Will Salesforce Win the AI Era Like It Won Cloud? | Kris Billmaier

0:00About 60 % of sellers' time is spent on non-sales activities.

0:04Sophie Buonassisi: Kris Billmaier, Executive Vice President and GM of Agent 4 Sales and Growth Products at Salesforce. Do you think there'll be a time then nobody's logging into a CRM? I think you're either going to choose where you want to work. I think we still build great experiences in our CRM. And I think a lot of our customers still work in CRM. But we want flexibility and we want choice. And so we're just meeting customers where they are. What's going on? Are we in a SaaS apocalypse or not? I don't think so at all. I think the era of SaaS is changing, right? I mean, we're moving toward an agentic future and that's how we're building.

0:37I think SaaS is evolving. And I tell everybody who will listen to this is like great products win. In every era, some companies have failed and others have thrived. And I think Salesforce is in an amazing position to thrive.

0:50Sophie Buonassisi: How has Salesforce adapted so well and what is it doing now for this AI era?

1:11Sophie Buonassisi: Tris. How's it going? Great. Welcome to GTO Now. Hey, thanks for having me. It's really exciting to be here. Thank you for having me in the office. I appreciate it. In the tower. This is great. In the tower. I got a tour of the top floor earlier. It's fantastic. Awesome. Yeah, excited to sit down together. Yeah. And I want to start off with some kind of overall context here. that you've been a part of for many years. So Salesforce, of course, people know it incredibly well today and always has been like a very dominant product. But at one point in time, it wasn't the CRM that it was known for today.

1:43Sophie Buonassisi: And it was really the cloud era that Salesforce capitalized on and absolutely moved faster than anyone in the market at a margin that nobody could catch up with. And now we're at this inflection point where a lot of people say is a very similar point where we're having a major platform shift, this time AI, and the same opportunity presents itself at any platform shift. Somebody takes that role. So the question becomes, is Salesforce that dominant player or not in this new platform era? And you've got a front row seat. So I want to open it up with just as you look across these eras, how has Salesforce adapted so well?

2:23Sophie Buonassisi: And what is it doing now for this AI era? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, you pointed out the cloud era and Salesforce was invented in the cloud, right? I mean, first mover there really. But there have been so many other eras that we've kind of transformed through. I think of mobile. I think of social. I think of predictive AI. And now we're in this agentic world. And I think what's really exciting for me is Salesforce has met those transitions at each and every point. And we've kind of provided the guide for our customers to help kind of usher them into the new era. And we're definitely in that new era now.

3:01It's super exciting. It's unlike any shift I think any of us have ever seen. But I think we take the steps to get ahead of the market and to make sure our customers are guided by us to get to that era. And I do think, you know, Salesforce is really well equipped as we transition, you know, to AI, to agentic experiences, agentic sales, with all the context and data that we have about our different CRM processes. I think we're well poised in this new era.

3:32Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. And you've made a lot of key decisions that make it very evident that you are well poised, one of which is the work that you're doing at AgentForce. And so Sales Cloud has been a product around for about 20 or so years. Yeah, 26 to be exact. There we go. But you recently renamed it to Agent for Sales. Tell us about the rebrand there. Is it mostly rebrand? Are there new AI functionality? Why the change? Well, one, we looked at the whole sales cycle all up. And we looked, you know, I'm fortunate. We have 15 ,000 sellers at Salesforce who I get to learn from every day how they work, how they interact.

4:08And what we found is so much of their time is spent in non-selling activities. And so every year we run what's called the state of sales report. And this year we found that about 60 % of sellers' time is spent on non-sales activities. So we looked at the overall flow and we said, what can we take off a seller's plate? How can an agent make a seller way more productive? And we know that productivity leads to growth. And so ultimately, how can we make these agents in this sales process a partner to the seller to make them more outcome focused and drive growth? And so it's way more than a rename.

