Salesforce
A cloud CRM and enterprise software company that now sells AI agents as digital labor.
Salesforce's Agentforce worked quickly for SaaStr: with a distilled prompt, it reached a 70% response rate from leads reps had skipped within a day. Salesforce backs this with about 2,000 hands-on deployment staff while hiring more field reps than ever. Lesson: aim agents at neglected leads first, and deliver live value before signing, as one $3 million deal did.
- 1Staff forward deployed engineersFocused on customer success
- 2Deploy during the pilotEngineer does the whole deployment
- 3Agent live on day oneTrained and in production before the check
- 4Sales handles procurementOne $3 million deal worked this way
- 5Contract e-signedROI already delivered
From Jason Lemkin, SaaStr
What was said about Salesforce
SaaStr pointed Agentforce at leads its reps had skipped. Given SaaStr's distilled prompt, Agentforce worked pretty well within a day. It got a 70% response rate from inbound leads that sales had decided were not worth their time.
Reps skip leads when the commission is too small or they are busy. Jason Lemkin says anyone with a few thousand leads or website visitors has enough data to benefit. His description of those leads: "Those are people that were dying to interact with us."
Salesforce backs Agentforce with about 2,000 people on hands-on deployment. Salesforce has roughly 2,000 people on hands-on deployment. It is also hiring more field reps than ever, not fewer.
Lemkin cites this as a sign that AI agent sales still depend on people helping customers get the agent working.
Make the agent deliver live value before the contract is signed. Customers now expect the AI agent to work during the pilot, before the big check. Staffing forward deployed engineers focused on customer success gets the agent trained and in production on day one.
One AI leader closed a $3 million deal where the forward deployed engineer did the whole deployment and sales only handled procurement. Lemkin says companies still running small pilots that roll out over years are growing about 8%. His line: "You've got to deliver the ROI before the document is e-signed today."
Behind the founder: Marc Benioff
Benioff runs it like a 25-year-old startup with 75,000 people, about $38 billion in revenue and a market cap above $300 billion. Its own help site resolves 83% of inquiries with no human and cut human escalations by 50%, and it runs about 2 trillion AI transactions a week. Benioff is testing celebrity ads with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, a live help site, and marketing against Microsoft Copilot. He is hiring 1,000 to 2,000 account executives and shipped it to 135,000 customers. Fiscal 2025 was meant to be the year of Data Cloud, which was being turned on across all 135,000 customers. Agent technology moved faster than expected, so the plan shifted to Agentforce.
SaaStr pointed Agentforce at leads its reps had skipped. Given SaaStr's distilled prompt, Agentforce worked pretty well within a day. It got a 70% response rate from inbound leads that sales had decided were not worth their time.
Reps skip leads when the commission is too small or they are busy. Jason Lemkin says anyone with a few thousand leads or website visitors has enough data to benefit. His description of those leads: "Those are people that were dying to interact with us."
Salesforce backs Agentforce with about 2,000 people on hands-on deployment. Salesforce has roughly 2,000 people on hands-on deployment. It is also hiring more field reps than ever, not fewer.
Lemkin cites this as a sign that AI agent sales still depend on people helping customers get the agent working.
Make the agent deliver live value before the contract is signed. Customers now expect the AI agent to work during the pilot, before the big check. Staffing forward deployed engineers focused on customer success gets the agent trained and in production on day one.
One AI leader closed a $3 million deal where the forward deployed engineer did the whole deployment and sales only handled procurement. Lemkin says companies still running small pilots that roll out over years are growing about 8%. His line: "You've got to deliver the ROI before the document is e-signed today."
We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened next | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr)
Agentforce, given SaaStr's distilled prompt, worked pretty well in a day and got a 70% response rate from leads reps had skipped. Salesforce has about 2,000 people on hands-on deployment and is hiring more field reps than ever.
Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield
It bought Slack in one of the biggest tech acquisitions of its time, and Butterfield left it two and a half years ago.
He saved OpenAI, invented the “Like” button, and built Google Maps: Bret Taylor (Sierra)
Bought Quip for $750 million, and sits in the direct sales lineage with Oracle, SAP and ServiceNow.
Why great AI products are all about the data | Shaun Clowes (CPO at Confluent)
Its configured instances become a customer's own process, and even Salesforce can't list the sales rules inside one without reading the code. Shaun called its sales and marketing machine a PhD in marketing, and said nobody gets fired for buying it.
Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll
Low on features, it beat rivals like Vantive, Clarify and Remedy, which cost millions and took years to install. It installed with a URL and its logo said No Software.
Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua
Benioff is a great marketer who treats a keynote like a product, pushing the envelope by standing outside a competitor's conference. His advice is to keep a beginner's mind and listen to customers.
Geoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a market
Its sales and service copilots come closest to the tornado. They run across the whole base on its own language model, giving high productivity at modest risk.
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy | Richard Rumelt
Salesforce began by asking how software should work: like a webpage, as Amazon does, rather than a computer program. Rumelt uses it as an example of imagining the perfect version of an ordinary thing.
What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom)
Part of the incumbent customer support landscape with decades of table stakes. Early customers bought Intercom next to it for modern messaging.
A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Sales Pitch)
It began as CRM for very small businesses, so buyers needed no category explanation. Lenny's search for forum software shrank to whatever integrated with Salesforce, and nobody rejects it for being old.
The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway)
B2B stacks revolve around Salesforce. In B2B2C, pairing it with HubSpot has no good answer, because neither is a CDP and mapping users to companies gets painful.
The power of strategic narrative | Andy Raskin
Benioff pitched a shift from software to the cloud instead of comparing features with Siebel, and told buyers to go buy Siebel if they wanted the old game. Zuora's CEO learned the move there as employee number 11.
How to achieve hypergrowth in your business and career | Carilu Dietrich (Atlassian)
It does advertising well by featuring real customers.
The ultimate guide to product-led sales | Elena Verna
If sales lives in Salesforce, bring PQA data into it rather than forcing a new tool. Salesforce widgets are part of the prototype stack.
The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab)
The sales-led pioneer that has begun adding self-service, an example of the trend of sales-led enterprise products adding a product-led component.
How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts
Early on it built a community of outside consultants who helped companies implement it, the model for post-product-market-fit enterprise products.
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