, I think, is this really interesting role in that, I mean, same with all sales, but especially top of funnel. It captures a lot of data that is used by other folks. So for instance, when I worked with top of funnel teams really closely as a PMM, particularly start-ups, the data that they were generating is what I used to inform positioning, to inform messaging, to inform how -- who we were targeting, how we were talking to them. All that raw data that our top of funnel is generating and capturing, that really became the foundation for your organizational strategy. And so it's such a critical piece that if we can automate capturing some of that, not only is that going to make free up time for our sellers, it's also going to make our data cleaner and more accurate and better, which is going to ultimately help everyone. So if we can do these 2 things, if we can just simplify the process and automate a little bit, automate here and there, those are going to massively accelerate our top of funnel, which is really, really exciting. I am -- I've chatted for more than enough, as you can tell, I can talk about this topic genuinely all day long. But rather than continuing to bore you, I'm really excited to pass it off to Victor to get us through the actual product and actual sales engagement, so really, really excited. Quick plug before Victor comes on the line though, if you do have any questions, please drop them in the Q&A, and we'll do our very best to get to them at the end. Victor, show us some cool stuff.

Thank you, Spencer. Hey, everyone. It's great to meet you all. My name is Victor. I am the Product Lead for Sales Cloud Seller Experiences, been with Salesforce for the past 6 years. And I've been building sales engagement since the inception of the product when it was so-called high-velocity sales and targeting specifically just the top-of-funnel motions. But since then, the product has really expanded its exact aperture to truly become the system of action that sits on top of our system of engagement and record. I would love to walk you through a couple of our latest capabilities, what is the typical life of a seller that's able to utilize all the different tools to simplify their process, to automate the mundane, and we're going to do it everywhere where that seller works. So give me a second, I'm going to go ahead and pull this up so that we can walk through this strategy together. Okay. Spencer, am I up?

Good to go.