4:49It's embracing agentic experiences across the entire deal cycle from prospecting to engaging customers to booking meetings to really self-driving CRM, which I think is kind of the holy grail of what we've been looking for. with CRM and how CRM is transforming more into, I'd call it agentic revenue orchestration at this point. And it's really exciting. We're seeing a ton of success with it.

5:18Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. And with that kind of shift, do you think we'll actually rename the category, if you will, from CRM to agentic revenue orchestration? I think we should. I think this era is all about outcomes and doing more. and to me, I think CRM has had its place, but I think CRM is kind of the backbone for how we think about the revenue cycle going forward. And so I don't talk to our customers about CRM anymore. I talk to them about revenue orchestration and how that gets done agentically. And talk to us about the headless part of that because I think that's probably synonymous with the word around automation and so forth that you've used there.

6:02Sophie Buonassisi: What does that actually mean? Just to give people a little bit of context of like a headless CRM or revenue orchestration platform. I think it's about meeting sellers and CROs and OX individuals where they want to work. And so when I think about headless, I think about Salesforce as a system of intelligent outcomes that can be surfaced anywhere. So we obviously have a great Slack integration. We're really excited about that. We know sellers live and work in Slack. But we also announced the integration with ChatGPT a few months ago. We've done work with Gemini. We're doing more and more with the platforms that sellers live in to reduce that friction, not have to swivel chair.

6:47And in all cases, bring that agentic, intelligent outcome to those areas where sellers work. So for me, that's really our headless strategy in action.

6:56Sophie Buonassisi: Right. Do you think there'll be a time then nobody's logging into a CRM? I think you're either going to choose where you want to work. I think we still build great experiences in our CRM. And I think a lot of our customers still work in CRM. But we want flexibility. We want choice. And so we're just going to meet customers where they are. Yeah. Where would you say, out of curiosity, most people are working? Like when you're meeting them where they are, are there interesting patterns that have been emerging? I think it's really diverse. I think a lot of people are embracing, you know, the LLM providers.

7:29You see folks in, you know, co-work. You see folks in Teams, Microsoft. You see folks in Slack. And so it's, I don't think it's one specific area that everybody's working in. But I do think the conversational nature of how people are engaging with their CRM data and driving that agentic revenue orchestration is happening in all of these different locations.

7:55Sophie Buonassisi: So you've made a lot of concerted efforts to meet people where they are. And you've also made a lot of product changes to also facilitate that. What is agent force now for people if they were just to wrap their minds around it in one line? For me, for sales, it's the agenda of revenue orchestration system, end to end. I mean, it takes on the tasks that sellers shouldn't have to focus on. That's 60 %? Yeah, that's 60%. I don't think about, you know, I often look at the from to, right? What did Monday morning of a seller's day look like a year ago? It looked like you were looking for somebody to call, trying to build pipeline, taking hours to do that.

8:39Now we have a prospecting agent where you define your ideal customer profile. And overnight, it fills your lead list. And then it says, how do you want me to engage with these leads? Do you want to reach out to them? Do you want me to reach? It's very much taking over the top of the funnel, building those account plans for you, and then helping close deals more efficiently. And so I think that's really the summarization of what we're doing here.

9:08Sophie Buonassisi: Brilliant. And so all those product shifts, the integrations like we talked about, of course, I wouldn't say M &A is new to Salesforce, but you've made some really interesting moves around acquiring companies like Momentum, Regrello. Regrello is actually a GTM fund company, so we love to see it. But overall, that kind of brings me to like a broader conversation that is very relevant to, I would say, Salesforce and multi-product companies, which is the build versus buy. You know, do you right now have any kind of pushback on, say, in your sales process around how people are evaluating the sales process now that there's so much vibe coding and so forth at people's disposal?

9:49Yeah, I mean, I think there's, I mean, we're seeing a lot going on in the market from vibe coding solutions to, hey, we just want to adopt what's out of the box. But at the end of the day, I think the context that Salesforce has around the entire sales cycle and the data and kind of moat that we have there, that context really appears throughout. Without that, without the context, you really don't have anything. And so, yeah, this is the whole headless strategy. We're excited about people by coding in the future. We're excited about people leveraging our APIs and MCP. And we're excited about people using our out-of-the-box experiences as well.

