7 Practical Ways to Put Sales AI to Work | Salesforce

Welcome to 7 Practical Ways to Put Sales AI to Work. Over the next hour, we're going to show you some of our latest sales AI innovations that you can start using today to drive growth and boost productivity. From pipeline to paycheck, alliteration is how we start this show. Thank you for joining us. I'm your host, Keri Chow.

Hey.

It's Olympic season. They're getting underway. And in the same spirit, we have a sales cloud dream team here for you today. Carrie Cathan Carcanis. Marianne Patel. Victor Lu. This is like the LeBron James, Steph Curry, Caitlin Clark of sales cloud. This is what I'm saying. It's coming to you live from Salesforce headquarters in San Francisco. And we're all here to help you unlock the power of AI for your business. If you're feeling overwhelmed, yo, we got you. If the AI revolution is a wave, we want to help you surf it, not have it crash on top of you. Nobody wants that. So here's what's coming up on on our jam packed show. First, we're going to unveil some of our latest game changing AI innovations for the sales Blazer community. Plus, we've got details from our brand new state of sales report just released today. And we'll explain how to take action from those incredible insights. Then we're going to walk through some live demos of our most powerful sales AI solutions. You'll hear from Cognizant, one of the top consulting firms about how they deploy Salesforce AI across their business. And on top of all of that, this is going to be interactive. We want to hear from you, the viewer. Join us in the chat on Salesforce Plus. Experts are standing by to answer your questions right now. And the Salesforce sales cloud dream team going to be answering your questions live throughout the show. Sound good? All right, so without further ado, we're going to dive in. And who better to kick things off than the GM and EVP of sales cloud, Cathan Carkanis. Caitlin, you're like the. I just called you the LeBron James sales guy. I mean, come on, are we hyped?

The best thing that probably ever happened to me.

So good. How excited are you to be here tonight?

Hey, first, so good to be on your show. And a big hello to everybody who's tuned in online across the world. Look, it's a very exciting moment. My team and I, we just. We're churning out products at the speed of AI And I want to show it all.

We want to show it all. And we're not going to waste any time. We have a huge announcement to make. We're kind of breaking news here because at first we're going to talk about a Dreamforce, but we've decided to give audiences a sneak peek today. What is this breaking news you're about to announce?

You know, I said speed of AI we were going to hold this back till Dreamforce, but we can't. We can't. This has to go out today. And it's, it's, it's an incredible new leap in the world of sales tech and sales AI. We are going to be launching autonomous sales agents. I will show it to you, but that's at the end of the show.

Autonomous sales. Okay. So for those new to AI, autonomous, we're talking about like an AI that can just take all the action. Like, is that what you're telling me?

AI that can work hand in glove with you to complete a full task and a job? And I'm going to double click into that because there's predictive, prescriptive that's telling you what might happen. There was generative AI and I'm already saying was as if it was five years ago. This was just last year. Speed of AI welcome. But that was the copilot experience assisting you in your job. Now we are moving to autonomous, the third wave where humans and AI are working together as a team, where not just helping you, but doing parts of the job for you.

Again, in the spirit of the Olympics, like this is Usain Bolt. Like we're talking about how fast the speed of AI is. It's incredible. That's a great teaser. We're going to get more into that later. But what just came out today? The brand new state of sales report. So, Cathedral, really quickly, what is the state of sales report and what stood out to you? Why is it so important?

Look, it's exciting. I'll tell you why. It's the most comprehensive pulse of what's happening in the world of sales in the world. So we went out and we spoke to 5,500 sales professionals in 18 countries global and we asked them questions on AI, questions on productivity, questions on sales best practices, questions on sales discipline, questions on how, what are the best techniques they're using for revenue models, everything in between. We packaged all that and an incredible research report. This is a research report, State of sales, and we published it today. In fact, it went live an hour ago. I think so. So all of you head to salesblazer.com and download the report. And there are a couple of interesting Things. Maybe I can just wet your beak a bit.

I would like to have my beak wet on this.

All right, good. This is a very important topic. It's that kind of a morning. One important thing. We all are talking about AI. Yeah, but are people doing it and is it resulting in value? We separated the group of people, salespeople who are using AI and who are not using AI. People who are using AI, they reported a revenue growth. 86% of them reported some form of revenue growth. That's pretty compelling number. That's not an ambiguous number. But there's one more interesting thing that stood out. Do you know what happened to the headcount of the teams that were using AI?

What?

There's a stat around that. But you got to read the report. Come on, you got to read the report.

All right. Okay.

Fair.

I love it. And clearly these are insights that everyone can take action with. Like that's what it's all about. It's about not just the information, but what to do with that information.

It's a playbook.

Yeah, exactly. One of those stats in there, and I'm going to give a little more of a teaser here, is about that. Sellers are only spending about 30% of their time actually selling. So that seems like a huge opportunity here.

That's a big stat. You said 30. I flip it the reverse way. 70% of the time is spent on non revenue generating tasks. Tasks such as administrative tasks, tasks such as researching the customer, tasks such as connecting the dots, tasks such as updating various systems and coordinating across these multiple point solutions out there in the world. That's a lot of time spent and that is a huge anchor on productivity. We are coming down to the basics of AI driving seller productivity. And that's what we are. That's the big, big aha in that report is whoa. That much. This is a huge opportunity.

Huge opportunity. The big aha. But I want to be super clear for our viewers here, like spell this out for us, what does this mean for our customers?

You know, it's. We went out and we spoke to CSOs, CROs, sales leaders, VPs of sales, VPs of sales, operations. And we double clicked into this productivity chasm, if you may. And it's kind of very interesting is all of them have tried to approach the problem with yet more point solutions rather than a fundamental rethink of what is the seller experience. What are the tools we are giving our sellers to make them that much more productive. And that's what led us to deeply listen to them and Connect AI to a purpose of driving seller productivity. And that's what today's session is all about.

