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Who you’ll learn from
Is Salesforce the dominant player in the AI platform shift, or the incumbent about to be disrupted? Kris Billmaier, EVP and GM of Agentforce Sales and Growth Products, sat down with Sophie Buonassisi at Salesforce Tower to answer that directly.
Kris runs the business behind Sales Cloud’s 26-year run and its rebrand into Agentforce Sales. He makes the case that CRM is becoming “agentic revenue orchestration,” that the category needs a new name, and that the future is headless. For Salesforce, that means surfaced inside Slack, ChatGPT, Gemini, and wherever sellers actually work. He also shares the internal numbers, including an engagement agent that worked the leads Salesforce had always ignored and generated over $100M in pipeline in eight months.
What you’ll learn:
- Why 60% of a seller’s time goes to non-selling work, and which agents remove it
- The case for renaming the category from CRM to agentic revenue orchestration
- What “headless CRM” means, and why Salesforce integrated with ChatGPT and Gemini
- How one leader manages 100 reps plus the equivalent of 400 agents
- Why the Momentum acquisition matters: “memory fragments” that cut an 8,000-word meeting to the 800 words that count
- Why Salesforce is hiring more sellers, not fewer
- How hiring shifted from “what did you do” to “how do you build” (and why a PowerPoint is now a red flag)
- Pricing in the agent era: seats, flex credits, and a coming leads-worked outcome metric
- Why Kris says we’re not in a SaaSpocalypse, and how a 70,000-person company still ships weekly
Episode highlights
1:12 – Welcome, and the Salesforce platform-shift question
2:25 – How Salesforce adapted across cloud, mobile, social, and AI
3:32 – Why Sales Cloud became Agentforce Sales
5:17 – Renaming the category: from CRM to agentic revenue orchestration
6:56 – Will anyone log into a CRM again?
8:09 – Agentforce in one line, and the seller’s Monday morning
9:08 – Build vs. buy, vibe coding, and the context moat
11:01 – The Momentum acquisition and memory fragments
13:04 – Sellers managing teams of agents, and the $100M pipeline story
15:03 – The agent stack: prospecting, engagement, pipeline, quoting
16:27 – Efficiency, accuracy, and auto-generated forecasts
18:03 – Why Salesforce is hiring more sellers
19:16 – What the modern sales role looks like
20:08 – Sponsor: Primer
21:34 – How AI changed hiring: from “what” to “how”
23:48 – The window: shipping weekly, not on three annual releases
25:13 – What product-market fit means now
26:05 – Software vs. services, and the $10T question
28:10 – The complexity problem: easy by default, advanced by choice
30:07 – Go-to-market evolution and consolidating the stack
32:07 – Leading as a player-coach
33:16 – Being “chief repetition officer” and educating the field
35:00 – How a 70,000-person company stays agile
36:48 – The biggest lesson from Marc Benioff
37:57 – Pricing: seats, flex credits, and outcome-based metrics
40:53 – Are we in a SaaSpocalypse? The full answer
42:08 – Where Kris gets his learnings
43:07 – World Cup picks
Key takeaways
1. CRM is becoming “agentic revenue orchestration.”
Kris doesn’t pitch customers on CRM anymore. After 26 years, Sales Cloud was renamed Agentforce Sales, and it’s more than a rebrand. Agents now run prospecting, engagement, account research, pipeline management, and quoting across the full deal cycle. The self-driving CRM is finally the pitch, not the dream.
2. Sellers won’t come to the CRM, so the CRM goes to them.
Kris lives in Slack and says he doesn’t log into Salesforce anymore, he just queries a Slackbot for his forecast and top deals. That’s the strategy: surface intelligent outcomes wherever sellers already work, Slack, ChatGPT, Gemini, Teams, so nobody has to swivel-chair into a CRM tab.
3. The “sellers get replaced” narrative got it backwards.
Salesforce is hiring more sellers, not fewer. Agents absorb the prospecting and admin reps hated, which frees people for relationships and the human parts of the deal. As Kris puts it, we’re still selling to people.
4. Hiring shifted from “what did you do” to “how do you build.”
Kris still just hires the best, but the test changed. He asks what tools you use, what you’ve built yourself, how you prototype and pivot. Show up with a PowerPoint now and he’ll ask why you didn’t just vibe-code the prototype overnight.
5. It’s a “now” window, not an 18 month one.
Salesforce went from three releases a year to shipping weekly or biweekly. Kris thinks in days and weeks. His rule for a 70,000 person company that still moves fast: be convicted on direction, and remember ambiguity is the death of speed.
6. Software may be a $1T market, but services are $10T – and agents blur the line.
Kris treats agents like junior employees that need context and coaching to mature, which makes services central to customer success. But he’s careful: the product still has to be “dead simple that anybody can run with it.”
7. Pricing is moving from seats to outcomes.
Salesforce still sells mostly by the seat, but it’s added flex credits, a $2-per-conversation option, and a coming “leads worked” metric tracked through a digital wallet. Kris expects the model to flip toward consumption and outcomes, but only as fast as customers want it to.
Kris Billmaier
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisbillmaier
- Salesforce Agentforce: https://www.salesforce.com/agentforce
Sophie Buonassisi (Host)
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/sophiebuona
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- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
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GTM 201 Full Episode Transcript
00:00 – 00:04
Kris Billmaier: About 60% of seller’s time is spent on non sales activities.
00:04 – 00:13
Sophie Buonassisi: Chris Bill Meyer, Executive Vice President and GM of Egypt Poor sales and growth products at Salesforce. Do you think there’ll be a time then nobody’s logged into a CRM?
