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Experts of Experience
Salesforce Solved The SEO Issue
00:56:30
AI isn’t just transforming marketing — it’s reshaping the entire customer experience.
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A
And sales cloud specifically, we've really solved SEO.
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B
Something that has come up in multiple episodes of Experts of Experience is how can you show up in AI generated LLM responses?
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C
Almost every CMO I'm talking to is like, I'm not sure how to show up in LLM results. That's where people are looking. That's where traffic's coming from. Zero click might be happening in the future and I don't know what to do.
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B
That's why today we're still stealing this episode of Marketing Trends with Amber Armstrong, who's the CMO of Salesforce Applications.
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A
This is a really scary moment for marketers. We have to switch from this thinking that our websites are intended to capture early funnel traffic to nope, you have to put the content on the website because all of the early funnel is going to happen in LLMs.
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C
That's crazy.
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B
Welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lacy Peace, and today I am hijacking an episode of our sister podcast called Marketing Trends. Marketing Trends is hosted by Mission CEO Stephanie Postols, where she gets to sit down and talk to marketing leaders across all different industries. And I've said it over and over again on this show that marketing is usually your customer's first touch point with you as a brand. And it is so vital and so important that that first time they see your logo, they get a sense of who you are, what you're about, what you can solve for them. And there's been this fear among many marketing leaders and business leaders in general that the content that they've been creating for discoverability, you know, SEO content will no longer be relevant in the new generative engine optimization world or geo. Amber has a different story. She doesn't think that it's all for nothing. In fact, Amber has a really interesting take on how GEO content actually will tie back to SEO content and all the different things that you need to know and understand as we move into this more generative world. So without further ado, here's Stephanie Postuls hosting a Marketing Trends episode with Amber Armstrong, CMO of Salesforce Applications.
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C
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Marketing Trends. I'm Stephanie Postles, your host and today I'm so excited because we have Amber Armstrong joining us for round two on Marketing Trends. Amber, welcome back.
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A
Thank you so much. It's so exciting to be here.
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C
I know. I was just looking at your episode and it was 2021, your last episode. I think you were CMO live person then. Yeah, it's been a long time.
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A
It's been a While a lot has.
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C
Changed, yeah, I'm excited to dive into all the things that have changed. But first I want to start with your background, because of course, I was, you know, scrolling on your LinkedIn and I'm like, whoa, she's first been in marketing her whole life, basically. And you started as an intern at IBM and now, I mean, you're at Salesforce, you're overseeing, you know, different products, services that have over $20 billion in revenue. So I'd love to just hear about your career path and. Yeah. Your background.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. Well, actually, before I did my internship at IBM, I worked at two small software companies in the warehouse management software space.
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C
Okay.
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A
And I decided to go back to business school school because I wanted to get a job at a bigger company. And I thought that's the only way I was going to be able to do that. And so I did. I went to Chapel Hill and then got the job at IBM coming out of that and was interned there for the summer. Loved it, and went back full time. And I had 14 years at IBM. And in those 14 years, I mean, IBM's gotta be one of the best training grounds out there. I just, I learned so, so much. People ask me, you know, why did you stay at IBM for so long? Well, because I never got bored, right? There was always something to learn. I was a part of a program where I got rotated through different parts of the company. And so I really got this broad exposure across marketing. And one of the things that really stuck out for me in that part of my career is someone said, you know, who do you want to be when you grow up? I was like, well, I want to be the most senior person in marketing. And at the time it was this man named Jill Duncan. And. And I was like, so I'm just going to collect his skills. That was the advice. Just collect his skills. And so I did. Across my career at IBM, I did that. And then when I decided I was ready to leave IBM, there were kind of a few things that were kind of coming together, but the main thing was I kind of knew what the next jobs were. And I was like, I really want to go fast and I think I can do it on my own. And I wanted to stay in the AI space. The majority of my career has been in AI in all of its forms, all the way back from, like predictive AI and now, now obviously in generative. And I got this offer to come to Live Person, which is in the AI space. And I went there and I did some of the best Work. I'm most proud of some of the work that we did at Live Person. We launched this whole curiously human brand, really redid the website stem to stern. I mean we really did some really great, great work. And then ultimately I missed the big company. I missed that. Being able to have that kind of constant change in scale and the global pieces of it were a really important part of what I like to do. And so now I've been at Salesforce for about two and a half years, a little bit more than that, and I'm having an absolute blast. I just took on a new expanded role. So I've been leading sales cloud for about Right. At two and a half years and I just expanded my role. So now I lead sales cloud, marketing cloud, service cloud and commerce cloud with leaders kind of reporting into me. And so I get to, I get to work on this over $20 billion set of businesses which is just, it's, it's really, really fun and challenging. Very challenging.
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C
Yeah, that's, I mean it's wild to think about that many things falling under you. I mean, what does your day to day look like with so many different priorities, especially knowing that, I mean, I think Sales Cloud is 25 years old and is Service Cloud 20 years old?
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A
Yeah.
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C
And then you've got some more fast growth products that are also in the fold. Like how do you manage your time and what does your days look like?
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A
Well, the first trick is I have really good leaders, so I have a really great team. I'm actually hiring for a couple of the roles right now.
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C
So what are you hiring for? Let's give some shout outs. A lot of great people are listening.
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A
We're hiring for the sales cloud and the service called Sema Roles right now.
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C
Okay.
