How Anthropic's Head of Industries Built an AI-Native Sales Org from Scratch

Give a warm welcome to Anthropic's Head of Industries, Eleanor Dorfman. All right. Hi everyone. My name is Eleanor Dorfman. I lead the commercial and industries sales team at Anthropic, and I've been at Anthropic for a little over a year and a half now. We've had a commercial product for the last 3 years, but it wasn't until the Claude 3 family of models, when Claude started getting really good at coding, that things started to accelerate. And it wasn't until December of 2025 when things really took off. The launch of Opus 4.6 in December was a bit of a sea change for us, and we came back from what was in hindsight an incredibly restful winter break to demand going vertical. We had not hired for it. We had not prepped our processes for it. We had done extensive planning for the year and what we thought the year, or at least the first quarter, was going to look like. We were not prepared. Even if we were prepared to hire and onboard and 3x or 4x or 5x the sales team, You simply can't absorb that number of bodies at the pace that we needed to absorb them in order to deliver against the demand and in order to deliver a positive customer experience. So the question we had to answer early in January of this year, which now feels like a lifetime ago, was how do you build an AI-native sales org from scratch because we fundamentally had to turn everything we'd been doing on its head in order to meet the moment that the market had put in front of us. Our thesis was that we actually had invested in a really incredible stack of existing tools. All of these tools had Thread— had Threaded Claude natively within them. They had— I think we just heard from, from someone who had put Claude inside of their tools. And if we had a strong stack and a foundation, we could build coherence and a holistic approach to the customer journey in those tools and then thread Claude where we didn't have solutions. So build on the stack we already had and lean on Claude for everything around that stack, in between that stack, and making sure Claude was the narrative thread and the connective tissue So it wasn't just 6 tools with Claude bolted on. It was a cohesive customer experience built on top of our existing investments, with Claude doing things we hadn't even imagined it was capable of before Opus 4.6. We'd invested in tools and we use them. So we use Lean Data for routing, we use Clay for enrichment. Salesforce is our system of record and source of truth. We use Jira for tickets. Intercom's Fin product we use for customer support as well as for sales support. I joke with the Ironclad team that I'm a daily active user. I am in Ironclad every day working on contracts. We have Snowflake, we have BigQuery. We are the heaviest Slack users you can imagine. We use the G Suite, all of the above. And these were all working for us, and we decided to double down on our investment in them. So we fundamentally made 4 investments around the 4 constraints that we couldn't move. We had demand we couldn't staff. We had Claude inside of our existing stack. We have functions around sales. Sales doesn't operate on its own. Sales sits around legal and deal desk and revops and billing. And compliance and customer support and customer success. Sales is not alone on an island delivering a great customer journey. Many, many teams needed to meet the moment alongside of sales, and we had to just aggressively grow AE capacity without killing them, which is also a constraint I probably should have put on this slide. So we couldn't kill our sales team, but we couldn't grow headcount overnight. We have an extensive recruiting process. We weren't going to sacrifice our bar, our culture, or anything like that in order to service the demand. So we were left with no choice but to build to support it. There are a lot of orthodoxies that have governed and really defined the last 15 years of enterprise software. I've been in developer tooling and infrastructure for 12 or 14— actually not going to do the math— for a very large part of those last 15 years. And this is one that I really stood behind. There's product-led growth and there's sales-led growth, and never the two shall meet. Self-service wasn't the enemy. It was just a different team. It wasn't part of what the sales team did. And we had to throw that orthodoxy aside at the beginning of this year. So I've always thought and I've always operated with my product counterparts that enterprise plans should be gated by a human. Customers want to talk to an AE during this buying journey, and we no longer could make that the case. So we no longer have enterprise plans gated by humans. We've launched enterprise self-service. We launched an MVP in January. We launched it into production, I think, in February, and it's been a huge success. We do not think of self-service as a downgrade We think of it as a part of the buying journey and a way that we can move, remove friction and make sure that we get the right customer, the right buyer with the right plan at the right time. All of our leads are enriched and evaluated and qualified by Clay and by Claude. And then there are two funnels and we're still working on nailing this. So you might hear some people who feel that they ended up in neither funnel. But we're willing to make sure we're really investing to make sure that everyone who wants to talk to Claude can, anyone who wants to talk to a sales member can, and anyone who wants to buy