Okay. Awesome. So like any typical seller does when they start their day, they may not actually start their day inside of Salesforce. When I was a seller, I start my day with my e-mail. I'm sifting through my inbox, trying to figure out who has messaged, who has pinged me in the past couple of hours while I was sleeping. Who should I be following up first? And who should I be engaging to start building out my top-of-funnel pipeline? And this motion of me engaging customers, me proactively reaching out, me personalizing is an activity that I repeat over and over again, 20, 30, 40 times a day, just to hit the right volumes that I need to start filling out that funnel. Something that would have ticked in me typically, I would say, 3 minutes, 5 minutes with every single correspondence now can boil down to simple seconds to be able to start ghostwriting and to start personalizing that message in order for me to send a message that is really specific to this customer at hand. I could go in, I can make quick adjustments to this message. I can even utilize custom prompts that are defined by my admin, by my ops team to utilize the power of generative AI as a way for me to scale my personalization and to engage with customers in a more semi-autonomous way, also to make it simple for me to schedule meetings with my customers instead of me needing to go back and forth with them, I could easily go in and just slot in my next 3 available times with a simple click. Then customers here could take out the time that works. If not, they can select another time and then boom, I'm going to have a meeting on the calendar, without me lifting my finger and doing too much work to make it happen. But outside of e-mail, I'm going to be constantly researching customers on the web, looking for my next target, trying to identify the right signals for me to be able to take action. Many times, I am working inside of LinkedIn. Now the power of Salesforce is going to follow me. I don't necessarily need to work within my e-mail. I don't need to go into Lightning all the time to get my work done. With Salesforce Everywhere, I have an extension that follows me on every single page that I'm on. Imagine I'm prospecting a sales navigator, trying to figure out my account list, I'm trying to determine who I need to go after. Now Salesforce Everywhere is contextual. I'm able to go in, I can easily update information on the fly, such as this annual revenue figure without me needed to jump directly into Lightning. If I were to scroll further down, and I see contacts that I need to be able to reach out to directly from this single screen as well, I could easily go in, start creating new contacts, opportunities, leads with a couple of simple clicks. Beyond me just creating and ingesting data into Salesforce, I have the full power of actionability within this [ ipano ] experience as well. All of my tasks, all of my cadences are easily discoverable. I could hone in into things that are important by things that I'm storing. And directly from this panel, I could easily also e-mail to any customers also using the power of generative AI without me needing to hop off of this specific screen. Alongside me managing my tasks, I also have a handy workspace available, which is a spreadsheet-like experience that enables me to quickly get my data into Salesforce. No longer do I need to drill into each individual record. I see my opportunities, accounts, contacts, leads, any custom object that I want in this spreadsheet-like experience. And for me to update information is as simple as me putting in and adjusting simple values like what I would do with the spreadsheet here, and everything is going to be prepopulating back into my Salesforce instance. All right. So I just went through a couple of prospect emotions through the day. I define my prospect list. I made a couple of touch points with my customers, with my prospects. And I'm hopping back into Salesforce. And now, I'm greeted with a new seller home where I'm able to start and end my day to also have a bird's eye view of what's going on across my pipeline, my accounts, my relationships, my close and open opportunities. I have the ability to view contacts that's may be suggested to me based on my activity within my e-mail. I could easily define my goals by defining the number of meetings, the number of calls and e-mails that I want to be able to accomplish on a weekly or monthly basis. And every single time I book a meeting or make a call or send out an e-mail through Salesforce, that would automatically track that for me. I can hop in into viewing my events for the day and any upcoming task as well directly off of this single pane of glass. Let's drill in a bit, let's take a look at a couple of top contacts that I want to go into. Now, I'm greeted with a new and enhanced version of contactless views. We call it the contact intelligence view, where I have a Salesforce prescribed experience that gives me visibility into how I should be targeting my prospects, my contacts based on different types of activity or engagement metrics. I can easily view people who are having no activity or just sitting idle that I need to engage with or maybe folks that I have an open task on, maybe an upcoming cadence that I need to proactively drive and engage with immediately. Without me needing to swivel into each of these individual record to view their activity information, I have the power of a side panel experience infused with insights, that's going to give me visibility into areas to pay attention to like Lauren Bailey here with 4 open service cases. Maybe I need to resolve these service cases before I actually make a call to her. As I look through and view my previous activities, I could easily see within this single pane of glass, all the different things that are upcoming, what our recent, that may prompt me to actually drill in and potentially take action. So let's go into Lauren Bailey here. Let's see what's going on with her specific record. Directly off of this contact record now I could be greeted with an automated action that is reminding me to enroll into a cadence because this specific lead is showing high marketing touch points. But the power of this recommendation, the power of this automation is the fact that you could do this on your own as a seller or as a manager. You do not need to go into flow, you do not need to build complex programmatic queries to be able to define the simple automation. It's as simple as you clicking and pointing and defining your criteria for the records that you own or for the records that your team owns. Here, I'm rolling into a hot prospect cadence. I have the ability to go in and define conditions on my own here. Here, I'm defining it based on an account engagement score that is greater than 80. But I do have the ability here to just trigger off of an engagement, such as an open happening, a customer reply, a meaningful connect that I have over the phone. I could even drill as far into the conversations that on mining, such as a mention of a competitor or a specific product or if a customer is hitting specific challenges or there is an attrition risk, I can always use this as a way of guiding my reps to the next step based on things that are happening in the moment of that conversation. Beyond me being able to trigger off of automation, trigger off of insights, off of insights that's generated from my AI, I can also use AI as a way to bring me up to speed. So if I were to, let's just say, look at this account, Omega Inc., and I want to see what's going on with Omega, so I could have a little bit more prescriptive guidance on how I want to take the next conversation. I could easily go in now and just create a summary. And then with the summary, it will give me full visibility on what's happening with this account, so I can start planning my next action accordingly. And this type of summarization works across my accounts, my contacts, my leads, my opportunities. So a lot of different places where I could now be brought up to speed within seconds without me perusing through this entire record, trying to figure out what is going on. Now let's drill into one of those cadences that was recommended in order to have a more prescriptive guidance on what is the best way to engage and communicate with this client, how can I scale out my best practices in a way that it could impact my entire organization, how do I transform my A players -- transfer all my B players into A players based on the best practices that my A players are enacting out in the field with every single touch point. So here, I'm drilling in into my newly updated and revamped Cadence Builder. And within this new Cadence Builder framework, I have the ability to define different types of steps to guide my sellers along on every single step of the journey. I have the ability to add in different call scripts or e-mail variants in the case that I want to test out different language to see what sticks and what doesn't. I have the ability to define timing, specifically to when this step should be assigned down to the hour of the day. I could affect the way that this step is going to be due. I can even kick off flow automation in the case that I want to, let's just say, update a field after someone has completed the specific set. As part of this new Cadence Builder framework, we now also have the ability to define unique cadence tracks. And you could think about tracks sort of as a differentiated sub cadence that you're able to drive specific set of actions when a condition is met. For example, if a customer has responded positively with a conversation, maybe they're interested in schedule a meeting, I then could prescribe a specific step whenever there is that positive sentiment detected within the conversational flow on any step. And I could also do the same in the case that I get pushed back. The customer says they may not be interested. Then I could also now handle and provide specific guidance in order to lead my rep along on how to handle the right objection, how to transform a no into a yes, and to be able to win back that customer engagement. Alongside me creating this cadence, I want to make sure I'm also able to continuously iterate on it, utilizing feedback that I'm going to be able to gather out from the field. No longer do I need to do lengthy write-alongs with my sellers to be able to understand what is happening, what the power of conversation insights. I have the ability to go in and understand every single call, every single meeting that's going on with these by properly classifying this specific engagement with key insights that are important to me based on product competitor as well as any custom mentions. My reps no longer need to take any notes. I could easily go in and view all of the transcript here to understand what's going on. But let's just say I'm trying to figure out what I want to do against a competitor. And sometimes, it may take some time to go through 30, 50 calls to get a good lay of the land and understand what's going on. I now have the ability to look at a summary generated by Einstein that gives me visibility into the sentiment, what exactly is happening from a call standpoint and to help me define what are the next steps that I need to do, even assign specific action items that can easily go in and start creating as a task for me to follow up later. I can even start exploring the conversation itself in order to dig in a little bit deeper into what's happening like tell me the pricing around my competition. And if that was something that was mentioned in the call, it would give you an answer. If it doesn't, it will say that it doesn't. Or if you just ask it for another couple of details like what are -- what is my next action I need to drive that is the most important for this client? And then it will review the transcript for you to be able to figure out what it is based on specific moments that's happening within the conversational flow to be a little bit more direct with the guidance that's been given. All right. So I walked you through a couple of key capabilities across the seller persona, across managers, across ops to be able to align the organization, to guide selling, to be able to automate simple processes and also to take advantage of artificial intelligence in places where it makes sense to augment and to assist the moment of selling. Spencer, I'm going to hand it back to you.

