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

Good morning everyone. Welcome to today's session, Get more value out of Salesforce with infused AI-powered Insights. And thank you all so much for joining. My name is Natalie, and I'm on the corporate marketing team here at Salesforce. Before we begin, I would like to cover a few quick notes about our webinar platform. Today's webinar will be available on-demand after we wrap up, and will be accessible through the URL that you're on now. [Operator Instructions] And lastly, we encourage you to submit questions at any time throughout the presentation using the Ask a Question widget at the bottom of your console. We'll get to as many questions as we can at the end of our presentation. And with that, I'm going to hand it off to Cole to get us started.

Awesome. Thank you. Hey everyone, I'm Cole Shelton, I'm one of our Product Managers. And I'm also here with John from our Solution Engineering Org. And together we work on something called Pulse, that we want to tell you about today. But just to set the scene first. I think we all probably get this slide. We're systematically seeing across different domains different ways that AI and sometimes GAI have helped with learning, have help with discovery, have helped with productivity, for example, and that definitely includes on the data side. Data and analytics is where we live. But as we talk to our customers, we hear about a pretty consistent set of themes for gaps or challenges. And one of those, I'd almost call kind of the aspiration gap. We see tools like ChatGPT and their incredible usage. And you know they're pretty good at some things. Other things are not so good at. But for those that they are really good at, we consistently hear about the challenge of how do we operationalize those tools in a way that's useful for our teams. How do we get it in front of them in the right way. And then if we look at the data and analytics side, the good news is that 80% of leaders are saying they want to make more thoughtful data-driven decisions. But only about 20% of them are able to get the kinds of insights they need into those tools in front of their teams in the right way. So fundamentally what we want to do is help with that kind of transition. As a transition away from needing to ask really nicely if the data and analytics team who is busy with 12 different requests, can you help us with this analysis that would really help us right now. And instead moving to a world where it's easy to have personalized proactive insights delivered to each of us because we all have the same 5, 10, 15 KPIs that we're measured on and care about. And then for those metrics, when we want to go a little bit deeper, instead of needing to learn a complex and powerful tool, but do the discovery on our own, how do we lower the barrier to entry, make it more approachable and guide people towards their answer. And then to make all of that powerful, we have data in so many different places. How do we make it easy for the data teams to combine that data to a single source of truth and push it into the flow of work. So that is really what we're focused on with Pulse for Salesforce. This takes some of our learnings with Pulse in Tableau and brings it into the Salesforce CRM context. And Pulse is really about that insight piece. It's about delivering insights for the KPIs that you care about. So what are we doing to then bring it more into the CRM? So first of all, we're giving you easy ways of inventing it throughout the experience. And John is going to show you some pretty cool ways of doing that. Second, we're giving you prebuilt metrics, 9 sales metrics plus an easy platform to build more. And then finally, we know sometimes working with the data can be a challenge. So an easy guided setup to get you there. So what does that actually look like? How does it work all of that? Let's actually get into a demo so you can see it. John, do you want to take it over?

