Salesforce's Devin Kunysz: CRM-Driven Consumer Goods Growth

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0:50That's salesforce.com slash consumer goods.

1:20increasingly digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG Guys.

1:50just recently signed two weeks ago with Republic Records. I'm joined today by my East Coast co-host and co-founder, Mr. PBSP, all the way from Connecticut, where fall weather surely must have set in. Has it, Peter? Well, the leaves are falling, but it's still 75 degrees here. The leaf peeping has not commenced. We're probably a week or two away from that. But just recovering from all the incredible travel you and I have been undertaking, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Austin, San Diego. It's been a very busy month, Sri, and we're not, now that we're into October, we're heading to New York City for Advertising Week next week.

2:27So very, very busy time for all of us. Indeed, sir. And I'm sure you're getting prepped for the NLDS just as I am for the ALDS with, unfortunately, the Yankees' daddy, Tampa Bay. To our audience, if you're getting value from these conversations, we have three quick requests from you. The first, subscribe to us on whatever platform you're listening on right now, whether that's Spotify, Apple, Amazon Music, anywhere else you get your podcast, YouTube. Hit that subscribe or follow button so you never have to miss an episode. Second, leave us a rating. Takes just a few seconds. It makes an enormous difference in helping other CPG and retail media professionals actually find us easily.

3:01We built this community one listener, one episode at a time. And a five-star rating is the single best way you can help us keep growing it. Thirdly, follow us on LinkedIn between episodes of publishing thought leadership, celebrating growth in the industry industry analysis and content you won't find anywhere else all built for the cpg and retail community already a part of so cpg guys on linkedin hit follow click the link in the digital show notes of this episode subscribe rate follow that's what it comes down to three simple actions that help us bring you more of the conversations that matter now to our guest shoppers have evolved retailers have evolved so why does so much of cpg selling still look exactly like it did a decade or so ago.

3:42In this episode, we're breaking down how Salesforce is helping brands finally connect the dots. We're talking about ditching the fragmented systems and bringing trade promos, customer data, retail execution, all under one single roof. Nirvana for a CPG brand and retail in the process. We'll discuss why getting your teams in sync is the ultimate cheat code for better retailer partnerships, squeezing out growth in a slow market. We're also tackling the new wave of AI shopper tech and how you can protect your bottom line right now given the volume pressure in the industry. Today we're joined by one such person working at the center of how CPG companies are rebuilding their commercial engines.

4:21Devin Kunish is the senior director at Salesforce leading the retail, consumer goods, and manufacturing industries. Because he sees the full picture from the factory to the checkout aisle, make moves out, He knows exactly how to help CPG brands turn trade spend into a genuine competitive advantage. If you want to understand why connected front offices are the future of CPG and what AI and shop agents mean for your growth, let's get on to hearing from our guest. Devin, welcome to the CPG Guys on a Friday morning. Thank you, sir. A big, big moment for me. Long-time listener, first-time caller. Super excited to spend time with you guys.

4:55Let's get into it. Edward, thrilled to have you on the show because given my past life at General Mills and given where the stock is, businesses, volume is, man, we could have used this unified trade promo solution in space. So to our audience, please check out the digital show notes of this episode to find a hyperlink to Devin's LinkedIn profile and the Salesforce website to learn more about what we're going to discuss as we carry on with this conversation, which I will kick off now with our first question for Devin. Devin, so let's just put that word out there. Tech-fueled sales. It's the need of the hour.

5:25It's the answer to the hour. It's the answer to volume challenges, because as humans, we ain't figured it out for three years. So hopefully text the answer. Why is CPG selling still operating the way it did in 2010? Customer teams, channels, things of that nature. So much has changed in the industry. It's a digital shopper. We believe a third of shoppers are using AI every day in choices for their shopping. But the process is so 2010, if not earlier. What are some of the leaders doing with tech fuel sales that our listeners should be thinking about now, like today? Yeah, I mean, by way of proving that, I just got off right before I got on with you guys with some of the CROs of two of the largest companies in the space.

6:06And I was laughing with my team because it is exactly the same as when we were key account managers back in 2008. And just a way of introduction, I spent the first 15 years of my career in industry, right? So I came from industry. I built a brand for Amazon. I led stores at Starbucks. Then before that, I was a seller and a brand manager at Heinz, Pepsi, and General Mills. And to your point, nothing's changed. And I think what we see broadly is this. CPG companies haven't built the structural technology that allows them to sell differently, right? Retailers during that time, since 2008, have built lots of structural technology.

6:47They've built retailer media networks. They've built their insights. I was just listening to your podcast with the Walmart Data Ventures team. They've built all of that. And then the cam, here comes your key account manager. I've got my yellow notepad or my laptop that I'm taking notes on. And I've got a beautiful PowerPoint and an Excel grid of my 18-month plan. I say this jokingly, but I think that's the opportunity for the industry, right? And as I think about it, when I hear from CROs at the biggest companies is, we're invested heavily in insights and RGM. we've done all this work to like get our data right.

