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

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, where we'll walk you through Marketing Cloud's newest features and announcements. Now if you've tuned in for some of our other highlights webinars or came to our marketing breakouts at Agentforce, you might know me already. But for those of you who might not, my name is Lisa-Marie Long or LM, and I'm a Marketing Cloud Solution Engineer and will be your host today for our APAC edition of the Winter '25 release highlights. Now given a few of us are based in Australia today, I would like to start with an acknowledgment of country. We would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today. We recognize their continuing connection to land, waters and culture, and we pay our respects to elders, past and present. Now it wouldn't be a Salesforce presentation without our forward-looking statements. So do everyone on the call, please remember, Salesforce is a publicly-traded company. So please base any of your buying decisions on the products that are currently available today. Now you've already met me, but I'm also joined today by my fellow Marketing Cloud solution engineers, Kieran Franklin and Pence Sangkhamanee, who are our product experts and will be taking you through this latest release. Hi, guys. [Operator Instructions] We are also joined behind the scenes by Cameron Robert and Nico Manojlovic, who are ready to take your questions through this webinar. All right. Now the first thing I want to do here is also find out a little bit more about everyone on the call today as well. You've met us, but now we want to meet you. So let us know in the poll widget, whether you have attended a Marketing Cloud release webinar before or whether this is your first time. I'll give everyone a minute or so -- maybe a minute, that's a long time. A couple more seconds to fill in that poll. Let us know if it's your first time or whether you've been here before. Closing in 3, 2 and 1. It's always quite an even split. All right. So we've got 60% first timers and 40% -- yes, 60% first timers and 40% new, second timers, third timers, more timers. And so great, we've got a really good balance of content today for those of you who are joining us for the first time ever as well as those who might be a little bit more experienced with the webinars that we run for the releases. All right. So onto the agenda. So first, I'll briefly explain how Marketing Cloud releases work for those 60% first timers today and also include a breakdown of what Marketing Cloud actually is and the suite of solutions that sit under that umbrella today, right? So that's, oh, I'm growing it every day. So we like to kind of start with a preface there. Then what I'll do is pass over to Pence to speak through updates coming to Data Cloud and also more specifically, Data Cloud for Marketing. Followed by Kieran, who will cover off our new personalization capabilities and innovations on Marketing Cloud engagement. Then we'll walk through some new features on account engagement and finally, we'll round out our session today with some questions from the floor. Now a lot of you will already know how our marketing releases work at Salesforce. But for anyone new joining us today, Marketing Cloud releases happen 3 times a year. And once the release kicks off, those features will filter into your accounts over the course of about 3 weeks, depending on what stack your instance is on. Now our last release took place in June, and today, we'll be covering our Winter '25 release that spanned across October. So that just means that all the features that you see here are live in your accounts now. So before we dive into the new bells and whistles that you've got access to inside Marketing Cloud, we do want to make sure that we are clear on what we mean when we say Marketing Cloud. So as you're probably aware, Salesforce invest quite a lot into R&D, which means they were always innovating and growing our platform to support businesses as customers demand more and more tailored experiences and programs for marketing teams like yourselves on the call today. So as it stands today, Marketing Cloud is made up of the modules that you see on the screen now, so we have engagement and account engagement. So things -- think of things like our omnichannel and automated B2C and B2B messaging at scale, then we have Data Cloud and personalization. So for things like data unification and hypergranular insights into customer behavior that allow for those one-to-one tailored experiences, then intelligence for analytics and campaign optimization. And finally, loyalty and referral marketing for loyalty programs, rewards and creating customer advocacy. All righty. Now the reason why our solution has grown to include all of these modules is so that Marketing Cloud as a suite can help you engage across the entirety of the customer life cycle to build those really strong lasting relationships. Now I think that everyone on this webinar today knows why this is important. It's, of course, because customers nowadays demand better personalization across that relationship, so from awareness, to service, to loyalty. They expect companies to know who they are and also even anticipate and predict their needs. And that's really the #1 frustration, right, is a disconnected customer experience when it comes to the customers that we serve. Now this means marketers like us, like yourselves, have been able to meet customers wherever they are and personalize every engagement even across channels and departments. So Marketing Cloud helps marketers do this through data, AI and activation. And with Marketing Cloud, you have that trusted data foundation and an operational customer profile that connects data across the entire enterprise. So once that strong data foundation is in place, you can use both predictive and generative AI to deploy smarter campaigns and faster. And once markers have their data and AI strategies in place, this makes the personalization piece possible not only across those traditional marketing channels like e-mail and web and mobile and social, but also activating across sales, service and commerce department as well. And because each team has access to that same customer profile data, your entire organization can send those more relevant pieces of content and offers to create VIP experiences. And that's really how you build those lasting customer relationships. So what you'll see today is that the innovations that we're covering have that common thread of data, AI and activation. So no matter where you are in your journey with marketing cloud or which products you have or don't have, the Winter '25 release brings improvements to how you use data, how you use AI and how you manage those activations. So without further ado and to get us started, I'm going to hand over to Pence to speak through the first of those innovations on Data Cloud.

