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

Hello. Good morning, good afternoon or good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. Before we begin, I'd like to cover a few quick notes with you about our webinar platform. Today's webinar will be available on demand after we wrap up, and it will be accessible through the URL that you are on right now. It will also be sent out to you via e-mail tomorrow. Please note the slides will advance automatically throughout this presentation, and you can enlarge the slides or any other widget on your screen by simply dragging the bottom right-hand corner to resize. Should you need technical assistance, click on the help widget located on the bottom left corner of your console. We've also added some additional resources, which are available through the resource library right below your slides. There you can find additional related content. We encourage you to submit your questions at any time throughout our presentation using the submit a question widget. We will answer as many questions as we can at the end of our presentation. And if we aren't able to answer all the questions, we'll follow up with you offline. Lastly, let us know what you think of today's presentation by sharing your feedback via our webinar survey or share your excitement in the moment by using the emoji reactions on your screen. And with that, I am turning things over to Jenny to get us started.

Thank you so much, Ariana. Hi, everyone. I'm Jenny Tran. I'm a Senior Director in our Business Technology organization. I've been at Salesforce for 8 years now and have been part of the Salesforce ecosystem for over a decade. And my job at Salesforce is my dream job, and I get to work on our internal Sales Cloud or for a 25,000-person global sales team. And I lead teams of Salesforce admins and developers and product managers who are really building on top of our platform and deploying AI and agentic solutions that really help augment our internal sales teams to be as productive as possible here at Salesforce. Vanessa?

Hello. Thank you, Jenny. Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. Excited to be here this afternoon and thrilled to be at Salesforce during this incredible period of innovation. My name is Vanessa Tabbert, and I lead the SDR organization for our North American region, so sales development representative organization. I've been with Salesforce for 7 years. Prior to joining this team here, my background was primarily in building out sales teams for start-ups and scale-ups and implementing technology and processes that helped us scale, helped us grow, help make things more efficient, help provide a better customer experience. Thank you for having me, and I'll pass it over to the amazing Amanda Kelly.

Hi, everyone. My name is Amanda Kelly. I am a data analytics senior analyst. I work on the AMER sales development BizOps team. Previously, I was supporting BDRs and XDRs, and now I'm working very closely with Vanessa in helping on our sales development organization for America as well as for EMEA. Before Salesforce, I actually worked at a travel tech company, and I was there for about 7 years on account management side. So I have experience both in the sales organization as well as in operations. I work very closely with Vanessa on all things operations for AMER sales development, as I said before, but that specifically involves things like Agentforce as well as reporting. Now I'm going to turn it over to Lissa.

Awesome. Thanks. So hi, everybody. I am Lissa Smith. I am a business architect on our global sales ops team, and our team supports the processes, governance, user experience and tools for the global sales teams here at Salesforce. I've been at Salesforce for almost 5 years, but I've been part of the Salesforce ecosystem for over 18 years, working in sales ops and as a Salesforce administrator for a lot of that time. So like Jenny, I have my dream job because I get to work at Salesforce on sales force.