Claude can. So Claude and Clay do the qualification, they do the enrichment, and then you can go into the self-serve funnel where Finn from Intercom guides you on their journey. We partnered really closely with the Finn team to build, take their flagship support product and make it a viable tool for sales. And it's been amazing. Then they get set up with an enterprise plan. It's real ACV. They have terms of service. They can do invoicing. We get them enrolled and provisioned, enrolled in training and kickstart their journey completely self-serve using Claude and our tech stack. If Claude and Clay qualify you for the sales funnel, The lead goes to the BDR team, they're qualified, and they're AE routed. So we're running these two in parallel at any given time. And since we launched this, soft launched in January, hard launched in February, 54, 54% of our new enterprise logos have come through the self-serve funnel in 2026. So this has been an incredibly important funnel and a way that we've tried to meet the moment and drive a more effective sales funnel. The second investment is that we knew that Claude lived inside of the tools that we had already bought and spent the last 3 years building around our needs. We have 6 core tools that really define the journey of a lead. We've talked about Clay. I'm a huge Clay fan. Clay for enrichment, Lead— Lean Data for routing, Salesforce for op creation and opportunity management, Gong for call coaching. We are heavy, heavy Gong users. Ironclad for contract redlines and Slack for Close One feels like a really small way of describing the role Slack plays, but Slack is for deal coordination. It's for comms. It's for many other things, as I'll show you in a few slides, but for the purposes of a lead working its way through our architecture and our plumbing, these are the 6 tools. However, I imagine you don't want to just see an architecture slide that talks about the tools we built. And as I said earlier, Claude isn't just the 7th tool we built it on— we bolted on. Claude is what makes the tools we've already bought talk to one another, work together, and create a seamless customer journey. So let's talk a little bit about how that shows up for the AEs and the sales team on a Tuesday morning, a Monday morning, any day. When a new lead comes in and the account's created in Salesforce, we're working on getting all of them in, but it's a work in progress. Prioritization is done. Claude and Clay do the account research upfront. They do the prioritization, they update the account record, they pull in any historical context from Slack, from Google Docs, from previous Don calls. And when the AE is slotted in, they have all of the context they need that helps drive their prioritization and their actions. Every single customer-facing rep starts the day in Cloud. I'll talk about this a little more later, but we've built a series of skills inside of Claude that enable the AEs to be massively more productive. One is the morning brief, which is built on top of all of the connectors that we use to run our business. So on Gmail, on Gong, on Slack, on Google Docs, on Calendar, on Salesforce, on Intercom, on Greenhouse. There are so many systems where little pieces of context are incredibly relevant to ensure you're prioritizing your time, you're operating efficiently, and you're delivering a world-class customer experience. So with one prompt, this is how every AE starts their day. I have mine sent to me in Slack every morning at 7 a.m. Eastern because I'm based in New York, but it tracks everything that looks at your calendar. What do you have that day? What emails have you not answered? What Slacks have you not actioned? What centralized initiatives do you still need to deliver? What marketing events are coming up where you need to prioritize inviting customers? That morning brief is deposited in your inbox or Slack or in Claude.ai every single day and prioritizes your day. These 3 actions need to be taken. These emails need to be responded to. Further along in the deal cycle, we've leveraged Claude inside of our tooling, which we use, uh, —think we'll use Outline for—so where we put in Google Docs where we publish our policies inside of historical precedent and policy, as well as context based on Slack discussions, emails, and Gong calls. So when AE is ready to draft and ship a proposal to a customer, Claude does it. Claude made sure it's within policy. Claude made sure it lines up. With the customer expectations. Claude has all of the knowledge of our products, of our models, of our roadmap. Claude knows where we've won in the past and why we've won. Claude knows who the customer is, what they care about, who are the stakeholders that had been— that have been involved, what has been the shape of the negotiation. And with one prompt, instead of an AE opening up a spreadsheet, opening up 9 different tabs, with all of the Deal Desk guidance, listening to Don calls and looking at transcripts to find the history of what had been negotiated, Claude generates the proposal for you, uploads it into Ironclad, and kicks off the process. I will be honest, we still start every forecast meeting with at minimum a 10-minute discussion on how we should be forecasting. We're doing a lot of forecasting. We're trying to be disciplined. It is a moving target and a work in progress when the ground is shifting under your feet as rapidly as it is in AI and for the labs today. It's definitely something where I'd like to think we're getting a little