Awesome. Thank you, Lisa-Marie. So let's get started with the innovations for Data Cloud. As you know that we're constantly innovating on Data Cloud and this is one of the fastest-growing organic innovations that we have here at Salesforce. Today, we have narrowed down to top 3 features for us to go through, but I highly recommend that you check out our winter release notes to learn more about additional innovations from Data Cloud. First off, I'd like to introduce you to Data Cloud sub-second real-time capability. The key here is about turning sub-second real-time data into instant action. This is a new real-time end-to-end data layer in Data Cloud from the point of ingestion to harmonize all the way to unify and activation. So you can access and update Customer 360 profile in millisecond. This allows you to enhance customer experience by being able to use real-time data and turn it into instant personalized experience for your customer. A great example of this is where we can dynamically tell a web content based on the latest behavior of each customer on the website. For marketers, this means that we're now able to adjust campaigns in real-time and optimize messages as behavior evolve. You can respond at just the right moment with the right offer of content, improving your marketing efficiency and making the most out of your marketing investment. And for decision-makers, continuous updates on customer profiles mean you always equipped with the most up-to-date information. You can quickly identify trends, spot issues and make smarter, faster decisions leading to superior outcomes for both your customer and your business. Now you might get all excited and start to think about the different ways to engage with your customer, making the most out of sub-second real-time data. It's important that we get the balance right when it comes to the level of engagement with your customers. And that takes us to the next feature of Data Cloud, Communication Capping. This is a customer-configurable compute to help you control the frequency of communications and marketing spend across channels or line of business. You can now limit the number of marketing communications being sent at department or enterprise level. This capability is designed to help you manage your campaign budgets, while enhancing customer experience and mitigate communication fatigue for your customers. It's also designed to ensure that we continue to comply with regulatory requirements and all of that can be done with clicks, no code, by your business. Moving on to our final Data Cloud feature that I'll cover today, and that is Meta Conversions API. Now this is a big deal for anyone who spent a lot on advertising with Meta. Being able to connect your first-party data with advertising platform is becoming increasingly important in order to optimize ad targeting, decrease cost production and see a more complete picture of campaign outcomes while maintaining customer privacy of course. Meta Conversion API allow customers to send them first-party data to understand if their advertising effort leads to conversion, so they can better measure and attribute that advertising. And that's where the power of Data Cloud comes into play. Through the process of bringing data from various sources in your organization, creating a full Customer 360 profile across the entire customer life cycle, marketers can now use that data to share with Meta to drive improvements in ad performance. The conversions API can also track lead conversion and engagement activities from click-through to conversion, enabling better measurement capabilities across the funnel and helps you better understand the true value of advertising on Meta. Now let's have a quick look at that -- at some of the features in action today.

