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

[Audio Gap] decisions based on currently available technology and not our future road map. And you'll be pleased to know that this is all available on our website if you want some light bedtime reading or perhaps over your Christmas break. And with that, let's jump straight in. Firstly, a warm shout out to all of you. Thank you for being our customers, partners and members of our communities. We hope that today, we can make it a really valuable use of your time. Today, you're going to be hearing from myself. I am the new product marketing lead for Sales Cloud across APAC. Alongside me, I've got our fantastic solution engineering lead here, Angus. We've got [ Nomi ] and Jeff live from San Francisco. So really, we've got the team who are at the front line building these products here with you today to answer all of your burning questions around what is Agentforce for Sales. So today, we're talking about Agentforce as it relates to Sales. For those that are less familiar with Sales Cloud, let me just give you a quick whistle stop tour as I introduce you to the Sales Cloud fan. At the foundation of this fan is our core CRM capabilities that you know and love. Every blade of this fan represents capabilities that we've built into the platform that help you drive that growth from pipeline to paycheck. These are the capabilities that you all know as sellers that help you prospect, collaborate with your team, forecast and, of course, close that business, which is even more important at this time of year. And AI is woven into every part of this blade just to make your teams way more productive. Thousands of customers of every size in every industry, in every geo trust Sales Cloud to be their growth platform. So our solution is built on top of that platform, which means we are rich with harmonized data connected to the entire Customer 360 and again, fueled by that trusted AI. So our fan here that you can see represents that completeness of our sales portfolio as we help companies supercharge selling and accelerate growth at every stage of that sales cycle from pipeline to paycheck. Next slide, please. But we are at an inflection point right now with AI. We are moving from a productivity revolution to a workforce revolution. If we look at the last 10 years, when we started this journey at Salesforce, all of that AI that we've seen has been built about assisting individual sellers because we all know that we need more time back to get those deals done. And this all started with predictive intelligence with Einstein to help you predict deal outcomes, help you get where you need to go or where you might want your forecast to land. All of these predictions help sellers make smarter decisions. But then, as we all know, came generative AI, where we've taken it that one step further. Gen AI helps you as reps automate account research, generate e-mails on demand and summarize records. This was how AI has helped you sell much faster. Now the exciting stuff is all about autonomous AI now. I know there's a lot of buzzwords I'm throwing at you, but we really are in this new space. Until recently, we've all been focused on using AI to assist sellers, whether that's helping them automate sales tasks, moving between booking meetings or conducting the next role plays. Next slide, please. Now as I mentioned, this is the workforce revolution, a new era we are fast approaching. It's no longer about just insisting an individual seller, but instead, how do we help you augment your entire workforce and organization get to a place of, I guess, limitless possibilities? Autonomous agents help you scale your sales teams like never before because they do a lot of those low-hanging fruit tasks for you, whether it's booking a meeting for your reps or even coaching your reps. The future is here right now. And I know we've continued to hear this, but humans and agents drive success together. And today, I am so excited to share with you 2 sales-specific agents that, like I said before, will really make your sales teams limitless. So firstly, we have Agentforce SDR, which will effectively help you maximize pipeline by nurturing leads 24/7, pretty cool having a sales rep online 24/7. I know I'm tired, but this is a whole another kettle of fish. If we go to Agentforce for sales coach, that's going to give every rep a dedicated coach to make them your best rep. And look, no one has time for those feedback sessions, and this is really an opportunity for you to be able to do that. Before we dive into these agents, let's talk about what exactly makes an agent. Next slide, please. So there are 5 attributes of a sales agent. The first is a role, as you can see here on this slide. Every agent has a role or an outcome they're trying to achieve. In the case of sales agents, that's nurturing pipeline and coaching reps. In the second box here, the way that you get through building these agents is through data, similar to humans using knowledge to make decisions, agents use data in your CRM to make these decisions. And in that third box, as they make these decisions, they are acting on that information, whether that's booking a meeting or doing a role play. And fourth, but they're not just acting in a vacuum, right? Like agents have to have guardrails or rules that you set up for them. And last, but not least, the main attribute there is that these agents can interact with sales teams and customers on multiple channels, just above your CRM, whether it's e-mail, WhatsApp, SMS and beyond. So I want you to keep these 5 attributes in mind as we walk through one of those first agents that I just spoke about before, Agentforce SDR. And with that, I'm going to hand you over to our solutions engineering lead, Angus.