Amazing. Thank you, Victor. I get so excited every time, you definitely -- product, every time you do, I swear, there' s new cool awesome stuff. So thank you so much. I'm excited to kind of pivot our webinar now to a little bit of a fireside chat and really excited to welcome Charlie Elbert to our webinar. So Charlie, thank you, first off, for being here. Why don't you start by telling us a little bit about who you are, what you do and how you help Salesforce.

Yes. Thanks, Spencer. So yes, Charlie Elbert, I'm the Vice President of Sales Development for North America. So I lead a 100% SDR organization. And so what that means at Salesforce is that we have 100 SDRs who are waiting for every lead that marketing generates to follow up and make sure that we provide a great customer experience, but also drive pipeline and revenue to our sales business partners. And so, Victor is a close business partner for us because sales engagement is critical to how we do that. That's it. Happy to be here.

Yes. Thank you. You mentioned that Victor is obviously a critical business partner, a critical business partner for all of us, really. Why don't you -- can you tell me a little bit about how you're using sales engagement?

Yes, absolutely. So our -- almost every conversation that SDRs have in our organization is driven through a sales engagement cadence today. So when leads come in, we use offer types and product interests to assign cadences automatically. So every call that an SDR makes is data-driven and giving the customer relevant content. And we found that by like our investment in this has improved customer experience, but it's also -- like Victor has commented a few minutes ago, it's really raised the floor of what SDRs are capable of doing because the experience is so consistent from SDR to SDR.

