E38: How Adam Alfano Is Leading Salesforce Into Its AI Era

Hello and welcome to the Revenue Leadership Podcast by Topline. I'm your host, Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner.com, and every Wednesday we dive deep into the strategies and tactics being used to drive success by the best revenue leaders in the world. So join me as I sit down with revenue operators to discuss actionable frameworks that you can implement in your business today with No fluff, no sales pitches, and no platitudes. This episode is brought to you by Momentum, the revenue orchestration platform that helps revenue teams actually execute. If your pipeline is clogged with admin, buried insights, and disconnected tools, Momentum fixes that. It automates workflows, structures customer signals, and drives next steps with AI. See how Zscaler, Owner.com, and Demandbase are supercharging revenue execution at momentum.io. Today's guest is Adam Alfano, who is the EVP of Global SMB and Emerging Products at Salesforce. We are recording from this lovely makeshift studio at World Tour.

Yeah, we've hijacked your show here. I apologize, but we're thrilled to have you on site.

We have been co-opted. It is Salesforce World Tour here in Toronto. I've known Adam now for a little while, and we've been meaning to do this pod, so we get to do it here live. This is my first live pod, I think.

This is exciting. I mean, I'm a longtime listener, first-time caller. I'm a fan of the show. I take a lot from the show.

I love it.

You've had some incredible guests that I know and revere, so it's an honor, man. Thanks for having us. Thanks for coming here. And I won't hijack the conversation. We'll just move on. We've done enough with the room.

Appreciate it. I was told I had to keep you on the rails.

I can drift, for sure. I mean, there's no doubt.

So you have spent 17 years at Salesforce. Yeah. From emerging SMB AE all the way through manager, RVP, AVP, senior AVP, EVP Amer SMB.

Yeah.

And now EVP Global SMB and emerging products. What a run.

Yeah, it's been interesting. Coming in in 2008, I grew up, I worked in the metals business. I'm from Hamilton. So if you know, I mean, I guess our American guests, that wouldn't mean a ton or listeners of Canada. Yeah, it's the Pittsburgh or Cleveland of Canada, steel town. I worked in the steel business and in the mid-2000s that industrial manufacturing world was pretty tough. And I sort of got a hot tip from a friend of like, hey, I work at this company, it's moving really quickly, it's pretty interesting. And I came in in 2008. We were probably, I don't have it exactly, but I think we were $650 million and 3,000 employees. And I wouldn't have guessed that we'd be at this scale. I mean, I'm sure Marc would've, but it's definitely been a ride for sure.

Very cool. And so we're gonna talk about two topics because I think that is a really unique career, and we're also at a unique point in time in the go-to-market business. You're sort of at the center of it being at Salesforce. And so I wanna talk about two things. One is just like career lessons in leadership over that span to continually reinvent yourself as a company is reinventing itself. Like, how the heck do you do it? And then leading through change. So 17 years, the first year being the financial crisis, being one of those moments, but going through multiple financial cycles, COVID, post-COVID, the slowdown, the seat contraction, which I'm excited to get into. And now AI, there's lots of really interesting examples of the world changing, and I wanna hear your thoughts on how you change and evolve with the world.

Excited to do it.

Lots to unpack. So, anything else I missed about your background specifically on the Salesforce side? Maybe tell me about—

I mean, I'm an incredible athlete. I think that's probably obvious with you just— No, I don't know. I've spent a long time at Salesforce. I'm a father of two 8-year-olds and a 6-year-old, so it's busy at home with travel sports and gymnastics and music and all that kind of stuff. Salesforce has been sort of at the center of my life for a long time. In a lot of ways, I grew up at this company. I'm very grateful for it. But no, I'm a musician. I tried doing that before I worked at Salesforce. There's a little tidbit for you. And I think a lot about creativity as it pertains to what we do and left-right brain and how you can win a lot more in the periphery than the linear. And I think a lot of that stuff, those those different hobbies and creative mechanisms have actually been a big part of what I've leaned on. Yeah.

Have you read the book Range by David Epstein?

Nope.

He would, he would have the explanation for being a well-rounded, well-versed person with left, right, left, right brain capability succeeding in this world. So that makes a ton of sense.

I like admired the Renaissance person who did like a million different things and I probably like over-indexed. Like, I try, you know, some people do that naturally and they're really good at it. I like tried really hard, but I've sort of tried a lot of different things. And I think that I think there's kind of learning in everything you take on. But today it's kids, it's work, it's, you know, traveling around trying to help people use digital agents and, you know, sometimes picking up an instrument when there's time or playing golf or whatever.

So let's get off track immediately. Like, just tell me about what do you think being sort of a left-right brain balanced person allows you to do as a leader?

Here's how I've articulated it in the context of work is there is a lot of people fighting and working in the linear of the job. You know, the, you know, I am listening to a business-focused podcast on the way to work. I'm reading the latest business book. I am doing my vocation as hard as I can as authored and trying to learn a ton about it. And all that stuff is good, but it kind of informs like one track. And I think it's the track that's often the hardest competed for, right? The things that are on the job that are directly applicable. Whereas when we're gonna talk about leading through change, we're gonna talk about how do you continue to evolve and have longevity, a lot of the wins are in your periphery and in the margin, are in, maybe using things that open receptors to kind of see things in a different way, or possibly, this is probably self-indulgent to say, but possibly see things that others may not. And so I always think I want a healthy balance of both. I want to inform that linear and be really good at my craft and on my craft, and then I wanna lean on outside inference and lots of different industries and read fiction novels and have a sort of a broad spectrum of, assets to draw from because they're all applicable. And I think like if you could just get all your synapses firing at once, you've got the best chance to succeed. I mean, it's a mental game out there. Yeah, ultimately. So I don't know if that makes sense, but that's how I think about it.

It does. And I think the way that Epstein talks about it is, you know, you're acquiring different sense of mental models and pattern recognition.

Yeah.

You know, he talks about how, uh, Nobel Prize winners tend to have some deep other hobby, music or some sort of like—

Did somebody tell you about my Nobel Prize? That's pretty cool.

Yeah, exactly. And so it makes a ton of sense. Then there's also so much less alpha in that one track that everybody's pursuing.

Yeah, and I'm not being disparaging. There wasn't any, like, I probably sounded a little narcissistic. I didn't mean to. I'm not being disparaging. I just, I do find that there's folks that are pouring everything into kind of one motion And there's a bit of diminishing returns in that, right? Like, you're only gonna get so much out of the all on-task focus, and often the big unlock actually might lie elsewhere.

So somebody texted me, Alf is a big mindset guy, you gotta get him talking, you gotta have him talk to you about mindset. So sort of a related topic, like, what does that mean to you and how do you bring that to your teams? And I specifically wanna unpack, like, how do you scale mindset? Because this is a thing I think about a lot.

Yeah, this could— we could drain the hour on this. I walked into Salesforce in 2008, and I was horrified at how smart everyone was. You know, I walked in and I was like, I had never worked in a place where everybody was smarter than the last person I met, and they were all capable, and they were all focused. And I was like, how the heck am I going to progress here? Like, I barely belong in the building. And that team was like— that team, the The manager was Ryan Baretto. You had folks like Sachin Gillani was on that team, James Sutton, all these, they're CROs and SVPs at Salesforce and all kinds of different folks. And the one thing that I kind of realized coming in is I had to have just a ton of determination and kind of resilience and grit. And I didn't have a great way to describe it at the time, but my edge was not going to be intellectual. I wasn't going to outthink these folks. As I moved on, I, you know, I just did what was natural to me in leadership and selling and learned the craft as best I could. And then I met a man named Michael Gervais. Is that a household name to you?

I'm a Seahawks fan, so—

There you go. Nice. Pete Carroll, Mike Gervais. Yeah, Mike changed my life, honestly. Now I'm just doing a, you know, a Mike Gervais commercial, but Maybe I can get him at a discount now.

So this is—

You know, he helps my team.

And you, Salesforce, brought him in because Dan Ross told me about this.