Break it down here for us. So take us through these AI use cases for sales. Let's make it clear.

There was another thing in that report. It was not just these numbers, but there was also a lot of concern raised in this report. For example, you know, people are overwhelmed. They're overwhelmed. There's AI talk and noise everywhere. LLMs, rag, llama, bard, mama, like, I don't know. I don't know. Look, we are in tech. We love that. I love to geek out all day long. Most people are not. They want to run a business. They want to run connect with their customers in a whole new way. They need to them an AI conversation has to be a ROI conversation. AI is roi. And we took that feedback very seriously because Salesforce always connects with their customers this way. And we're like, whoa, it's not about tech. It's about rolling out a playbook. A simple, practical playbook, not comprehensive, simple, practical. Of what are the few use cases you can get started with AI today? And what's your step by step guide to doing that? And that's what seven practical AI use cases is all about. It's kind of exciting.

It's super exciting. Can you spell out what are those seven AI use cases?

I would love to. I would love to. You know, it all starts with I said, like, how do you remove the administrative burden on the sales rep, freeing up time, the sales assistant giving every seller assistant that comes with them wherever they go. So the Einstein copilot is with you whether you're on your phone, whether you're in Salesforce, Whether you're in LinkedIn, wherever you might be, helping you research your customers, pulling in information for you, helping you update your data, helping you stay up to date on the latest things happening in your business. It's pretty incredible. Even telling you your forecast, guidance, even helping you write close plans, of course, helping you write emails. So that's a lot of assistance. 2 I really love is Einstein comes with you on your calls and takes all your notes, transcribes all your calls, summarizes your calls. So you're focused on your customer. But here's an interesting part. What if you could eliminate data entry? That's kind of cool. Yeah, that's a great use case. That's number three. But what I love even more is AI can help you see the future. Now, I know that sounds provocative. I know. But think about it this way. If you're working on an Opti, wouldn't you like to have a signal of what might happen with this opportunity? Or is this lead a good lead? Will it close then? What I love the most is AI is helping you get a guide path, a guide in selling, pricing recommendations, product recommendations, and you could go on and on. But what I love every CRO. Also, in the state of sales report, there was an interesting statistic around enablement. It's a hot topic across the world. And I can help you create coaching your sellers. Let's say your seller was on a call. An objection word was raised. You can dynamically assign a training program to your seller. That's kind of interesting. And finally, sales is all about building relationships and growing relationships. And I think so. You know, AI can help you connect the dots. I'll just leave it at that.

I mean, we're going to deep dive into all those seven use cases coming up right here in this show. But I'm going to ask you here, Cathy, I'll put you on the spot. Well, one quick aside. You said future. I hate to break it to you, but I had a Magic 8 ball when I was a kid.

You did.

And I shook it up and I could see the future. So this is not the first time, but. All right, what, out of all those amazing AI use cases, what excites you the most?

I'll tell you fundamentally, when salespeople come to us after using the product and tell them, tell me, I saved five, six hours a week. I saved a day a week. That's like, it makes their job fulfilling. And I think so. That excites me. These use cases do that. That's where our call support is a very. Is there a sales rep in the world that does not go on sales calls?

Everybody does that.

And we are all in the world of digital. So the Einstein copilot, Einstein conversational insights are some of my favorites. But I guess I like all of them.

That's a cop out.

It's a tough one. It's a tough.

So where can our viewers go to learn more about all these seven AI use cases?

It's a great question. And what we have done is we want to make it simple for you to understand and to also take these in your organization because you have to build support. You have to build. You have to build consensus around all of these transformations in your company. So head to salesblazer.com we have a complete guided tour. Now, this guided tour is not just slides. It's actual demonstrations and videos of the product, live product. And this is self serve. So you don't have to wait for me or somebody else to come show this to you. Though I would love to come show this to you live in your office, but head out there, go check out the guided tour and then give us a holler.

And the demos is truly, that's where it's so helpful and you could see the practicality of how you can implement it within your own companies. Remember, this is an interactive show. Please, for those on Salesforce, put in your questions. We've got all the experts here to answer your questions. One of the questions though, just off the top of my head though, is clearly we often talk about these innovations, right? All these things that are coming down the pipe. What is available right now?

I'll keep it very simple for you. The seven use cases that you saw on the screen a few minutes ago. And you can go down, you can go check out the guided tour. All of that is available right now. We have customers using it right now.

Boom.

And we keep improving it. But hey, get started.

And that's incredible, right? Like, we talk about the future, but the fact that they're available.

Future is here now. Boom.

Exactly. That's what I'm saying.

Future is here now. This is happening. This is happening. The world is transforming and it's happening at the speed of AI. This is the biggest thing happening to enterprise software anywhere in the world. And what we are trying to do, what we are laser focused on, is how do we help our customers get ahead of this? That's the focus.

It's like we said earlier, the AI revolution is a wave and we want to help customers surf that. I'm a surfer. I'm not a good one, but I'm telling you, it's much more enjoyable than having the wave crash on top of you. Please, viewers, keep those questions coming on. Post them on Salesforce Plus. Right now we have experts standing by to give you the answers. And we'll also be taking your questions live. Cathan is not going anywhere. He's going to share the first ever demo of our new autonomous sales agents later in this hour. You're not gonna wanna miss it. I got a sneak peek. It is incredible and it's gonna make your jaw drop. This is not overhyping. I'm just like, what? Anyhow, all right, to showcase some of the seven use cases of Sales AI in action now, we welcome in the one and only Marianne Patel, SVP of Sales Cloud. Marianne, thanks so much for joining us. What do you have in store for us today?