I love that. Tell me a little bit more about that consistency? Why -- like why is it so important to drive that consistency for your organization?

Yes. I mean -- so I've been at the company for 10 years. I've spent 8 years in sales development. So I've been a frontline manager. I've been a second line leader of the organization. I've led the org for the last 4.5 years. And we've -- for years, we found that while the conversations that SDRs are having and the relevance of those conversations, matters a lot, right? The people who were winning were the people who had the tightest process, and the people who could consistently execute what we knew worked. And for the first 6 years I was in the organization, we built tons of manual dashboards to like, we teach people PowerPoint slides, we show them how to do it. It was call 1, and then call 4. We had reporting how many things have you called once that haven't called for 3 days? It was really bootstrapped. But the people who were never on those dashboards were winning. And we -- as sales engagement kind of came into our ecosystem, it was a no-brainer because all of this work that we spent on building a consistent process from lead-to-lead and rep-to-rep was tremendously time-consuming for our leaders. And it prevented us from getting -- like coaching people on things like how to have meaningful conversations, great discovery. We had to spend too much time on the basics of the customer experience but now that can just happen in the background. But I do feel like we also could learn things like, which calls do we not need to make. Like we did a bunch of analysis that say, "Hey, persistence is sort of king in sales." We've all heard that, but sometimes persistence is a waste of time. And like we were able to provide data and said, "Hey, like if you've called someone 9 times, it's time to break up." They're not in. And we informed cadences that people aren't just guessing all the time, and that consistency has been huge for us.

Yes. I mean I have both built and sat in those training sessions for how to manage that process. And there are some glazed eyes in them, I'm going to be honest there, providing that process in real time is so much more valuable. Victor, obviously, Charlie is not the only person at Salesforce. You work across the organization. What are some other use cases that you're seeing for us?

We started with Charlie's team and they were amazing with providing the first layer of feedback that really guided the product in its infant years. And since then, we've expanded to almost every single sales team at Salesforce. We're in the hands of BDRs. We're in the hands of AEs. We're in the hands of SCs. They use sales engagement and the broader seller experience suite to be able to manage their day, prioritize their tasks, whether it is a cadence work item or it's a one-off task. They use it to stay organized and to be able to share best practices. They leverage it to auto log activities to save them time throughout the day, and they use it to also repeat success. But what is also most critical is us be able to bring that productivity to everywhere where sellers are working and also enable CRM for it to be contextual, assistive, proactive, all in the flow of work.

Charlie mentioned something, I think, really interesting. You said that as we brought in that standardization for Charlie's team, that really allowed us to be -- to drive a lot of this with data. Victor, are you seeing other teams at Salesforce apply that same logic, like look at those cadences, look at that data and say, "Okay, cool, we can stop after this point." Like are you seeing that same like real process optimization engine rolling throughout the organization?

Totally. It really depends on which portion of the organization is going to be guided with that data especially in organizations like Charlie where it's very tops on heavy, right? One little change that you're going to do is going to affect everyone's performance. I think you need to be very quantitative with the way that you're looking at it and utilizing to help guide the next best action to make these small tweaks and optimizations in the process or it could make a significant difference when you increase productivity by 3% to 5%. When you talk about AEs, they use it a bit more in a qualitative way. They do it as a way to enhance, the way that they currently do the work, and they do it more at a team-by-team level, right? I'm trying to inspect what works fall within my industry, what works fall within my segment? How do I take what I've learned and share those best practices with my fellow team members? How do I bring people along and talk about like what is this amazing e-mail template that got me a 50% click rate, right? How do I replicate that with other people on my team that may are -- may be new members and they're just ramping up. They're trying to understand what is the best way to solve. I think there are a lot of different ways that you can look at data. From a leadership standpoint, data is oil. It's a gold mine where you could go in and look at all these [ conversation ] insights in a way that can help inform the entire corporate strategy, right? Without you waiting -- let's just say you're marketing, right? You're trying to figure out what you need to do for your next best collateral to go after your competition. Now you don't need to wait for a win report anymore. You could go in, listen to the conversations, know what's going on and automatically use it as a way to start creating the best content to help enable the field without making it into a waterfall model.