7:21And then my question to them is, how's that executing? Well, you know, it turns out it's really hard. So I think what we're seeing is you have to build sort of these systems. And by the way, one of those systems, I'm going to be self-serving for a second, is a CRM, right? I'm not saying a CRM makes a good sales organization, but I have not yet met a great sales organization that doesn't have a CRM. And so So I think we can talk a lot as we go through the conversation about what that looks like. But I'll give you a couple of things that I've seen. I was with one of the largest CPGs in the world.

7:57We were in Bentonville looking at the way that they do key account management at Walmart. And they were showing me the way they track their joint business plan outcomes. And this will shock you, not at all. They were taking notes in the notes page of the PowerPoint slide, right? And I asked them, like, how do you translate that back? And it's like, oh, we have one-hour meetings with every one of our brand teams every week to share what's going on. I was like, well, that seems like a system that you could solve for. The same problem happens in RGM. The same problem happens across it. So how we're talking to our customers right now is how do we help you bridge insights into execution?

8:37And we just had our Dreamforce event, which is our big conference. And one of our best customers is Mars. They are an incredible customer. And their CRO for their snacking division was the headliner at our consumer goods keynote. It's a great session. It's recorded online. Maybe we can put that in the show notes as well. But he and I were talking about it. And he said for him, the final frontier is fixing this key account management, the modern trade key account manager. Most CPGs have invested in tech on the backside. They've invested in tech for retail execution and DSD, but they haven't solved this modern key account manager.

9:15And that's where we're spending our time now is what does the next generation of tech-fueled sales look like? So hopefully that's a good opener to the what is happening and the why is we just haven't invested in that space because everyone says, my key account manager knows who the buyer is. my sellers know what we're doing. We just need to go in and execute. And I think tech is the unlock for that. I'm happy to talk more about that as we go forward. Devin, welcome to the CPG guys. Yeah, the CPG guys are quite familiar with Mars. Our dear friend, Tim LaBelle, the chief Halloween officer, as he's known this time of the year, was kind enough to invite us down to their national sales meeting back in March.

9:58And we had a chance to address or organization. But as I think about all those field reps and salespeople that were in the audience, you know, we talk a lot on this podcast, and I'm sure you do in your role, about the cloud and real-time data. But those field reps will tell you, they walk into a store and they head into the back to look at the inventory, and they get like no cell service, none whatsoever. So how critical is it from your perspective for a modern commercial hub to function fully offline and how does that change the day-to-day life of a field seller? Yeah, I think fully offline is a capability that we've built natively into our product.

10:37I'll even take it a step further. To me, it's actually about turning that visit in the store into paint by numbers, right? So they completely lose connectivity in the walk-in. By the way, I'm not sure I want them deeply on tech in the walk-in, right? I want them stocking shelves. Tech is an enabler for that. What I really want is I want to change the actual UI for them. So how we talk about it now is we think agents are the key to this. Agents let you do work you couldn't do before. I remember when I was back doing the job, going to the store, and I would get my brief and it'd be an Excel spreadsheet.

11:14And I have to look at him like, all right, what's supposed to be on the end cap this time? You know, what's really good at answering that question for you? An AI agent. So we're working with a lot of these customers and we're saying, actually, give them a pre-visit agent that will pop up and they can ask questions like, what's the top three priorities in this store? Are there any open service cases before I walk in so that I don't try to sell the manager innovation and all he wants to talk about is the truck that didn't show up? We've all been there, right? And then the connectivity is super powerful, but I've got guidance throughout my visit that allows me to do the conversation better so that I can focus on what I'm good at, which is getting product on the shelf, pulling product out of the back room, getting it back to the shelf, and then selling new things.

11:59I'm not spending my time looking through five different sell sheets to see what I'm supposed to sell today. And connectivity is obviously critical to that. So we enable that so it can sync before it comes in. but I also think it's just broader than connectivity. It opens up a much bigger conversation if we change the way that job is done by adding agents that will do the follow-up. In fact, actually, we just introduced a Dreamforce on-device transcription. So you actually can have your device, with the permission of your customer, obviously, record the conversation you have, and it will actually populate your visit based on that conversation and say they wanted samples of the...

12:36Let's take your chief Halloween officer. or they wanted samples of whatever innovation Mars has come up with for this holiday. Do you want to send it? And imagine getting back to your car and the samples are already shipped and you've got a tracking link, right? That's the kind of power that we're talking about is it's taking things off people's plates. Whether it's offline, online, doesn't really matter. It does, but it's kind of more about taking things off their plate. Devin, clearly agents are already in play today. These things you're talking about are fully capable today of doing what you just mentioned.