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A
And, but within those teams I have really great leaders as well. And so I have really figured out kind of who's great at what and I'm able to kind of delegate and bring them along as I'm filling these roles. And then we have incredible leaders for marketing cloud and commerce cloud as well. So that's the first thing and all of my roles is like finding good people, leaning into their skills and making sure that where we have gaps, we kind of lift up around, around those. But the other thing that we did, and we just did this, actually this past week we just officially launched our kind of cross team call and we have six priorities and those six priorities are the things we're going to do consistently across the, the clouds because we're not trying to create this kind of Amalgamation of clouds. Like it's. Each cloud needs to be successful, successful independently because they're all touching different buyers and they're solving different problems. So the six priorities go across those six, but then I can't be involved in all of those and I don't want to create this open overhead for the teams. So we're actually introducing guilds on each of the six priorities and someone inside of the organization will lead the guild and then they have cohorts, so they'll have one person from each of the clouds that will come in and work with them on solving all the things need to happen around that particular priority. And so it's kind of two things, right? It's how having the priorities, clearly communicating those and then ensuring that the right people are thinking about those priorities every day and collaborating across the teams. Yep, we'll see if it works. We just launched it.
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C
Amazing. So what does it mean to have a guild? Like, tell me more about the thinking, like what does that look like? Because I've been a part of cross functional teams before that try and help, you know, keep the goals top of mind and make sure things are happening. I was on one at Google. Very hard to try and keep all these leaders talking to each other and. But also not merging them all into like same of same.
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A
Yeah.
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C
And so what is, how do you explain this concept of a guild and how to make this cross functional team work?
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A
Well, I'll give you an example. We'll just take one of the, one of the priorities. Right? So one of the priorities is around Dreamforce. As anyone who knows anything about Salesforce, Dreamforce is, I mean, I think it's the best industry event out there. It is incredible and it's really important from our pipe gen perspective and also from our progression perspective. And it takes a lot to execute. I think. You know, people think you, you show up to Dreamforce and it's incredible, but you don't realize all the very painstaking detail that happens. Unless you're in marketing, then you probably really understand deeply all the painstaking details. So the guild leader for Dreamforce will work across the four clouds to say, okay, here's the things we're doing. Like let's have consistency and kind of making sure we're approaching things in a similar way. Let's make sure that we're communicating with each other where we can cross collaborate, where we can, you know, work in marketing, help support commerce's message, work in sales, help support services message and drawing that communication. And then from a career perspective for the guild leader, because these are roles that they volunteer for. Um, they will get to present and kind of in a quarterly basis, this. I ask people to take on a guild lead for a year, for fiscal year, and they will get to present to our VP of product marketing, ultimately to our cmo, Ariel Kelman. And so it gives them a lot of opportunity to get exact exposure and also to learn more on something that they don't focus on every single day.
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C
That's awesome. I mean, definitely seems like it's going to help with efficiencies and also promoting people and letting them get exposure. What are some other guilds if you can share? I mean, the Dreamforce one seems very like. Yes, of course. That's a very important one. We've gone to Dreamforce a couple times, and every time I'm like in awe of the things that are going on at any moment and wondering how many people it took to just get this one booth here, giving this one experience. And there's hundreds of them.
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A
So they're. It's really, really. We have an incredible. Erin Olez leads our Dreamforce team, and she's incredible.
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C
Right?
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A
You're gonna. You're gonna put me on the spot here to be able to remember all of my priorities across the six. But the first one is we use a process at. At Salesforce called V2 mom, and it's all about our metrics, our vision, value metrics, methods. And one is having consistency in how we're looking at the numbers, how we're gonna measuring our success every month. Then, of course, we actually sit inside of product marketing, inside of Salesforce, and so making sure that we have great quality around our demos, our first call decks, all of the core basic assets. Then the third one is really aligning around Dreamforce, but also La Lima, La Lima and our company kickoffs. We do a quarterly company kickoff, which is a thing I think I've never heard of that at another company. And we do it to get alignment across the whole organization. So it's really important that we show up at that meeting as united team to our sellers so that they have really clear understanding. So La Lima and Dreamforce kind of go hand in hand because it's all about kind of bringing those messages and those activations together. Then how we actually enable our sellers. We enable our sellers around the problems that our customers are trying to solve. And in the past, we've answered. Answered those in silos. Here's how you solve the problem with sales products or service products. And so bringing those together, we will enable our sellers across all of these. And then something we haven't done great at Salesforce yet is account based marketing. We have great like high end, high touch kind of events and things for our, you know, most significant customers. But we haven't done a great job at account based marketing from a digital perspective. And so that's something that we're launching that we'll have someone really dedicated and focused in to. And then the very last one is all around the team. Right. And how do we build this culture where we're always learning and growing and challenging ourselves? One of the things in that this is something I'm leading right now because we don't have an actual guild leader for this right now is a career day event, something I did at IBM. We're repeating it now at Salesforce where we're bringing in executives and they're going to answer questions. We are literally people have anonymously submitted questions.
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C
Oh fun.
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A
And I have 10 executives who are going to be in the room and they're going to draw a question out of the hat and answer it live. And then we do a speed mentoring session. And it's such a fun event. But that's an example of something that when someone actually leads this guild, they'll come up with. How are the ways we can help the team expand their skills? How can we give them challenges and make sure that they're always learning and growing?
