Siemens Customer Interview | Dreamforce 2025

Scott Gardner, EVP Sales and marketing at Siemens. Scott, good to see you again. Great to be here and dare I say it, we're going to have some fun as two Brits on stage together. You ready?

I'm ready for this.

Okay, so you're leading the revenue organization for digital industries. Huge job. Congratulations. I also know that you're driving transformation for the sales organization globally across Siemens. Can you tell us a little bit about that? How Salesforce helping. How the hell are you doing that?

So, yeah, you know, day job running go to market for the digital industry is part of the business but, you know, no good deed goes unnoticed. So have a nighttime job as well of really transforming all of our systems, processes and data for sales. Heard on the video earlier. You know, our customers want to use all of our portfolio, particularly in the industrial space. That's what makes us differentiated from our competition. But historically, actually, whilst we're a very large user of sales cloud, different parts of our business, different units, used it in a different way. So delivering that great integrated customer experience wasn't always the easiest for us to do. So if we were talking to an industrial customer, we would tell them, hey, look, what you need to do in your factory is you need to connect everything. You need to make sure that you have a common data model. Then you need to drive the transparency of that data and start leveraging the opportunity in the application simulation and AI level layer. And that's really what we're doing to ourselves in sales. And using data cloud has given us a huge opportunity to drive in a very structured way how we bring together the different data parts that we have in sales cloud and actually manage that in a transitional way that is effective for us and our customers and drive our business. And with that we get a foundation of data that helps us leverage the opportunity we see.

So what I'm hearing, just to recap there is that data foundation Chris talked about earlier on. You're putting that in place right now and your processes, you're getting the houses in order, so to speak?

Absolutely.

Okay, so what does that look like for the team today? Maybe things that you couldn't do a year ago now with the agent for sales that you can do?

Yeah, I think, you know, when we focus on that data layer, it's really. And the foundations in the processes, it's let us run a lot faster with, with agent force because we've been able to use the agents in two ways. One is we're driving that seller productivity. There's a lot of demand from our sellers to make them smarter, make them quicker, have better interactions and better customer. Customer conversations. And we can do that, but simultaneously, because we're looking right through our processes, we look at how we can insert the agents through the process model. And actually Data cloud helps us do that very effectively in ways that we hadn't thought of. But there's also things that you just couldn't have done before. I mean, our first use case we ever tried was take 100,000 old dead leads and run them through the nurturing agent and just see what it did. And it found some revenue, it found some opportunities, and being able to do things that you were not able to do before. Even a company of our size has as finite resources. So making ourselves smarter, making ourselves faster, but also finding new ways of doing things is a great opportunity. I love that.

That sounds a bit like you found free money somewhere.

Yeah, we had some money down the back of the couch.

Now that was. You were talking there about your team. I know that Siemens is a multifaceted, very large organization. You do sell through the channel. You go to market with partners in many different ways. We just saw Partner Cloud demoed. How are we helping there? What's the story with partners?

Yeah, we have a really diverse ecosystem, and I think the diversity is probably one of the biggest challenges we have. You know, our partners do everything from help our customers to build rockets to roller coasters to factories of the future. When you're doing things at that diverse level, finding the right partners for the right markets and helping them be more effective is key to us. So rewarding our partners with the right capabilities in the markets we're addressing is part of what we're doing. At Partner Cloud, we launched our new partner program on the 1st of October. Partner Cloud lets us get closer and collaborate better with our partners, but it really helps us invest in the partners that are investing in us.

And I think what you saw in that demo as well, I love that answer. Thank you. But what you saw in that demo as well was visibility into what those partners are doing. Right. I think going back five, 10 years ago, we had no clue. Leads were gone into the ether. You didn't really know what was happening with those opportunities. Hard to forecast. I love that. Thank you. You're on this journey. You're pretty far along with it. I imagine that lots of other revenue leaders in the room are getting started or trying to figure out how to get started. What words of wisdom? What have you learned so far that you would share with the audience in terms of getting started with the gentic selling.

Well the first one is we said earlier you can't escape the foundations. You gotta get the foundations right. Go after the data model and also think about what your processes are that build that data for the data model. You can't escape that. However, just really focus. Is it cool or can you scale it right? There's so many opportunities of things you can do. So we have a big mantra around does this scale, does it move the needle for us? Because when it moves the needle we get that triumvirate of value right? We're faster, we're smarter, we're more efficient and that's really where we're focused.

I love it. So pick the use case. Don't do too many things at the same time. Scott, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for your partnership flying over from London. Really appreciate it.