I have Some amazing AI use cases. The first one that I love, it's all about keeping me focused and that's with Sales Assistant and Einstein Copilot. I also absolutely love having all of my notes taken for me and transcribing them on calls. So AI powered call support is something that I love. Something near and dear to my heart is eliminating data entry. And so automatic data capture is something I'm going to show you. And finally, I'm going to see into the future slightly better than a Magic 8 ball and I'm going to look at which leads and opportunities I should prioritize. So do you mind if I give you a demo? I'm going to jump right in.

Let's do it.

All righty. So here I have started on my seller home. This is my one stop shop to get everything that I need. And I want you to look at this automated contacts here because Einstein Activity capture is connected to Outlook, to Gmail directly. It's looking at my emails, my meetings and it's able to fill in the data in my CRM for me, which is amazing. But I want to figure out how I get started with my day. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on Einstein here and I am going to ask him some questions. Really simple human language, show me about my day. I'm going to click send. Einstein is looking at all of my actions, everything I need to do. It's given me my agenda in one place, help me figure out what are my top leads and opportunities I need to work on. So to get started with that, I am going to say, hey, generate a close plan for me for this top opportunity. And it's not a rigid standard plan. It's not something that my boss told me to do. It is focused on how I sell. And right at the top it's saying, okay, you need to schedule a call with Vijay. I, I need to do that. Normally takes a ton of different clicks and conversations and figuring out my calendar, but with Copilot, I just ask. And right there I get to see a full email of what I send. It looks at my calendar, figures out when I'm free, which is basically never. And it's going to do that for me. So if I click here, I want to send this email. And right here, right from Salesforce, the email is going to be drafted for me. It's going to send through Outlook and Gmail right when I hit send and I had to do absolutely no work. Einstein is helping me along the way now to prep for this meeting. What do I need to do? I need to figure out what I'm going to say. So here I'm going to look and say, okay, tell me about the competitive landscape. But it's not just going to look at data that's inside of my CRM. It's going to look at the data that's also on the web. Because both of those pieces of data together, my confidential, important business data, information that's out there, is going to help me figure out what their strengths and weaknesses are. Now I am feeling amazing. I'm going to crush this meeting. So now that I'm in crush mode, I'm going to go to pipeline inspection to see what other opportunities I can go take down. This is where I get all of my signals, my analytics and AI. It all comes together. And that starts by seeing into the future. It no longer looks like a Magic 8 ball, but hopefully you can see that it's telling me, hey, it looks like the current stage is taking too long. This is not trending really well. I need to pull this deal in. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at the deal insights panel and the deal insights panel right here on the right is going to tell me everything that I need to pay attention to. This opportunity amount, it's recently decreased five times. That is problematic. You know, in this case, I'm a sales leader. I need to figure out what's happened. So I drill into the activity and right there I can see all of the activities that happen. But I know the real meat comes in the meetings. And so now I can look directly at the meetings. I get insights if I want them, but I want to see for my own eyes. So I click here on the call and now I'm taken to this meeting. These people look way too happy for there to have been a price decrease. But if I look here on the left, these automatic insights, they show that pricing was talked about. Maybe this person doesn't have the budget or authority for this. I love that Einstein has transcribed this call completely for me. Many, many languages are supported, but I'm a busy person, don't have time. So I'm going to go to call summary and generate a call and with one click, what I absolutely love is at the top. It gives me a sentiment analysis of how this call went. I can get a full call summary and I can see the next steps because maybe the rep committed to something, maybe the customer committed to something. I want to see all of that in one place. I can also edit this because it's all about human in the loop and making sure that we have trust. But even this is not good enough for me. I am going to use Einstein and Copilot and ask some questions. I didn't really see where the customer had questions. I saw that some objections were raised. And so here I'm going to ask Copilot to help me with call exploration. Copilot allows me to see right what those objections were right in one place. So now I'm totally prepared for this meeting. But that's not all I wanted to show you. At the end of the day, as an organization, if you're a CRO, if you're a marketer, if you're a seller, what you really want is what's happening right now. You know, all too often your business is running super fast, things are changing, but you don't know what those signals are. And that's why we built sales signals. Now you can look at all of those calls in one place and get the themes that are coming through, see what's happening at the speed of your business. So if I want to see if they're talking about a specific competitor, I can see, oh my gosh, 800 mentions affecting $4 million in pipe. That's highly problematic. But if I click here, I can see some of the themes are actually that customers are saying that this competitor has really high pricing. They don't see the value. There are a bunch of opportunities that I could go take down and I can see right what customers are saying. This allows me to tune my playbook in real time. It allows me to change my battle cards, my marketing tactics. This is a great tool that uses generative AI to take all of those conversations that we're automatically capturing and it takes it to the next level to answer the questions you didn't even know you had. But I'm not even done showing off because we have brought all of this to the Internet. When you are using Outlook, when you're using Gmail, when you're using LinkedIn, all of these tools are for you with sales cloud everywhere and Einstein Copilot is there with you. You can ask Copilot all those questions that you thought of before. In this case I'm looking at account and I'm going to look at cross sell upsell opportunities and it's going to get all of that information for me. But imagine the power of doing forecasting in LinkedIn, sending emails in LinkedIn, generating information. All of that is what we want. And my mic Drop moment is all of this that I just showed you. It is available also on the Salesforce mobile app. We have a brand new sales focused, seller focused experience coming to you before Dreamforce and Copilot. It's already there right now. So go check out the Salesforce mobile experience.

