Shifting Your Sales & GTM Strategy with Salesforce SVP of Commerical Sales Adnan Chaudry

All of our mid market business and we are going to be talking about how our portfolio companies and how Salesforce Ventures and how Salesforce is shifting our go to market strategies during these very uncertain times. And really excited to have Adnan here, one of the best sales leaders I've ever had the privilege of working with and also he works with many of the leading tech companies so he has a really good perspective of what is going on in the market and he also has the, I don't know, benefit or dubious distinction, but lived through this before in 2008 and 2009. So a lot of lessons that can be taken from there as well.

Thanks Matt. Good to be here.

You can go next slide. Sorry, am I Adnan, can you back?

There we go.

All right. So everyone is adjusting their go to market strategy and I think adjusting really is the operative word here. It seems for the first few days everyone was adjusting day to day and now it seems more week to week. And initial reactions certainly were one of shock. Just trying to figure out what's going on. Checking in with their employees, making sure everyone's safe, making sure everyone's healthy and checking in with customers and doing the same. Seems we're headed more into a bit of adjustment period, trying to stabilize, trying to establish a new normal. And so we're going to talk about what that means in a bit more depth, go to the next slide. So we're going to talk about this in two parts. I'm going to first talk about some of the insights that we've gotten from serving Salesforce Ventures portfolio companies, both in terms of what they're seeing in the market and how bookings and churn and things like that are heading, but then also how they're adjusting to this on their go to market strategies. And then I'm going to hand it over to Adnan and he's going to go in more depth and provide a framework of how Salesforce is adjusting and then talk really some of the more detailed specifics about some of the tactics and strategies that we're, we're employing. So for those that aren't familiar with Salesforce Ventures, we are the strategic investment arm for Salesforce. So we have over 260 portfolio companies globally. It's all enterprise software, predominantly SaaS. Some of the companies you may heard of, such as Zoom, a lot of other companies on this list like Anaplan that you might be familiar with and feel like we did some surveys of the portfolio company and given the breadth and scope, feel like it gives a pretty good index of what's going on in SaaS and the enterprise software landscape. So we're going to walk through some of the surveys that we did. You can go to the next slide. So we surveyed a portfolio over a couple of surveys and to set this up, this is largely companies that are series A, series B and Series C. 80% of the companies fell in that category. These were kind of smaller mid sized companies with employees generally that had 11 to 250 employees. About 90% of the companies fell within that range and mostly selling mid market and up into enterprise. So think of this as more direct sales mid market and up kind of earlyish to early growth stage companies to sort of think about the survey results. So if you look at the results themselves, if you look at Q1, not too surprising. Bookings were down, I think the silver linings, but not by too much. 50% of the companies that we surveyed were at 60, 76% of plan or better, which was pretty good. It does tend to separate when you look at it more in companies that had their fiscal quarter ending in March versus April. And certainly kind of what you're going to hear coming out of this was that companies were able to really accelerate deals that were at the bottom of the funnel trying to close things quickly. And as April kind of came on, things started to slow down a bit more. So as you move forward and you start to look into Q2, not too surprising, everyone's expecting Q2 to be much softer. So in this case, only 30% of the companies that we spoke to expect to be to hit 76% of bookings, plan or better. Certainly some of this is a lot of this is going to be Covid related but I think also it's Adnan, we'll get into this two more. I think it's a bit of a strategy. Companies were very focused on customer success, retaining existing customers, just checking in, seeing how customers were doing, assessing the health of the business, assessing the health of their own employees, really focusing on upsell, closing existing deals and not as much focusing on top of the funnel. And so if you look at where pipeline is right now on the next slide, again pipeline is flat to down. Again, not too surprising. Similar things and this has come out as we started to really talk to many of our portfolio companies as well. Companies were really reaching out to existing companies and checking in. There was not a lot of outbound sales or marketing. And I really think what we've seen internally and externally is that starting to change. So last week really starting to adjust to. I don't want to say the new normal, but kind of trying to stabilize businesses and really starting to focus again a lot more on outreach. So we're going to check in on this in a month or so and it'll be interesting to see how this changes over time as companies really start to increase outbound as well. And if you look at churn, so in Q1, starting to see some early signs of churn, 30% of the company saw some increase in Churn. And then if you kind of look at this a little bit more on the next slide, If you look at the whole year, we are expecting to see a significant increase in churn. 30% of the companies are expecting to see churn increase by 1 to 5%. Another 36 are expecting to see churn increase by 6 to 10%. I think the silver lining in this though is that only 14% of the companies think that churn will increase by 11%. So I think that is somewhat of the good news in this in that SaaS businesses are sticky, companies tend to stick around. And so while the Churn, I don't want to minimize it, stable base of revenue should be able to maintain that through the year. So I think that is some good news. If you dig into the Churn numbers a little bit more, we're using some of the data that Gainsight provided and they did a great job. I recommend looking at the survey that they did, they really go into Churn and customer success and great deal. And this is highlighting something that we're really seeing across the board and that is you're seeing a bit of a separation in those companies that have really the stickiest, most critical solution. So if you have a renewal rate of around 90, 95%, churn's only expected to decrease by an additional 5%. Whereas if companies that have a bit higher attrition and retention is less than 80%, that churn could go up to above 16%. Go to the next slide. So we are getting a lot of questions around what are best practices, what are companies doing. So on the next slide I'm going to go through this somewhat briefly and then Adnan is going to go into this in a lot more detail. But some of the most commonly cited strategies and tactics from our portfolio companies, again really initially focusing on customer success and retention, from there focusing on upsell versus targeting new opportunities. Again, that starting shift, we're seeing that shift more in the last week or two to outbound sales. And everyone's really, really redirecting their efforts onto those industries that are less impacted. And now the goal is really moving to identifying opportunities regardless of the size, just finding opportunities that have the highest percent of close closing. Call that the sell what you can, sell a box of donuts if you need to, but identify things. I stole that from Admin. Identify what you can and try and close those deals. Also there is focus on changing terms to try and close and accelerate deals, reducing time commitment requirements for contracts, pricing minimums to get to a yes more quickly and then also focusing on cash and cash collections by building more efficiency in that process. And some of our customers are also shifting a little bit more into the enterprise side as well.