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C
That's fun. We had something similar to that at Google and it was super successful of just being able to ask executives anything in an anonymous way and also be able to see career paths across the company. So while I was in Google Maps, Street View, this whole Geo Group, I saw a path if I wanted to get into search or wanted to get into cloud or whatever it might be and it was cool just to see how you can transfer knowledge and skill sets and learn from executives who are, you know, doing something similar.
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A
Well, we did actually as a part of this kind of getting right we have a, this opening video that's kind of a slice and dice of these comments from some of these leaders that are participating. But we had them actually do at least four minute videos and they answer questions like what was your first job? What was your most embarrassing moment? Like it's, it's really fun and we'll use that as our ongoing career content. And so kind of once a month we'll publish a video, that sort of thing just to kind of be able to keep an ongoing drumbeat of focus there.
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C
Yeah, that's fun. Now I'm wondering, what was your first job? Have you ever had any, like, weird first jobs when you were younger?
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A
No. One thing that's. I know it's so, so disappointing, but I am a, to probably to a fault. Like, I have a plan and I follow my plan all the way through. I had no plan to have a first job. I didn't. Was not interested in having a job in high school and my dad said, nope, you gotta get a job. So I just went to the grocery store.
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C
Okay.
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A
And was like, can I get a job here? And they gave me a job and I did it all the way through college.
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C
Wow.
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A
Yeah.
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C
Okay. You were committed. Yeah. Committed to consistency. I like it.
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A
But it quickly even. I mean, I'd been there maybe six months before I got my first management job. Like, I really have always loved, like, what's the next challenge? Like, once I kind of have one kind of challenge under me, I'm like, ready for the next. Ready to keep pushing it.
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C
Wow, that's cool. Okay, so now thinking about that, pushing for challenges, you've been in this AI space. I mean, to me, you've been in it longer than most people have probably been in it now at Salesforce, I think you all have launched over 8,000 agents with AgentForce, which is wild. Within a year. I mean, one year, 8,000 agents, that's crazy. Like, what are you seeing in this space that's exciting you when it comes to these AI agents?
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A
Yeah. And it's, it's actually many, many more agents that we've launched, but it's 8,000 deals that we've done deals. Okay.
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C
That's a lot in a year.
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A
It's incredible. It's such a fast growing product and it's, you know, it's doing a lot of the things that we've talked about for a long time, Right. It's automating the processes. It's taking the things that we don't want humans to have to spend their time on and automating that work. But what's different is it's now doing it really well because these agents come with all of this context and all of this data across your CRM, across third parties, et cetera. And so we can now live this truth with our customers that like, yes, you can solve these challenges. Your sales teams can be more efficient, Your marketing teams can be more efficient. The way our marketing team is using AI is really, really, really impressive. And not even just the Salesforce tools, Right? Of course they use the Salesforce tools, but they also are out There using. We have Gemini. I have full access to Gemini, so we can input any information into Gemini that we want to, and it's trusted and protected. And, and the team, it comes up with incredibly creative ways to do that. The things they've done with NotebookLM. I mean, it's, It's. It's fascinating. It's really fun to watch. And I feel like we're just in this moment where work will not ever be done the way that it was before, and it's really, truly, truly different. And we just have to make sure we're focusing on the team. Like, this isn't cheating. This is how you get work done. Now, that's a really important thing. That's really shifted in the last year, I would say.
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C
Yep. Yeah, I'd love to hear about some of the stories around what your marketing team is doing that you're most proud of or that you saw what they were doing. You're like, okay, I would have never even thought about that. And then after, I want to get into some of your, like, just a couple customers where you're like, I'm watching them automate something that six months ago, I would have never even thought about.
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A
Yeah.
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C
So maybe start with your team first.
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A
Okay, so we'll start with my team. So we have this channel where people share all the ways that they're using AI internally, just kind of as like a learning and opportunity. Someone on my team came up with a notebook example of how they're training our sellers and giving our sellers access to literally any information that they could possibly want. So we input all of our customer stories, all, everything that we have on a specific product into a notebook lm, and then the seller can go in and ask queries, it can create a podcast. I mean, there's lots of things that it can do to be really helpful. And now on the service cloud side, we are answering, which, you know, every marketer on this call, especially in the tech space, if you've done a Gartner response, you know, it's 160 questions. We're now using a notebook and service cloud to actually be able to help us answer those questions and ensure we've got the consistency, that sort of thing. The other thing, another example of how the teams are using it is, you know, at Salesforce, Slack is so core to how we actually get work done. And I can't imagine doing life without Slack. It's just. It's. It's really good. So Agent Force is embedded into Slack, and I mean, everything that we need to get done can be done in Slack. There are very few things from a business process or a manager perspective I have to do outside of Slack. I rarely go to email. I regularly miss emails because it's just I don't go there. And so like the team using AI for everything they can in Slack, right? So Slack Search has AI. There's a great tool that the team's using now inside of Slack where you can say explain with AI and so you're on a just a specific message that's got, you know, maybe 20 acronyms on it. You can say explain with AI. And Slack actually goes out and searches your entire existence of Slack and other sources and says here's what this means.
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C
So good for especially like new employees being like what are all these acronyms? What are these products?