That was incredible. I don't know if you saw me over here, I was just like, wow, you can do that. I was just thinking about the efficiencies, right. And how much time I could save because how much time I'm generating those emails and we're almost paying homage to our clicks. Not code. You're just clicking and all of a sudden all those Einstein Insights and Copilot automatically imported and you're able to focus on all the things that truly matter. I know a lot of audience questions are starting to come in and we've got actually one From AMP on LinkedIn and this is a great question that I had, kind of a similar thought process is there are so many options right now, AI is new to a lot of folks and they're trying to figure out how do I dip my toes into this water. What advice do you have for a seller who's trying to figure out exactly which copilot they need?

Thank you so much for that question. We have the same question sometimes when we talk to customers and there's a couple things I look at. One is think about whether the Copilot that you're using is unified across all of the different tools that you use, but also all the people that you work with. Do your marketers and do your sellers and do your billing team all have access to the same data, the same architecture, the same platform. That is incredibly important. Two, I want to make sure that maybe you're a five person startup, maybe you're a multi billion dollar Fortune 50 company. You want to have a tool that grows with you wherever you are. And at the end of the day, as much as I love consumer AI, it does not have trust built right in. Trust is our number one value. I want to make sure that your business secrets are confidential to you and that it is enhanced by what is there. And so definitely look at whether the needs of your business are able to do that. And finally, also think about governance. You know we talked about building for this. It's clicks, not code, but somebody is making those clicks. Someone is determining that business logic. Can they do it once and can you use it all throughout? That's also incredibly important to get reuse from all the tools that you've been working on. For the last couple years.

I love how you pointed out that the copilot needs to grow with you because a lot of times even watching how Salesforce grew over this time and you can see how if you're a smaller company that's with a smaller subset versus how quickly things change, having that AI change with you is so important. Also, we know when it comes to AI data quality, super important.

Right.

When it comes to CRM. But it's not easy for sellers to always keep their CRM up to date. Right. That takes a lot of time and effort. How are we addressing that problem?

So first I'm going to throw myself under the bus. It's my fault for the last 13 years that we've been making you enter data in manually. It's my boss's fault for the year before I joined and it's somebody else's fault for like the 10 years before that. So we apologize. But hopefully for the next 25 years, it will be our job to make sure you never have to manually enter data in again. With Einstein Activity Capture, you're connected to your email, to your meetings, to all your conversations. We're connecting you through your AI powered call support to your meetings. We know that you are a seller who absolutely loves selling. Hopefully you don't also just love filling out forms. And so we want to make sure that it's as easy as possible for you to get the insights that you need to take action in the flow of work, to have it right at your fingertips to make you look awesome at your job. And we'll do the hard work behind the scenes. So apologies, but hopefully some of what we showed you will make your life easier coming forward.

So, viewers, you just heard it. Marianne is personally apologizing for all the manual data. So go ahead and send messages to her about, hey, what's up with all this manual data entry that I got to do?

Well, I use Einstein Activity Capture, so I'm going to automatically be responding to you and letting you do that. But thank you so much.

Well played.

Well played. Full circle. I love that. Marianne, thanks so much. You're going to be back a little later for more audience Q and A. Viewers, please keep those questions coming in on Salesforce plus and we'll continue to answer them live throughout the show. Now we're going to walk you through the rest of those seven use cases for sales AI as we bring in Victor Liu, Senior Director of product here at Sales Cloud. Welcome, Victor. So excited to have have you here. What do you got in store for us?

Thank you so much, Carrie. I am so excited to walk through a couple of key use cases where we're going to be able to put AI into the flow of work from a seller perspective, as we think about, it's all about how we're able to coach and upskill our sellers. How are we able to bring guided selling into the motions view determining what the next best action is through your communications. And how do we build meaningful relationships with with your sales, with your customers in a way where you're able to get the deal to the finish line. We're going to kick off today imagining we're part of a company that is about to launch a brand new product. And before I launch a brand new product, I need to ensure that my entire team has a full understanding of how to properly position, how to pitch, the specific solution. And now with enablement sales programs at my fingertips, every single seller can be able to be upskilled in a way directly within your favorite application. So here, let's go ahead and build pipeline off of our newest product. Drilling in, I'm going to take a look at a program that has everything within one single pane of glass. All the documents, all the enablement content that I need to start learning about how to sell, how to position, and also the specific milestone and actions that I need to take to be able to get to that initial call. But you know what? As a seller, I need to be able to start practicing this. I need to be able to start understanding how to perfect my pitch. But in the past, I may need to knock on the shoulders of my manager and say, hey, can you help me out? Let me try this out with you. I may need to get in front of a mirror and then try this over and over and over again without any good feedback. But now Einstein is going to be with me every step of the way. Let's take a look at how easy it is for us to be able to perfect your pitch. With Einstein really helping me out on understanding how I could start positioning well with my customers with a couple of simple clicks. Let me go ahead and submit my request to Einstein. And Einstein's able to understand what the ideal value proposition is. It's able to connect that with the way I've been positioning, how I'm telling the narrative, how I'm going to be highlighting the right problems to my clients in order for me to start hitting the phone and actually booking meetings. And what's more, I could do this as many times as I want to be able to practice and perfect this before I start slamming the phones. All right, let's pivot over. Let's think that I am now in prospecting mode. And when I prospect, I, I'm not in front of my CRM. I'm looking at the web, I'm researching clients, I'm looking at Lauren Bailey here and try and figure out what do I do next with Lauren. Fortunately, Salesforce is going to come with me every step of that process, even within my LinkedIn. And now Salesforce is also intelligent enough to understand what I'm looking at. The page contextually matching Lauren to records inside of CRM. When I drill into Lauren Bailey here, I could easily update any key fields. But more importantly, I can now drill in and take a look at specific guidance that is provided to me in the form of a cadence that is recommending to me the next best action that I need to take for Lauren. All the leads are predictably, automatically prioritized for me based on Einstein lead score. That's telling me which leads has the highest propensity to convert. That way I'm able to focus my time on the leads that actually matters. Going in, clicking to email, I'm already greeted with an out of the box template. But you know what? In order for me to really land this meeting with Lauren, it's all about personalization. It's all about doing that at scale. So I would like to leverage Einstein here to be able to help me communicate and personalize this message. And something that would have typically taken me 5, 10 minutes a day multiplied across 10, 20, 30 different touch points, I'm now able to streamline that into mere seconds so that I'm able to combine the ability to personalize the for and also with the ability for me to automate messages again at that level of scale. Marianne earlier has walked you about how we're able to mine through all the different contacts and communications and how you're able to automatically bring in those contacts into CRM. Now that I'm now about to take Lauren Bailey and Omega to the finish line, it's not just about me importing in records. It's also about what I can do across that organization. Because we all know that selling is to a team and it's an organization, it's into a buyer group. And with our full understanding of our organizational knowledge of every single touch point that's happening across every single meeting event, email that's hitting your system, Einstein's automatically organizing everything for me based on seniority, based on department groups, I could easily hone in and Identify pockets of the business that I need to be able to potentially build additional relationships with. There are folks within the management chain way that I may need to get in contact with to be able to book a meeting and to schedule a demo because this person is a technical expert. What's more, maybe there are a couple of people that were understanding of the conversations that I need to give a couple of additional love to and I need to start building meaningful relationships with past collaborators to give me that warm introduction, such as Jen Koo here. So that wraps up our demo. I'm going to hand it back to you, Carrie, to take it away.