Yeah, and it was a boss of mine who connected me with him, this guy Warren Wick, who's a great leader, and introduced me to Michael. And I think he came to like an offsite or something. I don't remember exactly. I think that's right. And he talked a lot about what's accretive over time when you think about the mental aspect of this job in terms of like, moving well, sleeping well, fueling well, and sort of thinking well. And I probably wasn't doing enough of any of those, you know? And I remember he asked this question the first time I met him, never really getting deep into it, about like training your mind. And there is no doubt that Salesforce has had a culture of like mindfulness and that, obviously Mark talks about it a lot, and I've had exposure to it, but I hadn't personally internalized it. And he asked the question, I probably gave like a snarky answer at the time. And I remember if he happens to see this, he may say I said this totally wrong, but he said something to the effect of like, you wouldn't debate with me that doing pushups over, you know, every day for 100 days would strengthen, you know, your upper body and your overall health. So why would you debate that like doing the same for your mind wouldn't strengthen your mind? And that was a bit of an aha moment of like, taking sort of mindfulness and mental fitness to a more practical place for me. Yeah. And I think about it a lot. I think a lot about like sleep hygiene. I'm not gonna sit here and pretend I'm like a master of fitness or nutrition. There's obviously a visual on this podcast, so I couldn't sell that story, but I think about it and I think a lot about sleep and mindfulness. And I guess, What I think about for me personally is I wake up every day and work alongside some people that are titans in the industry. I think are some of the smartest people in our industry, and my best chance is to get the absolute most out of what I have and be in sort of the most acute and refined and productive place mentally, because there were times in my career where I probably had to wake up and chew through a bunch of nascent you know, anxiety or self-doubt or whatever it may be that was in between me and the thing I was doing. And so trying to use tools like what Michael's taught me and to just show up more productive and kind of start, you know, at the 20-yard line where I'm in kind of my best mindset. And when I think about bringing that to a team, which was your question, because I got totally self-indulgent there, there'll be a theme of that.

If anybody's the narcissist, it's the guy who started the podcast.

Yeah.

You're in good company.

There's probably some psychologist that's going to study this and have an opinion. But look, for a while, this was like my— I didn't want to talk about this. I don't really know why. I don't know whether I thought there was a stigma, or it would sound corny, or people wouldn't take me seriously about it. But really, I think the way I've tried to leverage this is kind of sharing my story and the impact it's made on me, and then creating opportunities for my team to engage in this stuff. Used Finding Mastery with some of our leaders, and I think it's making an impact. Part of it's just awareness that this is a component. When you think about career progression, everybody knows they need to be a better presenter and have a better line of questioning and understand financial acumen and all those types of things, technology and everything. But I think just helping them understand that another part of this is your mental hygiene and your mindset is going to be a big part of the puzzle. And you can't— telling people to have a positive mindset isn't enough. Like, you have to give them some tools. It doesn't just— so yeah, that's definitely where all that came from. And I think about it a lot. And I spend a lot of time, like, we've talked, you came in to talk to my team, you were so gracious. And we talked a lot about like process engineering and how you're using AI. And we talked about how we're using AI to power our teams. All those tactics and strategies are important, but I obsess more about that there's this, probably this kind of collective engagement index for the overall team, and then every individual's on a bit of a curve, and every decision that we make and thing we do as a leader is either gonna positively or negatively contribute to that. And in my head, I'm like, I wanna come in in the morning, sure, I wanna drive all the productivity in the world, I wanna be really, really thoughtful to market and drive good process discipline, but I also wanna feed the most positive end of that engagement index I can. And I think that goes a long way to cultivating like a positive and a creative mindset with the team. Like, if there's like an energy to it, it's like an organism, you know?

I mean, this all comes back to like being a corporate athlete. And, you know, these skills, like the skill of learning to sleep well, is interesting 'cause it touches every other skill possible. The decision-making you make in a deal or in your business, your ability to show up well for your team, your ability to actually have an output. Sit down and write a document and focus. It's all, if you're sleeping well, eating well, if you're getting exercise, like everything else gets better and yet, I mean, people are probably sick of me talking about it at this point, but like it really touches everything.

[Speaker] It really does. Like, literal capacity is higher. Yeah. Like, you know, if you evaluated me trying to do that keynote on 4 hours of sleep versus the 7-ish I got, it just would not have been as good.

I—

Or it wouldn't have been as fun for me. One of the two. I don't—

Yeah. One of the analogies I use because I'm an MMA guy, I train.

That's how we met. We were fighting.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, you'll watch a fight and people will complain that they look so tired. And one of the things I'll say, it's like, okay, well, let's run a 100-yard dash. And like, you—

it'll—

we'll take two equal athletes, and one athlete we beat the crap out of before we run the race, and we'll see how fast and how—

right.

And like, that's why this guy's tired. And I feel like people live their life beat up, like, 100—

that's right—

two rounds of, uh, of a cage fight and wonder why, you know, they're getting why they're not at the top of the leaderboard.

And like SMB, can I just tease that for a second? Do you want to move on? SMB is a competitive stamina game, and I think you and I wake up every day and we like internally just want to compete. We don't have to think about it. Like, it's like, that's the fun part. I think for somebody younger in their career, or depending on their disposition, even if they're great at what they do, that can be very taxing. We're in a daily fight. We're not playing a yearly game. Every day matters. Today matters and tomorrow matters. And that can either excite and invigorate you, or it can really wear you down and actually be pretty hard. And it's everybody. It's sales engineers, it's marketing folks, it's definitely salespeople and sales development reps. And so I do think that that one angle to try to help people through that is possibly that mindset. And also, again, just kind of the positivity of the culture really, really can help keep that competitive stamina up because that's the market. It's the same at Owner, right?

Yeah.

Your team has to be on every day. A bad day hurts, then tomorrow's got to be even better.

Yeah. The daily grind of SMB is definitely—

But you love it, right?

Yeah, I think it's a blast.

Same. Yeah.

And I think one of the things that's challenging for folks is learning these tools. Like, there's, there's so much bad information out there. And so one question for you is, like, how do you scale this? Like, I'm sort of obsessing over this thing right now, is like, how do I scale becoming a corporate athlete across my team? Because you can't necessarily jam it down somebody's throat. Yeah, but, but how do you get this to more people?

Well, like I said, I have, I have literally used Michael's tools, because I think he has some great ways of communicating this to leaders.

And it's about engaging the leaders to be able to scale that.

Well, that's where I was going. Like, my, probably my best leverage point is the people reporting directly to me and maybe their plus ones. And probably a lot of the bigger impact I'm gonna make than like bringing people in a room and being like, sleeping's important and your mindset matters, like, that's just so frivolous, doesn't help anyone, is like, Can I help create an environment and sort of cultivate an ethos where— and you'd have to talk to my team, I don't know, but I would hope they would say that this feels prioritized. And not prioritized like in sort of a performative way. Like we do what we say we're gonna do in terms of trying to put an emphasis on optimizing ourselves for performance and cultivating positivity in a constructive way. And, you know, some of that cultivation is appropriately challenging people. There's a lot that goes into that, like intellectually stimulating people. So, yeah, I think that ultimately you're going to get a product of how you engage with the people around you, you know, and then it's sort of disseminated down and mutated. You're going to get some product of that.

Yeah.

And then the other side of it is I try really hard to just, this is the one where my team may comment and we'll see when we post this, but I try hard to stay as engaged in the field as I possibly can with customer engagement, of course, but also just, we do a lot of, I know it's a little bit of an overused term, listening tours and roundtables and things like that because I think where a job like mine goes to die is the leader that's really well-intended, but they've totally lost touch with what's going on. My team's like, I don't know, 3,500, 4,000 people, you know, and directly, and then more if you look at it indirectly. And so I just need to really know what's happening for a new AE. You know, what is the onboarding really like? What was the first week like? Where do you go to find information?

How do you do that?

You have to ask them. Okay. Like, you have to, like, stop them in the kitchen and be like, how's it all going? What's it been like? Do you like it here? Like, I always ask that question, you know? I've never had somebody be like, no, not really. But sometimes they'll be like, I like it, but like the onboarding kind of sucked, like, you know, stuff like that. And then we can go and make improvements.

And are you doing anything programmatically to like get a pulse of sort of voice of the field?

Yeah, like every company, we do lots of surveys and things like that. And that's helpful, but—

What's the most effective for you?

I think the most effective, like you met Maria, Maria and I usually when we go to a, like a hub office together. She runs a lot of the ops for our business. We'll sit down and we'll just do a roundtable and just ask people, and we'll get a cross-section of employees. But I would say the other really effective one that's sometimes even more meaningful is just taking the time to stop and talk to people ad hoc and accumulate information as you go, and you'll build a point of view. And a lot of times, you kind of have an assumption in your head you're testing. That's just life. Everybody does that a little bit. It's a little bit of confirmation bias. I think the whole thing with that one is like, if you're conscious of it, you're probably gonna do okay.

Yeah.

You know?

That makes sense.

And you also have to have people that will be like, you lost touch.

Yeah.

Like, I have no doubt that the folks, you've met some of the folks on my team, I have no doubt that they would be in 2 seconds like, you have no idea what you're talking about. That is not what's happening.

Yeah.

And I think that like sort of culture of truth is, you know, you're dead if you don't have that. Yeah.

the psychological safety for your team to speak up. One of the things I tell newbies joining my team, this is from like first-year BDRs to managers, is I take them through my blueprint. It's like, this is what you need to know about me in order to work with me well. For leaders, they like really need to get it, but even for like a first-time BDR, I want them to like have an understanding of what they can expect. And one of the things I tell them is like, I'm opinionated but open. It's like, I'm gonna have a lot of opinions. Like, I think deeply about this, all of this stuff all the time, and so, but that shouldn't scare you off. Like, I am open-minded, I'm intellectually curious on what you have to say. I might push you on it, I might say like, you know, well, what's the data to support it? I might like ask you questions that are difficult to answer, but that's my way of understanding the world, and so I'm trying to get people to expect me, like expect me to unpack and ask questions, and maybe push back on you, but you need to, if you feel strongly about something, you need to lean into that, or else people don't.

