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

Hello and welcome. Live from Sydney, Australia, on this thundery, I guess, rainfall day in Sydney. Thank you for joining myself here today and our brilliant panel of speakers. Today, we're going to get started with, I think, is probably one of the most exciting innovation Salesforce has seen today, Agentforce for Sales Coach. But before we do, I wanted to begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land in which we meet today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, recognize their continuing connection to the land, waters and culture. I would also like to pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging. As you all know, Salesforce is a publicly listed company on the New York Stock Exchange, and we just want to remind you to please make any investment or purchasing decisions based on currently available technology and not on our future road map. And you'll be pleased to know that this is available on our website in full should you like some light time bedtime reading. And with that, let's jump in. So today, you've got the 3 of us here joining you on this rainy Sydney day. We've got Dheeraj live from India, who's on the front line with our product team. Give us a wave, Dheeraj. And we also have Steph, who heads up one of our solution engineering team, too. So let's get technical. You can even start dropping questions in straight away, and we'll get to them later on in the webinar. So today, we're going to talk about Agentforce as it relates to sales, most specifically how we support sales leaders like many of you who've joined us here today. And for those that are less familiar with Sales Cloud, let me introduce you to what we call the Sales Cloud Fan. And this is really made up of the end-to-end sales process. At the foundation, you can see of this fan here is our core CRM capabilities. They help you prospect, collaborate with your team, forecast and close business, and AI is woven into every blade of this fan. And to make sure that your teams are more productive, more efficient, it's all built on our Salesforce platform. But today, we really are at an inflection point. We are moving from a productivity revolution to a workforce revolution. And if we just look at like the last 10 years when we started this journey at Salesforce, all the AI that we've built has been about assisting individual sellers to be that more productive and to be more efficient in their every day. It all started with predictive intelligence when Einstein helped. We helped predict deal outcomes, helped you understand perhaps where your forecast might land. We also help to highlight perhaps which leads have the highest chance of progressing. All of these predictions have helped sellers with smarter decisions. Then came generative AI, which I know we all hear every day, day in, day out, where we took it that one step further. And GenAI helps reps automate so many of the tasks for sellers like account research or generating e-mails on demand or summarizing records. This AI has ultimately helped you sell faster. But we're now in this new workforce revolution. It's no longer just about assisting an individual seller, but instead, augmenting the entire workforce of your sales team, no matter the size. It's about doing more with less whilst ensuring your sales teams are being as efficient and as productive as possible. Autonomous agents will help you scale sales teams like you've never seen before and do task that you could have never even imagined. That could be things like answering questions at scale without even having to look through multiple files and locations. It could be booking meetings without having to go back and forth with your clients. And what we're here to talk to you about today is an agent to help you with that on-demand coaching for your reps whenever they need it by conducting role plays and providing feedback, all with the ability to be grounded in your CRM data and in your processes and training capabilities. The real crux of leveraging agents and agentic technology is how humans and agents drive success together. It's all about how humans can really harness these agents to be more productive, help more customers and ultimately drive more revenue. I think of it like our own personal AI agent, which helps you in every step of the way of the sales process. And with that, let's get really stuck into it. I'd like to introduce you to our product guru, Dheeraj.