Thank you, Nikki. So let's talk about Agentforce SDR. This is how you can help scale your top-of-funnel inbound selling using SDR agents. Next slide. We all know there's a challenging gap in between lead generation from marketing and selling. This is a question around quality, right? We have a high volume of leads generated by marketing, but we know that only 17% of these convert into sales and are qualified by sellers. And that process of qualification is costly. It involves sellers investing human capital in that process. And we know things slip between the cracks. Next slide. And even when a seller gets engaged on a lead, it's a pretty complicated process to qualify a lead, lots of steps, it takes time and effort. And sellers need to balance quality with quantity, personalization with scale and time that they're spending on this qualification process is time that they're not engaging directly with customers. Next slide. But imagine now if you had an SDR rep that could support your sales team across every inbound lead, even those that today they can't get to. Instead of wasting hours every week on qualification and figuring out which leads are legitimate, they're now investing that time in building meaningful relationships and closing. The best thing is this agent won't get tired. It's available 24/7. It can personalize messages with the goal of getting your prospects to respond and engage. And when you get positive buying signs through that engagement, our agent will continue that conversation and book a meeting on our behalf. Agent managers will have the tools that they need to monitor, audit and train the agents, and they'll be able to do all of this with an easy to set up no-code experience. So we talked earlier about those key building blocks of what makes an agent. The way that using that no-code experience an agent is configured uses 3 foundational building blocks: topics, instructions and actions. You can think of topics as the jobs to be done by the agent. In this example, the topic is sending an outreach e-mail. And instructions do a couple of things. One, they use natural language to guide the agent on how to behave and most importantly, on how not to behave. So this is also where you can build guardrails in at a topic level. And topics also have actions associated with them. These actions can be calling a flow or building a prompt for a large language model using our prompt templates. In this case, the actions for our outreach e-mail drafting various types of e-mails, in this case, an initial outreach and nudge and then handling those queries when they come back. But let's take a look at a demonstration and see what this looks like in action. Thank you, Jeff.

Let's start this sales agent demo by setting up an SDR agent so you can see just how easy it is. Here in the agent wizard, I can see all the topics and actions that we can take right out of the box. Think of these topics as the jobs to be done. They ground the relevancy and the quality of the agent's conversations. Next, I can use plain text to tell my agent what its role is and give it information about the company and give the agent a name as well. Then I can modify the language and tone of my agent and even upload existing documents that give it context about my existing business. Powered by RAG, agents can retrieve documents to craft accurate and compelling responses grounded in my company's knowledge so that I always have faith in what my agent is going to say to my future leads. So next, I can set the engagement rules and guardrails to specify which leads will be assigned to this agent as well as what times the agent can actually reach out to them. But before I activate my agent, why don't we customize it a little bit further in Prompt Builder. In Prompt Builder, I can infuse our product data, best practices and sales methodology to craft the right responses that my agent will make. Here, I can add product service information, questions and an answer. We can even test the prompt right here to feel confident in the generated e-mails by the agent. I can take a look, and this looks pretty great to me. And so now I'm ready to activate this agent to reach out to my leads. Let's now take a look at what the lead sees when the agent reaches out. Here in the e-mail, we can see that the agent has pulled in the right information about the lead and crafted a personalized outreach. It contains selling points that are relevant to this lead, increasing the likelihood of the lead will engage. Best of all is that when the lead asks a question, the lead will autonomously recognize that and craft an accurate response with an offer to schedule a meeting with a human rep. This is just one example of SDR agent interacting with an inbound lead, but our agent can interact with thousands of leads at the same time. So your reps will have a full calendar of meetings of qualified leads.