Yes. And that's always been really my passion for top of funnel that just you get, the feedback you get and the data you get is so, so useful to drive honestly, just better business strategy and really help you scale that out. We talked a little bit about automation. I want to shift gears a little bit. Tell me a little bit more about how automation is helping your top of funnel sellers, Victor?

Yes. Ultimately, the goal is to still support and enable sellers with the fundamentals of selling, right? Like with or without automation, sellers will still need to focus on connecting with their buyers, resolving pain points, identifying need and ultimately driving customer success. But like every single seller that I speak to, time is probably the biggest limitation, right? You only have limited hours per day to get your work done, and you're usually operating on the customers' clock, not your clock, right? So if you want to be able to squeeze out -- squeeze more out of every single second that seller is working, you will want to do so with automation so that you could use your time more effectively and bring human touch to those key moments within the buying cycle. So we started off many years ago with automation technology that's going to help take off some of the easier tasks off of sellers' plates like updating their CRM, maybe automatically creating a task. Right now, we're more focused on assistive automation, which is using technology to help reps work faster and get more done like able to craft a personalized e-mail. But in the future, it will evolve into machine-led, assistive at scale where the technology itself can actually do certain jobs on its own. And then in that future state, it will be the reps that's going to be auditing and editing to just keep everything on track. And that's where automate AI really going to start to blur.

Yes. I love that it's kind of like here's where we are with automation, but there's this amazing future of what these tools are going to be capable of doing. Charlie, as Victor is talking through this, painting this rosy world, how are you -- how do you think about balancing the world of like automation but also that manual component of sales? Like how do you balance the automation, almost with like the person and the seller?

Yes. I mean I think the data supports the process consistency -- every sales leader wants they're people selling, right, and not doing manual tasks. And the stuff that it takes to get on the phone, I think we're all comfortable with automating and making it as easy as possible for our people to get somebody on the phone. And then we want the creativity to kick in, right? And then we want people to have those conversations and try to understand the pains and map them to solutions, but like we poured through the data and having 100 SDRs do 100 different things doesn't work, we need to automate some of these processes because it works better when it's consistent. And also, it lets us learn when we're making mistakes, and change them at scale. And so like I think the automation is critical how we will run these functions.

Yes. And I love that point of like changing at scale that again, if you're making one small tweak, let's say, instead of -- you mentioned earlier, after the ninth call, it's not effective. If you're making 8 calls instead of 9 for 1 BDR or 1 SDR, excuse me, that's not a huge change. But if you're changing it for 100, that's 100 calls maybe a day, maybe a week, like that's a lot of extra selling time that you know how back in your days.

It's per lead not per...

That's true. So it's even more selling time back in your day, apologies. But that, to me, is so powerful and being able to really bring that to your team because to your point, this frees up their time to have a better conversation, frees up that mental capacity. We are Salesforce, we can't possibly have a webinar without talking about AI. We've had AI for a while now. It's not something that just came out with the evolution of generative. And it's really this evolution of early automation into predictive and again into that generative world. Victor, how are you seeing AI and sellers really start to work together, because those, to your point earlier, that there is a lot of blurring of lines here. So how are you seeing those 2 work together?