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A
What are these new products? When you, you know, the way it came up was I had someone come into a, a work stream on how we were using, how we're talking to our customers using Agent Force ourself. And she got into this Slack channel and was like, I have no idea what they're even talking about. She used this capability, showed up to the call, was prepared, no one had to do the reset. It's really changed how everyone's doing work. And I'll tell you about a couple customers, I'll tell you about one in particular that I'm very partial to. So I will own my bias here. My husband is the CEO of a company called Pursina and Pristina uses Agent Force in three different ways. So they use what has been called our sales development rep, which basically allows we talk about it. At our marketing event this past two weeks ago, we talked about it as the end of do not reply. Right. So a company sends you a message and it says do not reply to this email. That's a terrible experience.
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C
Yeah, I've never actually thought about that. I'm always like, what is this email for? Then why can't I?
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A
It's like this one way conversation. But now with our marketing and our sales capabilities and how those things are coming together, you can reply to the email and the agent will answer. And the agent knows the context of the things that you've done on the website. It knows this broader context of what you're trying to solve and it's able to act as what we've previously called a sales development rep. And so Prisina is using a capability like that to be able to outreach to referring doctors. And so as the referring doctors have questions about the practice, they're able to answer those.
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C
Wow.
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A
They're also using it for patients where patients have questions. Prisina, I don't think I actually said this, but Prisina focuses on diabetes care.
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C
Okay.
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A
And so when patients have questions about getting appointments scheduled, et cetera, they're able to answer that using the service agent side of the agent force. And then they have. The thing that's really unique about Prisina is they pair social workers and doctors together to solve diabetes. So they make sure that the, the social workers are trained appropriately using our sales coach capability. And so they know that when they get on the phone with a patient, they can, they're social worker is going to be able to answer those questions in a way that's really guided by Prisina's principles and values and their approach and how they solve diabetes. It's. I'm very biased.
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C
Yeah, I mean, I'm going to be biased now too. It's pretty cool. And what numbers has he seen since pulling Agent Force into these different applications?
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A
It's still pretty early. They haven't released anything publicly yet.
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C
Just dinner time conversations of like this is working pretty well.
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A
Yeah. They're very excited about the ability to automate things inside of the medical practice so that their social workers and their doctors are just spending time with patients. That's the dream. And that's why, you know, I think they've really trusted Agent Force. There's actually they did a big video for Salesforce and it's, it's pretty fun. It's a great story.
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C
Oh, that's fun. Okay. Anyone else that you want that you're watching and you're really impressed with right now?
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A
There's so many customers that are just doing things that are really, really exciting right now.
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C
I've seen some of your guys customer stories and every one of them is very different, which is why I love it. They all have very unique use cases that probably now have a lot more threads that, you know, between retail there's probably a lot of similar use cases. But in the beginning it was all so different, which is why it was fun to keep track of.
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A
Yes.
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C
So something you and I talked about before we hopped on here was around like AI and the future of SEO and content. And this has been a very large topic of conversation. Probably over the last 15 episodes I've been doing where almost every CMO I'm talking to is like, I'm not sure how to show up in LLM results. And that's where people are looking. That's where traffic's coming from zero click might be happening in the future. And I don't know what to do. And I feel like you do based off what we talked about. So I would love just to hear some of your thoughts around this space of how to ensure your brand, your product, your services are showing up in all the places that your buyers are querying.
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A
Absolutely. You're, you're, you're in my jam. I love it. So I really love SEO and I think, you know, in sales cloud specifically, we really solved SEO in that we took a very targeted approach. And so I'll tell you about how we started on it and then how it's evolved. So the way that we started is we looked at our competitors who are ranking on keywords that we really cared about keywords specific to volume, particular strategic areas or business, and we just listed out those keywords and we started publishing content against those keywords. And we publish that content at the right length. There's a lot of real detailed thought that goes into how do you win that specific keyword? And we had a lot of success.
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C
One keyword or long tail keywords or both?
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A
Both. Okay, both. We did kind of clusters and we said, okay, this is a cluster of keywords, so let's publish around all of these keywords so that we can ultimately win this very, very important keyword. And it worked incredibly well.
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C
And this was starting two years ago when you came into Salesforce, Right. That's when you started doing this with sales cloud.
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A
Yes, with sales cloud. And it's all, all of that content shows up as sales blazer. So if you go to salesblazer.com that's where that content lives. It's all about how you, you know, how sellers can meet their career goals, can solve their business challenges. And, um, it's not necessarily about, you know, hey, here's the thing. You need to go buy from Salesforce.
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C
So good. I think this is my thing that I'm harping on all the time to any marketers, like, just do good thought leadership. Do helpful content. Would you read this content or are you constantly just pushing, you know, your products and building content around your products all the time versus get outside of that and think, what is this person actually looking for online? Like, even though this is B2B, they're still a consumer and they're still looking for career tips and how to be, you know, how to make money, whatever it might be. So I love that. Yeah, you called that out.
