Every marketer wants to cut through the noise. It’s arguable, perhaps, that it is harder to cut through the noise as a business-to-business (B2B) marketer than any other.
It’s certainly a feeling that Leandro Perez, Salesforce’s senior VP and CMO for Australia and New Zealand, knows well.
You might think that you have a fairly good grasp of what Salesforce does. It’s a CRM. But as Perez explained to B&T, that’s far from true any longer.
“We have a large portfolio. It’s important that we’re able to showcase the dimensions of it because we’re not just a CRM that does your sales interactions any more. We have a bigger business around service and call centres than Sales Cloud now. We have Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Tableau and MuleSoft,” he said.
“When we do our brand reports, there is still a large percentage of people who do not know that we own Slack, MuleSoft and Tableau. No matter how many times you think that you’ve talked to your audience, you actually realise that they still don’t know all the things that you think they know.”
For most marketers, that would likely be a worry—especially so given Salesforce’s rapid expansion into the world of generative AI. In fact, Salesforce believes that its new suite of tools, Agentforce, is entirely transformative for the company. There will be pre- and post-Agentforce versions of Salesforce.
Traditionally, as Salesforce’s EVP and GM for ANZ Frank Fillmann explained on-stage at the company’s Agentforce World Tour in Sydney last week, it had issued three releases a year. Now, it is operating faster with more product releases than ever, and last year, it rewrote all of its products to be AI-first.
“In 2014, we started out with predictive [AI]. We are now powering more than two trillion transactions per week, which is a bit mind-blowing. A lot of people don’t know that we got into Gen AI in 2016, not for external use but for internal, for co-development. We had no idea that a whole market category would be built around this,” said Fillmann.
“Last year, we came out with co-pilots. But that was so 2023. A lot has changed in the last 18 months, hasn’t it? Things are moving fast but we believe that they are going to speed up. We are now in the third wave [of AI].”
AI Agents & Messaging Adjustment
Salesforce’s AI agent future—an upgraded copilot that can “think, reason, act” according to Fillman—was first announced at its Dreamforce event in San Francisco. Dreamforce, for the uninitiated, is Salesforce’s largest event. Think of it as part American evangelical megachurch, part deep tech conference.
Perez explained that running these gargantuan events—Agentforce World Tour in Sydney, held at Royal Randwick, was genuinely packed—is a crucial part of Salesforce’s marketing to marketers and beyond.
“We are really good at bringing together audiences and extending our brand experience from our offices to these events,” he said.
Those audiences now include chief experience officers, as well as chief information officers, salespeople and customer service staff. Following our chat, Perez explained that he had to have a conversation with the GM, CIO and CMO of a large insurance provider in New Zealand—”having that conversation is very different to what we were doing ten years ago, when the Salesforce purchases being made were smaller and less strategic,” he added.
Having those different conversations has changed the way that Perez markets the business. Now, rather than simply showing the breadth of its offering, Salesforce is showing why clients should not “DIY their AI” and building a bespoke solution.
“It was so important for us to get out there and position Salesforce with Agentforce so quickly. When people thought about AI, the first thought was to go to the AI model vendors such as OpenAI, Microsoft or Google, especially as they thought of it as a productivity tool,” he said.
“It’s so important for us to have an event like Agentforce and our CEO is so committed to having it go global, is sharing with people that the kind of use cases they want are actually in the buckets of things we’ve already been doing for them.
“It isn’t just saying this stuff but it’s starting to show our customers and them saying ‘Oh, I was trying to DIY the AI and now with Salesforce, who I trust with all this other stuff, I’m able to do it faster.’
“It’s a multi-layered strategy with us saying it, being very fast following and getting our customers to validate it, trying to get support from journalists because it’s one of those age-old problems in marketing where, if you’re not associated with something, you need to make the link. The mental availability that people have for AI may not have been Salesforce—unless they were a Salesforce customer—but even then, they couldn’t solve the problem they had before Agentforce.
“That’s why my job is easier than it was six months ago. We were trying to get out there and say, ‘Hey, we also do AI!’ with the Matthew McConaughey ad, billboards on the train, the WAIld West Saloon in Darling Harbour. All of that was to say we’re a player in the AI space but it was a really difficult uphill battle.”
After Agentforce World Tour Sydney, Perez himself would visit Jakarta, Auckland, Melbourne and Delhi to help spread the good word. With such a rapidly scaling product suite offering increasingly bespoke solutions to problems via the agents that only operate on individual customer company datasets, is Perez’s life getting harder?
“Look, it is complex. I actually enjoy it. It makes the job quite dynamic. But it means I need strong leadership in each of the portfolio areas. I can’t be the expert in all of them. I need, for example, my Tableau campaign leads to be super strong on knowing when the releases are coming, what features we want to talk about, being those advocates for the launch and connecting with HQ. As a company, we have lots of experts in specific products.
“I set the operating system for my team and the expectations.”
But Perez is also working smarter and putting his money where his mouth is with Salesforce’s AI. He spent four years as Salesforce’s VP of corporate messaging and content at the San Fran mothership. During that time, he explained, he ran a corporate messaging certification process that would see team leaders “pitch” slides and messages in the run-up to new product releases.
“It took forever, it was nearly a two-month process. And by the time you got to the end, if the person at the end had a friendly manager, they could just say ‘Yeah, they know what they’re talking about’,” he said.
“This year, we actually trained an agent with the guidelines and staff would upload a five-minute video of themselves to Slack and Einstein would check to see if they landed the message, used a local example, ran to time and score you. You could pass or fail but you were doing it from the comfort of your home, office or one-on-one where you could receive coaching rather than in a public room.”
But rather than replacing the role of humans, Salesforce is betting big that its Agent tech will “augment” marketing, sales and support professionals. Instead of being faced with ‘or’ choices, they’ll be faced with ‘and’ choices.
“If we leverage these tools to unlock the capability of time and remove all of the stuff they don’t want to do, we can actually be in an abundance mindset. We can say yes to things that we don’t normally say yes to because we know the Agent can do the work that is repetitive or mundane,” said Perez.
“Something that I have been thinking of late is that I had previously been trying to shift some of that to low-cost regions. Now, I can keep them in the operating units that I have. Those lower cost regions, by the way, are also seeing costs increasing.”