13:10And I'm sure you're already well on your way of building it or already have built it in some cases, as you've explained. So clearly, salespeople should be able to free themselves up for higher level tasks and more relationship building, if anything. The part I worry about, Devin, is the tools are here. They're going to be used. The smart ones are going to adopt them very quickly, and they're going to be after the races. And maybe it's to solve for the volume challenges we've had, because AI will take you to the pinpoint precision of where the issue is and what to solve for versus hunting in eight spaces in the 40-page binder.

13:43You and I have been using all of, not 40, 200-page PDF we got every Monday morning. But what about, you know, before I go to the next question, my follow-up on this one is business process as well as human capital learning and process management. Have you thought about that and are y 'all bringing any capabilities along with the actual technology part to advise these large high market cap CPG companies on what fundamentally needs to change from a business process standpoint in adoption? It's a phenomenal question. It actually bridges well to the next conversation. But I think we're talking about that in two sides.

14:24The change management component, I actually think there's a... I've built two CRMs in my career. I have a blueprint for success. You pick three to five processes, and this is a professional term, that suck, and you fix those. I use sample requests as an example. I have never met a CPG that does sample requests well. It's an Excel spreadsheet. It's really hard. It's painful. New items, whatever that is for your business. Every customer that I talk to has a slight nuance of them. I always start with those two as examples. And then they tell me five more. And I just say, which of those five would be the most powerful if you changed them?

15:02And they tell me, and then we change them. So yes, we bring people along, by the way, like with Mars, we brought our professional services team. We helped them transform the way that they built their trade promotions. We actually cut trade promotion planning by 50%. So they're, you know, you, you guys have lived that life, right? The week long block out your calendar for a week because we're going to update our trade plans, we fix that. We cut it down to, I guess, two and a half days instead of a week, right? Still painful, but less painful. So that's, to me, the change management component is you actually just solve problems with technology versus throwing technology at them.

15:39And then the second half of your question is, I think, what are the business processes? And one of the big changes in software right now goes back to the AI agents, but I'll make a point that is kind of starting to come to life. So Salesforce, we use all of our technology very aggressively. We call ourselves customer zero. In the CPG industry, you'd call it dog fooding. We would call it trying our own product. I'll tell you this, I'm fully agent-pilled. And what drives change management is agents. Because you know who's really good at using software? AI agents. So I was sitting next to a CEO of a customer yesterday, and we were talking about CRM.

16:18And he asked me a similar question. He's like, how do I drive this change? Because my salespeople hate CRM, right? Every salesperson hates their CRM. We can own it. Even the salespeople who work at Salesforce are kind of like, I don't love CRM. Well, here's the reality. I just took out my phone and I opened my agent that sits on my phone and I talked to it. I said, I'm meeting with this CEO. Here's what we talked about. Go ahead and log a meeting with him. Set a follow-up email on my drafts about those things. I'll edit it. log contribution and log a deal support so my boss knows what I did. Send.

16:52And he watched that thing go through my Salesforce and hit objects and log all those things. And he goes, I want to work like that. And so that's the other side of this is I think agents are really cool. And while that future is here, to your point, it's not distributed yet. And so as people start to use more agents. We announced headless CRM six months ago. A key account manager could log CRM from a team's channel. They never have to open Salesforce, right? That's the power of where we're going. And we know there's a world where 90 % of people don't log into Salesforce. I'll tell you this, at Salesforce ourselves, 90 % of our logs come from Slack.

17:35And we've 2x the amount of data in our already very rich CRM because of that. So that's how I see the change management answering. But I'm curious if that holds water for you guys as practitioners. I was gonna chat with you about this fancy new word we need to bring in the industry called the unified commercial hub, but you just described it. And you answered my question on business process along with it. So Peter, let me turn it over to you for the next one. There's a bit of a catch-22 we see a lot in CPG right now, growth slows down. So brands freeze hiring or cut budgets, which means they don't have the resources to actually chase to channels where the growth is happening.

18:21So what does this vicious cycle actually look like on the ground and how can the right tech snap a brand out of it? Yeah. So, I mean, I'm contractually obligated to say the word agents multiple times on this conversation. But I truly, I'm going to go back to this and say, as I look at where this is going, most CPGs just are not adding headcount, right? That's been the reality for a dozen plus years. I think 50 % of the industry has either been in headcount reduction or hiring freeze at any given time if you go back to 2008. So what I have thought about a lot is what are the jobs that we're no longer doing?

18:58So I'll give you an example. When I was at General Mills, my desk used to be a manager and three associates, right? But my desk was just me. So what jobs did I stop doing? I had a list. I don't remember what those were now because that was 2016. But every CPG has that. And so how I'm thinking about it is you start to think about hiring jobs with much cheaper headcount, which is AI agents. So if I give you an example, Peter, let's take the long tail. I have a customer that they tell me this every day. I can serve customers at 10 units. It's an away from home operator, right? But I don't find them until 50 because my salespeople don't have time.