Thanks for the incredible demo there, Jeff. So now let's turn our attention to the second of the agents that we're launching today, Sales Coach. Now Sales Coach is addressing another challenge that faces sellers. Next slide, please. The selling role is getting harder. Keeping on top of change is a real challenge for sellers with new product offerings, messaging, pricing. And we're also hearing from some of our customers in particular industries that there is a transition happening in the workforce where more experienced sellers are retiring and you've got more early tenured sellers on the team. So with this pace of change, often sellers are having that challenge of discussing a topic for the first time in front of a customer. And we know that coaching and feedback and the opportunity to kind of practice pitches and negotiation makes a huge difference to the outcomes through the selling process. And this is the challenge that Sales Coach is addressing. Next slide. In talking with sales managers, we know that only around 4 hours a week of their time is available to directly coach their teams. And so being able to scale this up and provide every seller with a feedback experience and coaching opportunities is what Sales Coach offers. Next slide. So this augments the coaching workload of sales managers by coaching reps on every active deal and giving personalized guidance grounded on information around the opportunity and your best practices as a company to provide feedback for sellers and that opportunity to practice. Let's take a closer look at this and how it shows up in the configuration. We saw earlier with the SDR coach that concept of topics, instructions and actions. And Agentforce Sales Coach uses those same building blocks, but in a different way. In this case, the topics are around other coaching engagements, so coaching and opportunity, role playing negotiation and the instructions in the same way provide guidance on how the agent, in this case, the coach should perform and also guardrails about what you don't want it to do. And then the actions here are tailored to the specific stage of an opportunity that you're in. So they're going to be relevant for the situation that the seller is dealing with as they prepare to speak with the customer. But let's have a look at this in action with a demonstration as well. Thank you.

Let's dive in and see in action how easy it is to set up and start using the Agentforce Sales Coach. Let's start with setting up the Sales Coach agent first. As you can see, I've already enabled all of the supporting features for this agent, and it is as simple as just toggling this button on. I have already created the Sales Coach agent user and assigned the required permissions. Next, I've also granted the right users access to this agent. Now let's configure and activate our Sales Coach agent in the Agent Wizard. Here, you can see the first step is to review the out-of-the-box topics and actions you get. Think of these topics as the jobs your Sales Coach will be performing. They ground the agent in your CRM data and also provide instructions to ensure the quality and relevance of the agent. Next, I can set the agent's role. In other words, the agent's job description. I can also tell the agent about the company it is working for. And finally, assign all of this to the agent user I created in the setup step earlier. And lastly, I can also modify the language and tone of my agent. With that, I am ready to create and activate my agent. So let's do that. Now before I start a coaching session, let's quickly review the pitch practice prompt in the Prompt Builder. This prompt includes grounding data, evaluation criteria and a feedback structure, all of which will guide the coach in its evaluation and feedback process. Now let's see how the sales executive can initiate a coaching session to practice their product pitch so they can ensure it's polished and effective in moving the deal forward. I'm going to step into the shoes of a sales executive who just received a deal in the qualification stage. Before reaching out to the prospects, I want to ensure my pitch effectively covers our solution, addresses the prospects business needs, highlights the problems they're trying to solve and demonstrates how our solution can help. So I am going to click on start, select my microphone and my camera and I'm going to hit start. I finished my pitch and my coach is processing. Great. My coach shares an overall impression of my pitch where I was strong and actionable areas of improvement as well as next steps. The good news is Agentforce Sales Coach is available whenever I need so I can keep practicing and honing my pitch to be perfect. Thank you.

All right. Thank you so much for that, Jeff and [ Nomi ] for those demos and Angus for that update. So let's get stuck into some questions. If you could start to pop some questions into the Q&A function. We're here live. This is it. This is real. There's no robots here. We're live from Sydney, Australia, and we have the ever incredible product team over in San Francisco, both [ Nomi ] and Jeff, who are building our products on the front line with our engineers. So this is no better time to ask them questions.

So just having a look through at some of the questions coming in. I'm going to shoot my first question over to Jeff and [ Nomi ]. Can you give our audience a couple of use cases? I know that the product is going to be live on the 17th of December, but in your sort of early-stage pilots, what are some use cases you're seeing? Anything that you can share to the audience at the moment? Jeff, perhaps over to you first.