Let me go to the next slide.

I will say there are some encouraging signs that we're seeing in this. And so 70% of companies have been able to identify new revenue opportunities, whether it's shifting to public sector or shifting to healthcare. And you're just seeing just the whole go to market motion and how sales teams are configured to becoming just much more nimble, much more quick adjusting, experimenting, seeing where there's opportunities and going for that. And I think one of the other positive things and hard to see this now, but 90% of the companies that we surveyed did say they believe that this will create a tailwind for the companies coming out of COVID 19 and to dive into that a little bit more. We asked our companies about travel. 31% of the companies that we surveyed said that they'll see a decrease in sales related travel by 26 to 50%. And then another 24% said that that will decrease by more than 50%. And this is like coming out of this, this isn't now, this is going forward. We also asked another question where a portfolio company said that 90% of the companies expect work from home to dramatically increase. And so when you combine that and some of the other things we're seeing, it's really going to, we think accelerate the transition to a digital economy. It's really going to accelerate digital transformation and it's not just going to be, we think in things like work from home, tools like Zoom or IT solutions like vpn, but it's really going to transform how business is getting done, whether that's online education and learning. Right now learning for companies is only at 10% online. We expect that will increase dramatically. We're seeing a huge uptake in people wanting more automation, whether that's RPA or automating their call centers or automating other parts of their businesses as well. And it's going to impact all industries, whether it's we're seeing supply chains shift for manufacturing and companies moving from having a single source for a supplier in one country to multiple countries and needing to be much more agile, much more nimble. So that's going to require solutions that are cloud based that you can spin up in a matter of days or weeks versus a matter of months or years. So we do think that and what we're seeing is coming out of this, we'll see a huge acceleration in SaaS related solutions. So that is again, can't understate how difficult what we're going through now is. But there is somewhat of a silver lining I think coming out of this. So what I want to do now is shift over to admin and oh, just last bit too. We have all this data online. If you want to see more results from the surveys, you can, there's a link here. You can also go to our medium, Salesforce Ventures and we have a bunch of resources there. So with that though, what I want to do now is shift over to Adnan and let him talk more specifically about what's Salesforce doing, how are we reaching out to our customers and talk through some of the frameworks and tactics that we're using.