Victor, that was. That was incredible. That was another mic drop. I love what I just saw, especially when, when it comes to like that LinkedIn aspect of it. Because to your point, people aren't always in the same place. I'd love to know. You kind of alluded to. We hear this term like flow of work a lot, right? Flow of work. Flow of work. You gotta be in your flow of work. What do you mean? What do we all mean by flow of work? Why is that so important?

If you really think about a seller's day, they're wearing so many different hats. They're pipeline building, they're deal closing, they're building relationships, they're analyzing their pipeline. And as part of us doing all of that, it's really important for us to be able to meet customers and sellers where they're at. Sellers are trying to meet where their clients are at. And sometimes they're on the go, they're in front of their mobile devices, they're on LinkedIn. And we want to ensure that Salesforce is going with them every step of the way throughout their customer journey.

I'm not gonna lie. I don't wanna tell y' all how much I'm on LinkedIn. We're not gonna count the amount of time I spend there. But that's a great point. Like to be able to use my CRM, to use Einstein right there where I'm at, and especially taking those personal touches. Speaking of sellers responsibilities, I want to talk about emails. Obviously, they're everywhere. What's your inbox like? What's your unread email? Can I put you on blast?

You want to know?

The thing is, they're everywhere and they're all being automated. What makes sales engagement different?

There are so many different solutions out there that can automate your email. But for a seller, what is really meaningful is building that relationship, getting the responses and getting customers excited about your brand to be able to get that pipeline to close and in order to do so, it's about again, matching personalization to automation. It's not just about you sending the email out. It's about you harnessing the full power of your CRM. Every single touch point across your brand, your customer, across the customer.360 and we're bringing that power data cloud along with sales cloud and sales engagement to your fingertips.

It's incredible. And also it's so important because it's tailored, right? Like that's what you're. We're going to try to scale down on all those unread emails because we're figuring out, oh, this is what people want to read, this is what they need. Good email practice obviously means though, knowing who to reach out to. So why the need to invest in.

Relationship selling, especially in the B2B world? We all know that it's not just selling to an individual. In order to actually get your deal to the finish line, you need to be making relationships and contacts with multiple people within the organization. You need to get a specific person to buy in to give you the budget approval to be able to get your buy in from a demo perspective. So in order to convince everyone, you have to have a bird's eye view of everyone that's going on within the organization and ensure you're able to reach out at that level of scale. Because we know that selling is a team sport.

I love it. Thank you for walking through all of that, Victor. We're going to hear from more of you in a second here. But please continue posting your questions on Salesforce plus as we continue to answer that. All right, folks, are you ready to see the future right now? I'm not talking about the Magic 8 Ball. I'm not talking about Back to the Future and Sports Almanac. I'm talking about Cathan Carcass, GM and EVP of Sales Cloud. Joining us again, Cathan, you're going to show us how Einstein sales agents, autonomous agents work.

But before that, were those demos incredible? Like we've got an incredible engineering team and they are like innovating like it's insane. It is just incredible what they are shipping us today. And I'm going to show you what else they have got cooking. Let's do it as a sales agent. So here we are. You know, we talked about autonomous agents. What you saw with Marianne and Victor, what incredible leaders was the assistive AI, generative AI. Now we are going into the next world, we are going to talk about autonomous AI and I'm going to start this demo slightly differently. Gary, I'm going to start by set up because everybody shows AI but nobody shows how to set up AI. I think so. That's important. Absolutely, I think so. It's very important. So here we are in Salesforce getting started with Einstein sales agents. We'll start with. There are two jobs. The first, this agent is going to help you with to begin with at Dreamforce. One is sales development, top of the funnel, lead nurture. And we'll come to sales coach in a minute. So let's begin by enabling what we call foundational AI requirements. To use this, you need some foundational AI and guess what? That foundational AI is those seven use cases they talked about. Right. But we'll turn all of those things on for you in a single click. We aspire to make AI set up clicks, not code. Easy. Let's automate creation of the record. Let's have some fun. Carrie, maybe give it an avatar. Of course, my favorite is Einstein wearing a sales blazer hoodie. I mean, who wouldn't like that? But also notice you now are able to control the rules of engagement. You are the boss. AI is working with you as a team member and you're governing it. How many times you can send out an email, how many times you can reach out, what time zones you can even personalize it based on language. You can also choose the tone. You want a casual do you want it's formal because some industries it's formal, some industries it's casual. You can configure all that. You can assign it leads. So let's just use those defaults. But now comes the most important part.