Thanks for the question. And yes, we've already been seeing quite a few use cases in our early customer validation of this. Some examples include research use cases and health care use cases. But overall, the shared trend amongst all of them is that these customers are interested in using something like Agentforce SDR to be able to build outbound relationships with their customers. And so they're reaching out to them for things such as customer outreach, qualification, improving bottlenecks in their business where it may be too much work to get all of those leads easily. And so being able to automate a lot of them is saving them a lot of time and speeding up those processes for them.

I love that. More time to do the things that matter. Over to you, [ Nomi ]. From a coach perspective, any use cases that you're seeing in the early stages?

Yes. I will say we're -- I can really bring up how Salesforce is using Sales Coach. We have about 20,000 sales reps using Sales Coach to train on how to sell Agentforce to customers, and we're seeing really great feedback and really great adoption metrics there. So that's one I can -- I want to share right now.

I love that. So hopefully, we're all doing a good job then if we're coaching ourselves. We've had another live question come through. Does each Sales Coach session count towards consumption costs? So I think that's one for you, [ Nomi ]. And maybe you could add a little bit more color to pricing on top of that as well.

Yes, I can definitely help there. So what we -- when we say -- so coach charges per conversation and what we count as a conversation is every time you take a coaching session and you hit the "get feedback" button that is a conversation. So every time that happens, that will count towards the consumption cost. And you also asked me to talk about the pricing. And like I said, it was $2 per conversation. So I hope that answers.

Perfect. Thanks, [ Nomi ]. That's super clear. And another question that we have coming through, Jeff, is over to you. Are there any other channels that we're going to be supporting from an Agentforce SDR perspective beyond e-mail that our audience should be aware of?

Yes. So e-mail is our MVP channel that we'll be focusing on for outreach. We do have other channels on the road map, which includes SMS, calling. These are going to be across our medium- and long-term road map, but SMS and calling are definitely on that. And then we're also looking into web communications, which will be more of an inbound sales motion. So customers coming on to your website and then asking you questions through that website to build relationships and then create leads from them.

I love that. The limit does not exist on the channel possibilities. And to our audience, again, please keep putting in questions through to the Q&A. We've got our product team here to ask your questions live. A question on Sales Coach, over to [ Nomi ]. Does data from Einstein Conversation Insights and call summaries contribute to the agent recommendations when practicing?

Great question, Nikki. Not right now, but that is something that we have on our road map, really taking all of that data points into -- we want coach to take all of that data points into consideration before it gives a feedback, but not right now.

Love that. Cool. Lots to come on the road map, no doubt. We've had another question come through. Can I stop my reps -- this one is for you, [ Nomi ]. Can I stop my reps from overcoaching themselves, I love this question, by the way, and racking up consumption credits?

That is a really interesting question. One way you could do that is by simply removing the permission from that user when you want them to stop using Coach.

Yes. That's good. So there's your answer. Any follow-up questions, please keep asking those questions.

I want to just add there that you have the ability to monitor usage as well. So reporting on who is taking advantage of the coaching capabilities and to that question, whether or not that might be excessive, is something you'll have a lot of transparency into when activating Sales Coach.

Amazing. Thanks, Angus. I think that's a good lead in to this next question that would just come in. Can we build reporting for Sales Coach to understand agent uptake? [ Nomi ], that one is for you as well.

Yes. I think -- I will second what Angus just said. We are coming up with monitoring dashboards or I would say, manager dashboards where managers will be able to really monitor how many coaching sessions are happening across the reps in their team. So that will be one way to really get that number.

Love that. More questions on Coach. I love this, hot off the press. Can the Sales Coach agent or what we refer to as Agentforce Sales Coach be added to calls with our customers so we can get provide live feedback and next best action? I know we dropped this at Dreamforce recently. So I think the audience want to know when is this coming? What does this look like? [ Nomi ], over to you.

Yes. This is not -- this will not be possible when we go in the part of GA, but this is something that is -- that we're actively working on and planning for. So hopefully, sometime next year, you should be able to see Coach helping you on live conversations with customers.

All right. So that's -- so for now, to our audience, you're going to have to just work manually on those live feedbacks, but it will be coming in due course. The next question we had is we touched on pricing, [ Nomi ], earlier from a Coach perspective. But Jeff, perhaps over to you, can you give our audience a bit more clarity around pricing from an SDR perspective?

