Scale with Agentforce for Small & Growing Businesses | Salesforce

Welcome small and growing business owners. Do you want to know how AgentForce can scale, grow and transform your business? Well, over the next half hour, you're going to learn how. We've got customer stories, demos and even a live Q and A to help you learn how to put agentforce to work for your customers, your workforce and your bottom line. And immediately after all of that, if you're raring to get started or you just want to see how you can start with clicksnot code, we've got a free hands on workshop. Expert instructors are going to walk you through setting up your first agent step by step, right here on Salesforce Plus. You're not going to want to miss that. But first we'll hear how AgentForce can drive success for any size business. And to do that, I'm joined by Adam Alfano, executive vice president, Amer SMB Sales and Nicole Watson, director, Product Marketing, Salesforce. Now, Adam, I was a small business owner. I had to wear so many hats. It was very challenging. So you talk to customers all the time. What challenges are they experiencing and how can Agent Force help?

Diane, you said it, you lived it with your product company.

Right?

Army of one and out there competing with bigger companies. Look, at the end of the day, the small business companies we work with, they're so innovative. Many of them are on a mission. They're the bedrock of the economy. But they're all having to do more with less. And their employees are stretched and the owners are stretched. And the great news is there's some relief coming in the form of digital labor and we're really excited about it.

All right, so let's dive into that. Tell us what Agent Force is and how it can help a small and growing business.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, look, Salesforce is using Agent Force already and we're seeing about a 50% reduction and the number of escalations we have through our help site. Right. So Agent Force is incredible. Digital labor, autonomous agents that can do real work and make decisions, but also are living right in the same place where your humans are doing incredible work with Salesforce and what's happening for our small business companies. Wellness Extract is a great example. There's a great video about Wellness Extract. It's allowing them to have an agent that can be smart, make decisions, create incredible outcomes for customers and free up their employees to be even more productive and take on more high value tasks. And the possibilities are endless for frontline sales, for service, for custom use cases, for marketing. We're so excited about what digital labor is going to do. For our customers.

Yeah. So you're saying it's like really increasing efficiency.

Efficiency is the key. It is an unbelievable productivity unlock. It's making these customers compete way above their weight class. And I think for SMBs in particular, it's going to be a huge.

That's super exciting because that was always the challenge is like, how do I scale to the next level? And agent force is here. So, Nicole, let's talk about agents. What are they and how do do they work?

Yeah. So when we think about AI, it's moving so quickly, and you have generative AI where you can ask a prompt and then it can help generate content. Well, think of agents as the next wave, the next era of what AI can be. And it actually doesn't need humans to do simple tasks for you. And this is really exciting for small and growing businesses because when I think about whenever I was at a startup, when it was our peak season, our service reps were bombarded with requests. And so if they had an agent that could handle some of those simple, you know, cases and questions, that would have been a game changer for them. And then that allows the team to be able to focus on more of those higher end, more complex cases. And what's great for customers is they're able to get those personalized customer support super fast. And it allows the teams to then focus on again those bigger, more complex cases.

Yeah, win for the company. A win for the customer.

Exactly.

Sounds great. Adam, what are you hearing so far from customers who are implementing agentforce?

The initial returns have been incredible. We have customers moving really fast. I think a few things come to mind. Number one, it's really easy to set up. We have customers getting in there and building their agents very quickly. I hope everyone comes to these events, these AgentForce World Tours, and builds an agent. The setup is very rapid, but this is a trusted agent that's grounded in the same infrastructure that our Salesforce platform has been providing trust and security with for decades. And so it's an incredible way to get an autonomous agent up and running in a platform that you really trust. And the outcome for our customers, the point you made before is just incredible amounts of efficiency, allowing them to do more with less. I talked about the wellness extract example. There's another great customer, Pursina Health. There's a great video on them as well, where now agents are able to help with some of the customer engagement so that their employees can do what they're really intended to do and prescribe the right medication to the right patient at the right time. So really allowing these customers to focus on what they're good at and allow the agents to take on a lot of that monotonous work that is really better suited for a smart autonomous agent to go and execute. It's really exciting.

Awesome. Now, Nicole, are SMBs excited about this technology? How can they get started?

What are you hearing?

Yes, we are seeing a ton of excitement. We're obviously excited about the opportunity, but we recently pulled over 3,000 SMB leaders, and of the ones that are using AI, 78% said that AI was a game changer for their business. And it's super easy to get started. We have lots of trailhead content where you can really get under the hood about how those agents work, and then you can build your own and then you can go into your own salesforce. Org and start building them out yourself.