Absolutely. So, hello everybody. Let me go ahead and share my screen. And I have the great excitement to show you Pulse for Salesforce. So like Cole said, what we've done is we've imagined and experienced all in the Salesforce user experience. So today, I'm going to show it to you primarily from a browser. But imagine anything that I'm doing today could be done from Salesforce Mobile. So how do you get started? So you actually run a wizard that gets you kind of up and running very quickly. It synchronizes users. It puts the data in Pulse. It actually does a couple of other things, and it creates these metrics, and we actually have 9 metrics out of the box. Most of those, you can see here on the screen, things like total sales, Open Pipe, win rate. And what's interesting is things like Open Pipe is historical. So it actually generates on a daily and weekly basis. Now we'll talk about later how you could actually put additional metrics or bring additional data into the application. But we start you with 9 so that you can get up and running very quickly. Now what Cole said was right. I actually get an app automatically as part of Pulse for Salesforce in my Salesforce Lightning Experience. But what if I wanted to bring Pulse closer to my users where they live on a daily basis. So let's just switch here for a second, and I'm going to go to sales application. Now this is a typical home page for those that have not seen it before. This is our new Seller Home as part of our reimagined Lightning Experience. You'll get more information about that at Dreamforce. So that's my teaser to come to Dreamforce and maybe see Cole and I and others present more great information. But one of the things that we've actually gotten feedback from is utility bar is a great place to be able to tuck Pulse into. So with one click, I have Pulse right there ready to go. Now I have questions, and Pulse gives me answers. It gives me that real-time capability to be able to see what's going on with my business and be proactive enough to be able to take direction and action fast to correct anything that might be off course. So if I go over here, I can scroll down, I can see that total sales is lagging a little bit, I need to do a little bit more of my pipe. But one of the things I noticed is my conversion rate is down significantly and so is my win rate. What Pulse lets me do with these cards is to double-click into and get additional information. And I can see generative AI telling me things that are very important about this, like what are the win rate, what's the expected range, things like that. And I can one click away see a detailed breakdown of this information. And I can scroll down and see some of the things here. But I have a very specific question I want to ask, and that is something plain language which industries have decreased the most, and you can see I've done this demo already. And so my question is already cached in there, but I'll go ahead and click on that and click go. And what Pulse does is it interprets my question, and it could have been misspelled, it could have been anything, that's the beauty of generative AI, and gives me suggestions on what I want to drill into. And so it actually gave me a suggestion exactly based on my question. So I'll double-click on that. And I can see that I've got significant issues in insurance and technology. Now that may allow me to decide that I want to go do a campaign or maybe some type of lead generation or create additional pipeline in those particular areas, but that's basically what Pulse does. It gives me that quick informative insights so that I can take action very quickly. So with that, I'm actually going to go back to the slides, I'm going to stop sharing here for a second, and I'm going to take you through a little bit more detail within the slides. So I'll ahead and stop sharing, and there we go. All right. So I'm back to the slides. And you just saw the demo. So again, just to recap what I just showed you. Basically, you have the ability to stay on top of these metrics. We give you 9 prebuilt ones out of the box that we think are the most common, the most helpful and I don't know if I mentioned this, but Salesforce uses Pulse today. And so we actually generated some of these metrics directly off of the value that we found with our sales teams and marketing teams to be able to get this information very quickly. So these replicate very cleanly to what we've actually implemented here at Salesforce. You get personalized homepages and digest that are actually sent to you proactively. When I say digest or information on a weekly basis, we're going to send you an e-mail that you can double click into and get more information, but that e-mail will actually be a generative summary of all your Pulse metrics. And then like I said earlier, I didn't demo it in the mobile app, but everything we do with Pulse is mobile friendly in the Salesforce app. So you can actually -- if you're like me and you happen to kind of grab your phone first thing in the morning, I don't know what apps you look at, but I typically look at like the news app to make sure the world is still spinning, maybe double-click down on some KPIs in the news app that might be interesting. Well, now you can do that with Pulse and you can get ahead of your business before your day even starts, straight from Salesforce Mobile. Now we also give you those AI Insights. So I've already talked about the insight summaries that will get delivered to you on a weekly basis. It's an Insights Platform. So it actually finds drivers, trends, outliers for you. So you don't have to like go search for this information. Pulse actually surfaces it directly for you so that you can get that proactive approach to things, and you can see contributors and outliers. And then I showed you in the demo the Q&A capability, which is very powerful, where I can actually understand the why between the trends and the things that happen from a metric perspective. And then the final piece I mentioned on the onset was, well, how quickly can I get Pulse or Salesforce set up within my Salesforce work. Well, the answer is really fast because what we've done is we've taken all of the heavy lifting out of the integration and brought Tableau and Pulse directly into Salesforce. So you actually get a wizard base if you're an admin. And so the idea is, as the admin, you would actually come in, run this particular wizard, it's a managed package. So as we add more features and functions for Pulse for Salesforce, you'll actually get those upgrades easily and you can install those upgrades really easily. And so what we do is it's just a simple click. You go through, you give it some basic bits of information, you put users in a permission set, which is something you're very familiar with. And then you just click go, and then we take care of the rest. We create the data sets, we create the historical, what we call a flow to be able to get the information for like Open Pipe, so you can see how it trends on a daily or weekly basis. We create all those metrics, those 9 metrics that you saw from that perspective. We actually then take all those users and follow those metrics, which is a key component. And then finally, we give you that Lightning app that I showed you at the beginning of the demo. And all of that comes and is possible because we have this metric layer, which actually sits on top of your data source, and that's that single source of truth and it's enriched with business context. So that's Pulse for Salesforce, a demo and a quick explanation. I'm going to actually pass it back over to Cole -- I'm sorry, I had one more slide. I got ahead of myself. I showed you Pulse embedded in the utility bar. I showed it to you in the actual app. You can put Pulse anywhere. It's a simple LWC that's preconfigured. If you're familiar with the Lightning framework, I can drag and drop it and put it on my home page, if I want all my sellers to see it from a home page. I can put it in an app page, a record page or I can put in the utility bar. Now I'll pass it over to Cole to actually take us to the next slides.