19:40Great. We'd love to fix that for you. You know who has no problem reaching out to every single one of your trade show leads? An AI agent. In fact, we bought a company that will do that for you, right? We have out-of-the-box agents that can be deployed in 30 to 90 days. Because that's the other thing. When everyone talks about these projects, what everyone thinks is, oh God, this is six to 12 months of digital transformation. I'm going to have to bring in a partner. I'm going to have to spend 12 months overhaul. No, we are working on projects that can be deployed in 30 to 90 days. And that's kind of the change now I'm seeing is you want to be building an organization that is very agile and very fluid because your growth priorities might change next year.

20:24The way that the market is moving right now, I mean, gosh, we're going to talk about a gentic commerce at the end of this, but two weeks ago, Muse didn't exist. Now Muse is the number one app in the app store, right? So I think CPGs need to build flexibility into their tooling and their commercial teams to be able to pivot quickly to where the opportunities are. Even though 80 % of the business is still going to come from the Walmarts, the Kroger's, the Costco's of the world, the green shoots are going to change quickly and you need to be able to adjust to those. Devin, I'd argue that even though 80 % of the business is always going to be in-store or be somewhere in that, I do believe very, or we here on the CPG guys believe very strongly that agentic AI shopping is going to change even the grocery industry, where the in-store model is going to diminish from 80 to maybe 65.

21:16And 35 % is all e-commerce, online, things of that nature due to the agentic nature. Now, even if it stays at 20 % and doesn't budge because it took COVID to push CPG companies out of their lethargy to really get on with the digital bandwagon. So maybe it'll take that long even on the AI side. But our belief today is the shopper is 100 % digital anyway today. Their encounter with innovation now happens on TikTok, happens on Pinterest, happens on Meta, depending on the age and generation they're from, or on Instagram or so many other channels. Some discover it on Reddit for Pete's sake. In that sort of scenario, let's think about the consumer who's already there.

21:57Convince a CPG brand that they have no choice and they got to be thinking about agentic shopping today and what can they do about it? I got you guys. I'm going to start with a personal story. So this is the way that I do my meal planning for my family. I have an AI agent. I've built it. It was a combination of Gemini and Muse. I walked downstairs. I took a picture of my fridge where I keep all the meat and everything that I have that's not currently in the upstairs fridge for cooking, right? That agent then feeds me the exact list and says, okay, based on that, here's three recipes for each. Which one do you want?

22:35I sell it. One, two, three. I sit with my wife for about 10 minutes. We make a meal plan. that agent then spits out a grocery list, right? I take that agent. Now, I love grocery shopping because I've been in this industry for forever. And I have a four-year-old son who also loves grocery shopping. So we go and we party at the grocery store. But Sri, I'll tell you, I completely agree with you because what's going to happen is all that behavior moves to click and collect and you lose all of your impulse buyers, right? You're spot on. So let me take you even a step further. Let's say that behavior happens to 10 % of US customers.

23:10We've seen what happens when 10 % to 15 % of US customers switch to Ozempic. Now let's imagine 10 % to 15 % of US customers are just using click and collect and you lose most of your impulse buys. Because I'll take you back to what I think is going to potentially happen to grocery is any customer using agentic shopping, it becomes the shop clerk from 1905. If you don't know the history of grocery stores, It used to be I'd walk into a grocery store and I would go to the shop clerk and I'd say, I need chocolate and I need a beef and I need this and that. And they'd go to the back and they'd grab it.

23:42This was before brands. It was all white labeled. It was just like, I just grab whatever. That's the modern shop clerk. It's an AI agent. And by the way, it's retail media on steroids because that's what's going to happen. They're going to say to you, hey, this is retail media on steroids. Amazon has already launched it. I think I saw last week they launched sponsored conversations. So that's coming very soon. And so I guess I'll say, let me, let me, my first thing is I don't think you should flinch on physical, right? That's where all your investments in the commercial tooling pay off. You've got to win at the shelf because still, let's say 60, 70 % of your volume happens there.

24:17You have to win that battle and then you have to win the agentic. And I think what's happening right now is CPGs are like, I'm not sure that's big in deal and I'm not sure that's that important yet. So maybe I'll wait and see. I'm not behind yet. Actually, someone said that to me yesterday and I said, that's great. I agree with you. You're not behind. Is the goal to not be behind or is the goal to leapfrog and be in front? And that's, I think, the challenge that we as an industry have to embrace is I'm not behind yet. You're 100 % right, but you are behind your retail partners, right? Like I look at these retail partners and they are all in.