That's an interesting one. I have mixed feelings on that. I always recoil when I say, and you end up doing it and it happens, but my team or my SVP, it's such a weird way to talk about people you work with, like there's some ownership by way of hierarchy, So I don't do a lot of like, this is what it's like to work with me. And sometimes I wish I would because I have like a short of attention span as most, you know, sort of leaders and all that kind of stuff. But I'm sort of like, I don't— this isn't a me thing. Like, my literal job is to serve the company I work for and the employees that work there and create the best experience I can. So I'm sort of more like, I want to learn about you and how you want to work. And then I want to see if my stuff's like working for you. And I I try to not do a lot of that because I think the minute, the minute like it becomes about me, and I'm not saying your approach is probably awesome. I mean, you, it's your podcast, but I, I've been reticent of that to be a little more like, yeah, you know, this isn't my, this is our thing. We collectively have this. I'd love to know how you want to work. If you want to ask me how I want to work, I'll tell you. I'm not going to like serve it to you. And ideally we collectively come to a good place where we have some like mutual trust and some open dialogue. Like, I don't want to throw like a lot of hierarchy up and down. And like, for me, and I didn't take it that way, I'm just giving you my take.

But this is a good, this is a good topic actually. Like, I do it not, not to impose a hierarchy.

I didn't take it that way. I know, I know.

But, uh, I want people to like really understand me as much as they can, as quickly as they can.

Yeah.

Because then they can get a sense, it's like, okay, Kyle's just gonna have opinions because he's an opinionated guy, It doesn't mean that I need, 'cause if I don't warn them, if I don't warn people, it's like, hey, you're gonna bring me a thing and I might like have a strong opinion, but I am dying to be proven wrong. Just bring the data and bring like a good, you know, good first principles thinking, and people will learn that over time, but I'm trying to get them to learn it like on day one, where it's like, I really wanna win. It's like, you have to know that like, if I don't think we're winning, it's gonna kill me. And so, like, just know that the thing you see outwards is from my desire to win. And I'm just trying to give people these shorthands to interpret.

Yeah.

And because I want the same thing from them. Like, I ask people when they start to do their own blueprint so I can figure out— because some people say the opposite. Hey, I'm really introspective. I need to take away a problem. I don't like talking about a problem in a brainstorming meeting. I want to sit down and think and then bring back. Okay, good for me to know because I'm a guy who likes to brainstorm. Now I'm better at writing out my ideas, but I think it's in order to get to that level of trust and psychological safety, like you're saying, you'll have people that check you. I'm always trying to figure out a way to accelerate that.

I think my point in saying that was I genuinely try to just focus really hard on the we. And that might be like a here's my thing, here's your thing, and we can reach a common understanding. But because I don't, like, I genuinely don't want this team to be about me. I want it to be about them because the culture is going to live and die with them. If the culture lives and dies with me and I start to like project that, we're in trouble, you know what I mean? So that's, that's, that's the interesting thing about a role like this one, because you're trying to proliferate not that the role is like a moon landing, but you're trying to proliferate an energy and ethos to a pretty wide expanse of folks that are in different places with different cultures and different parts of their journey. So I always try to think about what are the best mediums. Slack's a great one for us in terms of trying to figure out engagement and can we permutate some energy and video content and other things through that. Things like troops we talked about and other things like that. So I don't know, but that's an interesting one is like how do you cultivate a culture with a team like that? And I think it also goes back to what we talked about before, like if you care a lot, genuinely care a lot, it's like a pretty good start.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

'Cause at least you'll prioritize it.

So what else have you done to scale culture? One of the things that was mentioned by a couple people over text is your ability to, inspire and motivate, and I think we're getting a lot of flavor of that. So how do you think about building and scaling culture when you don't wanna predetermine it, which I think is like apt in a lot of ways, but how do you get culture to grow in the right ways for the business?

Yeah, I mean, I do think that you have to do your best to create, and I think you'll agree with this one, like an environment where people feel real ownership. And I think at a scale-up, you got an amazing opportunity because you're all, very mission-driven, you know, it's like, in our world, they're sometimes a little further away in the hierarchy and things like that.

So how do you give people ownership, like in Salesforce, in a Fortune 500 company?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, there's a couple different ways to do it. I think number one, it's clearing a path for them so that they can focus on the things that are the best part of the job in terms of making customers really successful and doing things that are gonna be, you know, really have the kind of return that they need as a salesperson instead of a bunch of crazy admin and a million internal meetings. Like, that's the way to take away ownership. Like, actually trying to empower them to get out there and do what they need to do. And a lot of times that is a bit of an automation and tooling. And there's a great expression that a boss of mine used to say, that if you want to see what somebody prioritizes, look at their calendar or their bank account. Like, does your calendar actually, then your cadence actually deliver the kind of accountability of the field that you want? Or are you like overloading them with meetings and oversight and things like that. And then I think another part of it is just sort of helping them truly understand our mission and a little bit of our history and getting them to build their career plan within that and getting really excited about the potential, both for the technology and the company and the impact it can make and the good it does and otherwise, and also how it can impact them and their career and otherwise. So I think that helps a lot. I think that like there's work and there's a career, right? That's like a thing. I want this to feel like an incredible career destination place. And I feel, I try to think about this a lot, and it's a little altruistic, but what kind of person would I be if I didn't feel like a deep responsibility to reciprocate the pretty good career track I've had to like everyone else on my team? My literal job is to open pathways for all of them to follow that track. And I think if I, If I prioritize and create opportunities for that, they will feel buy-in and ownership, and they'll feel that they're on a journey and a destination as well.

Yeah. Yeah. If you go back to any of the employee engagement research or motivation research, it comes back to ownership. It's career opportunities. It's, it's feeling connected to a mission and community.

There's another one on that one that like I saw Jason from Saastr posted something. I thought it was a great post the other day, but the office has been huge for SMB. Yeah. And I'm— and I know that's not popular with every single member of my team, but I don't want to work there. But I walk in the Toronto office and or any office and there's hundreds of SMB folks that are sharing best practices and building their network and learning. And when we had more pervasive remote work, we just did not have the same energy and engagement, and it took a hit on onboarding and a bunch of other things, and I really think for SMB specifically, and I have a lot of people in SMB that come up to me that are newer to the company that are like, hey, thanks for pushing the office because it's been so incredible to build my network and meet people, and so I'm not saying this with an agenda. I do think for our culture, I think of us, the SDRs and the SEs and AEs and SMB are kind of the heartbeat of the Salesforce offices, is like we owe it to the company to go and build the energy, and that's a huge part of our culture.

Yeah, like if you have an office with no sales, yeah, it's not that exciting.

No, for sure. But the other side of it is when we went back to the office initially, we'd kind of— it was like go back to the office and then you'd like sit on Zooms, and we kind of lost our mojo for what— like, what is the office for? You know, now we're trying to do a lot more activations and training there and things that bring people together. The lunchroom's back now and all that kind of— so we're really getting our mojo back. Huge for our culture though.

Yeah, so we've moved, we starting January, we started to hire every new SDR and BDR 5 days a week in office and same sort of thing.

Our account executives are 4 days a week and that's usually Monday to Thursday and I go in Friday and like most of them are there, so they're like kind of on their own volition I think because it's pretty stimulating.

Yeah, it's fun, especially you build You build relationships, you build community. It's like way more fun to get told to beat it on the phone if there's like your buddy sitting next to you. Oh, you won't believe what this guy said versus, you know, alone in your apartment just staring at the phone.

Or how about the old like covering the phone and asking somebody who's been here for 2 years about something that you think might be pipeline, but you weren't sure for a given industry. Now the great news is agents are going to do a lot of that for us too, but nothing like a human for great context.

Yeah, the— I just pulled data on this because we're evaluating whether or not we want to like continue to expand in this office and the difference in ramp. So like first 4-month productivity in all of these roles is off the charts. And I went deep. I talked to so many different people about, you know, if they had run in-office versus remote BDR experiments specifically. And it was pretty unequivocal. Like people who are in office, the performance, the ramp is better.

I mean, it's everything for us. I've hired something like 530 account executives in the last 4 and a half months. And so that's like the ramp on that because we feed the whole company with talent, right? A lot of folks are getting promoted up to higher markets and leadership roles and things like that, and we're expanding the team as well. And, you know, you nailed it. The onboarding unlock, the indoctrination into the culture, the sense of belonging, all that stuff advances so much faster when you have an office to go to and you're meeting a team and your manager's there and all that stuff. So that's been a big win for us. And it wasn't easy coming out of COVID Like, it took some coaxing, but I feel like we've done a good job and it's pretty fun in there.

