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

Hi, everyone. Welcome to five ways of making CRM easy and scalable for your business. I'm particularly excited to dive into this content that we have prepared for you because it's going to be focusing around the best practices at Starter and Pro Suite at Salesforce. Before we begin, we want to acknowledge the Gadigal people of this land and pay our respect to elders past and present. Much of today's content is focused on data and best practices and then products showing current functionality. However, should anything forward-looking come up, we want to remind you to please make your purchasing decisions based on existing features and functionality. I'm Kate Nguyen, and I'm an Account Executive for SMB here at Salesforce focused on Starter and Pro Suite editions. I've been with Salesforce for over 5 years and much of that been spent in the SMB space. So I've had the great fortune to connect with and learn from businesses of all between small and medium space -- in this space like leaders like yourself. Joining me today, I have Max Josue, who has had amazing conversations within this space as well. He's also the account executive in the small to medium business space. And he's going through conversations of CRM evaluations and has amazing insights to share with you today. So how we're going to spend a bit of our next 35 to 40 minutes together to get today? First, we will have a talk about why having the CRM discussion is important, whether it's for the first time introducing a CRM to your business or you're approaching it for the second time. What are some common pain points or needs others face. Next, we will do a bit of questing based on common perceptions and concerns we hear. And finally, we'll then jump into an actual CRM demo led by Max, who will show you some key steps and highlights before we get started. I also wanted to point out on your screen today is on the far left-hand side is resources available to you to kind of walk through during this conversation. And then on the right-hand side is a question box for you to drop down any questions that you might come up with after the conversation. So what we're hearing is running a business has always been a challenging endeavor. From the many customer conversations I've had over the years, I've heard common themes, especially for SMB leaders that the day-to-day struggles of finding new prospects, bringing in revenue and juggling customer issues are always top of mind. Those in addition to broader headwinds like inflation, shifting priorities of customers and the business leader, consumer spending continues to tighten, putting increased pressure on businesses to do more with less. And this all leads into increased pressure towards efficiency. How do we do -- again, how do we do more with what we already have. To top that all off, there is an ever evolving consumer preference, making it hard for businesses to keep up. As it relates to consumer preferences, we know that customer experience remains a key factor in paying royalty. But the gap between customer expectations and experience that businesses are able to deliver is widening. From the state of the connected consumer report, we know that 65% of customers expect companies to adapt to their changing needs and preferences. But because of fully integrated technology and processes, we see 61% of customers say they are just -- they feel like they're just a number to the business. When businesses are adaptable and can't adjust to their customers' needs or even leverage the data they already have access to, it doesn't need for a very great customer experience. The CRM conversation often arises when business leaders are trying to solve this gap. So is the CRM setup expensive and difficult? I'll go into this a little bit more detail with all the many common challenges that we're hearing and also addressing the solutions. How can we make the CRM more approachable? And hopefully, we can discuss some of those perceptions that folks maybe yourself often hear part of that implementing CRM solutions. These value propositions help directly review entry or data that competitors are throwing at us. We are reducing perceived barriers to entry. There is a 30-day free trial available as you'll see in that resource box on the left-hand side. And you'll see in-app guidance and Spotlight cards are designed for standard business users in mind, new user blogs, [indiscernible], you name it. We do not have any hidden or required implementation costs. We offer different paths to getting started. First is using all of the in-app guidance and the do-it-yourself resources available. And secondly, we also have optional Premier Success offerings for businesses that would like more detailed guidance and support. Accelerating growth with enhanced Lightning UI with clear and intuitive navigation with faster time to value. We also have built on Salesforce trusted customer-first platform. And on top of that, future investment flexibility for growth. It really removes the concern for any future places of other systems. So in a moment, we're going to hear from Max to really go into a live demo of what this really looks like and how you can really navigate through the platform yourself. But why are businesses exploring CRM options? Before we go into this, I would love to kind of throw a poll out there for you to kind of engage with what are the biggest challenges that you're facing at the moment when you're trying to adopt your CRM. With Salesforce, we launched Pro Suite in November last year 2024. So it's been live for about a year now, and it was really designed to help tackle the challenges we continue to see within SMB business. It's Salesforce's newest addition that is truly a full suite of tools across marketing, sales, service and commerce needs, all provided in a simplified enhanced user interface. Again, in just a few moments, we've got Max who is going to jump in and demonstrate what this looks like and walk through the key value propositions of Pro Suite. So what you'll see is, one, a simple but powerful experience bringing together the Customer 360 so sales, service, marketing and commerce, like I mentioned, including data cloud underpinning it all in one app. Number two, you'll see the in-app guidance and out-of-the-box reporting and dashboard tools allowing you to have being able to get on your feet very quickly and get started and implementing this in your business. And finally, we'll see the easy tools to help you find, win and keep processing.