That's awesome. So if you guys could give one tiny piece of advice to people who.

Are thinking about getting started, what would that be?

I mean, I'd say jump in and get into the technology. I think you really start to feel the power of agent force when you get in and build your agent, and you can see how the declarative execution and administration happens. So I would say get into the technology as fast as you can and start building an agent.

Yes.

And I would say think about those areas where maybe you have some of that, you know, real pain or there's. You are seeing a bit of a bottleneck. Think of how agents can help your team with that and really extend the work that they're doing so that way they can be a little more strategic.

Awesome. Adam, Nicole, thank you so much for joining us, having us. All right, if you're ready to get started with AgentForce, just scan that QR code on screen or head to the link SFDC CO SMB to learn more. But if you've got questions about AgentForce right now, go ahead, enter them into the chat right here on Salesforce Plus. We are going to answer them live in just a few minutes. Now, earlier, I got to chat with Ernest Calling, CEO and founder of Transcend, about how AgentForce is making an impact on their business. Hey, Ernest, thank you so much for joining us. For our audience who may not be familiar with Transcend, can you tell us a little bit about what Transcend is and what it does?

100%, absolutely. Transcend is a bold, new, innovative telemedicine company that is designed to provide customized protocols for our patients to improve their quality of life. We address anything from hormonal imbalances to autoimmune issues and anything else in between.

Amazing. You've been growing really rapidly. As you were sharing with us earlier, can you talk about some of the challenges you faced as a business and how Agent Force is able to help?

Yeah, absolutely. So we now have almost 20,000 patients and the business has been operating for a little over four years and we've either doubled or quadrupled year over year for growth. And to have a system to be able to keep up with that has been very challenging. It was probably at the end of year two, going into a third year business, I needed to find a new solution for not just CRM, but for business operations in general. And Salesforce was extremely appealing. And once I got with the team, I could see the capability and vision, how that would come to fruition and help us meet the needs of our patients. But Agent Force and its automation capabilities and the way that we can utilize it and now take our concierge self serve and be able to mix that in a way where the patient is driving their ability to communicate with us and drive their healthcare needs, it's very unique and it's a platform that doesn't exist today. So having Salesforce as a partner and being able to utilize that has been critical to our strategic vision.

It's so fulfilling to hear how our products are helping businesses just like yours grow. What were some of the questions that you asked at the very beginning to start your Agent Force experience?

It kind of found us when you have 20,000 patients and growing and your employee force is, you know, under 100. At that point we were around 20 or 30 employees. Very, very new, small. You have to find a way to be efficient, effective and without diluting the quality of care for the patients. The only way we're going to be able to do that was to automate and to look at the systems and processes and find ways to consolidate those. And we were actually able to do that very seamlessly. So we worked with Salesforce teams, we walked through the solutions, had a solution architect tell us how we could utilize different parts of the sales clouds, Health Cloud and Agent Forest and how we can combine those things together and make it a powerful tool. Essentially, Agent Forest is employed to us. It's able to be one of our wellness specialists, it's able to be one of our wellness coordinators, it's able to be one of our operations admins. It's helped us reduce the operational time and redundancies where we have to put in manual information. And it's really been A force multiplier. That's why with the team of 40 specialists, we can actually work with 20,000 patients because everything's streamlined and efficient.

It sounds like it's been a huge boost in efficiency for you. Can you tell us about some of the results you're seeing so far and where you see Agent Force taking your company in the future?

Absolutely. So I think the most important metric for any business owner is the bottom line. And transcend across 100 million lifetime revenue just shortly. Just about 30 days ago. And that wouldn't have been possible without the technology that we have in place. You can't grow and scale and be able to keep a consistent level of quality. Care about that. And I'm very much looking forward to using this in the future. We'll combine it with other technologies such as AI and utilizing that to essentially take the data that we have and then use that feedback loop and sort of drive the agents and continue to find places for efficiencies. It's very much a part of my strategic plan.

Amazing. Do you have any advice for other businesses out there who are looking to get started with a similar experience with Agent Force?

I do. Don't hesitate. You're in a race with everybody else that is trying to come to the same solution and you're not going to find a better software product out there. If you're trying to automate and you're really trying to boost your. Your team, especially if there's any kind of processes you're looking to consolidate and you're looking to automate them, it's probably without a doubt the best that I saw in any of our research and we spent a lot of time being a company based on technology and being Healthcare is our. Our focus. You have to make sure that you have the exact right solution. It needs to be flexible. Compliance and other things are going to change and you need to be able to not only anticipate, but be able to change along with it and very quickly. And we're able to do that with the Salesforce products.