24:48They've built their shopper agent. I mean, you guys see it at Walmart and Amazon. Amazon's agent has 350 million users, I believe. And here's the crazy thing. Agents actually add Basque size. So I don't know if you guys have seen this, but agents add about 40 % to the Amazon basket. I see that in my own life. I mean, my agent upsells me constantly. You should get this thing. You should try that. Like, hey, have you tried this? Like, we'll add that to your cart. So CPGs have to find a way. And I think the other thing I'll flag is that the personal agents. So we talked about Muse for a second. I'm fully Muse pilled.

25:22Have you guys tried Muse? I'm just curious. Okay. You like it, Sri? The CPG guys are the first to try anything available in the market. I love it. I love it too. It's incredible. And you know what? It will get adopted in mass. They have 3.6 billion users. There is no way. They've already got 5 million. That's in two weeks. It's actually double the growth curve of chat GPT. And if you think about what that means, they probably hit somewhere between, I'd say conservatively, I'd be willing to bet on 100 million to 500 million, given that ChatGPT is somewhere around a billion, but they should hit a billion, right?

26:01So Devin, here's the issue we need to hit up. Yeah, let's talk about it. You and I love it. We're using it in our everyday life. How many CMOs are doing that? They represent the greatest brands in the world. These people don't even want a TikTok account. Sri, they're still working on their MySpace accounts. We have to remember that. Okay, Devin, continue. He's right. I back off. Well, okay, so I'll play it out, though. Even if you don't want to download Muse, I have lots of people who don't want to download Muse that I've talked to. That's fine. You have to be thinking about what's going to happen.

26:31So I'll play this out. You have to be ready for a gentic scale on your properties, both consumer-facing and B2B customer-facing, right? So let's take the consumer example. Do you have a service center that can handle a 20 % increase in contacts? Most people don't reach out to CPGs if there's something wrong with their product because the product costs like$5 and they don't care. But you know who doesn't care about reaching out to the CPG? Muse. Muse will happily send them an email. Is your service center ready to get deluged? E-commerce drove a 20 % increase in service contacts basically every year since e-commerce launched.

27:11What do you think personal agents are going to do? Same thing on the B2B side. And so I think there's a couple of things that those CMOs should be thinking about. And we can help with this, right? I tell every brand, I'm like, get your service contact center ready for agents because you're going to build agents to answer those agents, right? It's an agent arms race a little bit. And then the other thing that is really good for CPGs is content. And I remember a long time ago, we both worked at General Mills 3, right? So they have and probably still have one of the best recipe content databases in the world.

27:45They have all the Chex Mix stuff and all this incredible, powerful recipe database was a highly visited web traffic property. They have to put something in there to help people find it, to create a digital interaction layer to keep them if they get a click onto one of their properties. Because content is actually feeding all the AEO stuff. So we talked earlier about how the agent becomes the shop clerk. Well, we've actually got some software we just purchased. It goes through all your content and tells you what's keeping you from delivering on the agent experience. It'll tell you, oh, this piece of content isn't optimized for an agent to read it.

28:24And that reduced your referrals by 65%. If a CMO wants to talk about that, I will send them their report for free. All they have to do is send me an email, my email or a LinkedIn message. I will happily send to them for free. and if you guys have a CMO who tells you they want that content, you just ping me and I'll send them that report for free so they can see what that looks like because it's really interesting to watch how agents read your content. So content and service is my two core messages for these people. If you're not ready for agents yet, that's where I would go. You don't have to build an agent on your website.

28:58Build a content, build a service team, get ready to go. Peter, I know you and I have been discussing the B2C and B2B world coming together. So over to you for that one. Yeah, absolutely. Devin, AI is really inserting a new discovery layer between the brands and the consumers, right? And a shopper agent can actually shrink the digital shelf down to just three to five items, right? Not the endless scrolling it's curating for you. So if that's happening, then how should CPG operate in a world so both B2C and B2B revenue aren't suffering at the same time. Yeah. So I think this is a little bit B2B is easier, right?

29:42So the great news is B2B is far easier than B2C because B2C is fragmented. You have to really, the amount of prompts they're going to do are far deeper for B2B. You kind of have to win basically just a digital outrage layer. And by the way, no one's doing this yet. Very few people have gone into this space yet. It's a huge untapped. So I remember when I was a brand guy, I was one of the first people to put brands in video games. It was cheap. I bought space in the NBA's video game. I remember being blown away by the results. It was like double digit increases in sales, right? Because all of a sudden you have, I was the only food brand in the NBA's video game.

30:21This is the same thing. The first company that gets to a really good agentic B2B motion, and we're working with a couple of companies. So again, I'd say it's two places there. One is its acquisition. So we talked about acquisition. You have to build a digital interaction layer on any B2B site, right? If a customer comes to your B2B site, they might not come frequently. You have to have something that can answer their questions and get them into a funnel. And actually at Salesforce, we did that. We ended up finding we had about 5 ,000 uncontacted leads. Our agent wiped that out in a couple of days, right?