All right. Thank you to our amazing panel today. And before we kind of dive into our agenda, this is really our forward-looking statement. Salesforce is a publicly traded company, so please make purchasing decisions based on products and services that are currently available. And again, we really just wanted to say thank you for coming here and showing interest in Agentforce and how we've launched Agentforce for our internal sales teams here at Salesforce. So today, we're going to cover a little bit about why Agentforce and why we are choosing to use Agentforce internally to help us grow our business and extending our team with digital labor. We're then going to show you a few quick demos of how we're using agents internally and show you how simple and easy it was for us to really get started with building agents. Then we're going to share some of our key learnings from our recent launch of Sales Development and Sales Coach, and how we really think about measuring success in ROI, share some best practices. And then we're going to wrap it up with a really exciting success checklist that you can bring back to your companies. All right. Before we get started, I wanted to share really what it means to be a Customer Zero at Salesforce. It means that we get to be at the forefront of all the amazing new product and innovation. It means that we are the first adopters. We're the first to test. We're the first to launch. We're the first to really use our products internally for our sales teams so that we can make sure that we're bringing that product to market for all of you. And when we do, you can trust that. And you can trust that the product is ready for scale. Again, really whether you're a small business or a large enterprise, this really -- this momentum that we have in this Customer Zero focus that we have is really to ensure all of your success as well. And over the past year, we knew that we really had a huge opportunity. We really embraced a lot of our AI-first strategies, our Agentforce strategies, and launched multiple agents across the enterprise for not just our sellers, but our partners as well. We really redefined our go-to-market execution, all while acting as Customer Zero to ensure that our customers get to benefit what we've already done. But with that, it comes with challenges and successes as well. And some of those challenges are really knowing that the teams are being asked to do a lot more with less. And they're really feeling burnt out. They're feeling over stretched. They're feeling overwhelmed. And as a result of that, some opportunities are being missed. And many tasks are really go uncompleted and missed altogether. And at the same time, our customers and your customers are expecting more. Think about the last time where you called a customer support center and you're stuck on hold for 30 minutes or an hour. I mean people expect 0 hold time now, and that's the reality. People want more personalized and more empathetic experiences as well. And in fact, 41% of our employee time is spent on low-value repetitive work. And so the question that we should all really ask ourselves is how can we give time back to those employees so that they can really focus on higher priority work. So with Agentforce being our digital labor platform, we have already seen a lot of tremendous success with our recent launches that I mentioned earlier. And Agentforce is exactly what AI is truly meant to be. It is built around 25 years of investment into the metadata, the security, the permissions, the data model, the processes, all of your flows, your Apex code, your apps and all of the data sources that are unstructured and structured that really unlocks the power of Agentforce and brings it to new levels to help your businesses. And for today, we are going to focus on 2 sales skills. And before we kind of dive into that, I really want to just share and orient you a little bit about what are the 5 attributes that make up a sales agent? First is role. Role is a topic and jobs to be done that the agent can perform. So you'll have instructions that the agent is going to follow so that they can really understand how to perform that role. Then you're going to feed it with data. So that's exactly really what we did. We have external and internal data sources so that the agent is even more knowledgeable and relevant to your business. Then you assign actions so that the agent can take actions for you. There are also guardrails that you can put in place. And this is really where you can tell the agent what to do and what not to do in some cases. It can also interact across many channels. So this means you get to choose where you want the agent to show up. Is it in a form of an e-mail? Is it inside Slack? Is it on your website? Is it inside Salesforce directly, inside your CRM? And luckily, the beauty of this is all built on top of the trust layer, which will really help customers benefit from generative AI and agent AI without compromising that data security and privacy control. All right. I also want to introduce you to the agent development life cycle. It is very similar to any software app development process. But really, the key difference here is the speed and the ease with which you can do this. So this is actually the step-by-step development cycle that we use internally to build our agents. So now that you kind of have an idea and a head start of how you want to structure your agent, you can start managing and fine-tuning it further inside Agent Builder. So you can add and remove topics, you can add and remove actions. You could add data libraries. You can add context variables, and then you can take it for a spin, test it out within the Agent Builder itself, to see how it's performing. And once it is ready before you test it, you can start deploying it to any given channel like I mentioned earlier, directly from Agent Builder. So again, inside Salesforce, inside Slack, on your website, SMS or even in the form of an e-mail. So all of this can be done with just a few clicks in our drag-and-drop UI Agent Builder that you see in this screen shot. Okay. With that, we're going to share with you our recent implementation of our 2 sales skills. So first is Agentforce for Sales Development, which is really going to maximize pipeline by nurturing inbound leads 24/7, right? This is where the agent can engage, it can book meetings on your behalf. It means that your sales reps can really just spend their time focusing on the high-value opportunities and those high-value tasks while Agentforce can take care of the rest. And then on the right side is sales -- Agentforce for sales coaching. This is where the agent gives your team on-demand coaching. So from refining their pitch, before going in a call with a customer, they can interact with the agent real time, they can overcome objections to closing -- helping them close their deals. And the reps can actually get actionable feedback in real time, really to help improve their interaction every step of the way with their customer, and you'll see that in just a bit as well. All right. So for now, I'm going to pass it over to Vanessa to provide a little bit of context and some background into the why we're using Agentforce for Sales Development.