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A
Yeah. And so you just start with the data. Right. What do people want to know. They want to know what they're searching for, right? And so that's how they vote. And so we. I'm a little bit competitive. And so we say every search is a competition and we want to win them all. We only want to win the ones that have high enough volume in us in order for us to invest the time and money into that specific, specific keyword. But we've been really, really successful at doing that. And this. We're now rolling out their service Blazer. There's a lot of other kind of community things that bring both the content and the community together that we've launched across Salesforce. Agent Blazer is another. Another example. So then when we started to see all this, like LLMs and Google started to change how search worked, right? It was just last summer that, you know, the AI answers started coming in and they weren't even coming in for every question right now, anything you query, there's some sort of an AI answer at some varying level. And so we panicked a little bit because we're like, oh, my gosh, like, all this work we've done, all of this money we've invested and all of this content, it's just gonna go to the wayside. Wow, this is a really scary moment for marketers because we're so reliant. You know, digital and organic traffic is incredibly important part of our pipeline number. And then what we realized is actually we're getting traffic from the LLMs and it's not super high volume. This is. We started tracking this last July. But what we see is this hockey stick where the traffic coming in from LLMs is really, really high. It's growing incredibly quickly. And when they come in, they fill out a form 40% of the time.
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C
40%?
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A
Yeah. That's incredible.
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C
What was that compared to before? Just for reference, ish.
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A
Paid media, probably about 15%. So organic, probably more like 25%. So it's significantly above even our organic traffic coming in and filling out a form which is like, okay, wow, that's like the light bulb, right? We have to switch from this thinking that our websites are intended to capture early funnel traffic, which is what we've all been told for many, many years to. Nope, you have to put the content on the website because all of that early funnel is going to happen in LLMs very, very soon. For your leaders and innovation, it's happening right now. For everyone else, it's very quick. Follow. As Google has now deployed so much of the AI answers, that's fine because your website is still going to be the thing that captures them. It's still, still going to be the thing where they get specific information and maybe they won't be filling out forms, that's fine. But they will still go into chat. They'll talk to the agent. If you go to. I'll give you an example of where we see customers really engaging well online with our agent is if you go to help.salesforce.com it's incredible. Agent Force answers our service questions so incredibly well that I think it's like we just passed a million solved cases.
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C
Yep. I think we actually pulled. So we had on Bernard Slowy. He came on our other podcast, Experts of Experience that shout out sponsored by Salesforce, and he pulled that page up. Is that the one with the big search box that you just type in anything you want? Yeah, yeah. So he had, we had a whole episode talking quite a bit about that and how many cases you're solving. And like the ticker's going up at like every second.
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A
Yeah.
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C
Pretty impressive.
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A
And it just crossed a million. It's, I mean, it's so, so, so, so impactful and so let the agents do the talking. Let the agents answer the questions and then trust that if you put good thought leadership content out there, the LLMs, the, you know, all of the, the normal search kind of capabilities will actually guide people to your website when it's the right time for them to come to the website.
- [32:02]
C
Yeah. So, I mean, I'm sure every marketer's like, who we. Okay, so everything we did, it's still good. Especially if you have good traffic going to those pieces of content you have good thought leadership. I mean, I always say, I think you need to have it in all forms, like written audio, YouTube, like you should be showing up in a very omnichannel way so that these LLMs can find you in many places. What about when it comes to structuring it? Because that's been a big question is okay, I have all my content there, but these pieces still aren't getting pulled by these LLMs and they're finding my competitors article or a clip from YouTube that's just. Okay, so how do you guide your team on structuring the content so that it gets found?
- [32:41]
A
Yeah. I'll tell you, I am certainly not the expert at how to do the backend SEO work. I have incredible teammates that, that do that. But there's this guide actually that G2 just put out and G2 is great at search. I talk about them all the time. It's like it's our second website. Right. If you search for XYZ solution, XYZ product, XYZ software, you will get a G2 answer right after the brand, if not before. And so they have clearly figured this out. They're obviously ahead of the game and thinking about how they approach LLM search. They released a report. It's the 2025 Buyer Behavior Report that just came out.
- [33:31]
C
Yep. We got it up. Pulled up on the screen. Even though it's small right now. We've got it pulled up.
- [33:35]
A
Yeah. It's so great because it gives you the very specific details that as a cmo, I don't know to do, but that my web team knows to do. And so there's like three pages in there that I think are just really, really valuable that everyone should kind of understand and just action immediately.
- [33:57]
C
Yeah, I love that. And for anyone who can't see the screen right now, we will link up this G2 report as well in the show notes because it looks very helpful.
- [34:05]
A
Yeah.
- [34:06]
C
Okay. So structuring it well, making great content. Is there anything else in this space that you are either experimenting with right now? Yeah. When it comes to content SEO and making sure that you're found everywhere, the.
- [34:20]
A
Only other thing I would say we're really kind of learning and experimenting with is how our agent answers the questions that come into our marketing site. Right. So we have help.salesforce.com that gets answered with service answers. But how does it have what happens on our pages where we're trying to communicate and progress someone down the funnel?
- [34:42]
C
Right.
- [34:42]
A
And so we're experimenting right now and learning about how do we. How do we make sure the agent is doing the right thing, Surfacing the right content that is still thought leadership, but also helping to continue to progress them. There's. There's a lot to learn, and that's based and it's. I think it's going really well, but we're still experimenting there.
- [35:02]
C
Yeah. Okay. So for anyone who's thinking about building their first AI agent would. Are there any pitfalls where, you know, I mean, I'm imagining, okay, I'm trying to sell this, eventually this product, and instead this agent got caught up in news and being a thought leader, and it never ended up having any conversion or like, any stories like that of things to avoid or missteps that people might take early on?
- [35:27]
A
Yeah, I think it's just lots of. Lots of testing.
- [35:29]
C
Yeah.