30:53You'll have the same thing, all your trade shows. You start to build processes around this to drive. And then the CSAT side. So how do you drive the interaction with the customer to keep them? That's the other side of it. And like I said, we have agents that we can stand up in 30 to 90 days with you on both sides of that. So if a company is like, I don't know where to get started, again, drop me an email, drop me a LinkedIn. I'll bring a team in and we'll have a great conversation. Does that answer your question? I don't know if I kind of went back to the world too many times, but yeah, does that answer your question?

31:25It surely does. our only question back for you is when you have that conversation with those people, can we be a fly on the wall, please? Please. I would love to. I mean, listen, guys, you guys are really on the cutting edge of CPG, right? You guys are thinking about this. And it's nice because you get to think about it from a practitioner's standpoint, but you're also out of the day-to-day. I get the same luxury. I often think about that as like, I get to see 300 CPG retail and manufacturing customers a year. That's essentially one a day if we back weekends out, right? Sometimes it's two or three.

31:59That lets me see the scale of the problem. Because when you're in there and you're at fill in the blank customer, you're like, I got to grow this brand 5%. You're not thinking about the changes of the customer. But I'll tell you what I think is cool. We've never been in more opportunity. I think you guys talk a lot about joint value creation and joint business planning. I talk about that too. I talk about it a different way. I'm like, how do you go ahead and capture these things so that you can deliver on cool ideas, right? So everyone spends so much time just on the pitch of their innovation, most of which is going to fail.

32:33And I think about the brands that are actually growing. Let's take an example, right? I'm working with a candy company right now on thinking about how they would build front of store assets. So you guys have been to the front of store and seen those like Pokemon vending machines, right? That are always sold out. What if you did personalized candy in that space at a much higher margin, right? Now that requires tech. It requires thinking, but I think if CPG just goes in and says, I'm going to put my stuff on the shelf and I'm going to pull it off the shelf with my traditional brand route, and I'm going to shift some, I spend a digital, you're going to get the growth rate of CPG, which is two to 3%, right?

33:12The brands that are winning are doing something different. going to happen is you're going to bankrupt me because when my daughter sees that she's going to be daddy you need to get me personalized candy at the front of the store but i understand what you're saying well let's just say i might know a website that you can go and get this personalized candy so i'll send you the link you can be you can be the hero for the birthday we can we can help you out there's a vicious rumor in the industry that whenever you go to a trade show like grocery shop there's some m &m cpg guys candy lying around i don't know if it's true or false i won't confirm it, but maybe it'll show up at CES.

33:46And Peter seems to have a picture. I kind of need some CPG guys M &Ms right now. Those sound delicious. It's been a week, so a little Friday morning action sounds delightful. All right, let's get a little bit more technical now, Devin, and I want to talk about data. Why does a data flywheel matter? Because CPGs, when they create their strap plans, it's very siloed. Marketing does its own thing, sales inherits. gets very little input into it. Consumer insights, hopefully the future is you get one tool, retailer insights are going somewhere else in sales notes and spreadsheets, as you've already described.

34:23What changes when data is created at every step and flows all the way from the basket, reverse engineer all the way to the brand team? And that influences promotion choices to in-store execution. I'm going to get a little philosophical here for a second. So what really changes is the power of enterprise context. And that sounds like something that a tech guy would say wearing a blazer on a stage, but let me kind of unpack this a little bit, right? Enterprise context is really important in the context of selling to other companies. So let's take that joint business planning example we had earlier.

35:02Oh, I'm that company that's keeping the notes in the PowerPoint slide. What's happening is that company probably right now is investing in an AI model. So they're investing in OpenAI or Claude or Gemini to do a bunch of work and search across their company. Then they're investing in a data lake to organize all their data. And then they come to you and they're like, I'm surprised because 93 % of my projects are stuck in pilot. The model is cool and my data is all organized. I was kind of waiting for the data angel to come and save me, but now the model didn't save me and the data angel didn't save me.

35:40So what do I do? And then my answer back to them is, well, we have to go back to data lakes capture a record of everything that you've done in the past, right? Great job. You've organized all your promotions. Now, when you go meet with Walmart at your joint business plan, data lake doesn't have any context for all of the things that happen there, right? It just has a record of the promotions that you agreed to that you already ran. So in between that, we're finding, goes back to you need this software layer to make it digestible. And so what I think is happening, what I think is happening very importantly in the industry is we're moving from storing everything in an Excel spreadsheet that everyone maintains 18 different versions of and then emails to their demand planner and says, here's our plan for next year to one unified enterprise context.