Thanks so much for that overview, Kate, and thank you, everyone, for joining today. So what I want to speak to in this demo is some of the things that Kate touched on about how Pro Suite is super easy to set up and get going for you and your sales team, but also go through how it can help you find, win and keep more customers. And that starts here on the home page. So I know a lot of common customer questions come around how easy is it to add different users, what those users are able to access and what kind of display that they get when they log on. And it's really as simple as heading into settings, adding users. Here, you can see all the different users that you've got in the system, what different accesses they have. If you're wanting to add a new user, you just hit a new user, add in their first and last name under the profile, this can be customized to whatever you want. So here in the demo, we have a standard user or an administrator, but you could have marketing, sales, service, whatever your business is, you can have different profiles to suit different users. And it's as easy as just clicking into that and adding them in. What I want to highlight now is the home screen. So again, keep in mind, throughout this demonstration, everything within this is completely customizable. You can have the tiles sitting wherever they want to display all the different things that might be front of mind for your business. But what I want to highlight here, just the leads, for example. So you can see at a snapshot, you've got 60 new leads in. You've got a quick overview of your opportunities, your open cases, any tasks that you might have on for the day and contacts that you've been frequently in contact with. Again, can be completely customized to whatever is important to your business. But when I dive into the leads, I want to show you a few different things that really showcase how easy to use Pro Suite is. So like I mentioned with users, setting different things up, importing is also just as easy. So let's say you have leads that you've gathered from before you've invested in a system that are sitting on an Excel file, you can just click import. You can import from a CSV file, you can upload that here. And then once that uploads, there'll be different options for what you want to grab from it, whether it's a name and address, whatever that's important to that lead, where the leads come from, that can pull through and automatically flow into your lead list. So in your lead list, you have a quick overview of the person, the title, what company they're from, phone number, e-mail, the status of the lead and who's in charge of that lead. So Steph is the sales rep in charge of this lead. Max might be here. This can be customized again to show what is important to you in your business. I know if you hit filters, you can go into showing where the leads come from. So if your business runs events or webinars or have white papers that go out to customers, that can be information that's surfaced on the left-hand side or the right-hand side here, sorry. So you can get a quick snapshot as to who it is, what they've looked at and where they're from. So let's say we click into Edan, for example. So here, we can see on the left, Edan, where he's from, a bit more information around the company as well, such as the website, their address, number of employees, revenue. These things as well can be predetermined. So for example, if you have a landing page on your website that asks for information to be filled out, that can be merged in with here so that when someone fills that out, it comes through in this view here. In the middle, we have the activity with that lead. So we can see if there's been meetings with them, e-mails sent to them, we can go in and see what the content of this is as well. So you've got a really good overview as to what the leads looked at, how we've engaged with them so far. And then at the top here, we have the status of the leads. So is the lead new? Have we contacted them nurturing, qualified, converted? So again, all these things can be completely customized to how your business operates. You might only have 3 stages in this process. You might only have 1 stage in this process. You might have 10 stages in this process. That's completely customized to how your business works and operates and can be reflected within this top bit here. Let's say we speak to Edan, he's interested in the product that you're selling and we hit converted. What we can do here now is either create a new account, let's say, long string is not yet in our system or if it is in our system, it will pop up here and show you the corresponding account, contact, and this helps to eliminate duplicate, make sure all of the information is correct and has little data replication as possible. And so let's say we convert him in. I won't do this now because the account already exists. But moving into accounts now, also what I forgot to mention in that process is you can create an opportunity out of that. So it cannot just create an account, but also an opportunity corresponding to what you've spoken to that lead about. So if we go into accounts, and we have a look at feeds spend, for example. So on an account view, we get a lot more information as well. Similar to the leads, we've got more context around who the account is, different things like their address, phone numbers. We've got all the communication that we've had in the account. So there's multiple contacts in here. If