10:32So, come try and do it all.

10:34Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, I like it. I like it. Maybe that's the strategy, do it all. If you do it all, you can't mess, right? Yeah, 100%. One of the other kind of key shifts you'd say you've seen that position Salesforce to really win this AI era, because I know we've breezed over a couple and there's so much depth to each of them around the integrations, the product shifts, the meeting people where they are. You've got a lot of distribution advantages too and so forth. But are there any kind of key areas that you've seen? Even the M &A I mentioned. Yeah, I mean, to me, I always like to say great AI comes from great data and great data comes from your CRM.

11:08But there's so much gold in the data that comes from unstructured data, Specifically conversations, emails back and forth with your customers. And that's why we bought Momentum, right? I mean, it is the conversational intelligence layer that allows us to build an amazing data foundation. And what we glean from that are really interesting, what we call memory fragments, but allows us to kind of take the 8 ,000 words that are uttered in an hour-long meeting, drive it down to the 800 words that matter and auto-populate your CRM with that context and without any human bias. I think so often, you know, sellers in the past, again, from two, used to look at their admin Friday and say, what did I get done this week?

11:55Oh, I need to update my CRM. Those days are over, right? I mean, we're just doing that for you now. And I think that's really exciting and that's really foundational.

12:05Sophie Buonassisi: That is a music to a salesperson's ears. That is like truly the dream. That was always the dreaded part for salespeople. So it is a very exciting time for sure. We definitely see it on our side just around the application layer having so much utility right now. I know there's a lot of excitement around Vibe coding and that's fantastic for certain individual use cases. But in terms of a product with so much data and integration capabilities and requirements, like it's truly like not even a thought or conversation, at least from our end. At the end of the day, you want the provider that's going to take you into the future, like you mentioned earlier, and guide you and be at the top 1%.

12:45Sophie Buonassisi: And you can't build that. You have to go with a partner that is building and kind of at the top, upper echelon of their category. So that completely makes sense. Do you talk about the era internally at Salesforce? Are you referring to the AI era and what you're doing to win it right now? Yeah, absolutely. I think everything we do from how we build product to what we ship to customers to how our sellers engage in the overall sales process has changed. I mean, we're fully embracing all of these tools internally. And we're looking at this era and it's moving very fast. We like to think we're moving very fast with it.

13:28I think we are doing a pretty good job. But every tool that we ship to customers, we embrace on our own. And so I think the era that we're in is really about sellers and agents working together to achieve more. I imagine, and I think this is already happening, that a seller will manage a team of agents all with a common goal-oriented structure. And we actually see this internally. the person who runs our SDR team actually, quick tangent, we score one to five. So ones and twos are our lowest. That's about 75 % of our lead volume that comes in. Three to five, they get handed to a human seller to work.

14:14The ones and twos, we were never working. And so it was just like sawdust. So we said let's have our engagement agent reach out to those customers and in about eight months time we drove over 100 million in pipe that was totally unseen otherwise and our uh the individual who runs our sdr team will tell you that she has 100 sdrs but she has the equivalent of 400 sdrs through agents so she's managing a team of effectively 500 getting things done uh which at that volume uh of scale it's truly incredible and it just found money. So it's pretty compressive.

14:55Sophie Buonassisi: That is very impressive. So you've got an engagement agent. You mentioned a prospecting agent earlier. What are the other key agents that your team is now leveraging? We think about our prospecting agent does top of funnel for us, does outbound the engagement agent, reaches out to all those customers to be assistive to sellers as well. We think about our account research tool. We think about our pipeline management agent which moves deals along. And then we think about things like our quoting agent to really help close the overall deal cycle. And then really underpinning that is that data foundation that I talked about earlier.