36:29And what that cuts... So I'll go back to a story I told earlier. I told you there was a CRO that didn't believe they needed a CRM. I told them all the stories we just had. And they were like, I don't need a CRM. My people know who the buyer is. We're good. And then 15 minutes later, her four division presidents were telling me about the meeting on Thursday. They have every Thursday for four hours to deconstruct what's happening in the business. And as we unpack that, I'll give you a... I'll flash forward to the end. by the end of that meeting, they were talking about putting a CRM in place because what it does is it gives you all that conversational context of everything that happened in the meeting.

37:04Oh, Walmart is building out a much bigger set around X, Y, or Z. That can't live in your data lake. The model doesn't know what that means because it's not publicly available. That is CRM data and it becomes really rich context. And by the way, it actually amplifies your data lake investment and your model investment because you put that together and all of a sudden And you're like, whoa, now I know the model can stitch together all that stuff in my data leg. So that's what I'm seeing at least is you have to build the flywheel first, getting things out of people's heads, email spreadsheets, digitizing that unlocks so many other things to solve the pushback.

37:41Remember earlier I said, nobody wants to fill out the CRM. Great. Don't do it. Do it from the team's channel. Do it with your voice. Like we're fixing the logging. Because Sri, you ran a commercial organization. You wouldn't have put a CRM in place because you didn't want your people logging, right? You would have looked at me and you would have been like, Devin, I don't want my people spending all day logging things in CRM. That's not our business. Great. I've fixed that problem for you. Now you can have all the rich data and your people won't hate you because they don't have to log it with a bunch of clicks times 10.

38:14All right, Peter, over to you for the next one over here. Yeah. So one growth pocket is reaching customers that were previously unprofitable to serve, like the long tail of accounts, right? But how does a connected commercial platform make it possible to serve those customers in a profitable manner? Yeah. So we're starting to see people rethink cost to serve, right? So I'll actually give you an example from kind of consumer adjacent, right? Some of the golf companies, they were going in and seeing country clubs four times a year. And those sales calls, a human sales call costs directionally 150 to$200, depending on how much you're paying your sales reps, right?

38:57That's an expensive sales call, not crazy expensive. You can pay off 150 bucks pretty easily on golf clubs. As I can test. I am a golfer, but it's still expensive. So what they did is they switched one call a year and they switched that call to an agentic call. And that agentic call was replacing a call that was pretty silly for a human to do, right? That human was going in and all they were doing was asking what merchandise didn't sell and I'll give you 20 % off on it. Does a human need to do that? No. They send an email to the country club or the golf shop and they say, hey, just send us a list to the merchandise that hasn't sold, we will send you the 20 % off rebate.

39:36You can just mark that down right now. We'll auto approve it. And that's kind of what we're starting to see. That's why I said earlier, it's so important that you start thinking about jobs you couldn't do earlier or rethinking the way that you do the job today. Because everyone's like, oh, I want to put tech on my current process. Maybe your current process doesn't need to exist anymore because tech can change it. So that's kind of where I'm seeing people invest in the long tail and get much more interesting conversations going is, do I need a human to go there? No. Do I need a human to collect a form from you?

40:12No, just email it to me. We'll automatically take it. All this stuff. And by the way, that makes people happier because they don't want to deal with someone coming and having to keep an appointment because God, what if something happens at my... If you're in the long tail, you're running an independent business, right? Like I remember when I was calling on the long tail and it's like, oh gosh, this person has to go stock the shelves because their front end manager called out, right? That's not what you want. So you just replace those things with something a little bit more cohesive and thoughtful and you're off to the races.

40:44So the interesting thing there is I wonder if for these long tail businesses and accounts that we're talking of that were difficult and to serve because of the smaller volume challenges, AI is going to come in with this partnership with the CRM tools in place and be that answer to finding the 200 basis points of growth or 400 basis points of growth at the community level that's evaporated from the ecosystem. But I'm going to migrate somewhere else. Beyond the traditional channels, we're seeing market leaders explore enhanced direct channels, not just D2C sites, but using the data to power personalized breakthrough products at the front of the store.

41:21How should CPG brands and businesses think about that? Yeah, I think you guys have to, you know, you have Nick from RBC on here and he always talks about like finding these new insights, right? I think about this as you have to develop direct as a consumer insights channel, right? So So direct is not a revenue play for most CPGs. It doesn't make sense to do, right? I remember we looked at it and it was like, okay, I may make$150 from this consumer. Lifetime value is going to cost me 50 to acquire them. Like that doesn't make sense. But if you can test things, right? If you can test things and get them into the scale.

42:01And then I also think the bigger thing is you're going to have to build a database. So if we go back to that shop clerk analogy from earlier in the conversation, you really have two choices now. You can completely accept that retailers own the data and own the consumer and you're going to pay them for it, which is what's happening right now. Or you can try to build a case for data the retailers don't have. And that's what some of those direct-to-consumer brands are pulling in, right? is they're going in and they're saying, hey, I know these 10 things because I have an email list. They come to my site.