sales reps have engaged with different people within a business, that's where this will all show up as well as opportunities and also cases, which is something that I'm going to touch on a little bit later. But opportunities present a really great opportunity for you to enhance your sales process, make it more streamlined and bring a lot of manual processes into the one flow. So similar to leads, opportunities can be configured to whatever your business deems as important, what stages that you use, even what language you use. So you might not even use the language opportunity or sale, it might be leasing or project or onboarding. It can really be customized to whatever you want it to look like based on what your business does and what's important to you. And again, similar to the common theme, you get that 360-degree view of conversation. This will reflect in the account, which will reflect in the contact, all of this syncs across opportunities, account information, contacts, and you can really get that simple overview of everything to do with the business. But more specifically within opportunities where you can take some of that manual work out for your sales reps because I know a lot of people are still quoting out of Excel, they might have other products that they're using to make sure that they're quoting correctly. But here, what you can do is actually have products already built into your sales force. So here, we can see we've got coffees, different coffee tools. These are all products that we're selling to the customer, you can hit next, make sure that if you're wanting to put in different quantities, 3, let's say, for example, 1 and 1, what the sales price is. So if you're wanting to do any discounts or things like that, this is where you can edit that information and hit save. So that will then add the products into the opportunity. It will update the amount. So you can see here. So this is good for a few different reasons. One, you don't have to deal with external processes or different programs that you might be using for quoting. And two, by having this amount and having more insight into what products are being added into quotes, the amounts and things like that, you're able to start doing things like forecasting and being able to more confidently reflect on revenue and other things that are really critical for businesses day-to-day. Diving more into that is quoting ability. So you're able to actually create a quote straight from an opportunity. So you'd be able to put in the name, the expiration date of that quote, let's say, you're only offering them a discount. If they sign by the end of the week, you can have those terms and conditions in there and also different approval layers. So you can have thresholds of what discounts require, what amounts of approval and making sure that, that opportunity -- or sorry, quote goes through those different approval processes before it's then sent out to the customer. So instead of having to go back and forth with e-mail with different files and things like that, it's all within one system where you've got the parameters already set to make that process quicker, more efficient and more reliably quoted on. Another really awesome feature is being able to send payment links straight out of the platform. So if you click on here, if you send out a quote you can generate a payment link to go straight to the customer where they can put in their credit card details and pay straight away. And that money then syncs back into your bank account. And you can customize that payment page with your company logo or different animations or things like that, that pertain to your business. And yes, it just makes that whole process a lot easier for you and also the customer by managing payments. So I've spoken a lot about accounts opportunities, how to convert into sales and what that process looks like and how easy it is to do all within the one platform. But what I mentioned before around cases is something that I want to highlight now. So let's say, you're a retail business or any kind of business where your customers are coming back for help or inquiries. It might be maybe I need to change my billing address, I'm having issues returning something. That can come through as a case. And the really cool thing about cases is that it still pulls all that same information that you have in your sales and your leads and really gives you more context when your service agents are dealing with customer inquiries. So an example of this would be, let's say, Lana Coles come in, she is having issues changing her billing address. If there was any prior communication with her, it would be here. You can also have a knowledge base attached to this as well. So you could have a whole bank of common FAQs, which you're able to add into this service system so that when your reps are trying to solve common complaints or common things that customers are coming in for, you can easily filter, find and action, which obviously leads to better customer service and faster resolution time. But what I also want to highlight is that this syncs all with the Salesforce system that you've been using before. So if you click into the contact and her account, we can see through the service console that we have an opportunity in that account at the moment. This is the context of what's going on in the last few days. And when you're solving a case or you're dealing with any kind of customer inquiry, personalization and context is something that day-to-day is very important to a customer. I think the stat was 60% of customers wanting one-to-one customer service online and having your sales also service rep, understanding all of the context without you having to explain yourself again. And by having a central view of all the communications, having that data pulled from all the different parts of your platform into different systems really allows for that one-to-one personalized view and being able to resolve customer inquiries not just faster but also a lot with [Technical Difficulty]