15:32Momentum so critical in that grabbing all of that data and insight to power all of those scenarios. And the really incredible thing is it's all headless. So you can do that in any location and I I mean I live in Slack yeah so I don't log into our Salesforce experience anymore I just ask Slackbot about the data that I need that might sit in Salesforce and it gives me better answers than I could find on my own which is really amazing that is amazing and that

16:02Sophie Buonassisi: goes to show I mean even yourself like you said dog booting the product is meeting you wherever you are and that happens to be Slack which makes sense yeah and I mean like I think of myself as running the sales cloud business. Agent force sales business, I should say. And in order to do that, I have to understand my forecast and I have to understand where my top deals are. And to get those insights, I just query Slackbot and it returns everything I need to manage my quarter. You've gained a lot of efficiency through this process. How do you quantify that efficiency on your side? I know we quantified the pipeline generation efficiency, but when you think about your sellers on the team, what has changed for them?

16:42I think it's a couple of things. One, I think it's accurate data without the legwork, right? I think we're now, for all of our sellers, we have our conversational insights product turned on for all of them. And we record a lot of calls by default, unless the customer wants to opt out. So we gather all of that data that was otherwise kind of a two-step process for ourselves, right? Capture the data, take the notes, put into CRM. That's no longer necessary. So we've seen sellers become more efficient in that regard. Being able to take more meetings because they're not focused on building account plans, right?

17:19They're not focused on doing manual prospecting. There's just so much efficiency in every step of the process that's saved, but it's also an accuracy thing, right? A lot of our customers are at this point in time locking down CRM fields and just automatically transcribing data into those fields directly from calls directly from emails and it eliminates any bias or any any difference in a differing of opinion that a seller might have with what actually happened right and think about that like when it comes to a forecast right shouldn't my forecast just be auto-generated for me based on what the system knows, right?

17:59I think that's the era we're in.

18:02Sophie Buonassisi: It's pretty exciting. That's super, super exciting. And what about from a headcount perspective? Because your sellers have suddenly, including yourself, have become so much more efficient. What are you doing and seeing with your team? Are you increasing sellers, decreasing sellers? Does it remain the same? I think you saw probably Mark post on this a couple of weeks ago. That's the area where, I mean, we're definitely hiring sellers. because they're 10x sellers now, right? They're way more, can handle way more because agents are doing the things that they didn't like doing before, right? And so now they can focus on things that matter, which are building relationships, having that human experience because at the end of the day, we're still selling to people, right?

18:46And I think that's been a critical step for us.

18:50Sophie Buonassisi: There's, I mean, was a huge narrative around sellers are going to be replaced and so forth and quite literally the opposite has happened the opposite like the hiring on the sales front has just exploded and for good reason like you said oh yeah for sure yeah brilliant the sales team is growing you've seen tremendous growth across sales so much more efficiency like what does i guess the modern day sales role now look like in this ai era i think it's embracing the technology to help you the most i i it's funny I sat down with a couple of our BDRs. So the other day, they were showing me things that they'd built on top of Salesforce.

19:29And it was really exciting because you can tell they constructed things for the way they think and the way they operate, but using all of those intelligent outcomes that come from Salesforce. And so I think it's about understanding the tools. It's about learning efficiently and it's about leveraging those AI tools. I think those sellers that come in, whether it be junior role just starting out or a senior role reinventing how you do things, embracing the technology is what matters the most and learning how it can optimize your working style the best. That's part of our overall headless strategy as well.

20:05But I think that's kind of how sellers have evolved.

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21:22Sophie Buonassisi: And when you apply that code is when you want to extend your trial and or get 15 % off your paid plan. Just enter that code GTM15. Back to the episode. Completely makes sense. But how does that shift how you hire now, if it does? I don't think it shifts how we hire. I think we've always looked for the best. Yeah. And the best are now using AI to figure things out and embracing the new versus saying, I'm not ready to make that leap. Yeah. I think the embracing, building trust, and understanding what the power of the technology is, it just influences another skill in your resume. And so I think that's how, I don't think how we change, we've changed how we fire.