Fantastic. Well, congratulations on all of your success.

Thank you so much for having me.

Well, it's time now to see Agent Force in action with a demo. I'm joined by Jillian Domenico, solution engineer, Salesforce. Hey, Jillian.

Hi, how are you? What are we about to see? We're about to to walk through agentforce for sales. Specifically two parts. We have our SDR agent helping prioritize leads and then we have our sales coach helping to really give personalized feedback to our sellers.

Awesome.

Let's let's start the demo.

Perfect. So excited. So let's set up an SDR agent. So what we're looking at here is our Salesforce setup page. So, just as you would customize anything within Salesforce, you're setting up the SDR agent very similarly. So, first off, in the agent builder, I can see all the topics and actions an agent can handle right out of the box. So think of these as those jobs to be done. Next, I can use human language to tell the agent what its role is and give it contextual information about my company. And also give our agent a name. In this case, our Melanie. Hi, Melanie. And next, we can modify the language and tone of our agent, making sure the messaging is in line with our company. And what's really unique is being able to actually upload files and existing documents that give the agent even more context about my business. Powered by Reg so lastly, that brings us to our engagement rules, which, as the name suggests, provides guardrails for our agent around which leads our agent engages with and when the agent will reach out. So, as a previous sdr, this would have been amazing for me a couple of years ago, but the customization does not stop there. Now, what you're looking at is our prompt builder. So this is where we can really customize the agent even further. By infusing product data, best practices, sales methodologies, we can test the prompt and with our recipient, Chris Kim, in this case, our email response. And we'll see what this looks like in a preview. So this is all being generated from our CRM data, so as well as any data points that you have that are being pulled into Salesforce. Now, looking at this response, that looks great. We are ready to activate. So let's look at what an interaction between an SDR agent and one of our leads actually looks like. So from this first email, we can see the SDR agent has reached out, pulled in the right data about my lead, and use that to craft a really personalized outreach email. Now, in the next email, when the lead asks a question, the agent autonomously recognizes that that and proactively crafts an accurate response with an offer to schedule a meeting with a human rep. So this correspondence is just one example of how an SDR agent really engages with inbound leads. But keep in mind that the SDR agent can do this across thousands of leads. So your reps will have a full calendar of meetings with those qualified leads without lifting a finger. Now, let's move into the second portion of our demo today, which is our sales coach so with Agent four, Sales coach, every rep will get a dedicated coach to prepare for customer meetings. So helpful if your manager is either on site or working with other reps on the team. Because this is embedded within Salesforce, we can really have a customized approach to a specific deal in the company and how we're engaging with our buyer. So in this case we have our coach who's saying, hello, I'm glad we could connect. And what I'm going to say is that sounds great. Based on our previous conversations, I put together a proposal for a thousand units. Now as Salesforce listens for my response, I'll be able to actually have the coach respond in real time saying thanks for putting that together. Can we discuss the pricing for more of a competitive rate? Which of course I figured that they would ask that considering the volume that they're committing to, it's a fair objection. So in my mind what I'm thinking is of course based on our long standing relationship, I can offer you a 10% discount. How does that sound reasonable? Right now I'm thinking that this isn't going to be so easy. You know, the customer is saying I appreciate the discount, however the volume, I'm looking for something closer to 15%. Can we meet in the middle? So I want to get this deal done before the holidays. So I'm thinking absolutely. With a three year contract I can offer a 15% discount. Are we ready to move forward? Now? I'm crossing my fingers, but the coach actually responds with, you know, a three year contract is a bit too long. How about a two year contract with the 15% discount? Now I think about this, I'm really happy with it. So I say fantastic, we're excited to partner with you and I'll send over the contract details for your review and schedule a follow up meeting. All's well that ends well here and in about a minute and a half I've been able to actually have a test conversation with my test customer grounded in the information and the data that's within Salesforce in regards to our deal. So once complete, my coach is going to be able to actually process how I did by gathering some feedback and looking at the transcript of the conversation, incorporating that with my company's best, best practices and specific product information, whether it's involved with the deal or just with the account on the whole. So as it's generating that feedback, I'm really looking forward to seeing that personalized but objective feedback that includes not only a deal summary, right, quick hitting pointers, but also clear next Steps and highlighting areas that need my attention. So this all is really helping me feel more prepared and confident so that I can ace my upcoming meeting and again get that deal done before the holidays. So that sums up AgentForce SDR and AgentForce Sales Coach as it's able to unleash new levels of efficiency and performance from elite qualification all the way to closing deals.