bit better at. This week felt like we had a good forecast call yesterday, but we still have a ways to go. What's most important is forecasts are being largely run by Claude. And then inspected and reviewed by managers. So AEs are using Stills to make sure their sales force is updated, next steps are accurate, account notes and account plans are current. We have a sense we're a consumption business, so we know where spend is. We know what the commit is that we're talking about. We know what historical patterns have shown for that type of customer in that cohort. With that set of products, and AEs are submitting their forecasts using Claude. Managers are then reviewing them because all of the reconciliation has happened between Claude and our existing tools, and then submitting them. And forecast calls are for discussion. They're not for gotchas. They're action-oriented, and they're focused around where does the AE need help, where do the managers need help, where do we need to make sure that the customer needs are on someone's radar. What is hopefully coming soon is forecast accuracy, but we are not quite there yet. One other way we've been leveraging our existing stack that shows up for the AEs, and this one to me is critically important because when you're absorbing as many new hires as we are and when you're operating in an environment where things change hourly, I'm confident while I'm up here with you, something will have changed in the AI ecosystem that I'll need to internalize. But with product launches, with model launches, with an incredibly dynamic competitive ecosystem, with many different flavors of customer needs, preserving a culture of coaching is incredibly important. And so we have tried to really make this part of our culture for the AEs and for frontline managers, where every week Claude surfaces 6 coaching moments. And this isn't a static set of coaching based on a methodology. This is dynamic based on how the needs of our business evolve month over month. What was a priority last month is not necessarily the top priority this month, is not necessarily the top priority next week. And the most important thing we can do, the scarcest resource we have is mindshare and ensuring that we're hitting the coaching moments with the AEs focused on the most important things is the moment. Is the way to ensure we maintain a culture of coaching. We maintain focus in the field, which is a critically important thing in order for the AEs to meet the demand and to be effective. And we maintain a growth mindset. Nobody has done this before, and if anyone says they have, they, they are fooling themselves. We are all learning together and making that part of our DNA and how we work with our managers, how we work with the sales team, how we work with our customers is so important to showing up authentically and ensuring that every member of our go-to-market team is getting even a little bit better every day. And what I always tell the team is your job is to wake up every morning and figure out how you can make Claude and Anthropic incrementally better that day with our customers, for our cross-functional partners, or for your deals. Now you have to do all this. Closed one is my favorite dopamine hit. It's reliable. It gets me every time. It never gets old. I never get sick of it, but it's a checklist. And when we're growing as quickly as we are, the governance of closed one really matters. You need to make sure you have terms of service in place. You have a provisioning path for the customer. They're getting enrolled in onboarding. They're receiving an invoice. We have mapped their orgs correctly. We're a complex business. We're available on first-party services as well as through cloud partners. And sometimes just getting all of the little admin pieces in place can accidentally create a horrible customer experience if you don't get them all right. I have personally spent many late nights inside of our billing system trying to reconcile invoices when customers get locked out. This is a very important part of the cycle. And so we have one skill per step for closed one so that Claude can work across the cross-functional systems and ensure that everything is in place. We do this for self-service too, to get the customer's account closed, provisioned, billing set up, and getting them on enrolled in an onboarding training. Again, sales is not an island. There are so many supporting functions that needed to have the same elasticity we were trying to build in the AE org. In order to meet the demand. This is Deal Desk, this is legal, this is RevOps, this is customer support. And we had had— I mean, we still do, but it was a gnarly system. It was a sea of DMs. You needed to have the institutional knowledge or just simply be co-located on the same floor. A lot of AEs would just walk by RevOps and Deal Desk desk to try and get quotes approved. A lot of people on the East Coast and definitely in Europe were staying up very late chasing approvals. We were creating a very unhealthy cycle. And reps— so what we did is we looked at this and said, these functions play dual roles. They are there to support the sales team and enable a customer an excellent customer experience, but they're also there to protect the company. And to provide governance to ensure you're doing good deals that are in policy that you can stand behind in the future. So with the supporting functions and all of the systems that they leverage, which are honestly even many more than I had laid