Yeah, we had the advantage of, uh, I just did all my new people into the office because the team was only The BDR team is only like 20 people, so by the time we get through this, the end of this year, it'll be 50, but like 30 to 40 of those will be in office, Toronto hires. So I wanna talk about like, so Salesforce is a very defined culture, and there's a certain way that you need everybody to live the Salesforce culture, but there's also an SMB culture, there's cultures unique to your team, as much as you say it's not about you, Everybody I said, everybody I talked to about you talked about the cultures in your team were like uniquely exciting and motivating. So like, how do you balance those two things? Like Salesforce culture with Adam's team?

Yeah, it's hard. I think it's hard to have been at a company for this long and really like articulate how you think the culture's changed. We've lived a bunch of different acts. When I started, we basically only sold CRM. Sales Cloud and it was like the beginning of Service Cloud and now it's obviously every platform, every industry. But I still feel a lot the same way I did coming in on like Ryan Baretto's team in 2008. I still feel the same excitement about where we're going with the product. I still feel the same great pull from the customers. I still think there's this ethos of giving back and doing well for our, or good in our community that's so strong in our company The idea of belonging and all the things that we do well, and I really, I think one mistake is to try to hang on to a culture for better or worse as the world and teams and companies evolve. They need to change and grow, but there's still a, for a company our size, I still feel there's a pretty good entrepreneurial spirit that's in there.

It's a very defined culture at Salesforce.

And so I feel that, and then in essence, SMB, it's like everything's just cranked to 11. That's what it is. I had a great leader who led SMB at Salesforce for a long time and made a huge impact on my career who once, he asked me how I liked the job leading the SMB sales team, 'cause I've been doing this maybe 15, 16 months or something, and I was like, I love it, it's great. And he's like, what do you like about it? I'm like, I don't know, but it's really, it's super fun. He's like, I'll tell you what you like. When you go out and stand in front of your SMB team and give them your energy, you get 10 times back. And I think that's true because it's such, we all remember this part of our career. Most of these folks are, it's their second or third or fourth sales job and the whole world's in front of them and every day is a new opportunity to learn something that's totally gonna change their career. And I always think about, I don't always get it right. I've had a lot of leaders that I've worked for that have done it way better than me, but as important as the aggregate execution and the, productivity to market and the cross-functional teaming and all the things we do that are so important to the job, the little moments you create for these people are some of the most indelible. The thing that you took the extra second to help the person with the thing and they'll remember it their whole career and that's the stuff that really adds up over time and I think it also feeds the culture. And again, this podcast may come out so holier than thou and I just I just have to live with that. I don't mean for it to, but I do think about that a lot. I need to be a conduit for a world where my whole leadership team, and man, they sure do, is like they're going and creating those moments that somebody did for us along the way.

Yeah. And so when you were an RVP, AVP, what was it about your team's cultures that were different? 'Cause there was something there 'cause everybody mentioned it.

Yeah. It's hard to say, like I am relentlessly competitive like you are, you know, but I try to keep my priority of like, we're not like, somebody's not on the operating table here. Like, do I think it's serious business what we go and do at Salesforce and helping companies scale and leverage digital labor and all those things? I definitely do. It also can be very fun and we can have some kitsch and enjoyment and like we shouldn't, like this isn't, this is literally is not life or death. And so having a little bit of that humility and just general graciousness while being like doggedly competitive is partly the way I think about it. And I also think like we have this framework we've been talking about in what it means to lead, frameworks are so overused and it's funny, It happened to have 4 Ts, and I was at one of the chairman's clubs with someone whose wife worked at a company where she's like, well, we have a framework with 6 Ts. I was like, ah, that's 2 Ts better than mine. But what we said was, to lead and build the culture we want, we need to be great teachers. I think the coaching adage is a little overused. I think coaching has some connotation. We need to slow down and teach what we've learned over our time in doing this. We serve. We certainly need to be tone setters. We need to lead from the front and get out in front of the culture. We really need to be transformers. Like this whole business is in a transformation as we move to consumption, all the things we're doing, and we need to be technologists and we need to be passionate about technology and have a good perspective on AI and understand these models and use things like Cursor and really truly understand the tech. And I think if we do that, we'll be pretty effective. And I think there's just some unwritten rules if you follow, your teams will be healthy. Like, don't ask somebody to do something that you're not totally ready to do.

Yeah.

And know that often the best way to teach somebody how to do something is to actually go model the way and actually take the time to explain it to them while you're doing it.

Yeah.

You know, too often a new leader like pushes the person out of the way and does the thing and no one learns, or they give too much autonomy to an AE that wasn't ready and then the whole thing falls apart. So like some of those lessons I think we all know. And then there's the The penultimate one, which is like we could talk about all the processes and tactics in the world, but like the talent around you is going to make or break you in every scenario, bar none, like full stop, right? So if I wake up in the morning and I think I've got the 8 best account executives I can as a first-line leader, I really believe that and I'm investing in helping them evolve every day. Or as a second-line leader, I have the best managers and on and on. If I think I have the best SVPs, SVPs I could possibly have, my odds of winning are sky high if I'm making all the right investments around them.

So you guys need a 5th T, talent magnet. Now we're almost at 6.

There you go. I want to get to 7 obviously so I win that tease, but that's what we've been thinking about. I don't know if that's useful.

Teacher, tone setter, technologist.

Transformer.

Transformer.

Yeah.

OK. I like that.

I sort of jammed that word in. That's a weird way to talk about transformation. Information to say transformer, 'cause you think about the show immediately or the movies. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, my brain is so AI wired right now. You said transformer and I immediately think like the transformer, like from Google. But okay, let's talk about evolving. So the transformer, you've gone through many versions of Salesforce and like, let's start zoomed out before we go into sort this current transformation, but how have you reinvented yourself first and foremost? Because you've gone through all these different market cycles, ups and downs, and what have you done to keep yourself appropriate to the business and in the place you are?

There's probably a long answer to that, but you said something at the beginning that I have been talking about a lot recently that I hadn't I hadn't thought about until it sort of came up in a conversation a few months ago, but a lot of my contemporaries in the Toronto market when I started have one thing in common, which is we all got here in the teeth of the financial crisis and saw a tremendous amount of success at Salesforce through it, and it really didn't come easy, and you had to really, at that time, the company was doing a lot of great things to support us, and we had a really relevant product, product. We obviously still do, but we had an incredibly relevant product for what was happening in the world.

It was the start of that wave of technology.

But it was tough getting, you know, it wasn't easy then, and Salesforce did great. And I think we learned by proximity more than anything else, like this resilience and creativity to market that's just sort of probably a little bit of a part of a lot of those folks. Like Asachen's a great example, you know, went through that whole thing, and that's just, now that's with him as part of his first understanding of these markets, and I don't think that's a coincidence. I think that ultimately to have a good run at a company like Owner or Salesforce or a tech company that's gonna really grow and scale and change and add products and capacity, and Salesforce is gonna continue to evolve its go-to-market, you have to be really, really comfortable and be able to throw thrive in a ton of ambiguity. And when it comes to evolution, I think that without overdoing it, you have to be intentional. Like, there's definitely, every company has a version of the person where you're like, what happened to them? They were killing it like 5 years ago, and everybody knows the answer at a company scaling as fast as both of our companies are, which is they probably didn't evolve their playbook I think like a lot of the inform on how you can evolve to stay relevant at a company like Salesforce, first and foremost, starts with going and really listening to customers, 'cause they're gonna tell you everything you need to know if you shut up and listen to what they're telling you, and they're probably gonna tell you before you've really understood it, and so I think that was just taught to me really early on. I don't think that was like instinctual. To go out and, hey, sell the heck out of CRM for sure and everything else we had, but really listen to what they're talking about and what are they up against and what are they seeing. I think that you have to, there's a lot of great resources at a company like ours across the different business units, great people in product, great people in engineering, great people in marketing who have a lot of knowledge, finance, who have a lot of knowledge to unlock if you just take the opportunity to go ask them. And so I tried to do a lot of that and become a little more multi-disciplined. And I think that like this is obvious and again might sound a little preachy, but good leaders in evolving markets are really like two-ledger thinkers when it comes to like problems and opportunities and decisions where you spend as much time, it's like the Ray Dalio stuff, like how fluently can you understand like the other side of the equation that's not really the direction you want to go before you choose your direction. And I think that kind of think, that kind of balanced problem-solving thinking where you really try to understand in the fullest capacity like two dimensions of an issue or multiple dimensions of an issue helps you evolve. Because one thing about evolving is like your convictions may totally change.

Yeah.