Here we are in Data Cloud, and we're going to quickly walk through some of our latest features, sub-second real-time data and also later on communication capping. So let's start off with our sub-second real-time capabilities. This is an extremely powerful feature because it means you can be listening to all the actions that your customers are taking and how they're interacting with your brand. So we're talking things like website engagement, app engagement or really any engagement with your marketing materials. And if we go a layer deeper, we can also listen out for things like specific product browsing or product abandonment. And what this allows you to do because you have all this new real-time data is take action on customer behavior and intent while the customer is highly engaged. Now where this becomes infinitely more powerful is by leveraging calculated insights alongside this sub-second real-time data. Now calculated insights, our calculations with parameters that you set that allow you to define specific metrics like lifetime value and recency, frequency and monetary. And as we know, different organizations have different ways of calculating things like LTV, and that's where using calculated insights comes into play where you have full control over modeling what makes up these metrics. So to demonstrate this, if I click into LTV, we can see all the different fields we're bringing in that are rolling up into that calculated insight. So as an example, when a customer does something like making a purchase of a certain value and we've determined that, that value would push them into a different LTV tier, that data is brought into Data Cloud in sub-second real-time, and you're now able to personalize the messaging you send them straight away. The next feature I'll go over is communication capping. Now this feature will allow you to more granularly manage saturation and frequency of customer contact. So what I'll show you now is just how easy it is to set up a new capping rule. Now you can create it from scratch or import a file that contain your rule. But today, we're just going to create it from scratch. And you can set all kinds of parameters here using any of the data available to you in Data Cloud, but let's just talk through some of the basic ones today. So first, we'll select our start date and the end date. Let's say, I want this to run until the end of the calendar year and I'm going to set the limit at 3 messages. Now perhaps my capping rule only applies to customers in certain regions. So let's just select New South Wales, that's where I'm from. And of course, those 3 messages, we're not going to have those daily, let's say, that it's per month. Now the limit type is profiled because I want to base this on an individual. And finally, I'll choose e-mail as the channel. Now you can even choose more than one here so that your capping rule runs across multiple channels. But for now, I'm just selecting e-mail. Now ultimately, the value of communication capping is that you can optimize your budgets by serving the right amount of content to your customers on the right channels by avoiding creating message fatigue and, of course, ensuring the optimal frequency of communication touch points.