00:13 – 00:27
Kris Billmaier: I think you’re going to choose where you want to work. I think we still build great experiences in our CRM, and I think a lot of our customers still work in CRM, but we want flexibility and we want choice, and so we’re just meet customers where they are.
00:27 – 00:29
Sophie Buonassisi: What’s going on? Are we in a SaaS, backups or not?
00:29 – 00:50
Kris Billmaier: I don’t think so at all. I think the era of SaaS is changing, right? I mean, we’re moving toward an agenda future, and that’s how we’re building. I think SaaS is evolving. And I tell everybody who listen to this is like, great products win in every era. Some companies have failed and others have thrived. And I think Salesforce is in an amazing position to thrive.
00:50 – 01:11
Sophie Buonassisi: How has Salesforce adapted so well and what is it doing now for this era?
01:11 – 01:12
Kris Billmaier: How’s it going?
01:12 – 01:19
Sophie Buonassisi: Great. Welcome to now. Hey, thanks for having me. It’s really excited to be here. Thank you for having me in the office. I appreciate it. This is great.
01:19 – 01:22
Sophie Buonassisi: In the tower. I got a tour of the top floor earlier. It’s fantastic.
01:23 – 01:54
Sophie Buonassisi: Awesome. Yeah. Excited to sit down together? Yeah. And I want to start off with some out of overall context here that you’ve been a part of for many years. So Salesforce of course people know it incredibly well today and it always has been a very dominant product. But at one point in time it wasn’t the CRM it was known for today, and it was really the cloud era that Salesforce capitalized on and absolutely moved faster than anyone in the market at a margin that nobody could catch up with.
01:54 – 02:15
Sophie Buonassisi: And now we’re at this inflection point where a lot of people say is a very similar point where we’re having a major platform shift this time AI and the same opportunity presents itself at end platform shift. Somebody takes that role. So the question becomes, is Salesforce that dominant player or not in this new platform era? And you’ve got a front row seat.
02:15 – 02:25
Sophie Buonassisi: Yep. So I want to open it up with just as you look across these eras, how has Salesforce adapted so so well and what is it doing now for this AI era?
02:25 – 02:27
Kris Billmaier: Yeah, it’s a great question.
02:27 – 02:58
Kris Billmaier: I mean, you pointed out the cloud era and Salesforce was invented in the cloud, right? I mean, first mover there really. But there have been so many other areas that we’ve kind of transformed through. I think we I think of mobile, I think of social. I think of predictive AI. And now we’re in this world. And I think what’s really exciting for me is Salesforce has met those transitions at each and every point, and we’ve kind of provided the guide for our customers to help kind of usher them into the new era.
02:58 – 03:30
Kris Billmaier: And we’re definitely in that new era now. It’s super exciting. It’s unlike any shift I think any of us have ever seen, but I think we take the steps to get out ahead of the market and to make sure our customers are guided by us to get to that era. And I do think, you know, Salesforce is really well equipped as we transition, you know, to AI, to experiences a genetic sales with all the context and data that we have about our different CRM processes.
03:30 – 03:32
Kris Billmaier: I think we’re well poised in this new era.
03:32 – 03:49
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. And you’ve made a lot of key decisions that make it very evident that you are well poised, one of which is the work that you’re doing at Agent Force. And so Sales Cloud has been a product around for about 20 or so years. Yeah, 26 to be exact. There we go. But you recently renamed it Yes to Agent for sales.
03:49 – 03:55
Sophie Buonassisi: Tell us about the rebrand there. Is it mostly rebrand? Are there new AI functionality? Why the change?
03:55 – 04:17
Kris Billmaier: Well, one, we looked at the whole sales cycle all up and we looked, you know, I’m fortunate we have 15,000 sellers at Salesforce who I get to learn from every day how they work, how they interact. And what we found is so much of their time is spent in non selling activities. And so every year we run what’s called the State of Sales report.
04:17 – 04:46
Kris Billmaier: And this year we found that about 60% of seller’s time is spent on non sales activities. So we look at the overall flow and we said what can we take off a seller’s plate. How can an agent make a seller way more productive. And we know that productivity leads to growth. And so ultimately how can we make these agents in this sales process a partner to the seller to make them more outcome focused and drive growth?
04:46 – 05:15
Kris Billmaier: And so it’s way more than a rename. Yeah. It’s embracing a genetic experiences across the entire deal cycle, from prospecting to engaging customers to booking meetings to really self-driving CRM, which I think is kind of the holy grail of what we’ve been looking for with CRM and and how CRM is transforming more into, I’d call it a genetic revenue orchestration at this point, and it’s really exciting.
05:15 – 05:17
Kris Billmaier: We’re seeing a ton of ton of success with it.
05:17 – 05:26
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. And and with that kind of shift, do you think rename the category, if you will, from CRM to a genetic revenue orchestration?
05:26 – 05:52
Kris Billmaier: Well, I think we should. I think I think this era is all about outcomes and doing more. And to me, I think CRM has had its place, but I think CRM is kind of the backbone for how we think about the revenue cycle going forward. And so when I don’t talk to our customers about CRM anymore, I talked to them about revenue orchestration and how that gets done gently.
05:52 – 06:09
Sophie Buonassisi: And talk to us about the headless part of that, because I think that’s probably synonymous with the word around automation and so forth that you’ve used there. What does that actually mean for just to give people a little bit of context of like a headless CRM or revenue orchestration platform?
06:09 – 06:36
Kris Billmaier: I think it’s about meeting sellers and cross and ox individuals where they want to work. And so when I think about headless, I think about Salesforce as a system of intelligent outcomes that can be surfaced anywhere. So we obviously have a great slack integration. We’re really excited about that. We know sellers live and work in slack, but we also announced the integration with ChatGPT a few months ago.