I acknowledge that there's probably some stuff I said in like on like podcasts during COVID where like I would listen now and be like, I literally think the exact opposite of that. And that's not a bad thing, that's a good thing. In fact, if you're too married to your convictions, you probably have a better chance of being left behind. Now, convictions about discourse and what it's like to be a good leader, there's probably some of those that are unshakable, but from a go-to-market and what are we, what is the thing that's gonna get us there? You should be pretty open-minded about possibly changing positions and rewiring some of the way you do things, or one should, because like these, you know, this world we're in with AI now is demanding a totally different kind of thinking than we were doing, you know, 10, 15 years ago. So those are some of the things I think about. But all of it, if you truncated the answer, is you can, one can, with intention put themselves in an evolutionary mindset by listening really hard and thinking about what's going on around them and literally thinking about like what is happening in the world and how is what I'm doing right now, how does that need to change? And experimentation's another one that's like really high on my list. Go try some stuff. If you're not sure, if you think things are, hey, the sales cycle we need, we think it's changed. We think some of the things we were doing before deep discovery in that, maybe we need to do it a little differently. So let's go try it, let's see what happens. Let's not be scared to test some of these assumptions.

I've changed my mind on so much sales stuff over the years. Like even discovery, you know, we used to be like, oh, you gotta do the super deep discovery and spend all this time up front and you gatekeep the demo. You can't really gatekeep a demo anymore.

Well, I always say this, I'm like, If I purport to be selling super intuitive AI agents, should I need like 15 hours of discovery with 13 people at a small business to go get it? It's a little different if you're talking about like a big enterprise or something, but in my world, exceedingly more and more, we want you to go use this stuff. And then there's going to be a better opportunity to go fill in the blanks with your process and your business realities. And so there's a little bit of this shift to leading with a little more implementation, and yes, discovery's always gonna be important in terms of if you're fluent in your customer's business, you have a better vantage point to help them. But the idea that you have to throw somebody in a room and interrogate them through—

For 30 minutes before you—

Well, no, sometimes it was hours, right? And I think that's changed a lot, and I think that's an interesting change. It's just this tech's a lot more dynamic. If I can build a video game on, on cursor without coding knowledge, you know, my enterprise technology, you should be able to get your hands on and start using it without having to talk to me for 4 days. And so we're changing our thoughts on that a little bit too.

As a leader, what do you think is the thing that you think most differently about today versus like 3 or 5 years ago?

That is a really good question. I think differently about today. Well, probably this is a simple one, but like, it's really good for us to make mistakes and have a culture where we invite people, that we accept that people are gonna try things and not get it perfect. And that like, I probably tried to be so buttoned up processes and the way I wanted to do things that I got my team in a spot where they were probably pretty tight. And I think especially in SMB with newer sellers in a dynamic market, like, I wanna have some guiding principles. I wanna try to do gold standard great work, but I also wanna accept that, like, we're not gonna have all the answers. We're not gonna get it perfect. We're gonna bring people along and learn from it. Because I think if you, like, choke out an SMB business with too much oversight And when you get what you asked for, it kind of slows down. You don't get the same speed to market. So the idea that like not doing it perfectly is kind of part of scaling a team with a lot of new people and a lot of new products. And, you know, if we're kind to our customers and we are self-reflective, we'll get it right and we'll keep going. And I think we get it right way more than we get it wrong. But some of that is like where the real learning opportunity is. And also sometimes you have like some happy accidents when you let a little line out and you realize maybe what you thought what you thought was really important isn't, and there's different ways of doing things. So that's, I'm a little less like driving a process into the field where I'm like, I want everything to look like this, and a little more like, hey, we wanna have some governance around this and some guardrails, but let's create an environment where it's open to a little bit of interpretation, and we're not gonna like obsess over mistakes. We're gonna learn from 'em, and we're gonna maybe sometimes celebrate them. I think that's probably a little change.

That's an interesting one.

You were waiting for that answer to end. You were like, oh God, long time.

No, no. It's got me. I'm like such a drive-the-process type person.

No, I know you are. And I am too. I mean, look, it's a big SMB business. We're very formulaic. But like, here would be an example, right? Like a deal review. Let's talk about a deal. and it's some big deal, and it's a newer seller, and it's, you know, sometimes you get these SMB deals, they pop up, and it's a really big opportunity. And you're like, hey, you know, who's the CIO? And they don't know. And I'm like, how could you not know? Of course they don't. They've been here like 2 and a half months. You know, they haven't been in front of a deal like this.

They don't even know the word multithread.

I've sort of lightened up on some of this a little bit in the way that like, it's all a learning opportunity for all of us, and we're gonna get there over time. And I don't want to like, I want to add process discipline so that we have great hygiene in our app and how we're doing things and really clean pipeline and all the stuff that you do that's kind of a given. I couldn't run my business without it, but I want to leave room for folks to grow and not feel too choked out by oversight.

Yeah.

'Cause then I think we're just faster, we're a little more agile, we get better results.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Are you ready to level up your go-to-market strategy for 2026? Then don't miss GTM 2025, the only B2B tech conference exclusively for go-to-market executives. Join 1,000 other revenue leaders this September 23rd to 25th in Washington, D.C. for an exclusive executive-only experience. This 3-day event is hyper-focused on connection, strategy, and execution. Expect hands-on workshops, in-depth strategy sessions, and curated opportunities to build relationships with VPs, CXOs, and founders facing the same challenges you are. You'll stress test your GTM approach, align your team, and leave with real actionable insights from top-performing leaders. Don't miss the must-attend conference designed to help you boost go-to-market results in 2026. Visit attendgtm.com. That is attendgtm.com to secure your spot today. And don't forget to use the code Topline for 10% off your GA ticket. So we talked about, we talked about listening to customers as a source of evolution, cross-functional relationships, this mindset, like what else is there that's helped you evolve?

Yeah, I mean, I've definitely, when I've had the opportunity, I've taken some calculated bets. That's one thing for sure, and that's something I'd recommend from anybody embarking on their career that has big ambitions. When I had the opportunity, I moved to a new hub. I moved from Toronto to Chicago. I got an opportunity to help. I don't want to oversell, like start the hub, but I was kind of brought there to bring some tribal knowledge, and it created a lot of opportunities to get to leadership faster and learn what it took to to kind of bring an office up from the ground up, and then I got the opportunity to help start a vertical when we decided to focus on manufacturing and auto and energy, and that was just a unique experience to start to think a little more critically about cross-functional work and the marketing narratives and the product strategy and vertical growth strategy in general. I was a very horizontal seller at that point in the way I thought about things, and those have all, All those experiences add up over time, and then you end up in a job like mine where we're trying to figure out the brand position and the marketing strategy and the product strategy and all the different things we're doing across a lot of different products and markets and things like that. And all those things have good— they're good reference material where you at least have a little bit of pattern recognition. I mean, you know as fast as Owner's growing and at your time at Shopify and that, like, you're not going to You're gonna have to kind of make some of it up as you go and have some instincts, but I think the more you can try things, and a lot of my peers have had a lot of different cross-functional jobs. They've been in customer success, they've been in product, they've been engineers. I think that's good density for career progression, and for anyone listening to this who's a revenue leader, I'd take opportunities for change and I would also try different functions. You've worn a lot of different hats, and I think that That stuff becomes critical when you're working with bigger cross-functional organizations.

Yeah, risk appetite I think is huge. You see a lot of people who are like, oh, but if I keep doing this 12 months, then I might be able to go from manager, director, director to whatever. And then they miss out on so many of those opportunities that could speed them up, could actually slow them down, but at least it's learning.

There's an art to that. Like I always encourage people, people when I get opportunities to have career discussions with people, like, to the best of— the world's changing with AI, our landscapes are going to change, but to the best of your ability, draw out a 5-year career plan where if you woke up in 5 years and all your wildest dreams came true at Salesforce, what's the job you're doing? What does it look like? And then can you articulate what the path is to get there and some of the skill accumulation you need to have and maybe the network you need to build and be thoughtful and intentional about it? I definitely did that. You never want to be the person where your career aspirations is everybody else's problem, but you also have to be intentional about what you're doing. And so that idea of drawing up a career plan with some density where you can clearly articulate the path you want to go on and the help you need along the way and the things you need to improve on is something I think about. I think everybody should do. I think it really helps make those conversations more rich. And then your overall vocation goes up. I think you start elevating the way you're thinking when you sort of think about it in that context.

I think that one of the keys you said there is it wasn't architecting a career path of this job, then this job, then this job. You mentioned skills, the network, and I think this is where people go wrong is they think like, oh, my career path is just about me like begging for the next job. But it's really about, okay, what, Like at Shopify, I picked up this terminology, backwards-facing promotion. It's like, what skills and how would I need to act today so that a promotion feels like, oh yeah, obviously. Like I was already doing that job basically. So like it was a backwards-facing promotion.