We wanted to go one step deeper into some of the use cases. What are some of the use cases where we think Pulse is particularly strong. And I wanted to focus on 2 of them. So the first is really on coaching rep performance over time. As a sales manager or as a sales rep myself, as we're prepping for that weekly I have with my boss, I want to be seeing how I'm doing on some of those big picture of how's my sales conversion rates by different stages. Where am I strong? Where am I weak? How am I doing for my activities in my pipe chat? And what Pulse is really good at doing is pulling out some of those dimensions and comparisons and drivers that help explain how you are doing compared to, say, some of your peers, first for good and for bad. And it saves you time having to slice 16 different ways to try to see what really is helping explain that difference. So we know how to either help you improve or I know how I can improve myself. The second is, if you step up a level, and now we're talking about overall sales performance, say, for the territory or the team or the product or just the company as a whole. Pulse is good at helping you spot early signs of maybe areas where we're soft as we're looking at, are we going to make it for the quarter, are we going to make it for that month. But also call out those areas where we're doing kind of surprisingly well and we can learn from. Maybe there's something we do more there. Both of those, I would say, are real sweet spots for Pulse. Something Pulse is not, to be honest, it's not its strength is what I would almost call the record level insights. So if I'm a rep and I just get back from lunch, and I want to note the 3 -- those exact 3 accounts and I want to talk to them or I want to see which ops have had a close date change in the past week or so, that's really not the focus of Pulse. There are tools like for that inside of Sales Cloud itself, where you could use things like Slack Elevates to make that easier inside the Slack. But just for your context, that's, I think, 2 good examples of where it's strong and 1 where it's a little less strong. If you have questions about your use case or others, definitely feel free to post a question, we can talk plenty more about that. And then actually, that is the meat of what we have for you today. If you're interested in something like Pulse, check out this QR code or of course, you can talk to your account team. And then we wanted to give you some tools if you're curious to learn more about how Pulse works. What does it mean to build a metric? How do I maintain this single source of truth? How does it use row-level security? So we gave you helpful link there to get started. And then as John mentioned, we'll absolutely be a Dreamforce, our whole team. So if you want to come talk to us, we can dig in more. With that, if you guys have any questions, feel free to type them in now, then we'll be on here to start answering some.

Yes. Cole, I don't see any questions yet. So I think what we should do is maybe I'll ask you a couple of questions, and you can ask me some questions until people warm up and want to ask their own questions. So the first question I have for you is, I showed you sales metrics in the demo, right? Am I limited to sales metrics? Can I do other types of -- what if I have my Salesforce data somewhere else? What can I do with Pulse for Salesforce?

Great question. So we started with those initial sales metrics to make it easier out of the box. But under the hood, you have the full power of Pulse. And Pulse is a system for easily defining what your metric is and then pushing insights on top of it. So you can build any metric that you want and you can point to any data that you want. That's one nice consequence of having Tableau under the hood is we can connect to just about anything. And I expect we will be continuing to roll out some other metrics with time, but you're in no way limited to specific metrics or specific data sources.

So Cole, I'll follow up on that and ask you, I am a great user of Financial Services Cloud, for instance. Is Pulse for Salesforce something I can leverage?

Yes. So Pulse for Salesforce will work for Sales Cloud, sales plus Service Cloud and most industry clouds, basically, anything that has Sales Cloud under the hood. And as you probably guys know, most of our industry clouds are built on top of sales and Service Cloud. So the only little nuance there is that those prebuilt metrics, those are specifically the general sales metrics that we've talked about, things like pipeline and win rate, they haven't been specifically tailored to the industry clouds. But as we just mentioned, you can build any metric that you would like.