Great. Matt, thanks so much. Well, good morning. Good afternoon. You know, I'm going to be talking a bit about a couple of things. One is certainly the approach at Salesforce and some of the things that we've been going through, but also kind of a lot of what we've been hearing in the market. You know, between Matt's perspective and the 60 plus portfolio companies that he's working with, I'm responsible for the US gen commercial business. And so, you know, we've got companies that I interact with that hit all sorts of industries. Travel, leisure, hospitality to some companies that have been really hard hit others that have been on the other side of this and have really seen a massive uptick in their business. One of the guiding principles that helped me personally, I was there, as Matt mentioned, I was here at Salesforce in 2008, 2009. I was an account executive covering financial services, vertical and covering New York. And so I remember being in New York when the whole market was melting down and I think Salesforce has learned a lot since then and certainly the market has come quite a bit far from, you know, that point. Certainly, you know any, you know, the safe harbor, you know, if I make any forward looking statements, you know, this is largely meant to be if you're making any decisions on Salesforce, any product purchases make them based on current configuration, current functionality. More here. Invite you to read this later. But, you know, if we zoom out a minute, you know, the way that we're thinking about it, I think this is the case across the board. In late February, early March, I recall Mark Benioff, our CEO, had a company all hands shortly after the earnings release and talked about, hey, there's this thing coming. I think everyone looked and was a bit confused even like, hey, is this really a potential crisis coming down? You know, here we are 60 days later or, you know, a month and a half later and we're in this global crisis. And at first I just want to acknowledge that, you know, we're going to talk about the business models of some of our, you know, broader customers, some of the things Salesforce is going through. But, you know, this is a public health crisis, you know, it's an economic crisis, it's a business crisis. And so, you know, empathize with you, your family, your loved ones, your businesses that have been hardly hit heavily. And in these three key buckets, the crisis hit. Officially, I live in California. And so even though we were working from home and a lot of global travel for us and even domestic travel at Salesforce came to halt in early March, at least California, it was really mid March when the shelter in place, directives hit and certainly the country followed throughout. And when you look here, I think we're still here. When I talk to customers, they're in some version of this crisis management. If you're like me, a parent with three different schools running upstairs, as long as those kids aren't even back to work, you're still in crisis management. But I think as a business though, we've teetered back into stabilization. And then the third component, when all of this comes back and what that new normal looks like, and we go into acceleration. And so in this, this is the framework I'm going to walk through today. And you know, all of this blends and I'll sort of, you know, weave in and out. And I think, you know, for us, the crisis management tiptoeing into stabilization, where I think we are right now, at least in our business, this could also be considered the phase of back to work and how do we equip our teams to get back to work and whatever that new normal means. And so I use that term interchangeably and stabilization. And then kind of acceleration is sort of how we grow our business. So this is going to be the framework. And so in the first part of this framework on crisis management, I Just want to share some of the things and lessons learned we had. And so three key pillars here. One was like really refocusing our team and refocusing your teams and what does that mean then redirecting your operations and then how do you engage your customers? So each one of these areas has some lessons learned. And you know, on a call yesterday with somebody that's working with clients in the education sector and they're still trying to refocus their organizations and their teams, they're even trying to figure out, hey, do we, do we bring higher ed back and what's the go, no go date for, you know, some of the universities? When do we need to make that call? And that's going to be probably for them, you know, in late July at the best, if students are showing up on campus. And so they're still kind of in this early crisis. Having broader relief efforts. At Salesforce, you know, we believe our platform is something that, you know, the greatest platform for change. And so for us, you know, we've been really active in leveraging our ecosystem. You know, we've gotten over 50 million PPE equipment out in the market through just our broad efforts and working with our partners, you know, we've got, and by the way, in the back of this deck, I'm going to have a fair amount of links on a lot of the stuff I talk about. So if you're trying to figure out where to go find information, just know that it's coming. You know, we've reached out and we've, we've set up a grant process for a lot of our SMBs to help them financially in whatever way we can. We've made a public pledge, for example, to not have any layoffs for 90 days and see how that goes forward. But sort of being very open around anything we can do in these relief efforts. And then internally, transparency was a big part. We've got to rethink our channels for employee communications and feedback. And I'll give you an example. We're having a weekly global all hands call with our executive staff every single week for 50,000 employees. That was something that was typically at that level done quarterly. Now we're bringing that in every single week. We're doing sales leadership, all hands calls with customer service and support and sales every single week. So that cadence and that feedback loop has really ticked up. And that's a best practice that I think is across the industry and then also restating and revalidating your goals. Everyone here, a lot of the companies here are led by values. We're led by values. We don't have the market cornered on that, but really we've had to reevaluate how do we think about that. And our internal annual strategy process is called the V2 mom stands for revision, Values, Methods, Obstacles and Measures. We've taken that process and put it directly towards what does that mean for COVID 19. And so I've got that full V2 mom at the back end of this deck, should anybody want to read that, that talks about how do we treat our customers, how do we go to market, how do we think about events, how do we think in this new era. And we've really taken our values