- [35:30]
A
Right. Just test and test and test again, try to trick it. And obviously, you know, at Salesforce, we. We sell these Things so we know how they work very well. You have to choose a trusted provider because it's, it's not something that I think, I personally think people should be building on their own because there's just too much risk to your brand. I think go with a trusted provider where you know you can put the right information out there and that you're going to have the right guardrails. It's incredibly important.
- [36:03]
C
Okay, so we were just talking about G2 and I'd love to hear your perspective on third party sources. I mean that was a big piece to SEO back in the day was these best of lists, the best CRM, the best this and G2 giving. You know, here's what the customers are saying. How do you think about these third party sources or even thought leaders that are being the drivers of, you know, how you're possibly going to be found?
- [36:27]
A
They're incredibly important. Right. Because you know, it's these LLMs are using this, all of this context and making decisions on which is valuable and not valuable. We actually publish our own best of lists and that's something that has been. It took a lot of approvals.
- [36:43]
C
Yeah. To get your competitors on them. I always.
- [36:45]
A
Okay, yeah, we do okay. And we, we try to be, you know, balanced in these things. We also come from a position where, you know, if you look at Gartner as an example, we are a leader in every magic quadrant that we care about.
- [37:00]
C
Right.
- [37:01]
A
So we do come from a strong leadership position. So that's a little bit maybe unique to, to Salesforce versus where we just have this wide breadth of skills where we really are the leaders. But G2, I talked about kind of how they come in, but they also. It's from social, it's from, you know, it's, it's across a variety of areas. Continuing that third party validation is really important because it does, it does feed the LLMs. But it's also like people are still going to go and look at the Gartner reports, right. They're going to look at G2 and G2 is still seeing that. You know, they, I don't know if the traffic's going up or down overall, but they're still seeing the top Fortune 500 and also SMBs both visit the site. So I think it's do the same things we've been doing, but pay attention to when they're coming in from LLMs and how does it change their behavior?
- [37:58]
C
Yeah, I'm wondering if there's any metrics that you used to have in maybe your QBRs that now you're throwing out because of, I mean, this different buying behavior. I mean, I've seen a couple stats. I think it's like 80% of the B2B buyer journey is already made up by the time they're talking to sales. By the time they. They've already done all their research, they've already looked at G2, they've looked at Gartner, they've follow some influencers on LinkedIn. So it makes me question, like, what kind of metrics maybe are shifting within your org that you're like, we used to look at this one really strongly and now we don't and we look at these instead.
- [38:32]
A
I am so hyper focused on metrics. I don't think I've really given any of them up yet.
- [38:37]
C
You're told not all of them, but.
- [38:40]
A
It'S because they tell you something about that kind of part of the journey. Like, I think there's still. I don't have any metrics that I've really, truly walked away from. I will give you an example though, of how I change metrics across the maturity of the business.
- [38:56]
C
Yeah.
- [38:56]
A
So, for example, sales cloud, when we first took on our SEO journey, I remember saying to our CEO, I'm going to publish 70 articles in this particular quarter. And he's like, Great, that seems 70. Yeah. One a day. More than one a day.
- [39:18]
C
Yeah.
- [39:18]
A
Uh, but that's what we're gonna do. And. Sorry, less than one a day. Let me back up. Yeah, so 70 articles in a particular quarter, um, that's a lot. In a specific month. We actually ended up going way above that because we found a bunch of articles that were actually things that had been created and were able to optimize and, and get some early, easy kind of wins and increase that. So we very much. In that phase of the business where we were not showing up in SEO the way we wanted to, we focused on volume of content. Now I don't need more content, I need that content to perform better. So we're doing some of the things like adding in the. The various types like adding in infographics and adding in more of this richer type of content into some of those keywords so that they kind of move from position five. We always want to be in position one, two, or three. And so we're making those kind of optimizations. But now on my service cloud side, that part of the business, which I just started working with a couple months ago, they don't yet own all the keywords we want to.
- [40:29]
C
So you need those 70 articles we.
- [40:31]
A
Are pushing hard on publish, publish, publish, keep quality, but publish. And we work with this really great agency that's helping us do this across both businesses. And I just talked to their CEO recently and said, okay, what are all the things that have worked on sales cloud? What's working or not working as we're doing this in service cloud. And so now we're applying those learnings across both teams and it's great. But you do have to measure and think about businesses differently based on where they are, their maturity in that specific part of the funnel.
- [41:11]
C
So I'm guessing the newer products that are within your purview similar like you just need to get content out there right now versus sales cloud is optimizing content that probably is getting a lot of clicks, but it's a little older.
- [41:26]
A
Yep.
- [41:26]
C
That had to think about it.
- [41:27]
A
Yep. And it's also, you know, the. We still publish probably. I think we're still publishing about 10 articles a month in sales cloud because there's still things that are important to talk to our audiences about right now. But on the service cloud side we're doing 70 and on the marketing cloud side we're doing a lot of publishing there and then of course on commerce cloud as well.
- [41:52]
C
So. Cool. Is there any formats that you're betting on when it comes to content right now that maybe is newer than of course, just written content and blogs? Is there anything you're experimenting with or you want to experiment with?
- [42:05]
A
I wish I had a more creative answer for this, but I, I just want to win an LLM. And that's long form content, like through and through. It's different types of long form content. Right. The best dev list we talked about. Yeah, I think it was just, it's, it's less about any other form until the, until LLMs start recommending videos as, you know, a high, a high quality piece of content. I think we're just focused on long form right now.