Perfect. Thank you so much, Jenny. Okay. So when I first started at Salesforce 7 years ago, one of the biggest adjustments for me was just the sheer volume of leads that my team received. I had come from companies where we had very blended roles inside of the sales teams because we didn't receive enough inbound leads for it just to be somebody's primary responsibility. At Salesforce, just to kind of anchor on our model, we follow the predictable revenue sales model, of which one of the primary philosophies is kind of a place for everything and everything in its place, a very well-defined job functions within the sales organization. So at SDRs, the team that I oversee are responsible for acting as an extension of our marketing engine. We are exclusively following up on inbound leads. BDRs, business development representatives, outbound prospects into an account that are within defined territories or supporting specific account executives or even specific Salesforce solutions and industries. And then AEs, of course, are responsible for closing business. Just to kind of ground everybody in the volume and the scale what I'm talking about with Salesforce, our enterprise SDR organization, my team of 80-ish SDRs process about 5,000 leads per day. We support nearly every industry and every single solution that Salesforce offers and across all company sizes. So when we announced and when it became apparent that Agentforce for Sales Development was going to be something that my team could get their hands on, I thought about the applicability, not just for the company that I'm currently at, but also what it could have done in my previous roles in different ways that we could have leveraged this incredible technology. So over the past handful of years, and I'll kind of advance to the next slide. Over the last handful of years, our sales model has stayed very consistent in terms of the different roles and functions that we have, but we've become a lot more sophisticated in understanding lead quality and the propensity for different types of leads to convert into paying customers. And so when we look at our lead journey and my SDR organization today, we now have the data to know that there's a large portion of our leads that aren't yet sales ready. Here at Salesforce, and I'm sure every company, we're all about the prospect and customer experience and reducing friction. And so we do have a marketing-led nurture strategy that allows us to deliver relevant content, self-service content that a prospect or our customer is looking for without ever having to involve a human SDR. However, there are still many, many leads, where the best thing that we can do for them and for us is to make sure that we have more direct, timely one-to-one personalized outreach. So Salesforce and the vision for my SDR team is all about blending the human touch with the agentic experience, making sure that prospects are receiving timely relevant outreach and the ability, like Jenny said, to communicate 24/7 with a member of my team, whether that is an SDR right out on the floor out there or with an agent. So 40% of leads, the ones that we've pre-identified with our -- help from our marketing partners as having the criteria most closely aligned with propensity to convert come directly to my team. And based on that criteria, my SDRs are able to use our cadence management software sales engagement to do personalized outreach to the top quality leads ensuring that there's a standard experience across all of our prospects that there's no lead left behind, which is incredibly important. However, they're also able to use Agentforce for Sales Development to pair with their phone outreach. And so as we're just getting started on this journey of AI and Agentforce, there's 2 primary value props and 2 primary things that I've really anchored around or designed the usage of Agentforce around in my organization today. Number one, is that because like I said, my SDRs work leads across all different industries, company sizes, personas, and we qualify for the dozens and dozens and dozens of solutions that Salesforce offers, it has always been historically very challenging to make sure that we are delivering hyper-relevant content in an organization that delivers and sends thousands of one-to-one e-mails every single day. Agentforce for SDR is helping us make sure that whether it is a CMO that has filled out a demo for a retail company looking at Marketing Cloud or a data scientist who has engaged with a Tableau trial, we are meeting our prospects where they're at with the right content and call to action without additional time and human resources spent on research and personalization, which has been huge. Number two is that, as I'm sure many of you are familiar, SDR in sales in general is all about polite but persistence. But we know that at a certain point, the ROI on human SDR outreach starts to dwindle. Now before we fully pass that lead back to marketing to nurture, we can now deploy Agentforce to help us reengage and hopefully recapture interest while we are still likely to be most top of mind for our prospects. So Agentforce can continue to deliver unique messaging and work to schedule a call with the original SDR on their calendar, so that no lead is falling through the cracks due to any capacity constraints on our end. And my team can continue to focus on the hottest leads right as they come in. So with that being said, let's take a look at how Agentforce for Sales works today.