and applied it to these new methods through this crisis management. There was also an opportunity to redirect our operations. One is just everyone's gone remote period. Remote connectivity, that's a lot of challenge. You know, we have teams that are not used to working remote at all. They're office based and we have some teams that are purely home office based and they're closest to the customer. We have employees we've hired in the last month that have never been on site either to a client, have never met a single employee in person at Salesforce. So how do we bring them in? How do we make them feel part of the team and integrate them? And so we really put a lot of work on that. And then for marketing we've had to just pivot overnight. We're a company that's heavily focused on high touch in person events. And I'll give you an example, our Sydney World tour, you know we have 10,000 registrants and when everything shut down we had to pivot overnight. We went from a in person event with about 10,000 registrants and we let it virtually and let all the sessions virtually. And we've got some best practices we've shared around that. And that ended up having 80,000 attendees. And what we found through those events also is not only is there a great appetite for virtual, but on those virtual events we ended up getting a lot more higher level C level attendance that we would otherwise. And, and so really shifting both the marketing and sales engagements to all virtual and then the organization on our operations we've had to really self organize and a lot of this was informed by some of the lessons we learned in 2008. I remember when I was a rep there was still sort of the agile and the nimble process around credit collections. Customer service contract modifications was still so decentralized. We learned from that early on and so in this process really around customer success, developing a financial plan for our customers. And so we've learned a good best practice is to put more tools and more controls in the hands of frontline managers, frontline reps. So the back end finance teams, sales ops teams aren't inundated. And that's really helped through this message and then engaging customers. I suspect that's the common theme for everyone. How do you do it if you're like me? I got bombarded just even by so many different vendors and different players in the space about all these emails and it's really hard to pull that message back around what that means. And so for us we've been really selective, so cold calling efforts during this phase. We pulled back totally any non critical outbound efforts, especially within industries that were hard hit. We've totally pulled those back. And then the check ins were really about leading with empathy. Deep, deep listening Salesforce. We don't have the market covered on great ideas. And so a lot of what we learned we'd learned through our customers by deeply listening and deeply engaging. And what we found through that was there was a big appetite around understanding what's happening. And so Leading Through Change is a series we've launched. It's available to everyone, bringing in third party speakers, bringing in, you know, we had Mark Cuban a couple weeks ago, we're having Brene Brown for our SMB business around empathy and leading through leading with courage. And so there's a massive demand around some of this content and then others is just being there and just telling people you want to help. So Salesforce Care is our package of various solutions cross industry, whether it's health care, it's government sector or the public sector, it's the SMB space. There are specific tools for each of those areas, specific functions. We have customers that are totally isolated in the sense of that support teams that were used to working side by side at a desk and now they're working from their home office. So how do you pivot over to ask a question to someone? And so we've turned on tools and we made a lot of our product bundles free for 90 days. Those were some of the lessons learned we had during crisis management. And I think some of the industry has also sort of taken this to operationalize. If I go forward, one framework I just wanted to share from Pipeline. I get customers asking me a lot about Pipeline. We certainly put a lot of focus on that internally. And the one area I would just point out here is this is illustrative. This is Pretty standard out of, you know, certainly out of Salesforce or most CRMs around pipeline fidelity and the chart. So starting from the left, sort of where the pipeline starts at the end of the beginning of the quarter, across the bottom, various percentage changes and then certainly where you end and the green activities are the areas that create pipeline, create the positive, the red are certainly the degradation. And so for one, I think the create and close is super important. So every one of these slivers we dive in deeper. So we don't just say hey, what's the starting pipeline, what's the ending pipeline? So create and close that. Closing out your Q1 now. And so really the create and close effort when what was the motion? And we've even found even creating spiffs to incentivize create and close in the current motion, in the current month or in the current quarter created a big uptick. And that's the case across the industry as well. Certainly have your pre book, you have your pull forward revenue. I think what we tend to see is the more larger enterprise businesses tend to have more ability to pull forward because their pipelines are back end loaded versus I think in the SMB space that pull forward has been a little bit harder. Then you go to the push and what were the activities, what were the issues? For the push and for us this has been super, super helpful because projects either canceled, they're paused, or they're just pushed for a little bit of time or maybe they're thinking what their budgets are, how they want to operationalize. And so really understanding this bucket and segmenting it and sticking with it is super, super important. And then certainly a lot of value changes, certain things that are deading out in the wind. So for both the mid market SMB space and the enterprise space I think are super critical. And we find certainly, and I think this across the industry, the SMB space, mid market space, there's a lot more create and close and momentum in the front end of the year and front end of the quarter. And so those have been taking a bigger hit versus the larger enterprise motions. Those tend to be back end loaded, especially with whether it's the January or December year end. So pulling that stuff forward has really been helpful. So I would encourage people to really think about pipeline in this core fidelity stage and moving to stabilization now. This is the next stage. I would say this is the back to work. In some elements we feel very firmly here. In other parts we're still early