Great job. Gillian, I have a question about the coach actually. If you went and did that exercise multiple times, is it going to give you different responses?

It depends on the deal and also depends on this is very much suited to your business. Right. So this is just a very broad strokes example, but you'll be able to get different situational answers and responses based on time of year, you know, how long the deal's been open. It's really great.

That is so cool to be able to practice that.

I'm very jealous of anyone who gets to use it.

Yeah.

Thank you so much. That was amazing. I appreciate it. All right, well now that you've seen agents in action, you can practice building one yourself by scanning the QR code on screen. SFDC CO AgentForestTrails so you can take these trails on trailhead. You can learn on your own time or if you're an SMB and you've got questions right now, just drop them in the chat and we are going to answer them on air in just a moment. But for now let's see how Wellness Extract, our very first Agentforce customer, has integrated Agentforce into their business. Business.

Knowledge is the key to wellness. It is more important for us to educate customers rather than just selling them the product. AgentForce can help us make healthcare accessible to everyone. At Wellness Extract we sell high quality niche supplements. Most of our customers are chronically ill patients going through some specific condition. Our goal is to create a wellness agent which is backed by science. So when our customers walk into a store they don't know which product to buy. This information is very difficult to explain to a customer who doesn't know anything about science and studies. AgentForce can take all the technical knowledge and educate them how to choose the right product for their health. As we are competing with large corporates, it becomes more important for us to ensure that our operational cost doesn't go up. And the only way it could happen is if we have Agent force supporting our customer service team to deliver more in less time. Guardrails for us is very important. You have to be really careful what you are communicating to your customers. You can actually guardrail your communication with the scope that you want to give it should not say this that and if you have a document you can attach it which I can showcase. So here is the Wellness Agent. You can define your topics here, you can have your actions here and then you can just go ahead and open up your knowledge settings and then load that compliance PDF. But it's just a PDF document. You don't have to give in the instructions. That's what the power of Agent 4 says. Just to refer down to the right our knowledge base, a Customer might ask AgentForce, I take medication for chronic cholesterol issue, will this affect me? Then Agent Force can pull right answer from our knowledge base and help our customer understand how it actually lowers cholesterol. It will even offer to share research studies and clinical studies which will provide these answers. Whenever a customer seeks more information, it goes straight away to your customer support team. They already see a history of conversation. So you already are aware that the person is using blood thinner and you have given him the study link. We are trying to ensure that we have wellness for all and with AgentForce we would be able to deliver that seamlessly. I am really excited about the future of agentforce for Wellness Extract. Agent Force is the only tool which can take us to that kind of scalability where we are able to touch the highest number of lives.

You've heard all about AgentForce and maybe you're wondering where do I begin? Well, don't worry because we've made it easy. Here are the top three ways for small and growing businesses to get started with AgentForce. Number one activate Salesforce Foundation. Salesforce Foundations is a free upgrade to get access to core features across sales, service, marketing, commerce and data cloud all within your existing Salesforce instance. For free, Foundations not only lets you get more out of your existing CRM, you can also access a thousand free AgentForce conversations and it's easy to activate Salesforce foundation self service. Number two, head over to Trailhead to learn all things AgentForce. There are so many trails and modules explaining all about AgentForce, how to identify what you'd like an agent to do and how to prepare your business for agents. You can even practice building one all on your own timeline. And number three, once you've leveled up your Agent Force expertise on Trailhead, it's time to build your first agent in Salesforce. Remember, Salesforce Force Foundations gives you access to AgentForce so you can try it for free. But if you don't want to get started alone, we have free virtual workshops and hands on trainings to learn how to build Your first agent with our AgentForce expert instructors. So there you have it. Getting started with AgentForce in three easy steps to begin your Agent Force experience or just learn more. Scan the QR code on screen to walk you through the process. That link is sf. All right, everyone, keep entering any questions you have about AgentForce in the chat because now it is our time to answer them. And to do that, I'm joined by Nicole Watson and Jillian Domenico. Thanks so much for being here, you guys. Let's just go to our first question. What would be the easiest agent to implement?