- [42:35]
C
Yep. I did see a stat that YouTube is being shown like 103% more than the previous year when it comes to showing clips of videos and using that as answers. And because they're pulling all the transcripts to these videos now and then using it to surface that content in the LLMs.
- [42:53]
A
I love that.
- [42:54]
C
Don't sleep on video.
- [42:55]
A
Yeah.
- [42:56]
C
Subtle pitch for what we do. But yeah, video's a. Coming in strong.
- [43:01]
A
I love that. I know that.
- [43:02]
C
That's great. I'll send you this thing. We just. This wrote about it too and I'd love to hear Your thoughts on him. So I. I mean, we've talked so much about AI now, and of course, a big focus is you have a lot of people under you, I'm sure, and getting them upskilled, comfortable. Like you said, the messaging is even different now, where maybe a year ago, if you're using AI, I was like, no, no, you can't use ChatGPT. No, don't write that. It's like you're cheating. If you do that, you're not thinking. And now if you're not, it's like, why aren't you being more efficient and using these tools, you know, at your disposal? So how do you measure this within, you know, the teams that you work with to make sure that your team is, you know, comfortable with AI?
- [43:44]
A
Yeah. So Salesforce is so ahead of the curve on this. Every company does these, you know, employee engagement surveys. We actually ask, how comfortable are you using AI tools? And then we track it quarter over quarter and we see how is it trending? Hopefully it's getting much better. Obviously it's only going to go up, but it's an important measure and it's a reward. Right. Like, it's like, so leaders are like, wow, Amber, your team's really comfortable in AI. Good job. Right? Same for any of the leaders. And that is exciting because it gives the team permission to use these tools and. And we share it on social. So they get accolades from their peers when they share interesting ways that they have solved this, their challenges. My product marketing team actually just got together and they all submitted, like, things they were using across different parts of the funnel, and they hosted a webinar. They shared it out on channels. I mean, they're just really doing a lot of things that are supporting each other in this. One way that I encourage people to get their teams more comfortable is encourage and share how you're using it in your personal life. So I'll tell you a little story for me?
- [45:06]
C
Yes, please.
- [45:07]
A
I just got back. I did two weeks in Japan with my family. My husband, my son and I went to Japan. I planned the whole thing in Gemini personally. And then I came back and I wrote a prompt that is about three pages long that I can now input into Gemini, and it creates this itinerary that is so incredible. It's better than any itinerary you've ever gotten from any travel agent. Like, I feel so strongly about that. And now when I want to plan our next trip, all I have to do is change the details of the trip because it already has all my family's preferences, but built into the prompt. And so that's an example and I've kind of shared that kind of verbally with my team of like, I'm using this in my day to day life. Like, how are you using it in your day to day life? Because when you use it in your day to day life, then the professional uses start to open up. Right. You start to think about, oh, I could do this, or, wow, I hate doing this part of the process. Is there a way AI can help me do that and just, I think have people showcase that work, get excited about it and reward it rather than it seeming like they're cheating or, or, you know, that, you know, AI is going to take jobs. Right. I think there is a huge fear around that. And I think the people who, especially marketers who are going to be really successful are the ones that are like, I'm going to use this superpower myself versus worrying about, you know, is this going to take my job? Like, no, I'm going to make this my superpower. And that's what people who are coming in earlier in the, the their careers, that's what they're going to do. Right. They're all going to be trained on generative capabilities in part in college. Right. And so they're going to come out very skilled at being able to do this. And so we have to make sure that as we're further in our careers, we continue to learn, we continue to try to find new ways to do things we've done forever.
- [47:14]
C
Yeah. I love the idea of like blending what you're doing in your personal life and bringing it into the office. Because to me, that is the world we're in now where, I mean, back in the day you would go into the office and you would have access to a tool that you couldn't get on your personal laptop. And so you could only do it on that company laptop. And the worlds were very separate. And now it's like you're using the same tools for work life, home life. And what a fun way to get your team trying things out with no risk, by being like, look, here's a fun personal thing I did. And I think it says a lot about you as a leader doing that as well. Because there are a lot of leaders I talk to who have not even played around with it. And it's like, well, no wonder your team is timid to use it because you're not showing them it's okay. You're not giving them a permission slip and showing how you Yourself did it and played around and messed up and got wrong answers and got right answers and how, you know. So I love that you're showing up for your team like that and giving them that permission.
- [48:08]
A
Yeah, that's fun. And I am nothing if not like hyper efficient and so I extra love it because it just makes me so much more efficient.
- [48:17]
C
Yeah, yeah, I love that. So when it comes to this comfort level with AI, I mean do you have numbers of what you're looking at, where it started out and only 1% of people said they're comfortable or is it proving through task based work you need to be able to do something to prove that you're comfortable with it? In these surveys, how do you actually measure?
- [48:37]
A
It's more of a. Do you feel that you know how to use AI to better your work efforts? So it's kind of almost a yes, no kind of a question. Um, and yeah, people are trending very, very positively on it.
- [48:51]
C
Yeah. If they say no, does it guide them to something to help?
- [48:56]
A
It doesn't right now. I do think though that we're looking at it like and I'm looking at it now across these businesses and we have different levels of answers. All, all four of the major teams that I lead are all actually trending very, very positively. But some are trending more than others. And so we're leaning into the ones that are trending higher where those teams are sharing more and having them do more of that sharing now in our cross functional team so that everyone starts to see like, oh yeah, I can try that. It's great.