06:36 – 06:56
Kris Billmaier: We’ve done work with Gemini. We’re doing more and more with the platforms that sellers live in to reduce that friction, not have to swivel chair, and in all cases bringing that a gentle, intelligent outcome to those areas where sellers work. So for me that’s really our headless strategy and action.
06:56 – 07:00
Sophie Buonassisi: Right. Do you think there’ll be a time then. Nobody’s logging into a CRM.
07:00 – 07:15
Kris Billmaier: I think you’re going to choose where you want to work. I think you still build great experiences in our CRM, and I think a lot of our customers still work in CRM. But we want flexibility. We want choice. And so we’re just meet customers where they are.
07:15 – 07:23
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Where would you say out of curiosity, most people are working, like when you’re meeting them where they are. They’re interesting patterns that have been emerging.
07:23 – 07:25
Kris Billmaier: I think it’s really diverse.
07:25 – 07:55
Kris Billmaier: I think a lot of people are embracing, you know, the LM providers you see folks in, you know, coworkers, you see folks in teams, Microsoft, you see folks in slack. And so it’s I don’t think it’s one specific area that everybody is working in. But I do think the conversational nature of how people are engaging with their CRM data and driving that new orchestration is happening in all of these different applications.
07:55 – 08:09
Sophie Buonassisi: So you’ve made a lot of concerted efforts to meet people where they are, and you’ve also made a lot of product changes to also facilitate that. Like what is Agent Force now for for people, if they were just like wrap their minds around it. And one one line.
08:09 – 08:10
Kris Billmaier: For me for.
08:10 – 08:20
Kris Billmaier: Sales it’s the agenda to orchestration system and act. Yeah, right. I mean, it takes on the tasks that sellers shouldn’t have to focus on.
08:20 – 08:21
Sophie Buonassisi: That 60%.
08:21 – 08:44
Kris Billmaier: Yeah, that’s 60%. I don’t think about you know, I often look at the from two. Right. What did Monday morning of a seller’s day look like? A year ago, it looked like you were looking for somebody to call trying to build pipeline, taking hours to do that. Now we have a prospective agent where you define your ideal customer profile.
08:44 – 09:07
Kris Billmaier: And overnight it fills your lead list. And then it says, how do you want me to engage with these leads? Do you want to reach out to them? Do you want me to reach. It’s it’s very much taking over the top of the funnel, building those account plans for you and then helping close deals more efficiently. And so I think that’s really the some, some summarization of what we’re doing here.
09:08 – 09:35
Sophie Buonassisi: Brilliant. And so all those product shifts the integrations like we talked about. Of course I wouldn’t say M&A is new to Salesforce. But you’ve made some really interesting moves around acquiring companies like momentum regardless that you had GTM Fund Company. So we’d love to see it. But overall it kind of brings me to like a broader conversation that is very relevant to, I would say, Salesforce and multi-product companies, which is the build versus by.
09:35 – 09:49
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. You know, do you right now have any kind of pushback on seeing your sales process around how people are evaluating the sales process now that there’s so much vibe coding and so forth at people’s disposal?
09:49 – 10:14
Kris Billmaier: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s there’s I mean, we’re seeing a lot going on in the market from vibe coding solutions to, hey, we just want to adopt what’s out of the box. But at the end of the day, I think the context that Salesforce has around the entire sales cycle and the data and kind of moat that we have there, that context really appears throughout.
10:14 – 10:34
Kris Billmaier: And without that, without the context, you really don’t have anything. And so yeah, we were this is the whole headless strategy. We’re excited about people by code in the future. We’re excited about people leveraging our APIs and MCP, and we’re excited about people using our out of the box experiences as well. So I’m trying to do it all.
10:34 – 10:38
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, I like it, I like it. Maybe that’s the strategy. Do it all.
10:38 – 10:39
Kris Billmaier: You do it all. You can’t mess, right?
10:39 – 10:57
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, 100%. What are the other kind of key shifts? You’d say you’ve seen that position Salesforce to really win this AI era. Because I know we’ve breezed over a couple and there’s so much depth to each of them around the integrations, the product shifts, the meeting people where they are. Then you’ve got a lot of distribution of vantage to and so forth.
10:57 – 11:01
Sophie Buonassisi: But are there any kind of key areas that you’ve seen, even the M&A I mentioned?
11:01 – 11:26
Kris Billmaier: Yeah, I mean, to me, I always like to say great AI comes from great data and great data comes from your CRM. But there’s so much gold in the data that comes from unstructured data, specifically conversations, emails back and forth with your customers. And that’s why we bought momentum, right? I mean, it is the conversational intelligence layer that allows us to build an amazing data foundation.
11:26 – 11:55
Kris Billmaier: And what we glean from that, or really interesting what we call memory fragments, but allows us to kind of take the 8000 words that are uttered in an hour long meeting, drive it down to the 800 words that matter, and auto populate your CRM with that context and without any human bias. I think so often, you know, sellers in the past, again, from to used to look at their admin Friday and say, what did I get done this week?
11:55 – 12:05
Kris Billmaier: Oh, I need to update my CRM. Those days are over, right? I mean, we’re just doing that for you now. And I think that’s that’s really exciting and that’s really foundational.
12:05 – 12:41
Sophie Buonassisi: That is a music to a salesperson. Ears. That is really the dream. That was always the dreaded part for for salespeople. So it is very a very exciting time for sure. We definitely see it on our side just around the application layer, having so much utility right now. I know there’s a lot of excitement around live coding, and that’s fantastic for certain individual use cases, but in terms of a product with so much data and integration capabilities and requirements, like it’s truly like not even a thought or conversation, at least from our end, is like at the end of the day, like you want the provider that’s going to take you into the future, like
12:41 – 13:04
Sophie Buonassisi: you mentioned earlier, and guide you and be at the top 1%. And you can’t build that like you have to go with a partner that is. Yeah, is building and kind of at the top upper echelon of their their category. So that completely makes sense. Do you talk about the era internally at Salesforce? Like are you referring to the AI era and what you’re doing to win it right now?