22:09Sophie Buonassisi: That's a really refreshing take. Yeah. Yeah. Same. I like that. Just hire the best, period. Yeah. How do you determine their AI skills? Because anyone can say, yes, I've built agents, I'm AI fluent, but that can be very subjective right now when the playing field is really level set. Do you have any go-to tactics in your hiring process? I'll go from the product side because we've changed how we build products as well. I always ask what people's favorite tools are, what they've built themselves, how they build, how they think about prototyping. It's a lot of the how questions and what are you using and the speed to understand if you have product market fit or you don't.

22:54And then how do you pivot and how do you go faster? And what does a modern team look like? All of those things have shifted how we, you know, think about hiring the best.

23:04Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, that's so interesting. It's like it shifted from what did you do to how now. Oh, yeah. It's a little bit about the tools, though. Yeah. I think when, you know, two years ago, I would tell you I ran a panel and made somebody pitch me, you know, a presentation. If anybody comes in with a PowerPoint these days, I'm like, you could have just bi-coded a prototype overnight and showed me what you actually wanted to build and how you built it. So the expectations shifted a bit, but it kind of goes back to the eras, right? The shifting eras allow us to do more because of the tools that are available to us.

23:41And I think those that are going to win in this era and be really effective are the ones that are going to embrace the change.

23:48Sophie Buonassisi: And you mentioned you talk about it internally, this AI era period. And we talk about the window all the time from an investing perspective. and the window never necessarily closes, but it narrows oftentimes. What kind of timeline do you talk about at Salesforce for capitalizing on this window being more open than it will in future? Yeah, I mean, one, we start off how fast we ship. So, you know, Salesforce classically was on a three-release roadmap. Yeah. Now we ship weekly, biweekly at the most infrequent monthly. so I am thinking in days and weeks not in like months and years so the era is moved so quickly that I don't think we can say hey this is an 18 month window hey this is a 3 year window it's a now window and we're acting accordingly and I think those are the companies that are going to embrace the speed of change and can find product market fit and that's exactly what we're doing Yeah.

24:52Sophie Buonassisi: And we often talk about product market fit or PMF as this almost like a, I don't want to say treadmill, that sounds like a negative connotation, but like a continuous process where you're continuously meeting your customers where they are. Like you said, like what is product market fit for you guys or how do you think about it for this AI product and AI era now? Similar to how I thought about it in the past is really what's that aha moment that I can deliver to customers in the first five minutes that says, all right, I'm going to stick with this thing. And every product that we ship kind of has a different metric, I would say, to that for just core CRM use cases.

25:30What does it look like to get data in? How fast can we affect a customer to get their data into the system and to start acting on it? For more agent experiences, I'll go with prospecting. It's how do you define your first ideal customer profile? And how can we build that pipeline for you that you otherwise wouldn't have had? If you're coming in off the street, no data in your CRM, we can auto-populate it for you. For our conversational insights product, it's how can we auto-populate a record? So every one has its own metric, but it's all about adoption. So that's what we're focused on.

26:05Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, super interesting. And that completely makes sense. And so it really is just, I mean, an ever-evolving market. And, you know, PMF has changed tremendously. The market, the way we think about it has changed. And what I've kind of heard from you and what we also hear from others is it's so about servicing the customer. And we've never really seen up until this point, I would say, such a convergence of software and service. And Marc Andreessen famously said that software is eating the world. And now, say software is a trillion dollar market, the services market is like 10 trillion. What happens?

26:47Sophie Buonassisi: Is services now eating the world? How is this changing for you guys? I look at it as what does it take to make sure a customer is successful? Yeah. And to me, part of that is making sure they see value as immediately as possible through more product-led motion. So how do we get to that aha moment with our customer who might have purchased self-service? You know, not everything we do is account driven, sometimes self-service. So in those situations, that's high touch, sorry, that's high volume and can't be high touch, right? And so we have to have the product to suit that market. And at the same time, in a more complex, bigger deployment, you know, putting people out there, making sure that we're in the trenches with our customers, growing these agents who initially are kind of like junior employees, right?