Kerry.

Yeah, now you have organizational knowledge. You've got your pricing, your promotions, your differentiations for your product. These are all organizational knowledge or in AI terms it's called rag. You got to go train your SDR with your rag. We upload, let's say those two things. And now the AI Einstein sales agent is ready for handling your first set of leads. So let's go check that out. Now I'm going to show this in a split screen kind of a way to show you what's the Einstein workflow and what the email flow is looking at on the right. So bear with me as I walk you through it. So Einstein reaching out to the first lead. As you can see, it's an SDR kind of a reach out, trying to get a meeting. The customer. The prospect replies. This is very important. It's not just one email. And forgotten Einstein sales agents can handle Replies this is extremely important because that's where we separate ourselves from point solutions all the context of your CRM powered through data cloud we can handle replies and now also very important Kerry pay attention to the signature transparency we are transparently sharing. This is that sellers Heather's AI agent. So customers know that this is Heather and her agent working together human and you heard Mark talk about this maybe yesterday on cnbc. This is exactly what he was meaning about it. Humans and AI working together. And yes of course Simon wants to meet but Einstein will go one more step further help you schedule the meeting. Let's go get the meeting done and Heather will get a quick notification saying hey I've scheduled a meeting for you Heather AI human working together handing off for Heather to take it forward. Same flow but omnichannel now we can go on sms. Einstein can do the same thing via text messaging but in a lot of countries. WhatsApp Einstein, a sales agent can work on WhatsApp and that's in Spanish multiple languages. This is really important what we are trying to do here. This make the reach out personal and step back now. This is really important. You as the leader have complete governance and control on what's happening, what your automated agents are doing including the ability to audit in real time while it's happening. As you can see emailing now, chatting now. You can check it, you can stop it just like a normal manager would do. You know how they listen into calls and all that kind of stuff. That's exactly what this is all about. Pretty exciting. Pretty exciting. It's incredible happening now. But there's one more thing I need to show you Einstein Sales agents is not just about sales development but it's about coaching. Would you like, is there anybody who would not like to have a personal trainer? Carrie, would you like to have a personal trainer?

I need one.

I need one too but like it's kind of like it's not feasible for all of us to go get one right. But Einstein can be your personal sales coach.

Coach.

This is really exciting. I won't configure it all in the interest of time. Let's just show you what the output looks like. So here I am a salesperson on my opportunity screen and I'm working this opportunity, the sales opportunity because this contextually inside the flow of work in your CRM. Einstein sales coach knows you have a meeting coming up and Einstein saying hey do you want to practice? And you saw the basics of this in Victor's demo. We are scaling it up all the way to 10x by the time. And in this case, I have a recording I've brought because I don't want to do this live here right now. But this is how it will work. So you will speak, you will record yourself, whatever you want to say. You're practicing your pitch and Einstein will instantaneously guide you on his response like a coach. So you don't need to do this in front of the mirror. Let's do one more. And I'm going to do one more recording here. And you know, so this can be. So it's like you're talking to your coach. It's a back and forth, it's a back and forth. And that's very exciting thing for a seller. And it's a very non judgmental way, I think. So that's really important. It's a very non judgmental way. And now we can end the practice, submit this for feedback. So Einstein takes all of it together and gives you the feedback you need. So that's very exciting. But there's one more thing that can happen is, you know, now you're in the meeting. Now remember that meeting. My SDR set me up and now I practiced it. Now I'm actually in the meeting. But just like a good coach, you know, I'm sure you've seen any sport. Does the coach sit in a conference room while you're playing or is the coach on the sidelines with you?

On the sidelines?

On the sidelines, yeah. See that sidebar out there? That's Einstein's sales coach with you, coming with you in the meeting, real time. And of course with your permission, obviously, and very quickly giving you real time insights. So the customer mentioned competition. Whoa. How do you handle that in real time? The coach is guiding me, so not leaving me on my own, being with their negotiations, proactive suggestions on what to do, how to do it. This is game changer. And all the actions Einstein's doing on this call are out here for your approval. So this is pretty exciting. This is happening now.

That's an understatement about how pretty exciting it is. I want to like drop the mic and clap.

I shut my laptop.

I got goosebumps watching that. And multiple things that I kind of want to talk about, but like the coaching, the live coaching that you just said. And you know, we talk about how AI working hand in hand with AI and humans, but seeing in the middle of that call, having that coach help you with some of those insights, because you can then focus on your customer, right? And making all those Personal touches that only humans can truly do. And to have that coach coming in there and be like, hey, alluded to this competition. Oh, that's right. And then not even just allude to the competition, but give me the talking points on that.

Uh huh, uh huh.

Like that's. It's an incredible opportunity.

Can you imagine how helpful it will be for people who are junior who are just getting started?

Absolutely.

I mean, what a, what a force multiplier this becomes in onboarding your team members.

Exact force multiplying. Exactly what I was thinking. I know though, from a broad scale as we talk about this AI and the industry as people are getting new to it. Right. We keep talking about it and it's here though. People are worried that these autonomous agents are worried they might replace jobs. Right. We've all. Be honest, we've all heard that. What are your thoughts on that?