- [49:29]
C
Your guild coming back in strong.
- [49:31]
A
It is.
- [49:32]
C
I love it. Okay, this has been amazing. Now I want to future cast a bit and just hear what are you most excited about over these next 12 months? What are you working on? What big projects or what are you most excited about?
- [49:44]
A
So from a product perspective and the things that we get to talk to customers about, the next 12 to 18 months at Salesforce are going to be. We're going to be talking about things that we never imagined possible and getting to tell incredible stories about products that do really incredible things. Like that is exciting. That is so much fun to think about. Like how are we going to help sellers be so much more efficient? How are we going to help them enjoy their jobs more? How are we going to help those businesses grow in ways that they couldn't have before? And there will be winners and losers in that. Right. The companies that really embrace these technologies are going to be on the winning side and we're Going to get to tell all these great customer stories. On the service side, no one wants to call into a call center, right. People want to get answers to the things that they need. And when they call to a call center, they really want an answer that's very specialized to them. They want that high touch need for all their basic answers. They just want the answer digitally. And so we're going to make all of this and customers are now making this all very, very, very possible. And then on the marketing side, right, there's the end of the do not reply that we talked about, right? Like that's as marketers, that just warms my heart, right? That we can actually just have these conversations happening and send really qualified, nurtured leads to our sellers with all the context. So that when they do get to that, you know, that very final stage of actually talking to someone, that conversation is really valuable for that person because it comes with all the context, it comes with all the nurturing information and you can see across the whole company who's been engaged. And then I think the other thing Ruth focused on from a marketing perspective. So that's kind of what I'm thinking about from a, from a business perspective, what are the challenges we're going to get to solve. And I am so excited to get to tell those stories and to do it in ways that LLMs love, but also through these like beautiful customer videos that you talked about previously. We just met yesterday to talk about what are the stories we really build for Dreamforce, that sort of thing. So I just, I feel very, I feel very honored to be able to get to be at Salesforce and be in marketing at Salesforce from a team perspective. So we talked about kind of the six priorities. The one that I haven't really dug into yet, but that I did a lot of at IBM and a lot of it. Live person is the account based marketing.
- [52:37]
C
Yes.
- [52:38]
A
And the Guild hasn't started for that yet. It's. It's a murky, complicated, techy kind of thing that needs to happen. And agent force is going to make that so much more possible with, especially with data cloud because it kind of connects the data across all of these capabilities. So, you know, at Salesforce we are customer zero. So we use all of our own capabilities. So we will be able to use our Salesforce capabilities to build out this account based marketing approach and do it digitally, not just the kind of high touch stuff that we've been doing so far. And the thing that I think is really exciting about that is, you know Previously, I've thought about it as you do account based marketing because you want to be really efficient with your dollars. You want to spend it on the account that you really want to win and you want to make those experiences better. Now I actually kind of flip it the other way where I want our customers to, to have really incredible experiences that are helpful to them. And the way that I can do that is by really focusing on what do these accounts need, how can I answer that across the breadth of this business? And then how do I arm the sellers to answer that? And then how do I make it easy? Like you think of like the champion inside of a company. How do I make it easy for that champion to be the champion? And I do that by using account based marketing to influence the full buying team. And so kind of combining all of these things in account based marketing is something that it's not the fastest process. And so when you kind of ask me about, you know, 12 to 18 months, my mind immediately goes to account based marketing because it's, it's not a speedy process. But I do think it's one of the most meaningful things we'll do in marketing across our apps business in the next 12 to 18 months. Wow.
- [54:43]
C
Yeah, that'll definitely be. It could be a whole episode us talking about that because that has also been a theme that's been coming up of how many buyers there are now on one deal. And it used to just be the CTO or the CMO and now there's so many other decision makers who are involved that you have to get buy in from. So I still think abm, ABX is the future and you have to have a longer term thinker who's in charge of that program. Who knows you're not going to see anything for 612 months maybe.
- [55:12]
A
Yeah.
- [55:13]
C
Until that deal finally lands.
- [55:15]
A
So it's true, you know, and the it a couple stats of like how it worked at Live Person. So at Live Person we have, we saw 71% increase in our new logo leads and actually 55% increase in new logo wins. Like it really, really, really works. But it takes at least a year.
- [55:36]
C
Yeah, okay. It took a year there.
- [55:37]
A
Yeah.
- [55:37]
C
Yeah. Wow. But you've got stats of success from a previous company. So, you know, it works. And I think people will follow you anywhere because of that.
- [55:45]
A
I'm convicted that it works. I'm 100% convicted that account based marketing works. You just have to have the patience to do it.
- [55:53]
C
I love that. Well, this was a masterclass in all things marketing. Agents, AI, LLMs, SEO. So, Amber, thank you for coming on Marketing Trends. This is such a fun conversation. Where can our listeners, our YouTube viewers, everyone find more about you and what you're up to?
- [56:08]
A
Yeah. Well, welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn. I think that's, you know, a good, a great place to connect. And then, of course, you know, Salesforce is doing incredible things. Our website is a great representation of that. And you can also just search for us in LLMs, see if I'm right.
- [56:27]
C
There you go. All right. Thank you, Amber.
- [56:29]
A
Awesome. Thank you so much.