27:44That need to learn, that need context, that need a bit of coaching in order to kind of mature and evolve. In both cases, we have to solve for our customer needs. So I think services are a critical component to how we think about agents going forward. but the product also has to meet the market and be so dead simple that anybody can run with it.

28:11Sophie Buonassisi: Totally. And maybe feel free to push back on this, but I feel like the notion to date has been that the kind of pushback against Salesforce to date has been complexity or at least perception of complexity. But the way that you've been changing kind of eliminates that entirely. You've introduced free tiers, all the shifts in the product that you're saying. How do you think about this complexity equation when you're talking product, when you're talking go-to-market? Well, we have the luxury of having an amazing trailblazer base who their job is to drive success for their employer, their customer.

28:51But we have a saying on the team that it's, we make products that are easy by default and advanced by choice. And so the platform itself has so much depth and you could basically do anything, right? But do you want to do everything? And I think that's where we meet our customers. We meet our customers with out-of-the-box experiences that are simple, easy to use, easy to get started. I think about Slack and how we've integrated Slack and CRM. And it's a conversational onboarding to get data into the system that needs no setup at all, which is amazing. And then I think about more bespoke agents that customers want to build on platform that are specific to their business needs.

29:36The two are, you know, very opposite ends of the spectrum, but we can solve for both. And that's the easy by default on one hand and the advanced by choice on the other. And so we have to embrace both.

29:48Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. That's fantastic. I love that slogan and where you're building. Let's go a little bit deeper into how you're building. And again, not the what, the how, how you're building. We've talked about your team composition. Let's talk about your go-to-market strategy overall because you've got the self-serve side. You've got the sales motion side. How are you kind of thinking about your go-to-market differently than you were in the past? What has been the core evolution that you've seen? Yeah, it's a really good question. I don't think there's one thing that I would point to. I'd say the market has gotten much noisier.

30:24Yeah. Right? And it's now obviously easier to build products. It's faster to get them to market. And oftentimes we're seeing companies who are building in adjacencies or overlapping technology to what we have. And oftentimes in our ecosystem, we totally embrace that. So I've seen our go-to-market motion ship a little bit in terms of simplicity, one platform, one story. when I think about kind of what a customer's stack can look like today. There can be a lot of point solutions integrated in there. And I think every time you integrate a point solution, it should be a very thoughtful decision. Because every time you do that, you introduce a new integration.

31:11You introduce potentially a new area for management. And for us, I think our go-to-market motion has really been a simplified, full-stack revenue orchestration done agentically offering. And we start with the smallest of the small customers who want to self-serve and onboard. And if they want to grow up with us, great. You're never going to outgrow Salesforce. And then we have the large to the large who have been customers forever who want to make this agentic leap. and in each case we're just meeting the customer where they are with a consolidated stack.

31:49Sophie Buonassisi: Brilliant. And leaning into the how even further, honing in on more yourself, how are you thinking about your shifting leadership right now as obviously the role of the seller changes, the role of the product team changes? How have you had to evolve yourself? I mean, I buy post stuff. Nobody's yanked anything in yet. But I know I think it's it's there are no more just managers like you have to be a player coach. And that's kind of the strategy I've always taken is like you have to do and you have to bring the team along. So I think it's just more of that, more of embracing the new tools like we talk about.

32:34And then I spend a ton of time outside in. I look at what the market's doing. I'm inspired by so many startups that are out there you know breaking through shipping fast doing a lot of amazing things so I get inspired by that and I take a lot of my learnings from what we see in the market internally here to evolve what we're doing very cool and we talked

32:57Sophie Buonassisi: about shipping speed how you've increased on the product side and oftentimes it used to be that or we talk about it used to be that product was the bottleneck and then product got vastly expedited through organic means. And now it's really your go-to-market that's truly a bit more of the bottleneck. And you've increased that around all these different areas, which is great. What has been the key to keeping up the go-to-market side, if it has been a challenge, with the product side, that you've increased velocity? I don't know that... I wouldn't say that go-to-market has been bottleneck, so to speak.