Thank you, Nikki. Hello, everyone. So with Agentforce Sales Coach, it's going to be your trusted partner in scaling your sales teams and achieving accelerated sales growth. With Sales Coach, we're giving every seller or every sales rep the ability to practice their sales pitches or negotiation skills on every deal whenever they need it. Think of it as a dedicated coach for every team member. This is going to help guide, train and refine their skills. Now Sales Coach also provides personalized and objective feedback every single time. This is because it is backed by CRM data. This ensures that the reps can practice and perfect their approach even before hitting the field. Now let's talk about why we created Sales Coach. It's no secret that sales teams that get effective coaching perform better. But did you know that companies that prioritize coaching for their sales teams have 16.7% greater revenue growth? Now in spite of this, most managers are able to spend only 10% of their time coaching their sales teams. Now this is not because they think it's not important, no. It's just that there are too many conflicting priorities, and this is exactly where Sales Coach comes in. It's going to bridge the gap by offering scaling and personalized support for every sales rep so that they can reach their full potential. Now with Sales Coach, every sales rep can practice their pitching, handling objections and even their negotiation skills using Sales Coach on every single deal. Now Sales Coach is going to be available to them 24/7, which means they can practice anytime they want. Out of the box, we are providing with 4 of the most commonly used coaching scenarios. You have things like Sales Pitch. You can test your knowledge about your opportunities. You can do negotiation role plays. You can also do role plays of proposals or quotes. Now with all this, you can get actionable feedback from Sales Coach that is consistent and objective every single time. And this is possible because it is grounded in clean CRM data. In addition to CRM data, you can also give Sales Coach more context like your sales methodologies, your buyer personas, any other sales processes that you need to follow, even product information for that matter. Now Sales Coach is going to use all that information as context while giving out feedback to ensure that the sales reps are making progress towards closing their deals. Now one of the best parts about Sales Coach is how easy it is to set up. We have provided a step-wise flow, using which you can set up Sales Coach in a matter of minutes. And the out-of-the-box scenarios that we provide along with the prebuilt template is the icing on the cake. It helps you get started in no time at all. Now before we dive deeper into Sales Coach and sales agents, let's try and understand the 5 key attributes of any good sales agent. First up is the role. This is the job that we expect a sales agent to do. Now in case of sales agents at Salesforce, there are primarily 2 jobs that we are focusing on. One is nurturing the pipeline, and the next is coaching sales reps. Now for any agent, or for that matter, for any person to do the job well, they need the knowledge that is required, and this is where the grounding from the CRM data comes into picture. In addition to this, like I mentioned earlier, we have Retrieval Augmented Generation or RAG, using which you can give even more context to the sales agents by uploading details like product information or FAQs that would help the sales agent take the right actions. Now these actions are not taken in isolation or in a vacuum. You can define clear cut guided rules or guardrails that define what the agent should do or shouldn't do for that matter. Now with all this in place, the agent can help your sales reps on any channel, whether it is within your CRM, via e-mail or even beyond. Now let us break down how -- what are the major components of Sales Coach. So Sales Coach is broken down primarily into 4 building blocks. We have topics, instructions, actions, and for each action, we have a prompt template. Now topics are basically a group of instructions that are grouped together logically so that an action can be taken. Now in case of Sales Coach, like I said earlier, there are 4 scenarios that we support out of the box. Two of those are role play scenarios. So we have a role play for negotiation, and then we have a role play for proposal. This would basically help a seller talk to the agent as if he or she is talking to a prospective buyer. So within these topics, we are giving instructions to the agent on how it should behave. So basically, we are telling the agent, "Hey, behave like a prospective buyer. Negotiate for the best price. Try and get as many services included in the deal." So this would basically behave like a prospective buyer and help the seller practice their negotiation skills or proposal skills. Then we have a third topic, which basically takes care of the feedback that you get. Now all this is controlled by instructions. And you would be able to customize your prompts to your specific use cases. Now each of the actions that you see here has a prompt associated to it. So in the prompt, you can give any context related to opportunity. So you can give context about the opportunity size, opportunity business. Any field that's available on an opportunity, you can include it as context for the agent to use in the scenarios. Now in addition to that, you can also add questions into the prompt which you expect the seller to answer as part of their scenarios. For example, we're talking about a sales pitch. What is it that the seller has to answer as part of the sales pitch. He has -- he or she has to capture the key selling points of the product. They have to talk about why the product is a good fit for the customer. So you can capture any of -- any questions that you expect the seller to answer as part of the sales pitch within the prompt. So these are sections where you are defining what the seller should ideally say. The next piece is the feedback itself. You have the ability to define the feedback that the coach gives to your seller any way that you want. For example, out of the box, the way it is structured is, it captures what are the strengths of the sales rep in that conversation, what are the areas of improvement and what are the next steps. This would clearly guide the sales rep in taking actionable actions so that they can move the deal forward in the deal cycle. Now let us see how all of these come together in an amazing demo by Stephanie.

Hi. I'm Steph and I'm a sales rep who's been working on this really important deal with Omega for a while now, and it's time to negotiate pricing. I was really hoping to practice before him with my manager, but I know she's not free to meet with me before every call with every customer. Thankfully, I've got Agentforce Sales Coach right here who can help me out in opportunities that are in the negotiation phase because my coach knows that. So here, my coach is already recommending a role play. And since it's embedded in Salesforce, it's going to customize its coaching for me with all of that CRM context like the account and opportunity information. Here, Coach is going to assume the role of a prospective buyer and also help guide me through the sometimes difficult negotiations your sales reps can face. So let's get started. As you can see here, I've already been well prepped with what I need to be successful in this role play. But the main part is at the end of this role play, I am going to be given very specific feedback, not only feedback that's grounded on your CRM data about this particular opportunity and the account, but also your business processes and your products if you want to as well. So let's get started and see how Coach can help me out today. [Presentation]

Hello. I am glad we could connect today, and I am ready to discuss this deal.

Hey, there. How are you doing today? Are we ready to get started?

I'm doing well. Thank you. I'm ready to discuss this deal.

Perfect. So based on our last conversation, I was able to get a proposal of 1,000 units with each of those units being priced at $100 per month. How does that sound?

That sounds interesting, but I would like to discuss the pricing and see if there are any discounts available for AR bulk purchase. Can we explore that?

Definitely. And with our long-standing relationship, I'm able to offer you a 10% discount. Does that sound appealing to you?

A 10% discount is a good start. But considering the volume, could we possibly look at a 15% discount? This would make the deal more attractive for us.

I understand. There are a few ways that we can lower the cost, the first being a multiyear contract. For example, if you commit to a 3-year contract, we're able to lower those costs. And we also have a services product that we can add on that can add real value as well.

A multiyear contract is a good start, but we need more flexibility. Can you offer a higher discount if we commit to a 5-year contract instead? Also, we need to ensure that the service package includes 24/7 support and regular training sessions for our team.

Certainly, our services package does include that 24/7 support and regular quarterly training for your team. Does that address your concerns?

That sounds promising. To clarify, this would include full support and training services for the first year at no additional cost, correct?

That is correct. So are you ready to move forward?

That sounds like a solid offer. I will need to review this with my team. But it seems like we are close to an agreement. Can we schedule a follow-up meeting to finalize the details?

Definitely. I will send through an invite for Monday at 2:00 p.m. if you're free, and I'll also come with that updated proposal so we can review the numbers and get it all signed off. So thank you again for your time today.