and in the same construct. What are the opportunities here? One is investing in your team, calibrating your operations and then re qualifying your customers. And I'll just hit on a couple of points here that I think might be worthwhile to the audience here. One, the importance of morale and well being super, super critical more than ever with the situation where the teams are working from home. Our sales teams have never been busier. It's crazy. Like nobody's sitting around watching YouTube or Netflix. Like there's real work and it's not exactly clear. You know, sales is wearing many hats. Your customer support, your credit, your collections, your enablement, your number of different things. So we really have to focus heavily on their wellbeing. We've got a daily 9 Pacific 30 minute wellbeing session organization wide. It was around mental health and wellbeing. It's been super helpful to our team. We've actually now opened it up to the whole community, all of our customers, anybody on here. There's details at the back end of this deck where you can tune in if there's any sort of content that's of interest. And we've also used this as an opportunity to heavy investment and enablement and reskilling. You know, we have a lot of folks that are based in home offices closest to the customer. You know, this is not new whether it's in sales. You know, I've got kids and you know, I was having a conversation with my daughter the other day and she was talking one of her teachers who was, who's just been exceptional on the Zoom exchange. And run it. And now they have to really work on a different skill and vice versa. And so the enablement there has been really important. We thought about our new call motion, our first call approach. How do we come to bear? So that's been a heavy investment. The other part that I think is top of mind probably is around stability. I get asked by virtually every customer I talk to, hey, what are we doing around giving guidance on job roles and compensation? I'll tell you, from what I'm seeing across the market, you have some firms that have had to make deep cuts for all the right reasons that are certainly important to them. You have some companies that have done nothing internally. We've decided to give guarantees to certain sales teams. So that's been the best way to just sort of pause and say, hey, there's a guarantee. We've got you covered through this. Just focus on the right motion. And so through that that's really helped. And then if there's a specific tool that we think is really helpful to the market, or part of our stack that can really, really help. We put Spiffs to incentivize that continuity in the emphasis. And so putting Spiffs that are very specific and time bound has really helped quite a bit. And then we've also have had to really harmonize with new tools and processes. There's just so much coming at sales. As I mentioned, they're playing every single role. And so we've had to really create pocket guides and really get them super focused. And same thing with marketing. And then so what are the things we're measuring? And so this is the calibrate your operations. And so if we're saying, hey, do the right thing for the customer, have the right motion, so the kinds of things that we're doing now, and this is what also guided us in 2008, we call it AMP stands for activities, meetings and pipeline. This is the notion of, hey, have the right activities, have the right meetings, the pipeline will come. And so we're measuring those inputs because historically the output was, hey, here's your number, here's your pipeline, go for it. Now we have to look to a different metric. We have to look to a different metric than just quota attainment. Those things will come later. And then also forecasting, I've got a. Depending on the deal cycle, deal stays in the quarter. Now what we've said is, hey, cut out the COVID noise to the best extent that we can. Take all the COVID impact out and then confidence and really build that hard edge at 90% confidence. And so with that, that's given people a lot of confidence, a little bit more opportunity to sort of, hey, say this stuff is not going to hit, but this is going to hit. And then it's that having that first data point, then it creates a map. And then from there we've been able to build on top of that 90% confidence. And I've shared that with customers and I get that that's been a really good best practice. And then our marketing strategy continues to evolve. We certainly continue to roll out virtual events, but we really think it's all about speed and relevance. You've got to be fast and the content's got to be highly, highly relevant. And so for us, a lot of that's been around smaller, more intimate roundtables and also with the customers, when we talk to customers. And that's opened up as things have stabilized. Speak to power, you know, talk the truth. And in that conversation, I think people understand, like there's been a really confirming the project status is this on, is this frozen? What's going on? How can we best help? And through that conversation we've also been able to qualify at a deep, deep level with that 90% threshold. And I think customers have appreciated it because, because these projects just didn't show up overnight. They kind of maybe in some cases got frozen overnight, but they're open to it. And if it's a project that's maybe just frozen, there's actually a lot of get the permission from the customer. Hey, we're going to continue to work through this with our teams and that's been super helpful and it's also helped our team internally because again we tend to be heavily on premise in person with some of the events. So even the sort of solutions, engineering the, you know, building the right ROIs, the business case, we've now taken those to virtual sessions. But with the customer's permission we've been able to actually go deeper and through that uncover a lot of near term opportunities that the customers are asking for. They're begging for this help. So that's some of the high level at the stabilization phase. I did want to take this towards one of the key areas that's top of mind I suspect for everyone and that's around capacity and hiring and how do we think about AES. And this is just an illustrative example. It's a company with right now 50 AES, that's going to grow to 80 AES. The same model applies whether you have 5 AES and you're going to 80 or you have several hundred AES and you're doubling. And this was something that, you know, in 2008 Salesforce I think maybe stalled hiring a bit. And what we learned was that there were some pretty big trade offs. And so we're leaning into the market. You've seen some of the messaging we put out there. Mark's been very vocal about hiring and we're leaning into the hiring. And so I wanted to just walk through some of the key trade offs on each of these. And so in this example maintain the current course of hiring, Some