33:31Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I think it's, we built a lot. Yeah. And I think it's educating the field and educating the market. Yeah. And that becomes our, I wouldn't say challenge, but that's what we need to do consistently because things change so fast, right? And so if you're sending one message tomorrow, you either have to be on repeat about the thing that you're talking about that's new, or you have to be very clear in how things have shifted. And so when I think about telling a story to a customer or enabling our field, I'm like the chief repetition officer, honestly. It's like you can't say the same thing too many times because there is so much noise out there.

34:17And so you have to cut through it with a consistent message that's simple. I think that's been not the challenge, but that's been the activity.

34:27Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. What is it saying? It takes 17 touches in the past for somebody to remember something. I'm sure now with more noise, it's something like 47. Who knows? I couldn't even tell you, but I'm doing all those outreaches. All those. I love it. I love it. And Chris, I want to circle back to speed quickly here because you said you get a lot of inspiration from startups and other companies and you bring that internally. And everything that we've talked about to date and everything that people see with Salesforce and respect about Salesforce is for such a large company, you move so quickly. You get shit done.

35:00Sophie Buonassisi: Like, how are you able to move with so much agility when you are working in a larger organization? Have there been any kind of like specific unlocks for your team or other teams that have just allowed you to move that quickly? And I'll give you an example is go to market being a bottleneck. We hear that all the time from companies of far lesser size to or of equal size that they're struggling to keep up now with the product velocity. Whereas Salesforce, you found a way to do so already. like how i think it's a combination of things i think there's something to being founder led still i mean yeah you know i i'd say that mark is very inspirational and very visionary and you know when he puts his foot on the gas on something we can execute we can move and i think for leaders in the company like myself we've been here you know six seven eight years you kind of learn from that And so I'll tell my team, don't wait, light fires.

36:00I light fires all the time, trying to get people to move faster. But I think it's really being convicted about the direction that you're going. And to me, it's not so much the, you know, the agenda capabilities that we now have. It's a mindset of, hey, we're a 70 ,000 person company. We're not a startup, but we're sure pretty agile for being as we are. And so there's a sense of pride that comes with that inside of Salesforce. And I think, you know, leaders like myself and our teams, we embrace that. And we try to move as fast as possible and move out anything that's going to stop us.

36:37Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. That's super interesting about the founder side too. Very, very interesting. He gives pretty clear direction on a lot of stuff. Yeah. He's a visionary. He's a visionary. Absolutely. What has been one of the biggest learnings from working with Mark? Well, I'd say that's a good one. There's been a lot of learnings. I think his communication style is something that I am – he's very clear, he's very concise, and he makes his point. And I think that's kind of a general statement to make, but it's something that I've learned from. It's changed the way I communicate. And I think it is back to the point we were making earlier.

37:14is like how many times does somebody need to be told something before they actually understand it? If you can do it clearly and crisply and concisely, you're going to be able to do it less times and get that point across. So clean, simple, easy.

37:28Sophie Buonassisi: And ambiguity is really the end and death of speed. So I'm sure that helps with your processes. You got through. Yeah, I love it. Well, very good. We've talked about so many different shifts that you've made at Salesforce around this AI era and again, capitalizing on this another platform shift and being out of the curve, another one that has come almost as a byproduct in a way, but it's a huge go-to-market area around your shifts is pricing inevitably. So you've experimented with a couple of different things, a$2 pricing per conversation. Flex credits. Flex credits, yeah. Take us through the pricing strategy when we think about now AI products and how you shifted and evolved because you have, you know, iterated.