13:04 – 13:28
Kris Billmaier: Yeah, absolutely. I think we are everything we do from how we build product to what we ship to customers, to how our sellers engage in the overall sales process has changed, right? I mean, we’re fully embracing all of these tools internally, and we’re looking at this era and it’s moving very fast. Yeah, we like to think we’re moving very fast with it.
13:28 – 13:54
Kris Billmaier: I think we are doing a pretty good job. But every tool that we ship to customers, we embrace on our own. And so I think this the era that we’re in is really about sellers and agents working together to achieve more. I imagine, and I think this is already happening, that a seller will manage a team of agents, all with a common goal oriented structure.
13:54 – 14:19
Kris Billmaier: And we actually see this internally. The person who runs Ryder team actually quit candidate. We score 1 to 5. Okay, so ones and twos are our lowest. That’s about 75% of our lead volume. That comes in 3 to 5. They had handed to a human seller to to work the ones and twos. We were never working. And so it was just like sawdust.
14:19 – 14:51
Kris Billmaier: So we said, let’s have our engagement agent reach out to those customers. And in about eight months time, we drove over 100 million in pipe that was totally unseen otherwise. And our the individual runs, our team will tell you that she has 100 stars, but she has the equivalent of 400 stars through agents. So she’s managing a team of effectively 500 getting things done, which at that volume of scale, it’s truly incredible.
14:51 – 14:55
Kris Billmaier: And it just found money. So it’s yeah it’s pretty pretty compressive.
14:55 – 15:03
Sophie Buonassisi: That is very impressive. So you’ve got an engagement agent. You mentioned a prospecting agent earlier. What are the other key agents that your team is now leveraging?
15:03 – 15:28
Kris Billmaier: Think about our I was there a prospecting agent does does top of the funnel for us. Does outbound. The engagement agent reaches out to all those customers to be assistive to sellers as well. We think about our account research tool. We think about our pipeline management agent which move moves deals along. And then we think about things like our quoting agent to really help close the overall deal cycle.
15:28 – 15:51
Kris Billmaier: And then really underpinning that is that data foundation that I talked about earlier, momentum so critical in that grabbing all of that data and insight to power all of those scenarios. And the really incredible thing is it’s all headless. So you can do that in any location. And I, I mean, I live in slack. Yeah. So I don’t log in to our Salesforce experience anymore.
15:51 – 16:00
Kris Billmaier: I just asked Lockport about the data that I need that might sit in Salesforce, and it gives me better answers than I could find them I own, which is really amazing.
16:00 – 16:08
Sophie Buonassisi: That is amazing. And it goes to show you mean even yourself. Like you said, dog food and the product is meeting you wherever you are. And that happens to be slack, which makes sense.
16:08 – 16:27
Kris Billmaier: Yeah. And I mean, like, I think of myself as running the sales cloud business. Yeah. For sales business, I should say. And in order to do that, I have to understand my forecasts, and I have to understand where my top deals are. And to get those insights, I just query slack bot and it returns everything I need to manage my quarter.
16:27 – 16:42
Sophie Buonassisi: You’ve gained a lot of efficiency through this process. How do you quantify that efficiency on your side? Like I know we quantified the pipeline generation efficiency, but when you think about your sellers on the team, what has changed for them?
16:42 – 17:05
Kris Billmaier: I think it’s a couple of things. One, I think it’s accurate data without the legwork. Right. I think we’re now for all of our sellers. We have our conversational insights product turned on for all of them, and we record a lot of calls by default unless the customer wants to opt out. So we gather all of that data that was otherwise kind of a two step process for ourselves, right?
17:05 – 17:29
Kris Billmaier: Capture the data. Take the notes put into CRM. That’s no longer necessary. So we’ve seen sellers become more efficient in that regard. Being able to take more meetings because they’re not focused on building account plans. Right. They’re not focused on doing manual prospecting. There’s just so much efficiency in every step of the process that’s saved. But it’s also an accuracy thing, right?
17:29 – 17:52
Kris Billmaier: A lot of our customers are, at this point in time, locking down CRM fields and just automatically transcribing data into those fields directly from calls, directly from emails. And it eliminates any bias or any any difference in a differing of opinion that a seller might have with what actually happened. Right. And think about that. Like when it comes to a forecast.
17:52 – 18:03
Kris Billmaier: Right. Shouldn’t my forecast just be auto generated for me based on what the system knows? Right. I think that’s the era we’re in. Yeah. Exciting.
18:03 – 18:18
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s super, super exciting. And what about from a headcount perspective? Because your sellers have suddenly including yourself, have become so much more efficient. What are you doing and seeing with your team? Are you increasing sellers? Decreasing sellers? Does it mean remain the same?
18:18 – 18:41
Kris Billmaier: One area that I think you saw probably Mark post on this a couple of weeks ago, that’s the area where, I mean, we’re definitely hiring sellers. Yeah, because they’re sellers now right there. Way more can handle way more because agents are doing the things that they didn’t like doing before. Right. And so now they could focus on things that matter what you’re building, relationships, having that human experience.
18:41 – 18:49
Kris Billmaier: Because at the end of the day, we’re still selling to people. Right? And I think that’s been been a critical step for us.
18:50 – 19:02
Sophie Buonassisi: There’s I mean was a huge narrative around say sellers are going to be replaced and so forth. And quite literally the opposite has happened in the opposite. Like the hiring on the sales front has just exploded and for good reason. Like you said.