At Salesforce, we have a global team of SDRs who we want focused on the best leads. So we deployed Agentforce to nurture our low-quality marketing leads until they're ready for our human SDRs. Let's see how. When a low-quality lead comes in, Agentforce automatically sends a personalized outreach e-mail based on the leads product interest, and include selling points relevant to Salesforce. If the lead doesn't respond, the agent autonomously follows up after a day based on our predefined guidance and offers a demo video to entice the lead even further. Better yet, if the lead asks the question, in this case, about trial options, the agent pulls relevant information from our sales documents to craft a trusted, accurate response. The agent also includes a link to schedule a meeting, seamlessly passing the interested lead to the human SDR. Usually to execute this flow, our human SDRs spend a lot of time researching leads and digging through product materials to manually write e-mails and answer questions. But with Agentforce, this is all done autonomously. In the worst case, if the lead requests to opt out, the agent handles it, updating the lead record to respect their preference. And the best part, we can ensure agents are up to date with our ever-changing product portfolio by simply uploading our latest product and marketing materials. So SDR always provides accurate responses when answering lead questions. And since agents are an extension of our sales team, they slot into our existing lead routing motion and follow the same rules of engagement as our sellers. And we track the performance of our agents just like we do our SDRs. Thanks to Agentforce, here at Salesforce, we're able to scale our SDR team and maximize pipeline.

Now that we have gone through that demo and similar to a slide setup that we had from Jenny at the beginning, let's go through how we structured our agent for sales development. First, what is the role of agent for sales development? What jobs should they be doing? We decided that they should be sending outreach to the lower scored leads, very similar to what Vanessa just walked us through. Data, what knowledge can they access? We ground our agent on CRM and data cloud and then actions, what capabilities do they have? We, one, want them to send e-mail that's how we're going to be able to nurture those low scored leads. We want them to book meetings when our prospects are interested in setting up the meeting, and we want them to be able to manage the opt-out. So when a prospect wants to opt out of our communication, we want the agent to be able to autonomously do so. Then next, for guardrails. What shouldn't they do? For us, we decided to have the agent not discuss any competitor information when they are doing their outreach. And then lastly, what channel? Well, that's e-mail, of course, that is going to be how we're going to be able to prospect and have our outreach with these lower-scored leads. There are multiple learnings that we uncovered while standing up Agentforce for Sales Development for you to consider and implement when you stand up your own agents. So first one is align vision and team. Vanessa just did a fantastic job walking through our vision, but there are multiple ways that you can be able to augment your SDR organization and agents in itself. So make sure that you first are defining that shared vision. So that way you be able to all run together as a team towards that main goal. Once you have that vision in place, you're going to want to establish your cross-functional teams. You want it to correlate with what your vision is looking like for your agent. For us, that meant we had a cross-functional team of sales, business technology and product. Next is the SDR experience. You want to make sure you're understanding the existing SDR process and what their daily flow of work looks like. You want to be able to integrate and mesh your Agentforce for Sales Development into their day-to-day work currently rather than pulling them out of their current day-to-day process, which could then affect their productivity. So make sure you're meeting the SDR where they're at. You also want to make sure you're leveraging enablement best practices. The way that we did this was through twofold approach: one, we had a Slack canvas that was set up for at scale, and it had an extensive FAQ for any time one of our pilot users needed to be able to have a question answered about Agentforce for Sales Development. And then when each user came on to the product, we actually had one-on-one training sessions for those users to make sure that they felt comfortable utilizing the tool. Number three, is test, tune and repeat. Start with those out-of-the-box prompts, use them as a foundation when you're setting up those e-mail prompts for your Agentforce for Sales Development. However, once you start reviewing those out-of-the-box prompts, seeing what the e-mails are looking like that are going to be sent out for the outreach, go in and evolve with customization. That's what we did on our end. We wanted to make sure that what was being sent out by our Agentforce for Sales development, reflected Salesforce's messaging and also reflected on how our SDRs are typically communicating with our prospects. And number four, feedback is gold. Make sure you have a forum for continuous feedback. A lot of the enhancements that we've made for Agentforce for Sales Development is due to the feedback that we have had from our users. We had one specific member of our project team that was collecting all the feedback and escalating it to the project team. So that way, we make sure no feedback was left out. Once it was given to the project team, we then decided what was most urgent, what was most important or was this going to be addressed in future state product enhancements. And then last, anticipate visibility. For us, it's the first customer-facing agent, and this was the first time one of our agents was going to be talking with our prospects. And so that means that there's a lot of interest that's coming from that. So make sure everything that you're putting out to the customers is aligned with what your vision is as well as what your company's messaging is typically like. And then lastly, there's going to be a lot of visibility, as I said before. So make sure that you have a dashboard or some kind of reporting repository. So that way, you can see the ROI that's coming from that agent, and ensure all the alignment with your project team on the metrics that you're measuring by because this is going to have a lot of visibility that is not just coming from external, it's going to be also internal as well. Now I'm going to pass it over to Lissa to go over Agentforce for sales coaching.