38:16Sophie Buonassisi: And that's a really interesting area for companies to learn from. Yeah, I think so. And it's been a necessary iteration because if you think about Sales Cloud, traditionally it's just been a seat-based offering. And a lot of customers still want to buy seat-based from us, which makes sense. It's predictable. It's easy. The thing that we've heard, though, is, hey, don't flood me with add-ons. Like, make it super simple. And so we have. We consolidated down to our Agent Force 1 edition, which is think of our top tier edition that's inclusive of everything Sales Cloud has. Or if you're content with the existing edition that you're on, you can buy Agent Force for sales, which is where all of our agent capabilities live.

39:00And so we make it super simple if you're interested in the seat price. If you're interested in the more consumptive nature, you can go ahead and buy a bunch of flex credits and experiment and go down the path of building your own agents or leveraging them against the templates that we've built as well. So there's more learning to come here. In fact, we're going to introduce a leads worked metric here pretty soon. So think about it more outcome based pricing for sales solutions. but it's all measurable because we have things like our digital wallet which allows us to track and and understand and we have a bunch of calculators so i think we'll continue to learn

39:40Sophie Buonassisi: and iterate our pricing so it sounds like you're bundling a lot more um at least based on feedback yeah yeah make it easier make yeah everything comes down to make it easy for the customer i love it um no that that that's great that completely makes sense but from a revenue you shift perspective now that you've kind of got the seat base, you've got the consumption base with flex credits. Where does the split come in? I would say like, is the majority coming from one and the other? Are you seeing people shift over from seat? If you have any kind of metrics around that, curious, just an overarching kind of division around that.

40:14I think some customers are in different places than others, right? But I would say we're still largely seat-based from a sales spot standpoint with the consumption more and more growing along with our headless strategy that we just introduced a few, I guess about a month ago now. I think in the future, it's going to flip and I think we'll be more and more outcome-based and that will be consumptive in nature. I think that's just the necessary evolution and we're on that path. But I don't want to get too far ahead of where our customers are or want us to be.

40:53Sophie Buonassisi: Completely makes sense. what's going on are we in a sas apocalypse or not i don't think so at all i think the era of sas is changing right i mean we're moving toward a majestic future and that's how we're building but at our core i think about our tools and the data foundation that we bring and the outcomes that we generate i think sas is evolving and i tell everybody who listen to this is like great products win. So in every era, some companies have failed and others have thrived. And I think Salesforce is in an amazing position to thrive. And I don't think we're in a sass apocalypse at all. I mean, I completely agree with you.

41:34Sophie Buonassisi: I don't think we are either, but we had to address it because the headlines say it. I think the headlines say it, but anyone really in the trenches building knows and sees the revenue numbers, like very much so the opposite. it. Like you guys are, are hiring, you're seeing acceleration on the revenue side. Like it is, yeah, it is not doom and gloom, which is good news for everyone. Brilliant. Leadership, any kind of favorite books or I guess even now, where do you get your learnings from? Maybe it's not books, but any kind of favorite sources that have been helpful for you? Oh, wow. That's a great question um i i you know i grew up in a family where my dad was a ceo and in early technology in the silicon valley like worked at xerox park and like went up through sun microsystems and was a ceo for paul allen for a number of years so i get a lot of my leadership learnings from him um but throughout my career i've always found that it kind of didn't matter what i was working on it mattered the person I was working for if I could learn from them if I could be inspired by them and the team that I was surrounding myself with and if we had the opportunity to win and so those are still my kind of guideposts as I think about who I learned from how I learned and how my leadership style evolves I love it that's fantastic that you've got that inspiration for him.

43:00Sophie Buonassisi: And you're a baseball guy. You grew up playing baseball competitively, but we're in World Cup season. So it's soccer time to thrive. Who are you betting on winning? Well, everybody I bet on has lost thus far. So I don't know that I'll give tips. But, you know, Argentina, I kind of like them. Love to see it. So the data is there. The data is there to support. Yeah. And we have with our recent acquisition of Momentum, they have a big presence in Argentina. And so they were very happy about the win today. I bet. That is super exciting. Chris, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for the conversation.

43:38Sophie Buonassisi: This has been great. Thanks for having me. This has been awesome. Appreciate it.