Thank you so much, Max. That was so good. But it's always really nice and valuable to have a live demo of how the Pro Suite platform really works and how can we integrate into your business. I hope you can see where you able to leverage that platform in the business today. Again, we have -- sometimes people often think Salesforce is a large enterprise platform tailored to enterprise, but that's not quite the case. The fun fact is 70% of our customers are based in the small and medium business segment. So this has really been tailored to suit the needs, suite the challenges that we heard and watched through earlier on in this conversation as well. So to really summarize the key points that Max is touching upon in the 5 ways that make Pro Suite the way Pro Suite has been designed to, which is to make your life more easier and stay around is that, one, you get that in-app getting started guides that make the setup a lot easier and intuitive. You do have access to quick settings and that eases your onboarding. And as your business grows, the onboarding for your business employees a lot more seamless as well. Third to that is all-in-one suite that helps cross-functional products that we're working with different team members across the business in a single source true platform makes a world of difference to running your business smoothly. Fourthly, the Pay Now functionality that Max touched upon, it speeds up the [indiscernible] sales, making that again super streamlined for the business. And lastly, most importantly, I would say, is that trust and AI-ready layers are actually baked into the platform and they have been able to run your business knowing that it's secure. I just wanted to point out that you can definitely get started with your free 30-day trial. It's on your left-hand side. There's no credit card as well. And it's a really great way to see how it runs, see how you can play around with it. It's not as scary as it might seem. It's quite intuitive. You can really see how it can help your business grow.

We are on to some questions. Before I go into the questions, I just want to say a big thank you for your time today. I know I appreciate that. You're all probably having some busy days. So having a little bit of time out of the day to thank you how we help in the small and medium business space. I'm very appreciative. So if we go into the questions, I've got one question here. Why should we choose Pro Suite over Starter Suite? Is there much of a difference? In short, I would say Starter Suite is very tailored towards if you're super new to the CRM and your business is quite small and you really just need limited functionalities to kind of get your feet off the ground and manage your customer relationships, just to kind of get your foot in the door, work out the operation of new business, I think Starter is a really great place at a really great price point for your business to kind of get used to the platform. However, if you are anticipating more growth and thinking a little bit more strategically with your business and where it's heading, you might have to consider the Pro Suite option because you're going to unlock a lot more functionalities and a lot more customization that you will be able to tailor and you will be able to meet your business needs as well. And on top of that, we've got a lot more AI functionality embedded in the Pro Suite as well, which we will be able to kind of explore the resources again, on the left-hand side of your screen. So another question is there are ultimate CRM offerings other than Salesforce probably more experience in the SMB landscape. Other than cost, what makes Salesforce the software to choose? Great question. Okay. So I would say, yes, while there are other many options or CRMs for the SMB space, where Salesforce really stand at is that it is built to scale with the business is to meet you where you are and grow with you. So you don't outgrow your CRM because more often than not, other CRMs get catch and stuff in that platform and you're looking to grow your business, grow your employees, grow the use of the platform becomes overly complex and often becomes a regular place of exercise. With Salesforce, we are able to scale with you depending on your needs and unlocking your functionalities as you embark on your journey and where you are at journey [indiscernible]. I think that is all we have for questions. Again, any additional questions, please feel free to reach out. You'll see that Max and I, our details are on the right hand side of the screen as well. Happy to kind of jump on the call to kind of walk you through this in more detail. Always happy to help. Other than that, thank you so much for joining us today. Really appreciate your time. I hope it is valuable what you saw today. I hope Max was able to go through the demo, hope that was helpful as well. So I really hope that we'll be having more conversations after this with you. Thank you.