Great. Okay. Yes, let's jump right in. So we have more than 2,000 sales managers, and each of them has an average team size of about 7 to 10 direct reports. And I'm sure everyone here can relate to them. They're super busy. They've pulled in a million directions, juggling a lot of priorities. And they spend anywhere from 5% to 10% of their time coaching their teams on their deals. So this is where Agentforce for sales coaching comes in. This agent helps to augment the coaching workload of our sales managers. And for us at Salesforce, this will free up over 200,000 manager hours a year. And this is time that our managers can now spend on more impactful work with their teams and our customers. But it's not just helping our managers. Our sellers need to practice to learn how to win. And this agent gives them an on-demand, always available way that they can practice their pitches, they can role play, objection handling. And ultimately, it helps our sellers get ready to talk to you, our customers. So let's see a demo of it in action and hear how we rolled it out internally.

Sales managers are struggling to provide personalized coaching to every AE on every opportunity at every sales stage, even here at Salesforce. That's why we are deploying Agentforce to scale our coaching efforts to ensure every seller receives the guidance they need so that deals don't stall. Let's dive in into a demo to see how Agentforce sales coach is helping our sales force sellers. I'm going to play the role of an AE, and I'm preparing for a meeting with my account, Omega, who is really interested in learning more about Agentforce Sales Coach. Now I'm ready to start refining my pitch for this opportunity, and I'd love feedback on this critical deal, but my leader is away at a conference this week. Fortunately, I have Agentforce sales coach that can help and I can launch it directly from the opportunity record in Salesforce to practice my pitch. Hi. Since our last conversation, I've been thinking a lot about how we can help you with your surge of outbound sales calls, hiring challenges and ensuring your team gets the right coaching to close deals. And I have a great solution for one of those challenges. Have you heard of Agentforce Sales Coach? It's an AI-powered tool designed to boost your sales team's performance and acts as an additional team member. It will help with a few things you've mentioned wanting help with, refining seller pitches, handling objections and negotiating, and it does all of this with tailored role plays. Now what's unique about Agentforce is it provides personalized objective feedback grounded in your CRM data. Now this ensures every coaching session drives meaningful progress and advances deals forward. Now I know an easy setup is important to you. And with Agentforce Sales Coach, it's quick and easy with prebuilt templates that are customizable to fit your sales culture and methodologies. Would you want to see a demo or learn more? Now Agentforce Sales Coach is processing my performance to provide individual personalized and actionable feedback using details from the account and opportunity records in our CRM. Now here, I see my feedback and includes a deal summary, feedback on my skills, my knowledge of the product and even additional recommendations and next steps. All of this will help me feel more prepared and confident so I can ace my upcoming meeting with Omega. It also tailors the feedback on things most important to our company's goals, in this instance, Agentforce. Now all of this is available out of the box and can also be customized to add in more specifics. At Salesforce, we initially rolled it out to 500 sellers and after only 2 weeks on a pilot, we have rolled it out to our entire sales team. With Agentforce, our sellers can practice their pitch or role play to sharpen negotiation skills with personalized unbiased coaching on demand.

