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How Salesforce Solved The SEO Issue
00:58:24
How do you future-proof your marketing strategy when LLMs are rewriting the rules in real time? Salesforce Applications CMO Amber Armstrong has answers — and the data to back them up.
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- [00:00]
Amber Armstrong
This is a really scary moment for marketers. We started to see all this like LLMs and Google change how search worked. 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 the next 12 to 18 months. At Salesforce, we're going to be talking about things that we never imagined possible. My mind immediately goes to account based marketing.
- [00:36]
Stephanie Postles
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.
- [00:44]
Amber Armstrong
It really, really, really works. But it takes at least a year.
- [00:48]
Stephanie Postles
But you've got stats of success so you know it works. And I think people will follow you anywhere because of that.
- [00:52]
Amber Armstrong
100% convicted that account based marketing works. You just have to have the patience to do it. This past two weeks ago, we talked about it as the end of do not reply. A company sends you a message and it says, do not reply to this email. That's a terrible experience.
- [01:07]
Stephanie Postles
Yeah, I've never actually thought about that. I'm always like, what is this email for then? What are you seeing in this space that's exciting you? When it comes to these AI agents.
- [01:15]
Amber Armstrong
AgentForce answers our service questions so incredibly well. I think it's like we just passed a million. So I feel like we're just in this moment where work will not ever be done the way that it was before.
- [01:31]
Stephanie Postles
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.
- [01:44]
Amber Armstrong
We've really solved SEO in that we took a very targeted approach. And so I'll tell you about kind of how we started on it and then how it's evolved.
- [01:56]
Stephanie Postles
Hey everyone, welcome back to Marketing Trends. I'm your host Stephanie Postols and I just got off the mic with Amber Armstrong. Amber is the CMO for Salesforce Applications. So it's sales cloud service cloud marketing cloud and commerce cloud. And Amber is overseeing all of these divisions within Salesforce. What I loved about our conversation today is that we really dove into the future of LLM search and results and this is something that has been brought up at least 15 times over the past couple months with these different CMOs that I've been speaking to, and none of them really knew how to show up in these different LLM search results that everyone's worried about. Everyone's worried about organic content. Does SEO matter anymore? Does everything that I worked on in the past, it's not going to work anymore. It doesn't matter. And so we brought Amber into the studio because she knew exactly how to solve this. She had some great recommendations for what the future of LLM search looks like and how to prepare your content and your company in a way that allows you to be found in these LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, all of these. We also got to dive into the world of AI agents. So Salesforce has agentforce, and with that, they have launched thousands of AI agents with many, many different companies. And so I love that we got to dive into what these companies are doing with these AI agents and how they're transforming their entire industry and their companies and how their teams work. And it was definitely a masterclass and how to think about what you can do with these AI agents and how to implement them across your team. Plus, stay tuned to the end because Amber teases what she is focused on over the next 12 months and some of the big bets that she's making in the world of marketing. And wherever you're listening to this podcast or watching, please make sure you hit subscribe, drop a comment in the review box or leave me a comment on YouTube. I'd love to hear from you. And if you make it to the end of this episode on YouTube, please leave a comment below with the word LLM SEO. So I know you made it to the end, and I will be in there commenting right back. So with that, let's get into the episode with Amber Armstrong. 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. Amazing. Amber, welcome back.
- [04:07]
Amber Armstrong
Thank you so much. It's so exciting to be here.
- [04:09]
Stephanie Postles
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.
- [04:18]
Amber Armstrong
It's been a while. A lot has changed.
- [04:20]
Stephanie Postles
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. 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.
- [04:48]
Amber Armstrong
Yeah, absolutely. Well, actually, before I did my internship at IBM, I worked at two small software companies in the warehouse management software space.
- [04:58]
Stephanie Postles
Okay.
- [04:58]
Amber Armstrong
And I decided to go back to business 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 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 and in that part of my career, as someone said, you know, who do you want to be when you grow up? And I was like, well, I want to be the most senior person in marketing. And at the time it was this man named Bill 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 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 and all of its forms all the way back from, like, predictive AI and now, now obviously in Generative. And I. 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, 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, are 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 two. 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.
- [07:43]
Stephanie Postles
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?
- [07:59]
Amber Armstrong
Yeah.
- [08:00]
Stephanie Postles
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?
- [08:08]
Amber Armstrong
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.
- [08:17]
Stephanie Postles
So what are you hiring for? Let's give some shout outs. A lot of great people are listening.
- [08:21]
Amber Armstrong
We're hiring for this sales cloud and the service called Sema roles right now.
- [08:24]
Stephanie Postles
Okay.
- [08:25]
Amber Armstrong
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 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 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. We'll see if it works.
- [10:11]
Stephanie Postles
We just launched it. 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. It's very hard to try and keep all these leaders talking to each other, but also not merging them all into like same of same.
- [10:33]
Amber Armstrong
Yeah.