Yeah, and there's like another side to that one too, which is like in theory you could get a first-line to second-line promotion. And if you haven't been thoughtful about those things and you haven't drawn inference from other places. So you might just end up doing the same job with more people and different problems. So that idea that you can build enough of a plan with enough density, enough guidance and inference, that in a productive way while doing your job, you kind of elevate your thinking to what the next job and the next job may look like, I think is really constructive. And you start asking yourself, like, when you have a problem, like, hey, if I was managing me, how would I solve that problem? Problem. And that becomes an interesting way to drive up your comprehension, I think.

Future casting.

Not you, one. You're fine.

Yeah, like trying to put yourself in a headspace where you are already living this thing. I think that's a really great insight. Okay, so we're talking generally about how to evolve as leaders, but let's talk about the evolution we're all in right now. It's the thing everybody wants to talk about all the time. It's AI. And so I'm curious, let's zoom out and just talk about how you're bringing this to your team first. So you guys are making a lot of noise. Agentforce is sort of becoming, Salesforce is becoming Agentforce. You're transforming the business. So how are you thinking about driving this into your organization now?

Yeah, and it's change management at pretty high stakes. It's a lot of folks to drive through it. It's a pretty simple answer, but we're holding ourselves accountable to look at every process, every team, and try to figure out how we can use AgentForce productively to create better customer outcomes, more efficiency, more time selling for our employees, more speed to lead, all the different things we can do. And, you know, we, a lot of what we just talked about in the world tour is our reality, right? Point of view agent that can take a new AE in our downmarket team that has to sell to every industry across our entire portfolio and give them context about the industry, a great customer story that's really suitable, analyze an account and recommend some great places to look for pipeline, create some content, slot them in a marketing sequence with sales engagement, and then allow them to drive down that journey. That's a huge productivity unlock. I went to a meeting the other day in Toronto with a great CEO. We had a good discussion. I prepped with our sales agent and it was a great experience. It gave me some great references, it gave me some great context, it helped me analyze an account I'd never looked at before and have really good context around a complicated contract and some opportunities. So that's like on the job, the sales coaching stuff's really interesting. Like Data Cloud's such a huge unlock for us, for folks that, you know, have, data in lakehouses and other places, and you can take that data and zero copy it in and start to really harmonize a profile. And for my team, we have such a complete data set with the combination of metadata and Data Cloud for our customer. I'm not trying to make this a commercial. I think Data Cloud is, if you talk to a great innovative Salesforce SMB customer, a lot of them will tell you like, start with Data Cloud. It'll unlock all your data. And one of the, but my team, I want them to get way more fluent in how they can position this creatively and simplify it a little bit, because it's not without a little bit of complexity. And so sales coach is an awesome one, right? They can go and have an AI discussion and get some feedback on their pitch. And so that's a great one for onboarding. The SDR agent for us is a big unlock, you know, qualifying and acquiring and booking meetings with leads while we sleep. I talked about that in the keynote today. And those roles are all changing because of it. And if I have learned anything as we've rolled this out and the tech keeps getting better and there's new channels and all this kind of stuff, and I'm really impressed with how fast we're moving, but it takes some touch too. Like our SDR leader has a team of 500 SDRs around the globe and now we're disintermediating some of the process with an agent. And so there's obviously a little bit of like harmonizing of process and learning that the tech is really smart and the team's really smart, but those two things really need to come together. And so I think that, you know, and you've done a lot of this too with different AI tools and you probably agree like the agent to human engagement is— the tech is great, but the agent to human engagement is a lot of times the thing that takes a little bit of touch to get right. And I really think we're making progress, but those are some places we're thinking about it. But then there's like more tactical ones. A quoting agent where you can just tell it what you want and it'll parse through our somewhat complex catalog with a lot of different products and help you find the right thing. Tableau's got some amazing stuff in their next release where it's just sort of natural language into analytics, which is super exciting. As a sales leader, I'm pumped for that.

And so within SMB—

Sorry, that really did turn into a Salesforce commercial, but I'm excited about all this tech and we're using it. You know, for SMBs, like, yeah, the more I can automate— I take those 500 sellers and my sales agents giving them up that I just hired. Yeah, that we just hired. I did the I thing I said I hated. That we just hired, that the team just hired, and I give them this awesome contextual point of view agent that can analyze and give them actions and slide them into sequences and all this kind of stuff. I mean, our onboarding truncates so much.

Yeah. And so where How are you identifying opportunities and prioritizing them? Is this like RevOps out? Is this you and your leadership down? Is it bottoms up? Like how? You could do a million things with AI, especially you guys, even just your Salesforce's product suite within Agentforce is big. So how do you— Yeah, like how have you decided?

There's a whole bunch of other stuff happening too. Like we talked in the keynote about that, the help agent on our help.salesforce website saved the company $50 million. I've actually hired some, service folks that we've redeployed that are sellers now. You know, it's good. So it's, it's, it's helping us resolve 85% of cases and stuff. So there's lots of different use cases. I am really doing the same thing I would have tried to do with automation before it was agents, which is I'm looking at all the processes that are taking us away from selling, protracting ramp time, or creating less accretive results out to market where complexity is getting in way of speed. And I'm trying to figure out how to put an agentic tool on top of that can smooth out the process and give folks time back. And that's like back to really listening to the AEs. Like a lot of it is we get information back about Salesforce has, you know, it's been around 25 years and we have a ton of good insight and tools. Some of it lives in a lot of different places. Like a super easy opportunity for an agent is to to take all the data we have in all these different places, and Slack is a treasure trove of awesome best practices, but take that and harmonize it with Google Docs and other things and bring the right information to the right AE at the right time, 'cause that can be a little overwhelming. Like, where do I go to find the right thing? And so we're trying to listen to, we wanna lead the team a little bit too, 'cause I think the way we work is gonna fundamentally change over the next year, probably more than any other, year we've seen, but we want to listen to them and then come back with solutions to the things that are getting in the way. And I think if we do that, one, we know we're going to have something constructive. Two, we know it's going to be highly adopted.

Yeah.

You know, and then the third bonus is if my folks are using these tools every day, it's pretty easy to have the comprehension to sell it. I mean, it's totally intuitive.

And so what does that group look like? Who, like, what is the team that's talking to reps prioritizing the projects, like figuring out what are the first use cases to deploy? Like, talk to me about how you're making strategy decisions.

Yeah, it's, it's a combination. Like our sales engineering leader, this guy Sam Duvetti, he's all over it. Yeah, we have a great rev ops leader that's helping us. We did put somebody in a productivity role. They own some other functions too, but their title is VP of Productivity. And so we want them spending day and night obsessing over the seller, the SE experience, the SDR experience, and then how can we harmonize and make things better? The product teams have been amazing. They've given us resources and team members to help us drive this stuff home. Salesforce has always had a lot of great tools for us. We've always done a great job using it. I feel I'm more deeply committed to it than I've ever been because I see the power of let's move really fast And so it's really a full cross-functional team. It's one part product, one part rev ops, one part—

And are those committees? Like, do you have a committee for SMB productivity or is it for—

Yeah, that's right. Like, there's from each of those functions. And then some of our sales leaders, you know, you met that gentleman, Adam Johnson, and he's been at a bunch of scale-ups and has his own philosophies on automation, which is great because he can challenge our assumptions. The answers aren't all within our four walls, like that's for sure. I learn a ton talking to you and harmonize that with what we're hearing from the AEs and just try to get out as far on the bleeding edge as we can. Like, that's the idea. Yeah, I want to be the— I want to sit here and I think we will. I think we're on our way. We're already on our way. I want to sit here and I want to look you in the eye. I want to say we're the best AI-supported sales team on earth and Salesforce is powering it. And I'm so excited with what we're seeing with employee agents in Slack and agents like the sales agent I talked about in Sales Coach. And it's only going to get better.

So that is the ultimate use case. Yeah, like that's the ultimate case study.

Yeah, I mean, I have the best team for it. It's high velocity sales across 3,500, 4,000 people globally. And there's so much we can automate. Yeah, it has such an impact. And then there's one other big one I just want to, you know, renewals. I think there's just an incredible opportunity for a renewal agent that can go in and check on use case. 'Cause one of the things about an SMB business as big as ours is hundreds of thousands of accounts. Like it's hard to get to every single issue with a push model. And some of them are just dormant issues. Like someone would have to kind of awaken to find out. And so these renewal agents will do a great job of going to every customer, making sure they're happy, and if they're not happy, getting them to the right help and probably prescribing in a short order of time, even some, and possibly doing some light customization and things like that. Like that opportunity is super exciting.

Yeah, and there's sort of two interesting vectors for AI. You can take a look at all the things that your team is doing now and try to, try to automate away a bunch of work that's happening. But the other view that sometimes people miss is like, what is all the stuff we don't do today that AI enables us to do? And sort of the SMB versus enterprise is like, what do we not do today in SMB? We don't do QBRs, we don't do like value engineering, we don't do, like there's a bunch of these things that we know can help sell and support and renew customers. And you can say, okay, let's look to enterprise and look at what does the AI-delivered version of that enterprise customer motion look like? And can we now with AI bring that to—

Well, I think about that a lot. And even things like scaling, you know, exec engagement.