Awesome. That was pretty cool, right? Okay. So let's talk through how it works and how we set it up. And this slide is going to look familiar because both Jenny and Amanda have touched on this earlier, but we're going to dive back into those building blocks of an agent. So within Agent Builder, we define the agent role, which is telling it its job. And in this case, it's to be a sales manager that will coach sellers on their deals. We ground the agent with data from the opportunity and account records in Salesforce, along with data cloud data. And we assign it some actions to make sure it's giving relevant and effective feedback because we want to make sure the feedback is meaningful and actually helping prepare our sellers to talk to our customers. And as you saw in the demo video, we even customized the feedback actions to suggest Trailhead modules based on learning gaps that the agent identified in the session. We also set guardrails for what it should and shouldn't do. So for example, we can instruct the coach to make the tone of the feedback constructive rather than destructive criticism. And this agent sits within the context of an opportunity record in Salesforce with trust and security as a foundation. Okay. So that's how we structure the agent. And you saw in the video that we went from a pilot of 500 sellers to a full rollout in 2 weeks, but a lot was happening behind the scenes, and we learned a lot. So some of these are also going to be familiar. But first off, leadership buy-in was crucial. So when leaders see the benefit and the potential time savings for themselves, they're much more likely to encourage their teams to use the tool. It's all about showing them how it can make their lives easier and more efficient, and this will ultimately help sellers too. Next when we are identifying pilot users, we wanted to look for sellers who are early in their deal cycles so they could benefit from early coaching and then continue to get guidance throughout their entire deal. So we got their feedback throughout the pilot and then that continues today. And that's really helped us refine our approach. And speaking of refining our approach, it leads me to another really important lesson, which is to test, tune and repeat. So writing prompts is an art. It is never going to be perfect on the first try. So we started with the out-of-the-box templates and then began to customize them to reflect our own sales methodologies and processes. And then based on seller feedback, we updated them again and again. So I think it's really important advice for every agent is that you should anticipate change, just be ready to iterate because it's never going to be perfect on the first try, but your business is always changing and your goals are always changing, and you're going to want to adjust your prompts again and again as those changes happen. And then to the point of feedback, make sure you have a way for sellers to give feedback and escalate any issues. For us, we use Slack channels and Slack workflows. It allows us to troubleshoot any issues quickly. But then that also helps us build a road map for continuously improving the prompts. So back to that cycle of constant tuning and enhancement. And last of all, you might not have a prompt engineer on staff. Many of you might even be involved with writing some of these prompts to definitely start with those out-of-the-box templates like we did. There are really great Trailhead modules out there that can help you build your knowledge and then you can continue to refine those prompts as you go. It's going to be iterative and you're going to have to make changes. This is a new way of working for our sellers, interacting with an agent in the role-play scenarios. It's very different. It's really cool. But having conversations with an agent, that's a new way of working. But also for those of us behind the scenes who are learning the ins and outs of agents and topics and skills and prompts and actions and all of these building blocks, it's -- we need to all just lean into that new way of working. So all of this has helped us with pilot and launch and continuing to enhance the Agentforce for Sales coaching. And hopefully, these tips will help you too. So next up, Amanda is going to share how we measure success.