19:03 – 19:03
Kris Billmaier: Oh yeah. For sure.
19:03 – 19:16
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Brilliant. The sales team is growing. You’ve seen tremendous growth across sales. So much more efficiency. What does I guess the modern day sales roll now look like in this AI era?
19:16 – 19:38
Kris Billmaier: I think it’s embracing the technology to help you the most. I, I sat down with a couple of our beavers, so the other day they were showing me things that they built on top of Salesforce. And it was really exciting because you can tell they constructed things for the way they think and the way they operate. But using all of those intelligent outcomes that come from Salesforce.
19:38 – 20:02
Kris Billmaier: And so I think it’s about understanding the tools. It’s about learning efficiently, and it’s about leveraging those AI tools. I think those sellers that come in, whether it be junior roll, just starting out or a senior role, reinventing how you do things, embracing the technology is what matters the most, and learning how it can optimize your working style the best.
20:02 – 20:08
Kris Billmaier: That’s part of our overall headless strategy as well. But I think that’s kind of how sellers have evolved.
20:08 – 20:09
Sophie Buonassisi: A quick pause, because B2B has.
20:09 – 20:11
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20:11 – 20:33
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20:33 – 21:12
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21:12 – 21:34
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21:34 – 21:37
Sophie Buonassisi: Completely make sense, but how does that shift how you hire? Now? If it does.
21:37 – 21:42
Kris Billmaier: I don’t think it shifts how we hire. I think we’ve always looked for the best.
21:42 – 21:43
Kris Billmaier: Yeah.
21:43 – 22:08
Kris Billmaier: And the best are now using AI to figure things out and embracing the new versus saying I, you know, I’m not I’m not ready to make that leap. Yeah. I think the embracing, building trust and understanding what the power of the technology is, it just influences another skill in your resume. And so I think that’s how I don’t think how we change.
22:08 – 22:09
Kris Billmaier: We’ve changed how we buyer. It just.
22:09 – 22:32
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s a really refreshing take. Yeah. Yeah same I like that. Just hire the best period. Yeah yeah. How do you determine their AI skills. Because anyone can say yes I build agents I’m AI fluent. But that can be very subjective right now. When the loving when the playing field is really level set. Like, do you have any go to tactics in your hiring process?
22:32 – 22:54
Kris Billmaier: When we I’ll go from the product side because we’ve changed how we build products as well. I always ask what people’s favorite tools are, what they’ve built themselves, how they build, how they think about prototyping. It’s a lot of the how questions and what are you using and the speed and the speed to understand if you have product market fit or you don’t.
22:55 – 23:04
Kris Billmaier: And then how do you pivot and how do you go faster? And what does a modern team look like? All of those things have shifted how we, you know, think about hiring the best.
23:04 – 23:09
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, that’s so interesting. It’s like it shifted from what what did you do to how now?
23:09 – 23:10
Kris Billmaier: Oh yeah. It’s like a total.
23:10 – 23:11
Kris Billmaier: Of the tools though.
23:11 – 23:11
Kris Billmaier: Yeah.
23:11 – 23:31
Kris Billmaier: I think when, you know, two years ago I would tell you I ran a panel and made somebody pitch me, you know, a presentation. If anybody comes in with a PowerPoint these days, I’m like, you could have just by coded a prototype overnight and showed me what you actually wanted to build and how you built it. So the expectations shifted a bit.
23:31 – 23:48
Kris Billmaier: Yeah, but it’s kind of in kind of goes back to the errors. Right? The shifting errors allow us to do more because of the tools that are available to us. And I think those that are going to win in this era and be really effective are the ones that are going to embrace the change.
23:48 – 24:08
Sophie Buonassisi: When and you mentioned you talk about it internally, this AI era period, and we talk about the window all the time from an investing perspective. And the window never necessarily closes, but it narrows oftentimes. What kind of timeline do you talk about at Salesforce for capitalizing on this window being more open than it will in future?
24:08 – 24:36
Kris Billmaier: Yeah, I mean, I when we set up how fast we ship. So, you know, Salesforce classically was on a three release roadmap. Yeah. Now we ship weekly biweekly at the at the most infrequent monthly. So I’m thinking in days and weeks, not in like months and years. So I the air is, is moved so quickly that I don’t think we can say, hey, this is an 18 month window.
24:36 – 24:51
Kris Billmaier: Hey, this is a three year window. It’s a now window. And we’re acting accordingly. And I think those are the companies that are going to win when brace the speed of change and can find product market fit. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.
24:51 – 25:13
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. And we often talk about product market fit or PMF as this almost like a I don’t want to say treadmill. That sounds like a negative connotation, but like a continuous process where you’re continuously meeting your customers where they are, like you said, like what is product market fit for you guys? Or how do you think about it for this AI product and AI era?
25:13 – 25:32
Kris Billmaier: Similar to how I thought about it in the past is really what’s that? Moment that I can deliver to customers in the first five minutes that says, all right, I’m going to stick with this thing. And every product that we ship kind of has a different metric, I would say to that for just courses, use cases, what does it look like to get data in.
25:32 – 25:57
Kris Billmaier: How fast can we affect a customer to get their data into the system and to start acting on it for more experiences? I’ll go with prospecting. It’s how do you define your first ideal customer profile, and how can we build that pipeline for you that you otherwise wouldn’t have had? If you’re coming in off the street, no data in your CRM, we can auto populate it for you for our Conversational Insights product.
25:57 – 26:05
Kris Billmaier: It’s happily auto populated record, so everyone has its own metric, but it’s all about adoption. So that’s what we’re focused on.