Yeah.

I would like to get to as many accounts as I can. And in the past, some of the hangup is just process and time, et cetera. I can brief myself now out of the app. I can go a lot faster. We can truncate the process, and that's true of all the leaders to get better density. And there's lots of things like that that you're right, you can, you know, there's a virtual version of all of those tried and tested enterprise selling moments. And we're definitely thinking about that with Sales Coach and other things like that. I had another, oh, the other thought, you know, what I'm thinking about a lot too is like, you're in a vertical SaaS, as sort of mid-growth company or Series B, are you guys Series C now? C, yeah. C, yeah. One of the tricky things for us, like I said before, is it's every industry and it's every product, and we have some product specialists that are really helpful and we'll continue to have those, and we have some industry reps that serve certain industries. I do think AI's gonna help us sell more horizontally effectively fluency in the process, in context. And I think we'd both agree like that motivates a lot of speed in the motion when we have to, when you take away degrees of thinking and specialization that require additional analysis. And so I think we can motivate a lot of speed in the model and create better customer experiences and more personalized with agents that'll allow us to continue to move our model more horizontal, which I like because then I can And the lead sprinklers and things like that can be more unified and equitable. And so that's an interesting opportunity as well.

Yeah, it's gonna make, I mean, if you can provide industry insight at scale.

That's the whole idea.

Then your verticalization.

And what's the best way to talk to an industry? It's tell a great customer story. There's a bunch of nuance, but for SMBs to become full-blown experts, like it's kind of tricky. So I think that that idea that we surface context and insight, we surface great customer stories, that's a winning formula. And if you can start to do that at scale and provide sort of selling sequences for relevant products, help understand the industry cloud sort of value propositions and things like that and prescribe the right thing at the right time, it'll just make the experience our customers have on the other end infinitely better. You know?

Okay, last question and then we'll move to quickfire. So how are you driving engagement? Because I think engagement around this change, because you hear two messages on LinkedIn, AI is gonna be the greatest thing that's ever happened to any of us and AI is about to take all your jobs. And you mentioned Jason, you know, he's certainly of the like, it's coming for all your jobs. Message. So there's a lot of fear around AI and especially 500 BDRs, a whole bunch of SMB sellers, which is where AI is most applicable. How are you getting people excited about leaning in and not being scared?

This is going to be one of those where we'll be able to look back on this answer and see how right or wrong we or I was. But I think the more my team gets their hands on this, probably the more like sort of passionate and certain they feel about their role in it. I think the seller that can sit down and provide context and help somebody through change management and make connections to other viable parties, be it technical or other customers, et cetera, I actually think the premium's going up. You know, there is a bunch of process and other things that will be disintermediated, and we know that. And the way we're looking at it, Salesforce is like, we'll get this great opportunity to continually redeploy people into more accretive and constructive roles. Back to my, you know, moving some folks from service into selling roles and things like that. And that's a great opportunity. In terms of engagement, I'll go do a listening tour on this. I don't think our teams are running for cover and worried about this because I think they get a front row seat to see, you know, a company on a mission to help bring AI and humans together with agent force and they see the impact of it and they get to go play a role in helping their customers adopt these tools. I feel very bullish that the seller, the sales engineer that can artfully sit down and help a customer through this journey is going to be pretty enduring for a long period of time. That's my gut.

And you're automating the worst parts of their job, right?

What is our ultimate goal? You and I sit down and we obsess over how to give people more time selling and how to help them be more precise when they're doing it. And this is giving me both. So I think it's, I believe we'll be sitting here in 3 years and saying the seller, the sales engineer is a critical part of the operation. We're investing there. And boy, are they becoming faster to productivity. More productive and creating better customer experiences by way of a lot of this technology.

Yeah.

And they're less burnt out and they're less stressed because a lot of the things they need to do to learn and grow and find things are becoming way easier.

And you don't go into sales excited to fill out Salesforce fields after a meeting. Like, so if you're saying to somebody, hey, like, what did you get into sales for? Well, it's because I'm really good with people and I didn't really want to be an accountant or whatever, so I just just like fell into it 'cause that seemed better. Okay, well, how do we amplify the parts of the job that are getting in front of people, helping customers?

Building value, helping, what are we obsessed with? We want all our SMB customers to grow and serve their communities and serve their missions and execute for their customers. And that's what we, you know, that's what gets us excited. There was a part of the keynote where they used AgentForce to update a meeting note and the meeting note, like, it obviously updated a bunch of stuff in the app. It created a bunch of different actions and outcomes and it all happened very seamlessly. And like that's pretty powerful for if you're an AE, that's simple things that go a long way to making your day easier. Yeah.

There was a quote, so it's from 2023 and I only stumbled upon it like this week and it's from a guy who apparently is like a legendary software engineer, called Kent Bent or Ken Bent. And he basically, he said, the value of 90% of my skills just dropped to zero. The leverage of the remaining 10% just went up 1,000x. I need to recalibrate. And I read this and I was like, this is it. It's like, you know, the people who are operating scared, it's like, well, AI does all these parts of my job. Yeah, AI does a lot of parts of your job now. Right now, but there are parts of your job that you got way more leverage on. So you better go figure out how to use AI today or you definitely will get left behind and lean into the things where you have more leverage and good things will happen. This is like evolution, reinvention is like a big theme of this conversation.

And the human context and relatability and inference is critical. Like your podcast could be you creating a bunch of CRO agentic beings and then conversing with them and you get answers and they would be fine, I don't think anybody would listen. Actually, maybe people would listen to that. It's kind of an interesting idea. But the point is, this is still super important. And it's not going to go away. And I actually think the premium is going to go up as we automate more around folks and the idea that you host a webinar and a lot of people that come are like virtual SDRs and agentic SDRs and things like that. So the human really needs to go drive the context on the other end. I think that premium, that 10%, I agree with that quote, goes way up.

You just have to lean into it. Okay, so we'll do a rapid fire and we'll wrap. What do you think separates a good CRO from a great one or a good revenue leader versus like a truly exceptional one?

I think we've had the theme the whole way. I think they have an unshakable prioritization of talent and people and the sort of condition of their team and the construction of their team. And I think they're hyper-evolutionary. And I think when those two worlds collide, there's this thing that's enduring in any CRO, which is also like, you just have a real nose to market. It doesn't matter what conditions, it doesn't matter if there's headwinds or tailwinds, like you understand where the leverage is, you see it clearly, you have buy-in from a team that's healthy, and you're agile enough to keep evolving into where you see the opportunity, like when those things conspire, you have a ton of growth. And I think that that idea that like that sort of nose for where the real opportunities that are enduring and accretive are and really being agile in the way you're considering that and having some frameworks to measure the viability of decisions. Do we go to this vertical? Is a new product strategy important? Have we looked at our blueprint? Do we need to grow wallet share, really kind of understanding all the dimensions, and then being able to drive a creative action, because I think that the death of a CRO is you have some really strong convictions and you lead a team into a brick wall like that. And so I think those are all the kind of dimensions that add up to somebody being not only really good, but being really good for a long period of time, or if you lead your team into the brick wall, just hit that wall once.

We don't need to hit the wall multiple times. This is breaking my heart.

I have this thing I think about a lot on that one, which is like, having sold in the manufacturing vertical for a long time, and I came from manufacturing, I love manufacturers, but very rarely will like an old-school manufacturer be like, the market's awesome. It's just not really how they think. Even when it's good, it's not good. They're kind of conservative. They take a long time to make decisions. And I think we learned a lot in immersing ourselves in those customers in the way they think. And when I think about the impact of market conditions and different geopolitical and socioeconomic and even like tech impacts and shifts, it's like everybody's trying to take market share in the same weather. We should be the, if we're as good as we think we are, if our products are as good as our team is as good, it doesn't really matter what's coming at us. Every set of conditions is an opportunity. Opportunity to go take market share. Like, we all played the golf tournament in the rain. I just think that we're going to go have a better score because we've got the right talent, we got the right products, we got the right instincts, we got the right plan and the right leverage. And I think that consistently being able to clearly see that, like, where is our leverage? And then again, having the right prioritization around the team and evolving, like, those are the concepts I think about a lot.

Yeah. It's funny you mentioned the golf tournament. Posts like last year or whenever there was a Masters that was like horrible weather and a bunch of people fell apart. And it's just such a great analogy for the market at the time, right? This was like 2023, I think, when everything was melting down. It's like, look, like we're all, we're all in this at the same time. Like, are you going to win or are you going to lose and then blame it on something?

100%. If you're running the race, doesn't matter what the weather There's a chance to win. We're gonna win. That's how we— but then you have to back that up with like, what's the instrumentation and the density of what we're doing? And are we in the right places with the right resourcing and the right focus and the right messaging and narratives? And, you know, all that stuff adds up.

What's the most common—

I like how you said, hmm.