out, but Jira is a critical one for us. We structured this and invested in our tools so that reps stopped going to their systems and rather their systems came to them. So we made Slack the front door. Slack comes in, ticket out, Claude does the triaging. So Claude, actually Cowork now does a lot of this, and that's changed for us probably in the last week since I made these slides. But Cowork can check your emails and can submit the Slack ticket on your behalf, or the seller can submit the Slack ticket. Claude will triage and either resolve the ticket based on precedent and policy, or it will escalate the ticket with all of the requisite customer context, all of the history pulled from email, from Salesforce, from Gong, and will assign it to a human and let the AE know that they're in the queue so that the AE can set expectations for the customer and can follow along so that the quote is resolved, the terms of service is resolved, the vendor onboarding, the security questionnaire, all of the compliance pieces that are required to unblock and get a customer started. So we made Slack the front door for all of the support functions. And so then the last investment we made, and this is the more fun one, the last investment we made was taking the best practices of our best reps and encoding them as skills. So this is how we looked at all of the spaces in between our existing tech stack, all of the activities and the patterns that our best reps were doing, we don't have time or the luxury of having incredibly handheld onboarding and a detailed methodology so that we know when a new rep starts, on their 7th day, they'll get their first account. On their 2nd week, they'll take their first call. On their 4th week, they'll be able to start working with customers. On their 6th week, we expect their first deal. We aren't able to model out productive capacity like that anymore. We have to get reps in the door. They go through boot camp, we give them a territory, and we give them a sales plugin. And a plugin is a combination of MCP connectors and skills. And we built a sales plugin that documented what our top reps do and turned them into 5 skills that we encoded in Claude. That every rep uses every single day. The first one is the one I talked about before, but it's so helpful and so simple that it merits a second callout. The morning briefing. I simply do not know how I used to operate without it. I am someone who gets lost taking the subway home, and it's incomprehensible to me that I used to navigate my day or week without Claude telling me every morning what's important. So this is the one we talked about earlier. The second one is call prep. The morning briefing will give you the bird's eye view of what to prioritize and how to think about your day. But before calls, your best reps used to go on LinkedIn and research stakeholders. They used to go through Slack and Salesforce history to find contacts from previously closed, lost ops. They would spend time thinking about how did they want to position, what was their exit criteria for the call, what are the right discovery questions? Cloud is now their copilot. We do that— backslash is the shortcut to summon Estelle, backslash call prep, and the rep gets a briefing. Who's on the call? What do they care about? What is the historical context? What does a great outcome look like for the call? What are some discovery questions they should ask? How should they position? What's the competitive landscape? What has this company been saying publicly about their needs are and where Cloud could fit in? What partners are they working with? What other tools are they using? A succinct one-pager before every call directly to the AE to ensure even if they're back to back to back to back, they can get on that call and provide a seamless, tailored, and personalized customer experience. Now, they still have to read it. Claude does not do that for them yet, but I think ever. But this is a way that even with 5 minutes, an AE can show up on a call and know in their bones and manage the context switching that happens throughout their day. The third one is my favorite. Many things keep me up at night. One of them is wondering, are AEs following up on everything? When they tell a customer they're going to do something, do they do it? The customer follow-up still solves for exactly this. It will extract action items from your email, from your Dawn calls, from your Salesforce notes. If you're working with a customer or a partner on Slack, it will extract the follow-ups for you there. It will draft responses and put them directly in your email provider and send you a summary of everything you need to do. And then a reminder in your morning brief the next day, if you didn't actually go in, review, and click send, which you still need to do because humans in the loop are still a critically important part of the sales cycle. So the customer follow-up skill is so you can manage all of the volume and the context switching without missing a beat and go to bed every night knowing you have followed up and responded to your customer. We try to set internally a 24-hour SLA to follow up with customers and deliver on action items. The next skill is called competitive intel. This is a competitive environment and it is changing hourly, certainly daily, absolutely weekly. And there's a lot going on. AEs spend their days on the phone with customers and they're not able to necessarily keep track of every AI newsletter, every competitive release, every