Yes. It's similar to our story to automation, right? Like AI today is assistive by either driving more effectiveness with every single touch point so that you're able to boost your rate to advance or to close the deal or you could use it to make sellers more efficient, right? So that means they can do more with less. They can potentially touch more customers in the same amount of time. Where generative AI comes in is now the ability to start scaling out areas that we thought previously was not possible. That was only available using human capital, such as creativity and personalization. Now that actually becomes a possibility to be completed by the machine, it's not going to be 100% as effective as a human but it's going to be infinitely less costly for you to be able to do that specific touch point. It also starts blurring the lines a little bit between sales and marketing now where sales in the past was limited by your human capital and marketing had that infinite scale. But nowadays, you may not run into -- in the future world, that may not be the situation anymore where top of funnel will evolve, it will evolve from individual one-to-one relationships to almost a one to many setup, right? Sellers may end up playing a much more strategic role by focusing their time and effort on their largest leads and opportunities and letting the machine take over for the leads that may have lower propensity, that may be falling by the wayside or like the seller is maybe just hopping in and out between different conversations that is led by the machine to audience in the right moment and to course correct. It's similar to how you could think about those like 1960 switchboard operators, where right now they only have one line. But in the future, they may be running dozens of AI sellers and providing the guidance that they need and they're able to personalize upcoming scheduled e-mails or they could take over when calling back to a customer that is encountering mixed intense signals or some type of negative sentiment.

Charlie, how are you thinking about AI for your team?

Yes. I mean I think I largely agree with Victor. I think that the vision is that there's still a lot of need for sellers, but we can optimize their time and get them to the hottest, most sales-ready things and let technology do some of the -- get more of the nose for them, right, and get through some of the things that are lower value. And I think like in a future state, I think we should see that the funnel once humans engaged should get a lot more nail shape, I think, like we stop having to have sellers whittle down the funnel because the machine can do that and the humans can pick it up when it's ready to really be worked and progressed. And so I think Victor, we save a lot of time that way.

Yes. So you're going from -- if this is the world right now, these are all of the leads you're working, as we bring more AI, ultimately, your SDRs are going to end up working only these ones, which are the very, very best and really focusing on building those relationships very, very quickly. And I think what's so interesting about all of this is that as we -- as AI gets better and we start to use it more and more just not even in sales but just in our daily lives, that human connection is going to become more and more and more valuable, like that is going to be such an important part of selling a prospecting of just like building those relationships as AI starts to saturate. In the same vein, Charlie, where do you see the -- what's the future of this top-of-funnel role, SDRs, BDRs, ADRs, all of them, like what's really the future of top of funnel?

I mean I think the problem stays, right, like which is that we need to drive demand to our sellers. And it's going to -- I think that's the role -- I think Victor's comment about like where sales begins and marketing ends, I think like that's a really well-articulated way to describe it. It's like what role we all play into it and how you add this third element of AI into it, for sure, like I think our roles will probably evolve, but the problem of driving demand to our sellers is going to stay real. And so I think the roles will blur a little bit.

Yes. Yes. I think that's -- I think you're absolutely right. I mean, I think we've already seen this at an organization, not specifically at Salesforce, but organizationally, this idea of blurring as marketing gets more and more and more involved in that top of funnel piece, that handoff gets a little bit messier. So I think it matches that we'll start to see the work itself really start to shift. Victor, you work with tons of customers, you work, obviously, with us internally. Where do you see the future of the role going?

It's definitely going to be more strategic. One potential convergence is between sales, marketing, you got to think about your content strategy in a bit different way because you're going to be potentially leveraging different departments like 2 different arms on the same body. And also with this new event into AI, you now have this new potential AI seller, right? And that AI seller will only be as good as how you set it up, how you train it, how you ground it with the right insight with you also beating it the right details across your Customer 360. So they have an entire 360 view of the customer journey to provide the right guidance, to provide the right assistance to sellers, but also to be able to sell on their own.

Yes. Yes. I love that. We're closing in on time, and I want to make sure we have enough -- there's been a zillion questions in our Q&A panel. So if you do have questions, please drop them there. We'll get to as many as we can. I want to make sure we have time for that. But Charlie and Victor, what is one takeaway for all the folks on the line today? Charlie, we'll start with you.

I think it's to embrace the standardization of this. And like sellers want customization, but standardization and automation are the friends to unlocking real productivity gains and ultimately revenue impact?

Yes, I love that. Victor, what's your -- what's the one thing you want people to walk away with?