Cool. And looks like we just got a question from Adam. And I love his enthusiasm because he's already looking for the Pulse for Salesforce app inside of a Salesforce org. So let me kind of help you with that one for example. Yes, it's a managed package. So as soon as you actually acquire Pulse for Salesforce from us, it is a licensed product, we actually give you everything you need to activate Pulse for Salesforce, and that includes installing the managed package. And then from there, like I showed you kind of in that last slide where I talked about it, it's just clicking through as an admin to set up the package. And then all of your users that you've added to the permission set Pulse for Salesforce that we set up, we'll actually then see the application from that perspective. So that actually kind of explains -- I love the enthusiasm. And we're working on something here soon where as customers, you may be able to come in and trial or at least you, Pulse in a Salesforce work so you can see what it feels like yourself. But yes, it does have a little setup from that perspective.

And I'll add just one thing there. You also mentioned what are the prerequisites. So the only prerequisite is that your enterprise edition or above, and that's because that's what comes with API access. And so we leverage that for some of the data transformations and stuff like that. Also had another question. Does Pulse showcase an entire team's KPIs or an individual sales reps KPIs or both? So -- and Pulse gives you the ability to build metrics of many different kinds and then you choose who subscribes to what. So I may care about this set, and you may care about this set. Maybe we all care about all up team performance. But I also care about my specific territory, my specific products, et cetera. You care about your specific team or specific product. So you get to do a combination of the 2. Hopefully, that helps.

Yes, that's a great -- that was a great question. And we do have the ability, and that is something that we do here at Salesforce with Pulse is we do have team metrics and we do have individual metrics that get drilled down too. So if I'm a seller, I'm really kind of concerned about what my pipe is versus the team's pipe. But as I move up that chain and move into management or leadership or something like that, the higher we go, the more generic or the more general the metrics are against the team. So that was a great question. There was another question. This one may be something for you, Cole. It's, yes, is there standard foundational data points that need to be integrated to Salesforce to get the full potential of Pulse? Example, do you need profit data in your -- well, actually, it'd probably be something neither one of us could answer. Do you want to try and take that one?

Sure, sure. Well, maybe what we can do is talk about the basic -- the initial prebuilt metrics leverage things like the opportunity object since a lot of it is about pipeline, win rate, pipeline generation, that kind of stuff. So it will work out of the box if you're using the standard opportunity object. But of course, many people either use a custom object maybe as part of an industry cloud, and so we give you the tools to essentially point to a different object, right? So generally speaking, for the out-of-box stuff, it's focused on opportunities and a little bit leads. Then what else kind of do you need really just depends on what more you'd like to include. Internally, when we use this ourselves, we do kind of the full suite on the sales and marketing side, almost the end-to-end pipeline of lead generation contacts, accounts, et cetera. So it really just depends on the specific metrics that you're interested in.

There's another question, and this -- I may need to help you with this one, but I'll give it to you and see what you want to talk about. It has to do with the generative AI piece and the LLMs that we use. And is there an option to bring your own model instead of using what we do from Salesforce. So I think that's a general question. We get a lot for Pulse. And so maybe you can give us that one.

So you guys have probably seen within each of our clouds, we continue to develop more AI and Gen AI capabilities. They all use this foundational Einstein Trust Layer. So what we are working on is bring your own model technology so that you can choose which model that you want. That will come in 2 different ways. One way is there are a set of common models that people ask you about, right? We make sure to fed those, put them into our pipeline. And we want to increase that list of options that you can just select natively for us. Then sometimes you may even have your own internal model. That's kind of the next phase of bringing your own model. So today, we only -- we don't allow you to use your own model just because we're supporting it at an infrastructure level, but that's definitely something that we're working on. Anything you want to add there, John?

No. I think that's great. And we will be continuing -- I think one of the interesting things is we built Pulse for Salesforce with some premium features that are part of the Pulse package. So if you've seen Pulse before, but we're actually building even more generative AI features. Now those will actually require you to kind of consider maybe upgrading your Pulse for Salesforce and stuff like that. But generative AI is really taking charge in a lot of things that we're doing, and we're really leaning into that Salesforce One, Einstein One Trust Layer from that perspective. I got one that I will take, which I was surprised that we didn't get it sooner, which is the insights from Pulse are presented to a user. Is that data honoring the security model I've set up in Sales Cloud? So the answer is just transparently, no. What we do out of the box with Pulse for Salesforce is we pull your Salesforce data and bring it into the Pulse application. Now we can honor your security predicates, but because every customer has a different definition of what security is to them, we actually realized that it would be a very monumental task to get this product to market very quickly and also account for every potential security configuration that a customer might have. So what we have is we actually have in our partner ecosystem, a number of partners who've already stepped up and built into Tableau is a rich row-level security mechanism that has been tested for years, for at least 10, 15 years. It's secure, it's locked down, it's based on the user that's logged in and what they can see and what they can't, very similar to the Salesforce Data Security model. But because of the way that we do the data and because your security model may be unique, we actually need to be able to add row-level security to the application, if that's something you need going forward. And we anticipate a lot of customers will actually want row-level security. Some of them will want to have the platform a little bit more open and stuff like that. But we've got partners ready to go, to come in and spend maybe a week or so, maybe a little longer, depending on how complex your security models are to actually implement the RLS piece, or row-level security piece in Tableau. And then you actually would be honoring the security model that's in your Sales Cloud from that perspective.