Perfect. Thank you, Lissa. So when we think of measuring success, we like to really think of it in 2 different avenues. We like to think of it as qualitative and quantitative. From a qualitative perspective, we want to make sure that AI is going to help users get support faster and connect with a human at the right time. By having this happen, this allows our employees to focus more time on strategic tests, and that will overall boost our productivity. With agents, you can think about, one, agents that can assist employees by streamlining access to knowledge and information; or two, agents that can work completely autonomously and take action on behalf of a human employee. One thing we like to say internally is we want to meet teams where they are, whether that's in Salesforce, Slack or Tableau. We find ways to infuse agents in AI to help them through every step of the deal cycle. On the right-hand side of this slide, you can actually see some examples of the quantitative measures of the ways that we're measuring success. For the way that we thought through these metrics, think through where you want the agent to make the impact and where you're going to be seeing this in the numbers because that's where you're going to be able to see really the value in the agent. As I said before, there's a few different examples on this slide, but I really want to hone in on Agentforce for sales. Starting off with Agentforce for Sales Development. The way that we decided for the metrics that we are measuring for success is leads handled by agent, so how many leads are being handled by Agentforce for Sales Development, number of meetings booked and lead conversion rates. How we landed on these metrics is we want to see the agent being able to drive business for Salesforce through the outreach that they're having with these lower-scored leads. And both of these metrics show inputs and outputs. For inputs, we want to see how much is it being able to take on. So that's a number of leads handled by agent. And then the output is really what is that productivity we're seeing from the agent. So that's number of meetings booked for sales as well as lead conversion. Now with Sales Coach, we want to see the number of coaching sessions logged by each rep on the opportunity and how much time our managers are saving with the agents. We want to make sure the enablement for the sellers is replicated with the agent without manager intervention. For all Agentforce that we have within Salesforce, there's 2 other metrics that you can see at the bottom. You have correlation and sentiment. For correlation, we want to see correlation of sellers who use AI have higher win rates and close deals faster than sellers who don't use AI. And then for sentiment, we actually send out quarterly surveys and preform text and we receive a lot of constructive feedback through these surveys. So for us, we don't only just measure success with these quantitative key metrics. We're also looking at the qualitative side as well. Now you just went through a lot of best practices from the team that is presenting to you today, and we want to be able to give you a checklist for success. So first, start small with prebuilt skills, begin with prebuilt agents prioritizing high-impact use cases and regularly need to enhance these agents. As you saw, we used the prebuilt prompts that we had as foundations for Agentforce for Sales Development as well as Agentforce for sales coaching, use these prebuilt agents when they're getting started. And then assess the agent's autonomy and necessary guardrails for quality customer experience. As you saw, we set up guardrails for Agentforce for Sales Development and for sales coaching, make sure that you're thinking through those guardrails as you're setting up your Agentforce. Number two, begin with the end in mind, clean up business processes and design with the end in mind, establishing clear success metrics. Very similar to the success metrics, I just went over on the previous slide, make sure you have those established as you're going forward with your Agentforce. And also define the agent's persona skills and the specific problem they're going to address. That -- establish that vision that both Lissa and myself talked through. Number three, this is going to sound familiar. We went over this for both of the Agentforces, test, tune and repeat. Make sure that you're continuously testing and tuning because it's crucial post launch. As we said, you're going to continue iterating on these prompts, make sure that you're doing that testing to ensure that what's going forward to the customers is what you're looking to have, and align BT in business for daily stand-ups and use Sandboxes for those iterative improvements. Make sure you're testing even before it goes out to the customer. And then number four, develop a robust data strategy. Data is the backbone of AI and relevant data is invaluable. Make sure you're investing in cleaning and improving your data is so important because that is what the Agentforce is going to be grounded in. Number five, create an Agentforce-first culture. Agentforce is built on top of 25-plus years of the Salesforce platform. It's an opportunity to deepen skills for tools like Agent Builder. Like we said, spend those time fine-tuning the prompts and instructions for the best experiences to really help create that Agentforce-first culture. And then lastly, embrace new ways of working. Foster a new partnership between business technology and the business team, focus on true transformation and doubling down on change management. This is going to be a brand-new way a lot of us are working. And if the proper change management is not put in place, it's not something that's going to be continued to catch on within your company. Before we get to the Q&A, I have 2 opportunities for you to continue to learn about Agentforce. One, we have a virtual hands-on workshop where you'll have the opportunity to build your own agent. The next sessions are coming up the 1st week of March. Join us please and feel free to invite teammates to be able to have some of these hands-on workshops. And then number two, we recently published an agent playbook that shares other sales use cases by agents. Links to both of these will be pasted in the webinar side panel. Now I'm going to turn over to Maureen for the Q&A. So please feel free to start submitting some of your questions.

