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.
00:09:31 · John Somorjai, Alex Immerman
[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. [00:10:05] S1: Makes a ton of sense. We just started to touch on a number of your acquisitions. You have a long history of acquisitions, I think nearly 100,000,000,000 of acquisitions over the course of your tenure, 12 over the last year. Really amazing. As you think about M and A as your strategy, there were the large ones, Slack, and MuleSoft, Informatica, and then more recently, you've gotten to the AI native companies. You mentioned Fin, Listen Labs is another. Your framework for acquisitions, you touched on, like financials is the third component, the second strategic, and then first was what are your customers asking for? [00:10:50] S0: And also how can we accelerate them [00:10:52] S1: Accelerate them. [00:10:53] S0: With our distribution. I mean, remember we have 15,000 sales reps. And so if you can plug one of these acquisitions into that really, in the case of Listen, you know, only a handful of reps, you suddenly make it available to your entire sales team, you're gonna grow that business.
00:10:53 · John Somorjai, Alex Immerman
[00:10:53] S0: With our distribution. I mean, remember we have 15,000 sales reps. And so if you can plug one of these acquisitions into that really, in the case of Listen, you know, only a handful of reps, you suddenly make it available to your entire sales team, you're gonna grow that business. [00:11:10] S1: And so, maybe like, imagine I'm at the other side of the table, I am at Alfred, I'm at Listen Labs, I'm a really ambitious AI founder. I get approached, I'm spending time with Salesforce, and it sounds great to partner with your 15,000 sales reps, and get me pushed through your channel, I would love that. How do I think about partnering with Salesforce, versus, you know, selling to Salesforce? [00:11:45] S0: Well, I think we approach partnerships in a very open way, and so we have probably more than 8,000 partners at this time that we work with. These are ISV partners. Sometimes we invest in the partners by the way as well, and that's part of the role of Salesforce Ventures. But we want to have an open ecosystem where we're bringing as many solutions as possible to our customers, and they make the decision. They can buy a partner solution, they can buy a solution from Salesforce, but I think we... I think the the hallmark of of our company is making sure that we have this as broad of an ecosystem as possible because you want to have as much to offer as you possibly can. So there are there are definitely ways to partner with us. We have multiple types of partner programs, and a great organization that does that.