cuts and in this case the company 50 AES, you drop 20 headcount and then you're at 30. What's the impact of that to your business? And so that's the impact of capacity. Certainly there's other levers you can pull around improving productivity, minimizing attrition, promote internally so maybe onboard faster and certainly excelling the ramp time. And so this is a bit of an eye chart if you bear with me for A minute. The sales capacity trade off here and the key hiring phase. If you just assume a million dollar quota, 60% attainment. Again this is just illustrative. Everyone's going to sort of input their data in here and pull the lever differently. But in this example, if you go through the seasonal hiring and the example of hiring 10 reps in April, 10 in July, 10 in October, you end the year at 80 reps. Here we're also taking a pretty big assumption of a 90 day ramp and you're seeing the ramp phase internally. At Salesforce we view our ramp cycle closer to about six months for a typical AE more on the larger enterprise side. And so here you'd have 88% ramp capacity going into December and a bookings impact of 35 million of the yield. If you see what happens if you just stall hiring by Even just those 10 hires and you push 10 hires from April into October, you only end up with 75% ramped and about a $5 million, about a 3 million dollar hit on your business. What's really interesting is if you make some cuts now, so if you drop from 50 reps to 30, you cut those 20 reps out and then you've got to hire those back in the back end of the year. And even a big assumption, if you can hire that fast, let alone ramps, I think the make cuts scenario is a lot, lot more generous than it might be otherwise. Where you end up is you have a 50% of your team is only ramped, but the bookings impact is over $10 million and assuming 150k OTE again you can flex the OTE band. You find that in this example you get a $10.2 million loss in bookings, but you only pick up $1.5 million gain in cost savings. So just something to think about on trade offs because I think the market is moving so fast and I hear customers in some cases really struggling with hey, I'm going to make some deep cuts now and figure out later. And some customers are saying hey, we're going to stall or in our case we're going to go right into it and keep hiring through this downturn. Because we do think on the other end having the sales capacity ramped and being closer to the customer is super, super important and valuable. So that's just one framework I wanted to share here. And then to wrap it up on the third phase of acceleration or growth as we come back into work. Just some thoughts here that again, we don't have the market cornered on good ideas. But some of the things that we're working with and the feedback we're also getting one is under any scenario, you got to empower your team. You got to have that psychological safety. It's going to be some form of a rolling reboot for sure. And so you're going to be uber flexible with personal needs, whether it's in the stabilization or Now I do think once things sort of get to that standard, you got to have an expectation of performance. And so we're expecting every sales team member to have performance goals and we're expecting them to perform. And that's going to be creative, we're going to be scrappy. And so this is not about, hey, we're going to sit there and wait, Q4, get that one big deal. And that's going to make the year. No, in this new normal that's gone, I don't care what segment you're in, everyone's going to participate, everyone's going to put a win on the board. I think setting that expectation clearly to the teams can be super important because we're going to have to have new calibration on the operations side. I hear this a lot from a lot of my clients. Some are in retail, some are in hospitality. And this whole notion of reentering and shifts, you're going to have maybe a Monday and a Wednesday shift and a Tuesday and Thursday shift. How do we have a rolling reboot into the workspace? If someone gets sick or if a team gets sick, you need to quarantine a whole team. So I think this hybrid approach on adapting the operations is going to be something that's going to be more front and center and we're going to try to help lead the way with some of our clients. And then just the agility and being responsive. And here it hits every part of our organization. So as I mentioned, with marketing, our goal is speed and relevance and here operationally the same thing. There's going to be a lot of unknowns, whether it's customer specific or industry or public health directives that continue to come our way. And so a lot of the operations, historically I think we've been more quarter to quarter or year to year. Now we're going to go like week to week or month to month. These shorter time spans, shorter bursts and having those metrics are gonna be super critical. And then it's all about elevating our customers. And I think there's some companies that are well positioned for this. And the digital transformation is paramount. If people were trying to get here before, they're sprinting to get here now and really having the full full journey of your customer and everything that you're doing around digital touch points. If you're in retail alone, like how does somebody have a shopping experience or return experience? You've got to be fully digital. And here leveraging what's been successful around the stabilization phase, the remote support, high touch virtual exec events, focusing a lot of the marketing towards industries in heavy need or surging with new opportunities and again just doubling down on the emphasis around tying yourself to digitization, enabling smarter, more personalized experiences. That's going to be the new normal. That's how we elevate our customers through digital transformation and so make those investments now. Don't wait would be my advice to you some resources. I just want to leave you here with one Salesforce Care. Here's the hyperlink. This has all of our key offerings, our product bundles, our SMB grants, but I also wanted to give other takeaways as well. Here's our daily the next one up safety and well being actions. That's where we put all of our responses to the market. Our small business grants are on here. As I mentioned we have a Covid 19v2 mom. We're making it public Encourage you to dig in Leading Through Change newsletter Again we have a lot of thought leaders and change leaders coming. It might be helpful to you or your teams if there's interest. The Be well together is the 30 minutes daily 9am it's been incredibly helpful. My wife and I most days chime in together. It's really brought the content into the house in this new shelter in place world. You and I hope you, your stakeholders, your team are all safe and doing well. So Matt and team, I think we're there now. I think we're opening it up to any questions if there are any.