Well, two thoughts. Number one, it's a great question. But first we actually asked this question in our state of the sale survey. Remember I said at the beginning, so go check out that one. But here's what. It's very important. If you saw the demo, you saw that you are first things grounding the AI to work within the constraints and the boundaries and the compliance and the governance of your organization. You are the boss. I'll just put it at that. Right. Number one. Number two is this is augmentation, which means, look, a typical organization. We spoke with many CSO CROs. They're like, oh, we get 10,000 MQLs on their marketing qualified leads every month. Okay, great. But we have only like 20 SDRs or 50 SDRs. We can handle only the first 1000 leads. The rest of the leads flush down. So now you need more capacity. This is augmenting capacity in your existing teams and it's about fueling your top line. It's not an only OPEX discussion. This is about augmenting capacity to drive more growth in your organization. And all the while, the best part, it's hard to show it, but you know, it is. The coolest AI innovation Salesforce has done in my personal viewpoint, is the Einstein Trust layer. I think so. That is the most fundamentally powerful, game changing innovation.

Why?

Because AI you cannot trust is simply a sideshow. You need trusted AI, you need compliance, you need data residency, you need pii, you need hallucinations to be blocked. You need all of this to pass the muster of every audit your company needs to go through. We've taken all that away from your plate, built it into the Einstein Trust layer. Every AI capability you saw demoed is built on the Einstein trust layer. I think so. That's the key point here.

I love that and the trust. And you even alluded to it in the demo. Even the things about sending the emails and making it very clear and transparent to customers. Hey, this is coming from Heather's AI or so and so's AI. Right? Working together.

Right.

I want to deep dive into the coaching because I'm just watching this, I'm like, how does Einstein know? How does Einstein know how and what to coach? Right. How can we trust that these autonomous sales agents will be as good as a rep or coach that we hire and train?

It's a great question and I'll be the first one to say, look, there's a lot evolving here. I don't think so. One can replace intuition and judgment with mathematics, at least not yet, but probably do another show on that. But the key point here is two things for you to consider. Number one is you are training the agent to be personalized and contextual to your business. You saw the rag demo that I showed you two the Einstein. Let's take the sales coach example because that's what you are on. Okay. It's not going to know exactly what is the best thing to say in a medical sales selling call. Let's just say that. But it's going to know all the sales best practices and methodologies. So it's like a general physician, not necessarily a heart surgeon and a specialist. Right. And that's the level it gets you. The best way for me to put this is it gets you in field goal range. You score the touchdown, you take the ball to the touchdown, not the AI. But getting you to field goal range, that's a game changer. Yeah, that's a game changer.

I love that. Appreciate that analogy. For me, from the sports standpoint, obviously, we're talking about how customers and companies can start, organizations can start to bring in AI. What can organizations do now to prepare for Einstein sales agents?

As I said, I think so. It's very critical that you approach it in a step by step fashion. Building organizational energy and momentum on this is very critical. And to do that, make AI conversation a ROI conversation. That's my first advice. AI without ROI is a science project.

Oh, that's a keeper right there. That's a motto. I like that.

That's a keeper. But that's why you saw us with the seven practical AI use cases. Each of them equates to a tangible roi. You can measure. You don't need to do all seven of them. You don't. That's an assortment. Now. Why seven? We can talk about it later someday. But like pick two, pick one, get started, do one of those and then come join us at Dreamforce September 18th. I got to put a plug.

Nice plug.

Yeah, got to put a plug. We'll have more and then we'll help you get on this autonomous journey too. That's what I would say. Go to salesblazer.com, take the guided tours. Pick the use case that resonates to you or your organization's need the most. There are some very simple to easy to start use cases like call Support. You don't need a lot of infrastructure to do that. You just let Einstein come with your salespeople. Maybe you start there and that's going to get you the momentum to accelerate at the speed of AI.

That's right. Salesblazer.com, the guided tour. We're going to hear more from you, Caitan. You've been hearing actually all of us talk about what Sales cloud AI tools can do for you. But let's be honest, don't just take our word for it. Let's hear from one of our customers who says these inventions, these innovations have already taken their business to new heights. I had the chance to speak with Paul Chindatta, Data and analytics AI lead at Cognizant. Take a look. Paul, thanks so much for joining us. As we deep dive into Sales Cloud and the AI benefits, I'd first love to tell the audience a little something about Cognizant. Give me the elevator pitch. What is Cognizant's mission all about?

Kari, thank you very much for having me. It's an honor to be part of this conversation. So Cognizant is a global tier one company a little shy of $20 billion. And what we do is we help companies modernize technology, reimagine processes and transform experiences so that our clients can stay ahead of fast changing world. While I say that Cognizant is not just a customer to the Salesforce, but we are also a partner and we have won numerous innovation awards and we have been continue to do a lot of innovations from AI Gen AI and also from a data perspective and that's something that we are really proud of.

You're a longtime customer of Sales Cloud. I would love to know what was the problem or challenge from a global seller's perspective that you all were facing that you wanted to address.

One of the biggest challenge that we have is lean sales team across the globe and the amount of time they are going to spend to kind of get to the new opportunities. And then oftentimes we have seen that, you know, a lot of opportunities has been missed because we don't have. We don't get to view the entire account. Somebody what needs to be prioritized, which account, which client? How do we kind of maximize our revenue and our growth? And last but not the least is your admin tasks. There's so many things that we focus on admin tasks and that actually increases the overall time to even create an opportunity, track an opportunity and close an opportunity.

Talk to us about the starting point because you're already into your AI journey. Not a lot of companies necessarily are. What did it take to start?