Maybe the only thing I would add there, totally true, lots of our partners can help with that kind of work. The other thing we are trying to do is make that set up as easy as we can. And so we do provide documentation about what does it mean to set up row-level security for the Tableau data source to match your Salesforce data. This is also true for some of the Pulse components. What does it look like to build a new metrics in this kind of metrics layered approach. We want to be as helpful as we can and lower the barrier to entry for that kind of work. So I'd just add that as well.

And we did get a question about -- we have somebody here on the call that's not a Salesforce customer, but they're really interested in what we're doing with Salesforce and integrated into different things like security business and stuff like that. One of the things that you will get as a follow-up for attending this webinar, and we would love to talk to you a little bit deeper into that. Pulse for Salesforce is actually -- has a sister product, which is called Tableau Pulse. And it runs on the Tableau platform. so that if you're an existing Tableau customer, you happen to be using Tableau Cloud. Or if you're interested in what you saw today, but maybe you're not a Salesforce, maybe Pulse for Salesforce isn't the right fit for you because you don't have Salesforce, we have Pulse for you. And we can do just about everything that we showed you today, it can be done with any data inside of the Tableau platform. So we do -- we have a sister product. And so if we do reach out to you and you're interested in learning more specifically about Tableau Pulse, let us know, and we'll be happy to talk to you a little bit more about that.

We had another good one, too. Do we need to be on Tableau Cloud to use Pulse for Salesforce? What if I'm still using an on-prem Tableau Server, will that be a limitation to me? So it's due to -- not a Tableau customer at all, first. You do not need to be an existing Tableau customer. This SKU, when you buy it, will come with the necessary Tableau components under the hood. They'll come with the Tableau Cloud site that will help power this experience. So it's totally fine for you to use. That's also a similar answer for the server folks. So you guys may know for our Tableau Server customers, Pulse is a cloud-only feature. This SKU will come with the necessary components of Tableau Cloud site, et cetera, to help power the experience. So it will be fine there as well.

Yes. It's a really great way to get started with Pulse for Salesforce because those users that you might be bringing Pulse for Salesforce into, maybe a whole set of net new users that have never used Tableau, and what we've done with Pulse for Salesforce as we brought the full experience inside of the Salesforce UX. So one of the things for those that may be thinking, well, wait a minute, you give me a Tableau Cloud site. What does that mean? It's a different interface. Everything you saw in the demo today is all Salesforce. We have made this a Salesforce app, which is powered by Tableau Cloud on the back end. Your end users will not ever go into Tableau Cloud. They won't ever use Tableau Cloud. They will consume all of their metrics, all of their insights and everything directly from Salesforce Mobile, Salesforce in your homepage, Salesforce in the app, it's all in Salesforce.

And that is also part of the motivation for this. Tableau itself is an incredibly powerful tool that does so much. But we know for some teams, they can be a little bit intimidated to get started. So we wanted to make it easier for those native inside of Salesforce to start getting the benefits of stuff like Pulse. Starts the journey with Tableau not having to bite off that entire apple, if you will.

All right. I don't see any other questions. I think we did a pretty good job of answering and giving some additional information and we've got a way for you to get a hold of us. And like I said, we will reach out as well if you've attended this webinar. Cole, any final thoughts?

No. I appreciate the time guys. We'll definitely be there at Dreamforce. So feel free to stop by our booth and say hi. We can walk you some more both on the Pulse for Tableau side and the Pulse for Salesforce side so you can really pressure test it.

All right. With that, I guess, Natalie, we're ready to close out.

Thanks, everyone, for joining. And just a reminder that the webinar will be available on-demand at the same link that you are on now. So feel free to check it out again. We'll see you next time. Have a great day.