small product update from our team. And it's happening over a ton of surface areas. So with the competitive intel still, rather than having a battle card that product marketing maintains every quarter, Claude will generate an interactive battle card. It will have a matrix of the customers. It will be tailored to the customer you're working on. It's dynamic, it's up to date. You can interact with it. And this enables AEs to always be ready from a competitive perspective and to make sure on every call and in every customer interaction They're positioning Claude in order to win the deal and provide the best customer experience. The last one is very whimsical. It's my favorite. It's called Create an Asset. Previously, in prior lives, if you wanted to build custom collateral for a deal, you either had to be working on a top 5 deal or you had to have a friend on the marketing or design team who would prioritize your work. With Create an Asset inside of Claude, for any deal, any stakeholder at any stage, you can generate a completely custom piece of collateral, and Claude will surprise you. You can tell Claude what you want it to do, but you can also let Claude decide what is the best asset for this moment in this deal with this stakeholder at this moment in time, and Claude will generate a prototype. A one-pager, a landing page, an interactive HTML file, a puppet show, probably not a puppet show, usually one of the ones I just said, but Claude will generate that asset for you. You can generate it while you're on the call. Some of our reps like to take gone calls when they've had a really good discovery call and drop them into Claude Code so that Claude Code can build a prototype, but they can build a completely tailored asset. It could be a proposal, it could be an ROI calculator, It's designed to assess the deal, assess the stakeholders, and assess what the needs are at that time. This is the only one that got a follow-up slide because I really do like this one, and it's the one where the teams are really using it all the time. The skills also know your brand, and it's so, so nice to not have to worry on if you've selected the right color or if your A is in the right position. We are very, very, you know, we're protective of our brand. We care a lot about it. We invest a lot in it. We work really hard and we don't want AEs shipping— I heard AI slop mentioned a lot in the previous session, so we don't want them shipping AI slop to customers. We want it to be tailored. We want it to be on brand. We want it to help them win. This would not be a tech talk at a conference if I did not end with 4 ways that you can get started today to make your team a little more— I call it AGI-pilled. How can we be an AI-native sales team? How can we do one thing manually once and then make sure we've trained Claude to do it the next time? How can we have Claude spotting the patterns before we can? Because Claude is the copilot on every deal. And context is flowing in between Salesforce and Slack, the AE's brain, and back into Claude. And Claude is just getting better and better at our sales motion and delivering for our customers. So number one, turn on Claude where it's already embedded. It's not even just flipping a switch. It's making sure you're being intentional and not just saying, okay, great, we're using this AI feature in Salesforce. It's how are we using it and how does it connect to the rest of the customer journey? Thread Claude through the sales cycle you're already running. It's an accelerant. And with new capabilities, we've moved from just deterministic workflows for probabilistic ones. It is fun to experiment with Claude and to use Claude as your coach, as your partner, as your copilot in the deal, and to let it make you better and let it push you outside of what always got you here and think about new ways that you can Honestly win and close deals. The sales cycle you're running works. So thread Claude through the sales cycle you're already running and think about it from what is the customer experience, what is the AE experience, and how can I track and accelerate these at every single stage? Getting tickets submitted for Deal Desk and Legal was a massive accelerant for us. This is not something you'd normally spend time thinking about as a sales leader, But sales leaders are rapidly becoming systems thinkers over deal strategists, and you have to think about the system in its entirety. Number 3, really double down there. Make Slack or Teams the front door of one of your support functions. It is a massive enabler. And 4, document what your best reps do and ship it as a scale, as a still. I cannot fully explain the cognitive relief that comes from knowing that I can take the best practices of my best reps and make them the baseline for how everyone else operates and have total confidence that I have made that the baseline. This was— entire deck was brought to you by Klondesign. I did not actually try to pitch any products, so we'll put that to the side. But it isn't a new stack, and I think that's the thing I really wanted to convey today. It's being intentional about your existing stack. These tools are incredible. We have spent years learning them, building around them, investing in them, designing them to fit our sales motion. But if you have Claude in between and Claude around it to enable the reps, your people, your processes, you can massively increase the adaptability of your team and the capacity and productivity that they can manage. Thank you.