26:05 – 26:35
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Super interesting. And that completely makes sense. And so it really is just I mean an ever evolving market. And you know PMF has changed tremendously. The market, the way we think about it has changed. And what I’ve kind of heard from you, and what we also hear from others is it’s so about servicing the customer. And we’ve never really seen up until this point, I would say such a convergence of software and service.
26:35 – 26:45
Sophie Buonassisi: And Marc Andreessen famously said that software is eating the world and now say software is $1 trillion market, the services market, it’s like 10 trillion.
26:45 – 26:46
Kris Billmaier: Yeah.
26:46 – 26:52
Sophie Buonassisi: What happens is, is the services now eating the world? Like, how is this changing for you guys?
26:52 – 26:57
Kris Billmaier: I look at it as, what does it take to make sure a customer is successful.
26:57 – 26:57
Kris Billmaier: Yeah.
26:57 – 27:25
Kris Billmaier: And to me part of that is making sure they see value as immediately as possible through more product led motion. So how do we get to that? Moment with our customer who might have purchased self-service. Right. You know not everything we do is is account driven. It sometimes self-service. So in those situations that’s high touch sorry that’s high volume and can’t be high touch right.
27:25 – 27:43
Kris Billmaier: And so we have to have the product to suit that market. And at the same time in a more complex, bigger deployment, you know, putting people out there making sure that we’re in the trenches with our customers, growing these agents who initially are kind of like junior employees.
27:44 – 27:44
Kris Billmaier: Right, right.
27:44 – 28:10
Kris Billmaier: That need to learn, that need context, that need a bit of coaching in order to kind of mature and evolve. In both cases, we have to solve for our customer needs. So it’s I think services are a critical component to how we think about agents going forward. But the product also has to meet the market and be so dead simple that anybody can run with it.
28:10 – 28:40
Sophie Buonassisi: Totally. And it made me feel free to push back on this. But I feel like the notion to date has been that like the kind of the kind of pushback against Salesforce to date has been complexity, or at least perception of complexity. But the way that you’ve been changing kind of eliminates that entirely. You’ve introduced for tiers all the shifts in the product that you’re seeing. How do you think about this like complexity equation when you’re talking product, when you’re talking go to market?
28:40 – 28:41
Kris Billmaier: Well, we have.
28:41 – 28:42
Kris Billmaier: The luxury of.
28:42 – 28:45
Kris Billmaier: Having an amazing. Trailblazer base. Yeah.
28:45 – 28:53
Kris Billmaier: Who you know, their job is to drive success for their employer or their customer. But we have a saying on the team.
28:53 – 29:28
Kris Billmaier: That it’s we make products that are easy by default and advanced by choice. And so the platform itself is has so much depth. And you could basically do anything. Right. But do you want to do everything? And I think that’s where we meet our customers. We meet our customers with out of the box experiences that are simple, easy to use, easy to get started, I think about slack and how we’ve integrated slack and CRM, and it’s a conversational onboarding to get data into the system that needs no setup at all, which is amazing.
29:28 – 29:47
Kris Billmaier: And then I think about more bespoke agents that customers want to build on, platform that are specific to their business needs. The two are, you know, very opposite ends of the spectrum. But we can solve for both, and that’s easy by default on one hand and the advanced by choice on the other. And so we have to embrace both.
29:48 – 30:07
Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. That’s fantastic. I love that slogan. And where you’re building. Let’s go a little bit deeper into how you’re building. And again not the what the how the how you’re building. We’ve talked about your team composition. Let’s talk about your go to market strategy overall because you’ve got the self-serve side, you’ve got the sales motion side.
30:07 – 30:14
Sophie Buonassisi: How are you kind of thinking about your go to market differently than you were in the past? What has been the core evolution that you’ve seen?
30:14 – 30:43
Kris Billmaier: Yeah, it’s a really good question. I don’t think there’s one thing that I would point to. I’d say the market has gotten a much noisier. Yeah, right. And it’s now obviously easier to build products. It’s faster to get them to market. And oftentimes we’re seeing companies who are building in adjacencies or overlapping technology to what we app. And oftentimes in our ecosystem, we totally embrace that.
30:43 – 31:16
Kris Billmaier: So I’ve seen our go to market motion ship a little bit in terms of simplicity. One platform, one story. When I think about kind of what a customer stack can look like today, there can be a lot of point solutions integrated in there. And I think every time you integrate a point solution, it should be a very thoughtful decision, because every time you do that, you introduce a new integration, you introduce potentially a new area for management.
31:17 – 31:44
Kris Billmaier: And for us, I think our go to market motion has really been a simplified full stack revenue orchestration offering. And we start with the smallest of the small customers who want to self-serve and onboard. And if they want to grow up with us, great. You’re never going to outgrow Salesforce. And they only have the large, the large who have been customers forever, who want to make this a leap.
31:44 – 31:49
Kris Billmaier: And in each case, we’re just meeting the customer where they are with a consolidated stack.
31:49 – 32:07
Sophie Buonassisi: Bryant and leaning into the how even further. Honing in on yourself. How are you thinking about your shifting leadership right now as obviously the role of the seller changes, the role of the product team changes, like how have you had to evolve yourself?
32:07 – 32:34
Kris Billmaier: I mean, I post up, nobody’s hacked anything in yet, but I know I think it’s it’s there are no more just managers like you have to be a player coach. And that’s kind of the the strategy I’ve always taken is like, you have to do and you have to bring the team along. So I think it’s just more of that, more of embracing the new tools like we talked about.
32:34 – 32:54
Kris Billmaier: And then I spend a ton of time outside in. I look at what the market’s doing. I’m inspired by so many startups that are out there, you know, breaking through, shipping fast and a lot of amazing things. So I get inspired by that, and I take a lot of my learnings from what we see in the market internally here to evolve what we’re doing.