Thank you so much, Amanda, and to all of our speakers. I hope everyone found that content valuable. I know I have heard it a couple of times and learned something new each time. We have a couple of questions that came in. I'm going to start, if it's okay. Lissa, here is one for you regarding Sales Coach. So the question is, how are your sellers responding to using coaching agent? Are they comfortable practicing with it?

Yes. I would say definitely, yes. So far they've been comfortable. The practicing a pitch is a little more straightforward because you're just giving your pitch to the agent and then you get feedback at the end. The one that is definitely a new way of working, like I mentioned earlier, is the role play because you don't know which direction that's going to go. The agent actually will ask really good questions just like a real customer conversation and take you in a different direction. And I think that's where they're even seeing more value because it just leads to those unexpected conversations. And the biggest request we've gotten from sellers so far is that they want to go back and reference the feedback that the agent gave them later, which just speaks to how relevant that feedback has been.

That's great. Actually, while you're unmuted, I have a second question for you. So what type -- you sort of alluded to it, but maybe you can provide a little bit of detail. What types of customizations have you applied to the coaching agent to make the feedback even more relevant?

So we've had to teach it a lot of product information. It needs to know Agentforce in and out, which is pretty meta to have to -- the agent has to know all about Agentforce so that the sellers can pitch Agentforce well and give great feedback on their Agentforce pitch. So we've had to teach it a lot about Agentforce and our products. And then, again, our sales methodologies, our processes. And then like you saw, I think the coolest part, we're Salesforce, we love Trailhead, being able to embed some of those Trailhead recommendations into the feedback, I think, is pretty cool.

Add to that as well. So I actually worked with Lissa really closely and her team to just to make sure that we're continuing to fine-tune those prompts and the actions and really making sure that our data was clean and accurate, right? And the real unlock and the beauty of Agentforce is that it's one of those technologies that you don't just implement it and move on, right? It's -- you continue to go back and iterate and really invest in all the things that we talked about earlier, like your data sources, your actions, the guardrails that really make the agent work for you better. And luckily, we made all of that super easy as well with our low-code solution. So it's been a really great experience for my team to work with Lissa's team to continue to iterate -- I mean, not just for our sales coaching agent, but all of our sales agents across the board. So it's been really, really great to experience that and also work really closely with Lissa's team. Thank you for letting me add a little bit to that.

Of course. Thank you, Jenny. All right. Just in the spirit of time, I think we'll take one last question, Vanessa, I think this is a good one for you. So specific to sort of the process between the Sales Development agent and your team, how do you ensure that successful handoff between the agent and the seller?

Yes, good question. It's actually really pretty simple. There's 2 things here. Number one is like my entire business is completely predicated on speed. I expect people, we all expect salespeople to be super responsive and always available. And Agentforce is fantastic because it's as close to having like a real-time correspondence like you would experience on a phone call with the sales rep as possible. And so the other thing is that for every company I've ever worked for, it's always been said that if it's not in Salesforce, it didn't happen. And so I think like being able to have the tie between the trust that it's going to be very rapid responses, but that myself, my team, my SDRs are able to see everything that has happened in an agent correspondence, is incredibly important, whether that is the back and forth objection handling, whether that is questions that have been asked, whether that is just trying to find the appropriate time on the SDR's calendar, knowing that it's all going to go back into the CRMs, so we're able to get data from that, but also knowing that it's been as real time of a conversation as possible that we have access to all of that has been phenomenal.

Very good. Well, with that, thank you all again for joining. We hope you found the session valuable and hope to see you at another webinar soon. Goodbye.