Thanks so much, Pence. So now it's time, time to present our newest innovation in the area of personalization, Salesforce Einstein Personalization. So we really believe this new capability. It's going to bring together the power of real-time AI decisioning and customer data to create those meaningful personalized experiences that's going to drive your desired customer actions. Einstein Personalization, which was officially released earlier this year, it's built on the Salesforce Data Cloud. So what that means is that it uses the power of Data Cloud and the real-time layer that Pence mentioned just earlier, plus unified data and advanced decisioning to create those real-time personalized experiences that are going to drive customer action and positive business outcomes. So Einstein Personalization is going to enable markets to create those one-on-one experiences with data gathered from across all of your customer touch points by leveraging a combination of machine learning models and also business rules. And then it's going to empower those same marketers to create hyper relevant, in-the-moment content and offers across those digital channels such as web, an e-mail, SMS and more. So there are 3 key use cases that today, Einstein Personalization Salesforce with our additional release. The first of these key use cases is Web Personalization. This is your ability to create those one-for-one web experiences, using real-time data, tailored to your customers' preferences, but just as importantly, aligned to your business goals. And because the personalization services built on Data Cloud, it pushes all that rich web engagement data back into the unified customer profile, which, of course, means that can be used to power those personalized experiences across different channels, such as the sales and service use cases. An example of that might be a service rep. A service rep could see all of the rich web engagement data directly in their console, and they could perhaps use that to give a customer a discount on a product they're browsing after resolving a support case for that customer, which, of course, is going to help them drive upsell and ultimately lift customer lifetime value. So within that context, let's dive a little bit deeper into some of these newest capabilities we've released to enhance these Einstein Personalization use cases. So the first of these capabilities that I want to talk about is Web Personalization Manager. Web Personalization Manager is a new feature, which provides marketers with an easy-to-use Visual Editor to create and manage those personalized web campaigns. It's going to give your team the ability to add personalized content or recommendations to your website via a low-code approach. That's going to empower both developers and your business users. And what's so great is that this is going to ensure that each and every visitor receives a unique and engaging experience tailored to their unique preferences and behaviors. So I want to call out again, one of the standout features of this tool is its low-code approach. And what this means is that you can implement and you can manage your personalization campaigns without needing extensive coding knowledge, which really is going to make it accessible for all the members of your team. Business users, they're going to be able to easily create and adjust campaigns using that easy-to-use visual editor while your developers, of course, can still dive deep into customization and integration as they need. The second of these capabilities I want to share is our new recommendation filters. This is going to allow your teams to refine your recommendations by including and excluding what's available to return on a recommendation. And by this, I mean, what each person actually gets shown. Now this is going to greatly improve both the quality and the relevance of the recommendations that are provided. And this in turn is going to deliver better outcomes and higher satisfaction for your customers. So recommendation filters will include options for matching brand, co-buy or only items under a certain price. And of course, you can also use Data Cloud calculated insights to further filter items. You can use those for rich data insights to further refine your recommendations and ultimately make them even more precise and more effective. So the next of these new capabilities I want to talk about and one I think that is personally really interesting is our new AI and rules-based recommendations. So this is going to allow marketers to use objective-based recommendations to boost performance on personalization campaigns and you're going to have a choice from either AI or rules-based approach. So let's begin with AI recommendations. The AI recs are really simple to set up. You simply need to choose your objective like maximize revenue or maximize the clicks, and then you just let AI optimize the customer experience to deliver against that goal. So an example of that, AI can automatically personalize the web page. So think of content in the Hero or maybe product recommendations, based upon that business goal to maximize revenue and of course, the customers' individual preferences and affinities. And because it uses machine learning, it's continuously learning and continuously improving. So that's going to ensure that each and every visitor gets the most relevant content and/or product recommendations every single time. And because Einstein Personalization again is built on the Salesforce platform, it's going to allow you to push all of this great engagement data back into Data Cloud. And push it into the real-time profile so that anyone across your organization, such as like anyone in the sales team or maybe in the service team, they're going to have that information. The information they need about the customer to personalize that very next one-to-one interaction. So really exciting. The other option we talked about is rules-based recommendations. That's for those who maybe don't want to use AI or perhaps just want a little more control. You're going to be able to show things like top-selling products or create customers tailored to your unique needs. So an example of this would be, I live in the Sydney area, but you could use rules to target people perhaps from Sydney, who are a gold tier member. And then I want to use a recommender with a filter to further show only best-selling products for the upcoming summer season to all those people that qualify for that decision. So AI-based and rules-based recommendations, in combination, exciting new feature within Einstein Personalization, which brings us to the last of these new capabilities, Personalization Analytics. Personalization Analytics is going to let you see the impact of your personalized efforts -- personalization efforts at the decision, the campaign and even the personalization point level. So marketers, they're going to be able to capture insights into the impact of personalization on their customers' behaviors and actions and really see how it's impacting your key business metrics like conversion and revenue as well. So we believe with these insights, you are going to know what personalization point or decision impacted conversion and revenue. So you're going to truly have a gauge on the effectiveness of your personalization efforts. So with that, that's -- for now, all of the exciting new features within Einstein Personalization that I'm going to present for this release. But I encourage you to check out the release notes for way more cool features in this release. So next, let's discuss all the amazing innovations coming to Marketing Cloud for both our B2C and our B2B markets in the audience today, and we're going to begin with focusing on Marketing Cloud account engagement. So let's get started with the release of our brand-new revamped and simplified program set up for loyalty management. Loyalty program set up is going to be even quicker now with the streamlined setup of programs and all their associated components like your currencies and tiers and benefits. And you can now access a summary view of the loyalty program setup at any time. And I mean you can quickly navigate to the advanced capabilities when they're needed. So this is going to provide all of our customers with some really great benefits, such as reducing the time it takes to get a loyalty program to market and improving the overall speed of the configuration deployment of that program, which, of course, is going to enable users to be more flexible and more flexibly manage and innovate within your own loyalty programs. So that's really great. In addition to this, the UX has also now been simplified to include those easy-to-understand summaries for users so they can easily understand and manage their own program configurations. So we believe, overall, this is going to be a much easy-to-use and much more powerful user interface, and I know our customers are really going to get a lot of value from it. So next, let's discuss our new journey audit UI capability. With this new release, the journey audit log is now available in the UI. The journey audit log, it's going to give you full visibility into all the changes that you made to your journeys. So you can really monitor their evolution. The journey audit log feature, it's going to show information about creating and modifying and activating, deactivating, stopping and even deleting your journeys. So what it means is that you can view the activity and the status history of a contact or a journey or even a journey version. The journey audit log is going to help your team in, we believe, 3 really important areas: one, it's going to provide your team with the ability to troubleshoot campaign issues much, much faster; two, we think it's going to empower them to identify key drivers of change within campaign performance; and three, it's really going to help your team to stay on top and to be accountable for campaign management. Now essentially, what we're providing is a lot more visibility into your customer journeys and giving you more options to experiment as well. And we're really excited for the impact we think this is going to have with our customers, but that's just the beginning for this Marketing Cloud release. At this point, I'd like to present a short demo video, highlighting some of these new exciting capabilities before handing back to my colleague, Pence, for some more upcoming releases within Marketing Cloud in count engagement. So let's watch the demo. [ Presentation ]