32:55 – 33:16
Sophie Buonassisi: Very cool. And we talked about shipping speed, how you’ve increased it on the product side. And oftentimes it used to be that or we talk about it used to be that product was the bottleneck. And then product got vastly expedited through a genetic means. And now it’s really your go to market. That’s truly a bit more of the bottleneck.
33:16 – 33:28
Sophie Buonassisi: And you’ve increased that around all these different areas, which is great. What has been the key to keeping up the go to market side? If it has been a challenge with the product side, have you increased velocity?
33:28 – 33:29
Kris Billmaier: I don’t know that. I wouldn’t say that go to market has been bottleneck.
33:29 – 33:32
Sophie Buonassisi: So to speak. Yeah that’s great.
33:32 – 33:36
Kris Billmaier: Yeah, I think it’s we built a lot.
33:36 – 33:36
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.
33:36 – 33:36
Kris Billmaier: And I think.
33:36 – 34:01
Kris Billmaier: It’s educating the field and educating the market. Yeah. And that becomes our I wouldn’t say challenge, but that’s what we need to do because things change so fast. Right. And so if you’re sending one message tomorrow, you either have to be on repeat about the thing that you’re talking about that’s new, or you have to be very clear in how things have shifted.
34:01 – 34:07
Kris Billmaier: And so when I think about telling a story to a customer or telling enabling our field.
34:07 – 34:07
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.
34:07 – 34:27
Kris Billmaier: I, I’m like the chief repetition officer, honestly, it’s like you can’t say the same thing too many times because there is so much noise out there. And so you have to cut through it with a consistent message. That’s simple. I think that’s been that’s been not the challenge, but that’s been the activity.
34:27 – 34:28
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.
34:28 – 34:36
Sophie Buonassisi: What is the saying. It takes 17 touches in the past for somebody to remember something. I’m sure now with no more noise it’s something like 47. Who knows?
34:36 – 34:37
Kris Billmaier: Couldn’t even tell you. But yeah.
34:37 – 34:40
Sophie Buonassisi: I’m doing all those I love it, I.
34:40 – 35:00
Sophie Buonassisi: Love it. And Chris, I want to circle back to to speed quickly here because you said you got a lot of inspiration from startups and other companies, and you bring that internally. And everything that we talked about today and everything that people see with Salesforce and respect about Salesforce is for such a large company. You move so quickly, you guess you’re done.
35:00 – 35:29
Sophie Buonassisi: Like, how are you able to move with so much agility when you are working in a larger organization? Have there been any kind of like specific unlocks for your team or other teams that have just allowed you to to move that quickly? And I’ll give you an example, is go to market being a bottleneck. We hear that all the time from companies of far lesser size to or of equal size that they’re struggling to keep up now with the product velocity, whereas Salesforce, you found a way to do so already.
35:29 – 35:31
Sophie Buonassisi: But how?
35:31 – 35:56
Kris Billmaier: I think it’s a combination of things. I think there’s something to being founder led still. I mean, you know, I I’d say that Mark is very inspirational and very visionary. And, you know, when he puts his foot on the gas on something, we can execute and we can move. And I think for leaders in the company like myself who have been here, you know, six, seven, eight years, you kind of learn from that.
35:56 – 36:22
Kris Billmaier: And so I’ll tell my team, don’t wait like fires. Yeah, I like fires all the time trying to get people to move faster. But I think it’s really being convicted about the direction that you’re going. And to me, it’s not so much the, you know, the agenda capabilities that we now have. It’s a mindset of, hey, we’re 70,000 company, we’re not a startup, but we’re sure pretty agile for being there.
36:22 – 36:37
Kris Billmaier: We are. And so there’s sense of pride that comes with that inside of Salesforce. And I think, you know, leaders like myself and our teams, we embrace that. And we try to move as fast as possible and move out anything that’s going to stop us.
36:38 – 36:38
Sophie Buonassisi: I love it.
36:38 – 36:41
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s super interesting about the founder. Let’s head side too.
36:41 – 36:43
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Very, very interesting.
36:43 – 36:44
Kris Billmaier: He gives pretty clear direction.
36:44 – 36:45
Sophie Buonassisi: A lot of stuff. Yeah.
36:45 – 36:46
Sophie Buonassisi: He’s a visionary.
36:46 – 36:47
Kris Billmaier: He’s a visionary.
36:47 – 36:48
Sophie Buonassisi: Absolutely.
36:48 – 36:54
Sophie Buonassisi: What what has been kind of one of the biggest learnings from working with Mark.
36:54 – 37:12
Kris Billmaier: Well, I’d say that’s a good one. There’s been a lot of learnings. I think he’s communication style is something that I am. He’s very clear, he’s very concise, and he makes his point. And I think, you know, that’s a kind of a general statement to make. But it’s something that I’ve, I’ve learned from. Its changed the way I communicate.
37:12 – 37:28
Kris Billmaier: And I think it is back to the point where making earlier is like, how many times does somebody need to be told something before they actually understand it? Yeah, if you can do it clearly and crisply and concisely, you’re going to be able to do it less times and get that point across. So clean, simple, easy.
37:28 – 37:57
Sophie Buonassisi: And ambiguity is really. The the end and death of speed. So I’m sure that helps with your your processes. Yeah I love it. Well very good. We’ve talked about so many different shifts that you’ve made at Salesforce around this AI era. And again, capitalizing on this platform shift and being out of the curve. Another one that has come as a byproduct in a way that is a huge go to market area around your shifts, is pricing inevitably.
37:57 – 38:04
Sophie Buonassisi: So you’ve experimented with a couple of different things a $2 pricing per conversation.