You were like, no, because I want to— the question I had in my mind was like, how do you build a nose for the market, but we're supposed to be in rapid fire. Okay, I'm gonna ask it anyways. So we're fully off rapid fire, but so you mentioned developing a nose for the market, like how do you go do that, or how do you teach leaders to go do that?

Yeah, I mean, I got the opportunity at Salesforce to see a company that was making some really smart go-to-market and product decisions in a pretty interesting growth phase, so I got to learn from it. I remember when we were considering whether we wanted to verticalize manufacturing, among some other things we were doing to try to drive some bigger growth. And I think it's really like you have to be able to deconstruct TAM data in the context of your current state and understand the levers that you think you have to mobilize in that TAM and know that you have the product market fit, the team, and the wherewithal to go do it. And then the answers become pretty clear. Clear. And like an easy example of that in this context for us was at the time manufacturing was like one of our highest inbound lead sources. Manufacturers were in this sort of digitization mode. They were starting to transform, and yet the close rates like paled in comparison to every other industry. And there's a number of reasons for that. It could, it could be a little bit product market fit. There were some companies like SAP that were like dominating their mindshare. It could be awareness and things like that. Maybe the industry converts at a lower rate, but definitely an ingredient is we had no expertise. We weren't speaking the language of the customer. We didn't have products that were purpose-built for manufacturers, and so we could make some assumptions against our penetration in that TAM, the size of the TAM, the growth of the TAM, and sort of the, you know, that we could improve conversion rates up to a certain point where we were pretty well guaranteed some good reciprocation on growth, and That's a practical example of how I think about this, and there's a bit of that for everything, right, in terms of possibly evaluating, you look at your product set and your density and where you're winning, and hey, we realized last year, boy, we got a great opportunity to do a lot more with Slack. Gosh, I couldn't live without it, and we had an incredible year and just drove some unbelievable growth and a lot of great customer outcomes, and so being able to look at the data and know that you can instrument around it.

But how did you develop that sense? Like, what were the, where were the places you learned to do that?

I think I mostly learned by watching a lot of great sales executives at Salesforce that not only did this stuff but took the time to explain it. Honestly, I think that's a big part of it. And then some of it's like, back to the mindset and that, being in a bit of an innovative mindset and running to problems and trying to figure some things out. And, you know, you could be a sales leader that builds pipeline and closes it and that's it for the day, but that's only gonna endure for so long. So I think I've, you know, me and a lot of the folks I work with, we're always trying to figure out like, what are the levers we have? How do we do things differently? What could we try? Can we prove with data that what we think we want to try is right? And I think that that's, A little, maybe a little, some of it was like a natural instinct possibly, but probably a lot of it was stuff I learned and stole from other people. Plagiarism's highly encouraged in sales, you know, so.

Yeah, yeah, in business.

Yeah.

So what's the most common advice you give to like new second and third line leaders? You know, somebody taking on a big new scope, it's their first big, big job. What's the most common advice you give to those folks?

Yeah, I think there's a couple things when your scope increases. If you're doing it right, you're gonna have a crisis of prioritization, right? You're not playing hard enough if you don't, is my feeling, but while that's happening, while the number of things that you worry about grows and grows, you have to have authored a plan of the things you believe are critically important. Important, and you have to start to think about whether the things you're worried about fit in with what's important and eventually pick— you can't get better at 15 things at once. Nobody can. That's actually a recipe for disaster. That's like the most obvious advice ever, but if everything's important, nothing's important. So the idea that you're gonna go into the second or third line job, the number of things that you confront every day are gonna go up by a huge quotient, and you need to be mindful of taking inventory of those and starting to pick the ones where you really have to win and probably starting to be okay with some of the stuff being suboptimal while you solve the things you can. That's one. I've said it before, but it's the true advice, like talent will make or break you. If you're a third-line leader, your second-line leaders are gonna define your success. I think that as you move up, you become a more cross-functional leader. Empowering and building up and being a great partner to the teams around you versus tearing them down and pointing fingers goes a really long way. We are blessed to have such an incredible product team and marketing team at Salesforce and RevOps and everyone else. And my goal is to try their stuff and try really hard, and hopefully they try my stuff. And then we can mutually agree, but too often I think I think sales leaders want to go and slam the table and point fingers and have strong convictions. So I think just being open-minded and as a cross-functional leader, really trying to understand folks' perspective and embrace what they're doing. And I think the last one we talked about is just staying really close to the field, staying really close to customers, creating— I mean, I always talk to my team about I want a certain number of customer meetings a week. How could I lead this sales team if I don't know what our customers are talking about? That's insanity, right? But also like talking to the individual contributors and talking to the business partners and understanding what's happening. When those things collide, I think you're in a pretty good position for success. One is in a pretty good position for success. So that's typically the advice.

Nice. What's the hardest lesson you've had to learn in your career?

I won't be specific about the timeframe, but I've had times in my career where I think I had a diabolical go-to-market, an incredible marketing narrative, a world-class product market fit, and I didn't have the right leaders and I didn't want to admit it to myself. And even with everything we thought going so well, we didn't do as well as we thought we were going to. Those are the lessons you only want to learn once.

It's especially hard when things are going well to make the decision.

Well, the key when things are going well is to manage as hard as you can when when things are going well. Like, my team, we almost overdo it, but let's be as self-critical as possible when we're playing with the lead. And let's figure out all the things, if in 6 months all of this goes totally haywire, what are we gonna wish we did right now? And let's start doing it immediately. Like, that is, you nailed it. I think complacency in success is a recipe for disaster. And I think great CROs are kind of, doomsday preppers a little bit, you know? I certainly think about that.

I say, I took this from a former boss and I say it all the time to people now, it's like, I pay you to be paranoid.

Yeah.

There's a level of paranoia that is like extremely healthy. Oh, exactly, yeah. We raised this big round and the conversation in our executive team has been like, how do we make sure people think we're—

Congrats, by the way.

Thank you. We really try to make sure make sure we're doing enough to have the team feel that we have not made it. So we have like—

That's right.

We have this like, the Mamba mentality, like meme is sort of everywhere, job's not finished, we didn't come this far just to get this far. It's a message that we've been drumming so hard because it's really easy, like, you know, we're a unicorn now, we've made it. It's like, no. Think of how friggin' big Salesforce is. That's where we wanna get to.

Yeah, it's fun, like with culture, we talk a lot about how you build culture. Don't discount a really good theme, especially if you're super bought into it. But you have, as the leader, you have to be all in. 'Cause it's bad if you have a theme and then it just goes away somewhere 3 months into the year. So I definitely, every year is a new theme and we try to—

Humans are narrative-driven. We're driven by stories and, and like a sense of connection and belonging to others. Like, we do this all the time, for sure. We set a big gnarly goal, we give it a name, and then we—

that's exactly right—

after it. Uh, okay, last question. What's the best thing you've read in the last year?

I'm gonna stick with the theme. I think Michael Jervais' new book First Rule is incredible. First Rule of Mastery. I think it's a master class in performance mindset. Uh, I've been reading— I read, um, I talked a little bit about like fiction, nonfiction and fiction and things like that. I've been reading a lot of those Erik Larson books. Those are pretty interesting with so much going on in the world. I read like In the Garden of Beasts. I highly recommend that. It's like a little on-the-nose recommendation, but that was really good. Let me think fiction-wise. I read this great book by Paul Auster, Baumgartner.

Okay.

Very interesting. I don't know if that— that might be an edgy one for the audience, but I thought that was a cool book. He's a great author. But in terms of like really applicable to business, I think that, that Michael Jervais book, First Rule of Mastery. My wife actually bought it. She was— that's how it landed in our house. And even though I had some proximity to him and I loved it, it was a page-turner for me.

Well, hopefully we've sold some copies of All Things Michael Jervais.

Yeah, for sure.

I can reach out.

This— who knew this was gonna be a Michael Jervais? By the way, I feel a little overdressed, but in fairness, it was the world tour.

You're okay. So we're both in our element.

There you go. Oh, see, I'm like the corporate guy. I want to be the cool guy. I need a do-over.

There's no buttons on your shirt. That's pretty good.

Yeah, I'm trying new stuff. Yeah, this has been a privilege. Thanks.

It's been awesome.

Thanks for coming on our turf. And, you know, like I said, we hijacked this a little bit, but the conversation was I admire you and thanks for the work you're doing. I love the podcast. I don't know if I'll listen to this one. That's always a little cringy to hear yourself.

Everybody tells me I should listen to my own episodes to like get better. I have—

yeah, it's hard to do.

And thanks to everybody here, appreciate it. Yeah, this was, this was great.

Awesome. It's so good to see you. Thanks so much. Appreciate it, dude. Yeah, right on.

Thank you for listening to the Revenue Leadership Podcast. If you enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe, and you can find a link in the show notes. And be sure to leave a 5-star review, share it with your network, And please join me next Wednesday for another great conversation.