Thanks, Kieran. For our final highlights before we get to the Q&A, let's talk about the new features we have in store for Marketing Cloud account engagement. We are making asset management easier in your Salesforce CMS. A little bit of a background. Salesforce CMS is a hybrid content management system that help you organize different types of content and support advanced builder tools in Salesforce. This feature allows you to copy more access from Marketing Cloud account engagement into your Salesforce CMS. In the summer release earlier this year, we started off with copy of images. In this winter release, we are building on that by adding more asset types into the mix. Users can now also copy over their existing marketing assets like files, e-mails and forms into Salesforce CMS. Now what that means is it allows for the assets to be stored in one centralized location, making it easier to reuse, which reduces duplication of effort, saving time and resources when running multiple campaigns across different platforms. Moving on to our next innovation, allowing our B2B marketers access to more engagement data in Data Cloud. Last year, we released the Account Engagement Data Cloud Connector, which allow B2B marketers to create segments in Data Cloud, leveraging all of their data sources and activate into account engagement. And that was such an important milestone for us, to be able to unlock more customer data and insights from sources inside and outside of your CRM, allowing B2B marketers to leverage unified customer profile data and bring that to life in their multi-channel customer journey. In this winter release, we are expanding on our customer engagement data beyond e-mail. With the addition of form landing page, web page engagement data now within Data Cloud. With this new functionality, marketers will now have a more comprehensive view of the customer with engagement data from online touch points, like form landing page and web page included. And with that, richer Customer 360 data, it means that marketers will now be able to incorporate that data into that prospect segmentation. This will also allow marketers to unlock new sets of calculated insight to help them better understand their customer from a different lens. And those are the key highlights on Marketing Cloud account engagement. Handing this back to Lisa-Marie for some Q&A time.

Excellent. Thanks, Pence, Thanks, Kieran. All right. Now I won't lie to you all, the Q&A section has been going bananas. So I've been trying to keep up with a couple that I think might be good to answer on air today. I am still having a little scroll through. But I will start with one for Pence while I keep looking for a couple of good ones that have been fairly common across the attendees today. And so Pence, this is one for you just on Data Cloud. We'll start there. I'm going to find a few more as we go along. So I think our data is really complex, is the idea that my data science teams create the segment? Or is there something I can do as a marketer?

That's a really good question and complex data. I think that's something that a lot of us can relate to. Data science team love using Salesforce, but when we talk about Data Cloud in Marketing Cloud context, in this example, you as a marketer will be able to create segments to sell. Now if we think about the beauty of Data Cloud is that it helps you with the heavy lifting around bringing all of the data that you have into one centralized location. It helps cleaning the data and create structure around that so that our marketers can create segments directly within the platform. And you can do that using generative AI and natural language in what we call Einstein Segmentation or you can simply use our drag and drop feature in there, no coding is required at all. So yes, you can do it.

Thanks, Pence. I've managed to scroll up to the top of the questions now. So I've got a few in order for you. So your -- whilst I've got you, I might ask you this follow-up as well which I thought is quite a good one. So this is for Pence as well. We already use Marketing Cloud to manage customer saturation. So we use Einstein. How is communication capping different? And do we need to buy Data Cloud, if we want to use -- do we need to buy Data Cloud if we want to use it? Sorry, I'm summarizing it.