This is Deborah from the Saster team. I can read out a few questions for you guys if you'd like.

Sure.

So we have one that says how should companies think about sales teams right now? Do you look for top talent that might have been unavailable three months ago? How do you identify lower performers? When numbers and targets have completely changed or need to be, do you make drastic changes or stay the course?

Yeah Matt, I can take that. I think one is just always be hiring. In our case we haven't let off. We're going to continue to invest in talent through this and so certainly if you're in the market we're looking, please come find us. I think the second part of that question, Deborah, I think was around, hey, you know, it's easy to just look good with, you know, closing revenue and closing bookings and saying, hey, here I am, like, I'm the superhero. But I think that's in some ways, you know, the rising tide. Once that goes out, it really brings into focus what are the key activities of the top performers. And as I mentioned before, you know, we're looking at activities, meetings, pipeline, and the underlying motions under all of those are super critical. You know, are people agile? Are they able to learn a new skill? Are they able to pivot fast and move with agility? Is something I really look forward to and look to. I didn't get the last part of your question. Just to make sure I had it.

Sorry, I'm just pulling it right back up. Basically, it says, after identifying lower performers, when numbers and targets have completely changed or need be, do you make drastic changes or stay the course? Was the final part to that.

Yeah, I think for us right now, the drastic changes are really around making sure we're pivoting our message and our resources to take care of our customers and our teams. The market itself, if you step away from what we're talking about here, you look at the public equity markets, I mean, the smartest minds in the world haven't even been able to price assets. Asset prices have gone down 20 to 30% and then gone up 20% in a matter of two weeks. And so I think drastic changes from that standpoint, you know, I would maybe pause and think about before, you know, massive cuts or massive, massive policy changes towards some of these areas where we made the changes are really around giving people comfort and security, around some guarantees that they're going to be okay.

So we're seeing some questions kind of on the flip side of that. How are you mitigating churn? Does it impact business in the future? And another almost similar question. How does expected churn vary by company size?

Matt, you want to take that maybe with some of the portfolio that you've hit on the churn side. And I can add on.

Yeah. On the varying by company size, I mean, I think there's more of a natural. Larger companies tend to have a larger base of capital, more stable revenues. And so from that standpoint, companies that are larger companies are going to experience a bit less churn. And so I think that's a bit how company size plays into it. I would say it really is also going to vary a lot more, though, by industry and sector that you play in. And then, sorry, the oh, and how are companies addressing Churn? I think Adnan hit on this and some of the stuff that Nick and the Gainsight team focused on was really insightful, but it was really kind of breaking down the barriers between account management and customer success and sales and just really creating really nimble teams to respond quickly and surround those customers, spend a lot of time and then being flexible across the board, whether that's deferring and it's very much a customer by, by customer case. And that's whether it's postponing payments, deferring payments, or sometimes it was giving a customer, not making them pay for all the extra features of a product that maybe they're consuming and just charging them for the base price to keep them on. So it's just getting really creative and thinking about what are the best ways to retain that customer. And sometimes it's really going to be specific to kind of what their, what their needs are. But, but, but flexibility, listening, empathy is really the key thing.

Yeah. And what I would add, Sales team, the frontline leadership, has the best knowledge around how to pivot the solution set to help the customer. Maybe, maybe this team has been, you know, put on pause at the customer, but the solutions, your offerings can be applied here and they're a lot more nimble if you give them that flexibility. And so what might seem like, hey, it's a contract renegotiation or a payment issue is really around being agile. But if you make it seem like it's an operations and a finance approval, then you're kind of stuck in that path.

So moving forward, we've got a couple questions about this. Can you give examples of new tools deployed during this crisis, ones that have been helping engage customers better?