42:35They interact with my content. So I actually know this additional space the category is going. So I see it as almost like an R &D channel. Learn what sells, kind of push the winner. And then you can decide where you want to go big. And it lets you kind of test things either in a channel that's not dependent on retail. Because Sri, back to your point, If we shift from 80 % in store to 65 % in store, that 15 % that moves to digital, it's kind of up for grabs. And some of that's going to get caught by just advertising spending and it's going to stay the same. But some of it's going to shift because all of a sudden a brand that made sense in store because it had super eye-catching packaging and was incredibly good at generating impulse buy doesn't deliver on the needs of a modern consumer.

43:22I think about people like trying to answer the GLP-1 craze, trying to answer the protein craze, fiber, which I've been told is the next craze coming. That's where you have to have stuff in the incubation arm ready to go that you can bring to the forefront. That's what I would be doing if I was running a brand. Devin, my head is spinning. You know, in since the beginning of the millennium, I've done four deployments of Salesforce at various companies, and I am constantly amazed every time I did it of all the additional capabilities, benefits that come from that. And the roadmap that you've laid out for us today is making my head spin in a very good way.

44:06So to wrap up, if you're a CBG leader who's listening to this podcast episode, and we have quite a number of them that do, what's the first step you should take to start building a connected front office? And what should they realistically expect success to look like a year from now? Yeah, I think it's important that you pick a problem to solve, right? So we kind of went back to the conversation around, hey, some of the people start at long tail. Some of the people start at away from home. Some of them start with their retail joint business planning. And they pick that process and they start. Some people start with trade, right?

44:46The nice thing is our commercial hub can do all of that plus DSD. So I would say pick a problem. And then I'll also speak just to your retailer executives for a second, right? I sort of ignored them, but they are a big part of my business, retailers and manufacturers as well. The manufacturers and the CPGs get on the commercial hub train. We talked about that. For the retailers, let us come in and help you get ready for agentic commerce. And you might say, look, Devin, we've already built our shopper agent. It's best in class. That's great. Do you have your backend ready to handle agentic scale?

45:24Do you have your data ready to serve that shopper agent in real time. We do so many things for retailers too. So I would just think for the CPGs and the manufacturers, get your commercial hub ready and pick one part of your commercial team that is broken that you need help with. We will show you what next gen CRM looks like. If you haven't seen a CRM since 2018, it's changed a lot. And it's mind boggling how much of a work orchestration engine it becomes when done correctly. And then on the retailer side, let us get you ready for a Gentic scale. Because I think to Shreya and I's point, a couple million to a hundred million muses are going to be live in the wild in the not so distant future.

46:09And you've got to get ready for that or else you're going to be struggling to catch up. And that's a brand risk moment. Most customers will walk away after just two bad experiences, I'd get ready for that right now if I was a CPG or a retailer. So that's my leave for the team. A power-packed, rich conversation, Peter, the type that you and I love to have. You know, we kind of went deep into the industry, also challenging the industry somewhat, because the industry needs the help to bridge that 400, 500 basis points of volume growth that's evaporated over the last three years since March of 2023.

46:47So Peter, what would be your big takeaway today? I'm squarely focused on the power of enterprise context that Salesforce Commercial Hub enables, right? It helps organize the data capture and the organization of that information, providing context to how that this data can be applied to solve critical real-time business priorities right that is that's where it is and and and how the users of the tool can choose to engage with it whether they're actually using the tool or not devon gave a great example he does a lot of his activation in slack that's how you and i operate sheree and for people who use microsoft platform They can use Teams.

47:33So it really is about meeting the users where they are and helping them solve real business priorities. That's my big takeaway, Sri. I can go in 30 different directions, but I'm going to pick one easy one here. As trivial and silly this is going to sound to the both of you, I think this is very important. Number one, no more logins. Number two, AI-based voice call, voice conversation capturing with notes. Silly, trivial, small, game changers for a field sales force. I'll keep that as a backdrop to close out our conversation. Devin, it was a pleasure to host you on the CPG Guys today. It was a pleasure to be here.

48:17Gentlemen, I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. Thank you for having me. The audience of today's conversation sparked something for you, a new idea, a perspective that's brand new or just a reminder why this industry is worth showing up for every day. Share it, tag us, tell a colleague the more voices we bring into this community, this shop where all of us get at the end of the day to our followers on LinkedIn that trusts us to inform, educate, and entertain you about our industry. Thank you for your trust and encouragement. Until next time, keep pushing the conversation forward. I'm Sri on behalf of my co-host, PVSB.

48:46This has been the CPG Guys Podcast.

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