- [10:33]
Stephanie Postles
And so what is, how do you explain this concept of a guild and how to make the. This cross functional team work?
- [10:39]
Amber Armstrong
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. And 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. 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, they will get to present and kind of in a quarterly basis this, I asked 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 Hellman. 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.
- [12:16]
Stephanie Postles
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.
- [12:41]
Amber Armstrong
Yes. It's really, really moving. Incredible. Erin Olez leads our Dreamforce team and she's incredible.
- [12:48]
Stephanie Postles
Right?
- [12:49]
Amber Armstrong
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 Salesforce called V2 Moment, 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 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, 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 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 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 into. 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 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. It's such a fun event. So. 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?
- [15:41]
Stephanie Postles
Mm, 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.
- [16:07]
Amber Armstrong
Well, we did actually as a part of this kind of getting, we have this opening video that's kind of a slice and dice of these comments from some of these leaders that are participating. But we have 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.
- [16:36]
Stephanie Postles
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?
- [16:42]
Amber Armstrong
No. One thing that's. I know it's so, so 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 and was like, can I get a job here? And they gave me a job and I did it all the way through college.
- [17:09]
Stephanie Postles
Wow. Yeah, okay. You were committed. Yeah. Committed to consistency. I like it.
- [17:14]
Amber Armstrong
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.
- [17:31]
Stephanie Postles
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?
- [17:56]
Amber Armstrong
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.
- [18:03]
Stephanie Postles
That's a lot in a year.
- [18:04]
Amber Armstrong
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.
- [18:13]
Stephanie Postles
Right.
- [18:14]
Amber Armstrong
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 prot protected. 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.
- [19:43]
Stephanie Postles
We.
- [19:43]
Amber Armstrong
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.
- [19:49]
Stephanie Postles
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're 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.
- [20:07]
Amber Armstrong
Yeah.
- [20:07]
Stephanie Postles
So maybe start with your team first.
- [20:08]
Amber Armstrong
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 LM 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, and 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, 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 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.
- [22:24]
Stephanie Postles
So good for especially like new employees being like, what are all these acronyms? What are these products?
- [22:29]
Amber Armstrong
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 the Slack channel, 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. 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 Prisina. And Prisina uses Agent Force in three different ways. So they use our, what has been called our sales development rep, which basically allows. We talk about it in 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.
- [23:38]
Stephanie Postles
Yeah, I've never actually thought about that. I'm always like, what is this email for? Then why can't I?
- [23:42]
Amber Armstrong
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.
- [24:25]
Stephanie Postles
Wow.
- [24:25]
Amber Armstrong
They're also using it for patients where patients have questions. Prisina, I don't think I actually said this, but Pristina focuses on diabetes care.
- [24:34]
Stephanie Postles
Okay.
- [24:34]
Amber Armstrong
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 Prina 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, their 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.
- [25:30]
Stephanie Postles
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?
- [25:38]
Amber Armstrong
It's still pretty early. They haven't released anything publicly yet.
- [25:43]
Stephanie Postles
Dinner time conversations of like this is working pretty well.
- [25:46]
Amber Armstrong
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.
- [26:10]
Stephanie Postles
Oh, that's fun. Okay. Anyone else that you want that you're watching and you're really impressed with right now?
- [26:16]
Amber Armstrong
There's so many customers that are just doing things that are really, really exciting right now.
- [26:22]
Stephanie Postles
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. Yes. 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.
- [27:22]
Amber Armstrong
Absolutely. You're in my jam. I Love it. So I really love SEO and I think in Sales cloud specifically, we really solved SEO in that we took a very targeted approach. And so I'll tell you about kind of 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.
- [28:08]
Stephanie Postles
One keyword or long tail keywords or both?
- [28:10]
Amber Armstrong
Both. Okay, both. So 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.
- [28:25]
Stephanie Postles
And this was starting two years ago when you came into Salesforce. Right. That's when you started doing this with sales cloud.
- [28:31]
Amber Armstrong
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. It's not necessarily about, you know, hey, here's the thing. You need to go buy from Salesforce.
- [28:54]
Stephanie Postles
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.
- [29:24]
Amber Armstrong
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 search 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 in all of this content, it's just going to go to the wayside. Wow, this is a really scary moment for marketers because we're so reliant. 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. 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.
- [31:23]
Stephanie Postles
40%?
- [31:24]
Amber Armstrong
Yeah.
- [31:25]
Stephanie Postles
Yeah.
- [31:25]
Amber Armstrong
That's incredible, right?
- [31:27]
Stephanie Postles
What was that compared to before, just for reference? Ish.
- [31:30]
Amber Armstrong
Paid media, probably about 15%.
- [31:32]
Stephanie Postles
Yeah, that's pretty wild.
- [31:34]
Amber Armstrong
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 going to be the thing where they get specific information and. 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. Agentforce answers our service questions so incredibly well. I think it's like we just passed a million solved cases.
- [32:59]
Stephanie Postles
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, 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.
- [33:22]
Amber Armstrong
Yeah.