Sure, I can give a couple. You know, one of our examples is even with Tableau, you know, we've, you know, Tableau has turned. Tableau is an acquisition that Salesforce made a year ago or so. You know, that visualization, we've just opened up the marketplace and so the public sector health clinics are running their dashboards on some of these solutions. And just making these tools available has been super helpful. Other is, you know, we've got some of the tools around, you know, remote call centers or remote service or remote service teams. How do you give them something that they can, that's preconfigured and they can turn on very quickly. So that's been super helpful. A lot of collaboration tools that are tied into not just for purposes of pure collaboration, but the next level where they're Tied into the, you know, the data itself. And how do you, how do you collaborate on the data? That's been super helpful. A lot of our enablement tools and solutions, for example, you know, as we're enabling the team, even like quick videos that we're attaching versus making people sit through long webinars or that experiential training just kind of making quick guides. Quick pocket guides have also been really helpful.

Yeah, maybe to add one thing I think you're hitting on is something that's sort of the secondary effect of being a SaaS company that I think will have long ranging impacts and that is having collaboration, not just the pure play collaboration tools, but the inherent nature of SaaS being collaborative and tying to the data. And an example of that is a company in our portfolio propel people plm. It's a design tool, product lifecycle management tool and it allows companies as they're going to release a new design to more easily collaborate with other suppliers and manufacturers. And so it makes sense inherently like having that as a cloud based solution makes a ton of sense just because all the things that you associate with SaaS solutions but having that collaborative component as you're thinking about, I'm moving my supply chain from a country in Asia to maybe a country in Mexico and we've never met in person. We have to do this in days rather than weeks. You not only have to have that, there's no other way to do it but in the cloud, but then you're collaborating around that project and those tools really need to be intricately linked to the design changes, the quality assurance systems. It's something that I always thought was pretty eye opening in terms of that, that secondary effect of why SaaS solutions are going to be so impactful going forward.

So you've both mentioned video at different times. Video and being a part during this time we're seeing a few questions along these lines. Are you able to close big or rather enterprise deals that most commonly would have needed physical meetings in the past or are they being pushed to next quarter?

Yeah, I've never touched more executives in a 30, 45 day cycle in my life. The fact that I don't have to jump on a plane, the whole notion of flying to. That really need help right now. And so the short answer is yes, I'll even take it a step further. Like we've had to really re, rethink our approach because a lot of the I mentioned briefly earlier, like when we do big architect workshops or solutioning, we've been able to Pivot. And one of the way we've, one of the way ways we've done that has we've been dogfooding internally like we've been running our internal strategy sessions, our internal meetings onto ourselves. The fact that we've got to be running, you know, we're running, you know, daily, I'm sorry, weekly, all hands with 50,000 employees, for example, means we've had to get the tools stood up in place that can sort of take all that content and that feedback and keep working. And so for both, for large scale organizations especially, they've been coming to us asking us for guidance. And my experience is they're buying and they're interested and so make your message relevant and move fast.

So it looks like we have time for about one, maybe two more questions and I kind of want to follow in line with what we were just talking about. This is specific to Adnan, but of course open to both. How is your sales org leaning on ISV partners to generate co sell revenue, relationships, et cetera? Are you focusing at all on those partnerships as a means of entering new opportunities?

100%, yes. I mean we've got a very strong, healthy ISV channel. What's coming up now are really interesting use cases. Some of our ISV partners are just seeing their business as boom and others are trying to figure out how to rethink their message. And so that's a core, core tenet of our business and how we go to market, whether it's through the channel or even our sales teams and putting that solution set in front of our customers. And so that's never been healthier. And I know, Matt, if you have.

A different experience on that, I've also just been really proud at how many of the ISVs have responded during this time. So whether it's SIs or software companies just really helping us and help customers, whether it's standing up solutions so that companies could track healthcare, companies could track their healthcare providers could track their employees, what their PPE needs are and that way that you could within this was a company that's doing this in Canada, distribute that throughout Canada, or as I mentioned, propel, you know, leaning in on the manufacturing space for PPE equipment, you know, some of these companies have maybe expertise in areas that we don't. And so as we're pivoting, not only just how can we help, how can we solve these solutions, we've really leaned on a lot of our ISVs to just like, you know, how do we solve Covid, but then also how do we sell into some of these other market segments in new ways that we haven't as new needs are coming coming up, whether it's, you know, healthcare, education or manufacturing.

So it seems like we've actually run out of time. But thank you both so much. We are still inundated with questions, so we'll be sure to share all the Q and A with the Salesforce team and make sure that you have a chance to answer them.

All right, thanks so much.

Thanks and see you guys in the next presentation.

Be well. Thanks.