38:04 – 38:18
Sophie Buonassisi: Flex credits. Yeah, take us through the pricing strategy. When we think about now AI products and how you shifted and evolved because you have, you know, iterated. And that’s a really interesting area for companies to learn from.
38:18 – 38:39
Kris Billmaier: Yeah, I think so. And it’s it’s been a necessary iteration because if you think about sales, cloud traditionally has just been a seat based offering, and a lot of customers still want to buy space from us, which makes sense. It’s predictable. It’s it’s easy. The thing that we’ve heard, though is, hey, don’t flood me with add ons like make it super simple.
38:39 – 39:02
Kris Billmaier: And so we have we can down to our agent Force one edition, which is think of our top tier edition that’s of everything Sales Cloud has. Or if you’re content with the existing edition that you’re on, you can buy a agent force for sales, which is where all of our capabilities live. And so we make it super simple.
39:02 – 39:25
Kris Billmaier: If you’re interested in seek price, if you’re interested in the more consumptive nature, you can go ahead and buy a bunch of flex credits and experiment and and go down the path of building your own agents or leveraging against the templates that we’ve built as well. So there’s more learning to come here. In fact, we’re going to introduce a leads worked metric here pretty soon.
39:25 – 39:41
Kris Billmaier: So think about it. More outcome based pricing for sales solutions. But it’s all measurable because we have things like our digital wallet which allows us to track and understand. And we have a bunch of calculators. So I think we’ll continue to learn and iterate on pricing.
39:42 – 39:45
Sophie Buonassisi: So it sounds like you’re bundling a lot more. Bundle. At least based on feedback. Yeah. Easier.
39:45 – 40:07
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Everything comes down to make it easy for the customer I love it. No, that that’s great. That completely makes sense. But from a revenue shift perspective, now that you’ve kind of got the seat base, you got the consumption base, the flex credits, where does split come in? I would say like is the majority coming from one or the other.
40:07 – 40:14
Sophie Buonassisi: You’ve seen people shift over from seat. If you have any kind of metrics around that. Curious. Just an overarching kind of division around.
40:15 – 40:34
Kris Billmaier: I think some customers are in places than than others. Right. But I would say we’re still largely seat based from the sales spot standpoint with, you know, the consumption more and more growing along with our headless strategy that, you know, we just introduced a few, I guess, about a month ago now.
40:34 – 40:34
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.
40:34 – 40:52
Kris Billmaier: I think in the future it’s going to flip and I think will be more and more outcome based and that will be consumptive in nature. I think that’s just the the necessary evolution and we’re on that path. But I don’t want to get too far ahead of where our customers are or want us to be.
40:53 – 40:57
Sophie Buonassisi: Completely makes sense. What’s going on? Are we in a SaaS or not?
40:57 – 41:18
Kris Billmaier: I don’t think so at all. I think the era of SaaS is changing, right? I mean, we’re moving toward the future and that’s how we’re building. But at our core, I think about our tools and the data foundation that we bring and the outcomes that we generate. I think SaaS is evolving, and I tell everybody who listen to this is like, great products win.
41:18 – 41:32
Kris Billmaier: So in every era, some companies have failed and others have thrived. And I think Salesforce is in an amazing position to thrive. And I think we’re I don’t think we’re in a SaaS box at all.
41:32 – 41:51
Sophie Buonassisi: I mean, I completely agree with you. I don’t think we are either, but we had to address it because the headlines say it. I think the headlines say it, but anyone really in the trenches building knows like and sees the revenue numbers like very much so the opposite like you guys are are hiring. You’re seeing acceleration on the revenue side.
41:51 – 41:55
Sophie Buonassisi: Like it is. Yeah. It is not doom and gloom.
41:55 – 42:08
Sophie Buonassisi: Which is good news for everyone. Brilliant leadership. Any kind of favorite books or I guess even now. Where do you get your learnings from? Maybe it’s not books, but any kind of favorite sources that have been helpful for you?
42:08 – 42:28
Kris Billmaier: Oh wow, that’s a great question. I, I you know, I grew up in a family where my dad was a CEO and in early technology in the Silicon Valley, like, worked at Xerox Parc and like went up through Sun Microsystems and was CEO Paul Allen for a number of years. So I get a lot of my leadership learnings from him.
42:28 – 42:56
Kris Billmaier: But throughout my career, I’ve always found that it kind of didn’t matter what I was working on, it mattered the person I was working for. I could learn from them if I could be inspired by them and the team that I was surrounded myself with, and if we had the opportunity to win. And so those are still my kind of Guideposts, as I think about who I learned from, how I learned, and how my leadership style evolves.
42:56 – 42:57
Sophie Buonassisi: I love it.
42:57 – 43:09
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s fantastic that you’ve got that inspiration for him and you’re a baseball guy. You grew up playing baseball competitively, but we’re in the World Cup season, so it’s soccer time to thrive. Who are you betting on winning?
43:09 – 43:11
Kris Billmaier: Well, everybody I bet on has lost thus.
43:11 – 43:12
Sophie Buonassisi: Far, so.
43:12 – 43:19
Kris Billmaier: I don’t know that I’ll give tips, but I, you know, Argentina. I kind of like them. Love to see it.
43:19 – 43:22
Sophie Buonassisi: So the data is there. The data the data is there to support.
43:22 – 43:30
Kris Billmaier: Yeah. And we have with our recent acquisition of momentum, they have a big presence in Argentina. And so they were very happy about the win today.
43:30 – 43:38
Sophie Buonassisi: So I bet. Yeah that is super exciting. Yes Chris this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for the conversation. This has been great.
43:38 – 43:41
Kris Billmaier: Thanks for having me. This has been awesome. Appreciate it.