- [33:23]
Stephanie Postles
Pretty impressive.
- [33:23]
Amber Armstrong
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 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.
- [33:53]
Stephanie Postles
Yeah. So I mean, I'm sure every marketer's like, whoo. 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, 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, you know, just. Okay, so how do you guide your team on structuring the content so that it gets found?
- [34:31]
Amber Armstrong
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 in thinking about how they approach LLM search. They released a report, it's the 2025 Buyer Behavior Report that just Came out.
- [35:21]
Stephanie Postles
Yep. We got it up. Pulled up on the screen. Even though it's small right now, we've got to pull it up. Yeah.
- [35:26]
Amber Armstrong
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.
- [35:47]
Stephanie Postles
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. Yeah. 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.
- [36:10]
Amber Armstrong
The 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 helped us 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? Right. 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 in that space, and it's. I think it's going really well, but we're still experimenting there.
- [36:52]
Stephanie Postles
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.
- [37:17]
Amber Armstrong
Yeah, I think it's just lots of. Lots of testing.
- [37:20]
Stephanie Postles
Yeah.
- [37:20]
Amber Armstrong
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.
- [37:54]
Stephanie Postles
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.
- [38:17]
Amber Armstrong
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.
- [38:33]
Stephanie Postles
Yeah. To get competitors on them. I always.
- [38:35]
Amber Armstrong
Okay, yeah, we do.
- [38:37]
Stephanie Postles
Okay.
- [38:38]
Amber Armstrong
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. Right. 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 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?
- [39:48]
Stephanie Postles
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 or by the time they, they've already done all their research. They've already looked at G2, they've looked at Gartner. They 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.
- [40:22]
Amber Armstrong
I am so hyper focused on metrics. I don't think I've really given any of them.
- [40:27]
Stephanie Postles
You're told not all of them, but.
- [40:30]
Amber Armstrong
But 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, 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.
- [40:46]
Stephanie Postles
Yeah.
- [40:47]
Amber Armstrong
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. Yeah, but that's what we're going to do. And sorry, less than one a day. Let me back up. So 70 articles in a particular quarter, 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 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 wear, 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 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.
- [42:19]
Stephanie Postles
So you need those 70 articles.
- [42:21]
Amber Armstrong
We 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.
- [43:01]
Stephanie Postles
So I'm guessing the newer products that are within your purview similar like we 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. Yep. That how to think about it.
- [43:17]
Amber Armstrong
Yep. And, and it's also, you know, the, 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.
- [43:43]
Stephanie Postles
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?
- [43:55]
Amber Armstrong
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 devilist 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.
- [44:25]
Stephanie Postles
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.
- [44:43]
Amber Armstrong
I love that video. Yeah, subtle pitch for what we do.
- [44:48]
Stephanie Postles
But yeah, video is a coming in strong.
- [44:51]
Amber Armstrong
I love that. I didn't know that.
- [44:52]
Stephanie Postles
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 it. 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?
- [45:34]
Amber Armstrong
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, for any of the leaders. And that is exciting because it's. It gives the team permission to use these tools 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?
- [46:56]
Stephanie Postles
Yes, please.
- [46:57]
Amber Armstrong
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. 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 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?
- [47:59]
Stephanie Postles
Yeah.
- [48:00]
Amber Armstrong
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.
- [49:04]
Stephanie Postles
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.
- [49:59]
Amber Armstrong
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.
- [50:07]
Stephanie Postles
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?
- [50:27]
Amber Armstrong
It's more of a. Do you feel that you know how to use AI to better your work efforts? It's almost a yes, no kind of a question. And um. And yeah, people are trending very, very positively on it.
- [50:41]
Stephanie Postles
Yeah. If they say no, does it guide them to something to help?
- [50:46]
Amber Armstrong
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.
- [51:19]
Stephanie Postles
Your guild coming back in strong. It is. 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?
- [51:35]
Amber Armstrong
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, they. 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.
- [54:27]
Stephanie Postles
Yes.
- [54:28]
Amber Armstrong
And the Guild hasn't started for that yet. It's, it's a murky, complicated, techie 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 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 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 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.
- [56:34]
Stephanie Postles
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.
- [57:03]
Amber Armstrong
Yeah.
- [57:03]
Stephanie Postles
Until that deal finally lands.
- [57:05]
Amber Armstrong
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.
- [57:26]
Stephanie Postles
Yeah, okay. It took a year there. Yeah. 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.
- [57:35]
Amber Armstrong
I'm convicted that it works. Yeah, I'm 100% convicted that account based marketing works. You just have to have the patience to do it.
- [57:43]
Stephanie Postles
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?
- [57:59]
Amber Armstrong
Yeah. Well, welcome to Connect with me on LinkedIn. I think that's a great place to connect. And then of course, 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.
- [58:17]
Stephanie Postles
There you go. All right. Thank you, Amber.
- [58:20]
Amber Armstrong
Awesome. Thank you so much.