00:03:13 · Alex Immerman, John Somorjai
[00:03:13] S1: With that in mind, I really like that idea of a beginner's mind, the curiosity. How do the two of you approach acquisition and investment ideas together? [00:03:24] S0: Well, I think that one of the things that's always been the hallmark of Salesforce is we listen to our customers quite a bit. And so we get a ton of feedback around what do customers want to buy from us? Where do they feel like our products are missing? Where are the gaps? And we take that and work with our product teams to really identify what are the best opportunities. And that's certainly for the acquisition side. On the investment side, my ventures team meets with thousands of companies every year. And I think we get a very good sense of traction? Where is the interest? What areas of technology are really growing the fastest? And we can bring all of that feedback and learnings back into the company, and I think make better decisions as a result. [00:04:10] S1: And you alluded to Marc as this big visionary, and of course he is. How do you and your team think about balancing Marc's big vision mindset with strategic and financial discipline? Maybe there's been times where you've
00:04:10 · Alex Immerman, John Somorjai
[00:04:10] S1: And you alluded to Marc as this big visionary, and of course he is. How do you and your team think about balancing Marc's big vision mindset with strategic and financial discipline? Maybe there's been times where you've [00:04:26] S0: had to tell Marc no on his big grand idea. I'm curious how that all comes together. So, what we have is an internal framework that we follow, which we are pretty disciplined about following. We look at sort of three elements. The first would be where is the strategic fit and how much customer success can it drive? I think the second would be, can we accelerate the business? Will it fit into our technology stack? Is there a good cultural alignment with the team? Do we see the talent there as people that will work well within Salesforce? And then the third part, which is probably the trickiest in this day and age is how can we deliver value to our shareholders and to our customers? And what is the timeline for value accretion? Is the valuation reasonable? And that last point is probably the hardest right now because everything is expensive. [00:05:22] S1: We're in a unique moment in time, and we should use some time later to chat on that. Maybe to take a step back, Salesforce today, really large company, you're much more than CRM today. Mhmm. How do you describe Salesforce as a platform today?
00:05:22 · Alex Immerman, John Somorjai
[00:05:22] S1: We're in a unique moment in time, and we should use some time later to chat on that. Maybe to take a step back, Salesforce today, really large company, you're much more than CRM today. Mhmm. How do you describe Salesforce as a platform today? [00:05:38] S0: Well, think it's always been a place where customers can go to buy technology to help them interact with their customers in new ways. And that's sort of been foundational from the beginning. But how we think about it is that we have a platform that is at its core, it's delivering trusted foundation for all of your enterprise applications. And then you can interact with it from different surfaces. And that's why we made Salesforce headless. And so you can interact with it through Slack. You can interact with it through Cloud Force and through other places. And I think it's just as broad as a company wants to make it, a place where you can really deliver a lot of enterprise value. [00:06:20] S1: Absolutely. I mean, I think it has been really cool to see you guys leading the charge on the headless transition. I'm curious as we all enter this brave new world with AI, and there's new interfaces. You referenced Cloud. There's obviously ChatGPT. There's a broad swath of them today. You're able to access Salesforce via them. Maybe a good portion of your customers are aspirational about requiring fewer seats in the future, because they're able to accomplish more work today with AI than they previously needed to. I'm curious, under this transition, like, how do you think about Salesforce capturing value
00:07:00 · John Somorjai, Alex Immerman
[00:07:00] S0: in this new world? Well, first of all, I mean, I think we have different ways to price our products. But most importantly, consumption is a big part of how we price. And so many of our products, they are consumption based. Like, MuleSoft was always consumption based, for example. And so I would say what we try to do is make sure that, first of all, we wanna be delivering value that our customers really appreciate and wanna continue to pay for. And whether they pay on a per seat basis or on a usage basis, it doesn't really matter. But I think that the key thing is making sure that they're happy and successful and will come back. And that's one of the critical pieces about where the technology industry has been moving is more towards outcome based pricing where you're paying for resolutions. This is what Fin does so well for example. Versus just paying for a seat. And I think that's definitely a trend that we are getting really behind and more and more of our products are gonna be delivered that way. [00:08:02] S1: Yeah. Fin was certainly an early pioneer in in the outcome based, more resolution based pricing.
00:08:02 · Alex Immerman, John Somorjai
[00:08:02] S1: Yeah. Fin was certainly an early pioneer in in the outcome based, more resolution based pricing. [00:08:08] S0: And by the way, the reason they can do that is because the time to value is so fast. So Fin, you can get up running on average in sixteen days. And immediately start seeing the agents handling more and more of the calls that humans might have otherwise been escalated to handle. And so we actually decided, okay, well, don't we just pilot Fin internally and see what it does for Salesforce? And we found that we had it up and running actually in fourteen days. And on our help.salesforce.com website, it's now handling over 40% of the traffic. [00:08:43] S1: Oh, wow. [00:08:44] S0: And it is delivering 65% resolutions without going to a human. So that is really quick time to value, and that's kind of a hallmark of I think what a great acquisition looks like. [00:08:55] S1: Yeah. And then with enterprise sales in particular, you're earning a larger share of the labor budget, in your Fin example, that could be customer support, a little bit of sales. And so, in a Salesforce context at large, that can be my AI team is prospecting, it's finding leads, it's qualifying leads, it's following up, it's closing deals. Right. And so, as you're earning a greater share of that labor budget, sure, your customers may be paying you quite a bit more than they did in the past, but their overall cost of selling has gone down.
00:08:55 · Alex Immerman, John Somorjai
[00:08:55] S1: Yeah. And then with enterprise sales in particular, you're earning a larger share of the labor budget, in your Fin example, that could be customer support, a little bit of sales. And so, in a Salesforce context at large, that can be my AI team is prospecting, it's finding leads, it's qualifying leads, it's following up, it's closing deals. Right. And so, as you're earning a greater share of that labor budget, sure, your customers may be paying you quite a bit more than they did in the past, but their overall cost of selling has gone down. [00:09:31] S0: Absolutely. And qualified is probably one of the great examples of what you just said. So that can replace your sales development rep organization, essentially, where basically it's taking all the traffic that's coming in through the website and answering questions with its Piper agent. And it's a very human like experience where you're speaking to a very lifelike avatar and they can explain what the products do, and help set up meetings for you all automatically without touching a human.