For me, it all starts with the data. And like Charlie has mentioned, standardization that's even more critical as we start to think about how that data is going to be consumed. So how do you clean it up? How do you get it all into a single place where you could now use it to walk the right actions for your sellers to take, to use it as that proper grounding for AI to make the right recommendation. The performance of your intelligence will solely be based off of the data that you feed the model. So the best way you could do it is to start now, have your sellers start using their CRM as their system of action, have them use CRM to log all of their activities with those actions that they're taking from CRM automatically and to start beating the beast.

Yes. I mean, I think you said it like way at the top of the webinar, data is like oil for businesses, and I think that's so accurate. So the more that we can clean it up, that's going to be really key. Okay. I do want to shift gears a tiny bit because I've got to hang out with you guys and ask all these amazing question. It's been really fun. I do want to give our audience a chance if you have questions, drop them in the Q&A. But we'll crack through as many as we can. I'm going to kind of group a bunch of questions together here. And Victor, excuse me, Victor, I think we'll start with you. How are you seeing -- we've talked a little bit about it, but can you tell me a little bit more about how you're seeing this kind of technology, sales engagement tech being deployed for lower down the funnel roles, think like your account executives, like any folks like that?

It's bite-size piece mill pieces of automation and assistance. You're not trying to orchestrate their entire job, their entire way of defining the customer journey. It's about how do you find those quick wins, right? Like how can I reduce the ability for me to book a meeting with the customer going from 5 to 6 engagements down to a click? How can I start personalizing my e-mails better where if I'm inviting my customer up to dinner or to a specific event, how do I do that at scale, so I could touch 20, 30 people at once without meeting to write a personal e-mail every single time? How do I understand my customers better? How do I find my next best customer based on signals that are coming in and finding my next best customer may mean me understanding my existing customer base well, right? It doesn't have to be a brand-new, net new customer I'm hunting, it could be an upsell. It could be a cross-sell. That's super important for a down funnel as you start growing the spend of your customers.

Yes. I love that. And I think what's really interesting here is, Charlie, when we've talked about it a few times now, really how you're scaling that optimization. So a small change, one small change to maybe one cadence has a big impact because there's so many. Victor, it's interesting when you think about further down the funnel, we're talking about one account executive running invites for, say, one dinner or one event. We're talking 20, 30 people. So it's like -- it's almost like the exact opposite, right? Those like micro optimizations at an individual level to help them just get through their job, get through their day, because we know that AEs are still going to prospect. There's very few organizations where AEs don't do any prospecting at all. So we may as well embrace that reality and give them the ability to do it more effectively. Charlie, again, I'm combining a few questions. So hopefully, this can help a few different people. But there's been a lot of questions in Q&A around how and if you see SDRs deviating from that sales cadence to try and do stuff on their own? And how you sort of approach that conversation?

I mean, yes, of course, I think any new technology, people are resistant to change. And I think egos are some of those play a role in it, right? Like I know better. I think that the first thing is that like -- we have to sell the change I just tell in some situations, which is to say like, here's the data, here's why it works, here's why like we don't recommend ego rogue. We also have a lot of oversight. We track like adoption rates for every SDR. So we can say, "Hey, like you're not winning and part of the reason you're not winning is because you're not using it." Like we have zero examples of people going rogue and winning. And so like -- but the data is our friend. And I think like it tends to be a pretty solution-oriented conversation because we want everyone to be as successful as possible, but we just show that like we're not doing it to like say that we're the sales engagement power user, we're doing it to help everyone win. And when we get to a shared goal, it gets a lot easier.

Yes. Yes. I love the idea of anchoring this in that joint success. And I think -- and this is part of the reason why I personally love working with sales teams. When the structures we've set up for sales, overwhelmingly is that if they are successful then the organization is successful. And so there really is that alignment. I think bringing it back to that to say, this is how you're going to get to where you want to be and where we want you to be like I think that makes it so, so powerful. Okay. Everyone, thank you all so much. I know we didn't get to all these questions. We will try and get some more afterwards, but I do want to give you a little bit of time before your next meeting. Thank you, Charlie. Thank you, Victor, for all of your time. We really appreciate it. And yes, thanks, everyone. Have a wonderful day and enjoy the rest of it. Have a good day, everyone.