We are the early adopters of the data cloud and the AI. Some of the use cases that we have already implemented are opportunity scoring, production builder, wind probability, revenue simulation and then collaborative forecasting and time to close. What it means is that we started seeing a huge improvement of two weeks of the realized time from a time to close perspective, which is a huge benefit. From an admin task perspective. We have 30 minutes of estimated time per day that we are reaping the benefits of it. We started seeing an opportunity con by 5%. We started seeing a sales activity increased by 20%. And this is something that what we have developed in 2023 and we continue to develop much more broader use cases in this year and next year, along with the client zero that we are implementing that is going to give us much more benefits, hopefully next year.

As a whole, when you're talking about these use cases and you're looking around on the team, how would you say how beneficial has these sales AI features been to the team? And you just kind of outlined those use cases but as a whole it seems incredible of the overall impact.

It is a huge impact. I mean as I said, time to close. It's important to have time to close and we are reduced by two weeks is a huge impact. One of the use case that we are trying to enable is personalized emails. How do I make sure an email can be drafted, sent to the customer by automated email and also have an opportunity for our sellers to kind of know, edit that and personalize it before it's been sent across. That's a huge benefit that we are trying to realize. Think about qualifying the pipeline. How do I qualify a pipeline and give that a head start for SLS to say I don't need to do a lot of pre work because I know for sure. This is a qualified and it's going to be like a probability of 80% to 90% is a qualified pipeline. Think about forecasting alerts. How do I make sure that, you know, hey, am I going to close a particular opportunity in Q1, that I'm going to realize the revenue in Q2? And we're also thinking about how do I make sure our seller's life is easy by creating an opportunity. It takes probably an hour. How can I make that as a prompt gen AI and then be created in like 30 seconds? So that's the kind of impact that we want to make to our sellers.

I love it. The sky is the limit. Paul Chandada, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you very much, Katie, for having me.

All right, thanks again to Paul for joining us. Now it's time to answer your viewer questions. Cathan, Marianne and Victor all back with us. We've got some great audience questions coming in. The first one live from Mohsen on Salesforce plus. Cathan, this one's for you. Can we set up for different locations for the agents or different tones for each agent?

Yeah. To begin with you will have one agent, but as you saw in the configuration, you will be able to, let's say, create a west coast agent, a east coast agent, or a product specific agent. Or you will be able to say, I will take these two lead assignment rules and instead of sending it to my SDR team or somewhere else, I'll send it here. So you will be able to do that. We will support multi language. We are building more tonality into it and that's a key part of the roadmap of what will be coming over the next 12 months.

The tonality thing was cool when you were showing like, oh, casual tone versus more formal. I love that. I'm all about the casual. By the way, we got another.

I didn't know.

You didn't notice. I didn't notice. I didn't give that vibe.

No, not at all.

We got another question. This is from Ray on Salesforce plus. Marianne, this is for you. Does the call support work with Zoom or Microsoft Teams?

Ray, that's a great question. Thank you for reminding me. Something I'm supposed to say, which is, of course we support Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and we have a host of other connectors available. We know that a lot of your work that you do, it happens outside of Salesforce and we want to have your CRM, your tools be where you work and that's why we've built these innovations so 1000%. Thank you for asking the question.

I love that it's always about the workflow, right? Bring AI to the workflow. The workflow, the workflow. We've got another question. This is for everyone, so I'm going to toss this up like Family Feud style. Whoever buzzes in first. This is from Charles on Salesforce Plus. Can you share anything about upcoming features or enhancements we expect from Einstein Copilot? A little bit of a sneak.

Want to go?

First week we're going to be putting Einstein everywhere. We already have it on mobile, on desktop, on web. We're going to bring it to Outlook, we're going to bring it to Gmail and we're going to add a bunch more actions into Copilot as well. Where the things that sellers do 100 times a day, we're going to be adding to that in Copilot. So you can start logging, you can start creating tasks, enrolled cadences. It's going to be amazing.

There's one more thing on that to add to the key part which I want everybody at home or wherever you are to know is it's a platform. Copilot is a platform, which means it comes with the standard actions which Victor just talked about, obviously, and we'll keep adding to them. But you can build your own actions using our admin setup prompt builder. Definitely check it out because it allows you to take every workflow flow in your organization and bring it to the age of AI inside your copilot. Imagine AI for every workflow. That's a custom action in your copilot. I think so. That's pretty interesting for folks because look, no matter how much we try, we are not going to be able to build every standard action in the world. And most importantly, it's a long tail. It is verticalized by industry. It's very important to have a vertical approach to this and that's why we have opened it up as a platform.

I love it. We have another question here. This is from Sanjay on Salesforce plus Caitan. This is for you. How do I get the functionality that you've shown me today?

Oh, it's a great question. Number one is depending upon what Salesforce Edition you use, you may already have some of this because there's a very important thing we have been doing is a big principle in our product strategy is how do we give you more value in what you have? And that's really critical for us. How do we make it easy for you to try these new technologies? Also, I'll give you a great example. You saw Marianne talk about call support and Einstein conversational insights. Well, if you're on the sales cloud enterprise edition, we are including a limited number of licenses in it for you to try and then you can try get confidence and then make a decision. So this is how we are trying to do all these things. Not perfect. Not perfect by any means. There's a lot of things we could do better, but our focus is to just kind of make it easy, just not complicate stuff. You know, it's like just, let's not make things more complicated.

Make it easy. I love it.

What is better, complicated or easy?

I vote easy.

You vote easy.

But I'm also casual guy over here too. So the tone. I'm waiting for the Einstein tone. If my Einstein sales agent tone would have a lot of surfer dude, I'd be like, dude, what do you think about? I digress, y'. All, this was incredible. This wraps up our event. Thank you so much to the sales cloud dream team here. Cathan, Marianne, Victor. Really, really informative. Thanks so much for joining us today. We'll see you again soon. I'm Carrie. Ciao.