We actually -- I think we're -- the pricing conversations, I would recommend talking to your AEs about those for further detail, but pricing will be based on conversations. It's not time based. So it's going to be based on the number of replies. So -- and beyond those conversations, the goal is that we understand that when a sales rep or a digital agent is reaching out, it can take time for a response to happen. It's not guaranteed that your customer is going to reach out right away. And so we are going to build the pricing around that to help model what more realistically happens when a real sales rep would be reaching out.

Got it. Thanks, Jeff. Hopefully, that's clear on how we are thinking about pricing, both from a coach and SDR perspective. But as Jeff said, please reach out to your AEs and follow up after this for further questions before we go GA on the 17th. Next question, over to you, Jeff, is about customization. And [ Nomi ] will get to Coach after, but how can SDR be customized for sales teams? Can you talk a little bit about that or maybe a look into sort of what's coming?

There's a couple of key ways that customization can take place with the SDR agent. One of the ways that is shown in the demo is through lead assignment rules. You're able to basically decide when a lead actually gets assigned to your agents so that they can start reaching out. Those rules are pretty customizable by your org. You can then customize things even further within prompt templates. Prompt templates allows you to update or customize the content that your digital agent will be sending out via e-mail to better reflect your use case. So you can do things such as update the KPIs so that the digital agent has a better sense of what KPIs your business specifically cares about as well as changing things such as the language and tone of the digital agent if needed based on the out-of-the-box prompt we've already provided.

I love that because we don't want to have all the same tone and agent there. So lots of customization ahead. [ Nomi ], what about on the Coach side? What's the customization we're going to be looking at there?

Yes. Very similar to what Jeff said. I think most of the customizations you could do are all in the prompt template, right, where you can really ground your agent in that data, provide your own custom grounding data, key evaluation criteria, what do you want, coach to evaluate your reps on and also the feedback structure. Right now, we have an out-of-the-box feedback structure in there and Coach -- you can update that structure to reflect what makes sense for you, including the language and everything. So all of that will be possible in the prompt template.

Amazing. So it's all about the prompt template. We've just had another live question come in. And to our audience again, thank you, keep dropping them in. Back to pricing, we've had a question around, is that $2 cost in AUD. So [ Nomi ] or Jeff, who wants to take that?

It is in USD, as far as I know. But again, like Jeff said, it is better to take all of the pricing questions with your AEs.

Perfect. Okay. Great. So we're going to go on to our last couple of questions. So please do drop them in before we move on. For SDR agents, Jeff, is this only available for leads or can we use it for opportunities, contacts and accounts?

That's a good question. It is only available for leads in our MVP. We are exploring expanding it out to other objects. This is something that we want to test out and improve once we understand the efficacy on leads first.

I love it. Okay. Great. And any more questions from the audience, please start funneling them through. I guess I might selfishly ask one final question to [ Nomi ] and Jeff. how can our customers get stuck in? When can they get stuck in the Agentforce for Sales Coach and Agentforce for SDR?

Jeff, do you want to go first?

I believe the tentative GA date is going to be in mid-December. And so you can work with your AE to get access to this experience around then. And yes, this is going to be publicly available. So that is the main way of getting access to it.

[indiscernible] and Coach will be going GA at the same time, so what Jeff said.

So basically, Merry Christmas to everyone, a big Christmas present, early Christmas present for all from Salesforce is Agentforce for Sales. So if there aren't any more audience questions, we might just move on. As you know, we've got a lot of great content that we have coming out. In a couple of weeks, we've got a deep dive specifically into Agentforce for Sales Coach. So please do sign up now. There's a QR code on the screen, and you can register as well after. It's a great follow-up session, and please do get in touch with your AEs or with us directly so we can really follow up with you to get you started on Agentforce for Sales. And with that, I just wanted to say thank you so much for joining us here today. Thank you to Angus. Thank you to [ Nomi ] and Jeff live from San Francisco, and we hope you all have an amazing day. And thank you again for all the fantastic questions, and we'll be in touch soon. Thank you.