That is a great question. I would actually say that as companies think about how they can use agents, take a look at where you might have some trouble, maybe where are some areas where you could use some help with agents? And then I would think about that because easy is a little bit subjective based off of your unique priorities and your goals. But a great way to think about it is really putting them to work wherever they can be the most helpful. And thinking about it that way.

Okay, all right, that's a good, that's good to know. And Gillian, what are the most common use cases for Agent Force?

Another good.

It's kind of similar.

Yeah, very similar. Because it is subjective and it is. What's so great about Agent Force is that it's so wide reaching. Right? So it really does depend on the industry you're in, you know, what your business priorities and goals are. But where I've seen the most, you know, really quick wins is something as simple as overlaying on a website handling those complex but not too complex questions from customers, you know, that a bot perhaps in the past couldn't handle. Or just more of that catch all for FAQs and things that are again, really accessible to our customers, but something that maybe SMB customers haven't thought about doing due to, you know, the size of their business. So it really doesn't have to start huge. You can start really small with just, you know, things that will take that manual labor off your plate.

Okay, here's another one. How big does my company need to be to put agentforce to work?

So it really doesn't matter. Similar to what Gillian was saying, like it doesn't matter how many employees you have. You could have five employees, you could have 5,000 employees. Doesn't matter what industry you're in. Agents can really come in and help you with your business and help you to figure out how you can scale, how you can grow. And especially for small and growing businesses, this is a huge opportunity for them. To help extend the work of their teams and really, you know, help them to think about how they can work on more of that strategic work. And then also for customers, it creates a better experience because they're able to get support faster and quicker and it's more personalized.

Yeah. And as a business owner myself, you're always thinking, how can I grow? How can I reach that next level? And having that kind of support as an extra team member, really. Exactly.

Even like I'm thinking of like a real estate agent, like a one, one man show. Right. Because you know, you don't have 15 hands, you're wearing 10 different hats. So even something as small as just one person, right. You can leverage agent force. Right. It depends on what you want to use it for. But that's the beauty of it, right?

It's so exciting because I felt like I was a one man band. I was like, okay, I'm playing the drums over here and then I'm playing the piano over here. And I just have me having some, some help and collaboration I think would be really small and growing businesses. Okay. Along that lines, I don't have an IT department. Is this something that I can learn on my own? How much support does Salesforce provide?

Again, a great question. We hear it all the time. I heard that a couple times yesterday talking with customers. So the answer is no, you don't need an IT department. And that's kind of where all of this being grounded in your CRM data, but also being human language makes it so easy to actually just think about, you know, what you actually want that agent to do and be able to write it in plain language in really simple to follow prompt templates and builders. So my advice would be to get on trailhead, start playing around with it for free. Right. You can test it out and then you'll be able to see, okay, if I can do it in a couple of minutes, what else can I do if I have half an hour in my week, right. That I'm now saving time, having an 8 and do those things that I didn't have time for in the past. So yeah, the answer is, the short answer is no, you don't need an IT department. You just need some, you know, curiosity and wi fi access.

And what is that relationship like with account executives? Are they there to help support the journey as well?

From a solution engineering side, we love these conversations and we also want to make sure that this is a new venture for everybody. Right. Even Salesforce included. So we want to make sure that as your business partners. We're helping guide you and give you best practices not only from conversations, but also, you know, on site visits, matching you up with the right partners or the right internal champions. So we are here, you know, wherever you need us.

Love that. All right, well, we have one final question. What agents are available today? Are there pre built agents? Like how do people. I think people really want to know about how to get started.

So again, there's lots to unpack there because there's so many things that are on the roadmap which is so exciting today and what I walked through just previously. We have our SDR agent and our sales coach which is set to be released quite soon. Right now live, we have our service agent and anything to do with AgentForce First Service, which is so exciting and I think the first great step for our customers to try things out.

Fantastic. Jillian, Nicole, thank you so much for answering our questions and, and we appreciate you being here. All right, if you'd like to get started with Agent Force for your SMB, just scan the QR code on screen. SFDC co SMB. And guess what? We've got more Agent Force coming your way. You can join us right here next week, December 17th on Salesforce plus to meet agent Agentforce 2.0, unleashing digital labor for every team. Join Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff to see what's new in agentforce Slack integration, new CRM and analytics capabilities, and Atlas reasoning engine upgrades. Learn what it means for your teams with demos and agent first customer stories. But now stay tuned for our hands on virtual agentforce workshop coming up next. Don't miss out on the chance to see just how easy it is to build your first agent with our expert instructors right now here on Salesforce Plus.