That was a long question. Let me break that down a little bit. So first of all, the communication capping feature that we showed you earlier today, it is available on Data Cloud. So yes, you would need to purchase Data Cloud to use it as it stands today. Now in terms of how that is different from what you've been using, it sounds like you're probably using Marketing Cloud engagement and you're leveraging some of the features like engagement split or Einstein frequency split in there. So first of all, if we think about the Einstein frequency split, the feature there is designed to help you manage the saturation of e-mail, not other channels. Whereas communication capping, this can be done across one of many channels at the same time. So it has a broader coverage in that sense. Another thing to point out is also the way that you're using those feature today through Marketing Cloud engagement via Journey Builder. So if you think about a Journey Builder, it's more about managing the entire customer journey and allowing you to be able to keep it the way you engage with your customer or suppress them over the course of that journey. Whereas communication capping is more about setting clear rules that is driven by the business data. And the focus here is more around the volume of messages that can be sent to your customer or to overall by different department or at enterprise level. And this is designed to help you stay on top of your budget while improving your customer experience. Hope that make sense.

Thanks. Thanks, Pence. I hope that answered your question. If it didn't, we can definitely follow-up later on I thought that was a great answer, Pence. So, thank you. Kieran, I think you're looking a little bit left out over there. So I'm going to throw a few your way. On Einstein Personalization. So do I need a developer to run personalized content on my website? I'm not a developer, FYI.

Okay. That's a good question. Do I need to be developer? I would say no. No, not at all really. The new personalization visual editor, it's really designed for marketers to be able to run their own campaigns. The idea really is that this can be a huge time-saver because a lot of those marketing-led initiatives, they can be completed by the marketing team, by the business users without having to engage a developer. So I think that's really important to understand. Of course, for those more complex designs, the developer can always be brought into help. But I'd say no, no, not required at all.

Great. And on that topic, I think this is a good one, while we're talking about Einstein Personalization. Are the personalization capabilities shown dependent -- depending on what your website is built on?

Dependent on what the website is built on? Another good question. The personalization capabilities that we showed earlier are platform agnostic. And really, what that means is that it will work whatever your website is built on. All you need to do is deploy the web SDK, and you can start personalizing the web experience in real time. So no, absolutely, it doesn't matter what your website is built on, completely agnostic.

And there's one little one here just about the journey audit log as well. So does the journey audit logs show exactly what was changed?

Well, I love the journey audit log question. Good question. It doesn't show what was changed down to an activity level. However, you really shouldn't forget that you could only edit a journey in draft mode. And your audit log UI, it shows create and modify, publish, stop and even delete events within journey version and the user name and timestamp, which really is enough information to investigate any of those issues or errors you might be trying to identify. So yes, good question.

Great. Thank you so much. I'm just looking at the time, I think it might be time to get [indiscernible]. So thank you to Pence and thank you, Kieran, for answering those questions for us, but also thank you to Nico and Cameron in the chat who've been firing responses back to as many as they can during the webinar, and thank you to all of you for asking these great questions. So this is what makes webinar exciting and interesting. So thank you for joining with us. Now before I let you go, no one get too excited and signing off. I do want to share a couple of last things with you before we do close out the day because we do have some awesome stuff for you to take away. So first, checkout Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant report to see why Salesforce was named a leader in the multi-channel marketing space. And then next, check out our latest story that we've created in collaboration with Fun Lab. I was lucky enough to get to share the stage with them at Agentforce in Sydney and Melbourne to hear about their success story firsthand directly from the customer. So if you weren't able to join us for those events, this is an absolutely must-read story that is incredibly inspiring in terms of what they've achieved and also really great to see the results that they've achieved as well. And last but not least, download the newest State of Marketing Report, and that's where you can find out about all the latest marketing trends and insights on using AI and data to personalize at scale. There's lots of really good content in there to help inform your strategy so check that out. Now all of these resources that I'm talking about are all available in the resource library widget on your screen right now in your webinar console. So you can go and click those and download them and check them out. You'll also find copies of the demo videos that were played in today's webinar as well. All right. Well, that's us wrapping up the webinar. Thank you so very much for joining us today, and we are super looking forward to seeing you at next one. We're in that. You'll be able to say, this is not my first time. I wouldn't miss it for the world. Thanks, everyone.