This discussion with Salesforce’s Amelia Ochodnicky and Saleo’s Justin McDonald, centers on Salesforce’s “live demo mandate” and how to make live demos authentic despite challenges. They dive into personalization at scale and outline a hybrid method for effectively demoing AI. Enablement and change management are emphasized, reviewing how Salesforce has identified power users, shared best-practice stories, and used feedback loops to drive adoption. Reported outcomes include significant reductions in demo prep time and strong buyer trust through more context-rich storytelling.
Read the full transcript below:
Welcome, everyone.
Thank you for joining us today for “Crafting a Winning Demo Strategy”. I’m Christina Sims, the VP of customer experience at Saleo.
Joining us today, we have Amelia Ochodnicky, distinguished strategic solution engineer with Salesforce, and Saleo’s own Justin McDonald, our co-founder and CEO. I’ve had the privilege of working closely with Amelia and the Salesforce team over the past year, and I’m really excited that we get to talk with you today about their impactful demo strategy and how it’s evolved.
But before we dive in, I have just a couple reminders. We will have time at the end of the session for Q&A.
However, feel free to submit questions or comments anytime during the webinar through the Q&A window. And today’s webinar will be recorded and will be made available to all of you all after the session.
So with that, I will go ahead and hand things over to Justin to get started.
Very good. Thanks, Christina.
Appreciate the intro. Amelia, thank you for joining.
I know you’re quite busy, so we appreciate you taking the time to join us. So excited for today.
Obviously, Salesforce is known for the demo engineering, demo strategy over the years. It’s legendary, if you will, with the Q branch and now center of excellence.
So I think that combined with you and your experience, we’re just really excited for this and appreciate you joining.
Yeah. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here. Thanks.
And, of course, getting to know you over the past year, very grateful for your partnership, all that you’ve done for us, for the overall cause of improving demos at Salesforce. And I’m, genuine comment here, very impressed with you as a person. Your passion for demos, continued innovation, both pushing internally at Salesforce as well as Saleo, making us better.
I think the standard of excellence that I see out of you, every single comment, every single feedback point, is just super impressive. And then also as it relates to your clock speed, there’s nothing better than a really high clock speed on an SE when it comes to wittiness and just sharpness.
So I’ve so enjoyed getting to know you, and I appreciate you doing this.
Yeah. It’s been a pleasure from this direction as well.
We’ve had a really great time getting to know you and the team and all of Saleo and everything you guys have brought to us.
Very good. Thank you so much.
Alright. So we promised not to PowerPoint you to death, but we have two slides just to lay the framework for the conversation today, then we’ll go off sharing and we’ll have a nice conversation, a Q&A between Amelia and myself and Christina. So just to lay the framework here, this is more of the Salesforce charter, just a few of the initiatives and challenges you guys set forth to solve.
I think one, the live demo. I’ll maybe ask you a question here, around the live demo aspect.
But the authenticity, the live demo mandate at Salesforce, what it means to ship authentic products, to drive relevancy in the demo. And then by the way, many of these, I think, whether you’re Salesforce in size or a smaller org., are systemic to all SEs.
These are challenges on the sales and presale side no matter the size of the technology, the product, the platform, the company.
First, you have multiple tenants.
You have disconnected data.
You’ve got slow demo cycles.
All of those are hard to pull together.
You’ve got complex features.
AI only exacerbates that.
For Salesforce, you have incredible technology like Agentforce and Einstein that requires quite a bit of prep to get those into the right state.
And then generic demos. They fall flat.
Nobody likes to deliver generic demos, especially when you’re trying to make it relevant to the audience. And I think a term that we’ve really gathered from you and the Salesforce team is just the relevancy is all about trust.
We want to build trust with customers. So, as it relates to the foundation of all of this, obviously, you have the Salesforce platform, which seems to grow every single month.
You guys are obviously making acquisitions, continue to grow, continue to provide just a really great solution. So I am curious from a live demo mandate.
This is something that is near and dear to our heart. It’s kind of the North Star here at Saleo that we believe the live demo should be used in a live setting with the live product, the authentic product, not screenshots, not Figma’s, not clones.
And so I’m just curious your thoughts on that as it relates to, even Marc Benioff, his comments, what he expects from live demos in Salesforce.
Yeah. Absolutely.
One of the key differentiators that we’ve had in the ten years that I’ve been here, and one of the reasons I came to Salesforce, was that we do show live software as part of our demos. There is an absolute place for vision and for something like a Figma and for showing what’s coming.
But when you’re in front of a customer and you need to instill confidence in what you’re showing and be confident as the person giving the demo. You need to be able to use the live system the way that it’s meant to be used. And that’s why Saleo was so interesting to us when we first started talking to y’all. Why we got on board with you, because you were the only one, and are the only one in the space, that lets us have our software do what it’s supposed to do while giving us what we need as demonstrators, as solution engineers, in being confident in what we’re presenting.
And that has come from the top down. You know, Marc Benioff even says in some of our live events that we are not going to be using things like Figma or slides.
We’re going to rely on the trust that we have in our own software. And that’s really where we want to be.
And that’s why Saleo was so interesting to us as we’ve looked into how we can bring our demos forward.
That’s great.
And I think in the age of AI as well, synchronous real time prompting AI interfaces, it’s even more critical to be able to use live product. You just can’t simulate or replicate those in a Figma, or a clone, or a screenshot.
So completely agree. And, we love that we’re aligned on that.
Alright. So again, this doesn’t fully encompass all of Salesforce, more of the charter within the purview of data cloud and marketing cloud and some of the core components, core teams within Salesforce.
But you’ve got the live demo mandate. Let’s show the authentic product.
We’ve got great software. And so let’s show it off. Let’s use it.
Personalization at scale, really excited to talk about this with you today.
I know this is near and dear to your heart. You have put on a master class in personalization at Salesforce and just you personally as well.
So excited to talk through that, being able to tailor the demos based on who you’re talking to or customers. One of the things I think has been most interesting to me and some of the success stories of Salesforce is that you are delivering demos in high fidelity both to prospective customers and buyers, but also the customers.
And what that’s done on a really great demo to save churn or to be able to deter them from going elsewhere from some of the glitz and glam that may be happening in the market; some of it real, some of it not. So it’s been neat to see the personalization that’s happened, to your current customer base and those success stories.
We’ll talk about some of the AI enabled storytelling. So you have Agentforce, you have Einstein. Anytime you’re demoing AI, it’s built to work off a production based LLM with real production data and real customer data. And if you’re an SE, you don’t have access to a real customer instance to be able to show it off.
So how do you show the actual software, through the lens of what the product would do in a live setting with the right data? So excited to kind of talk about that.
And then operational efficiency, I know that efficiency is at the epicenter of all that you do at Salesforce.
It’s the underpinning of the demo center of excellence to this fantastic team. If anyone knows about Salesforce, the old Q branch, now demo center of excellence, they truly are legendary as to what they do to support the go to market motion, the SEs across the globe for Salesforce.
And so all of this is the overarching demo strategy and some of the points that we want to talk about today.
Alright, Amelia. First question.
Set the stage for the overall macro demo strategy of Salesforce, and then how it aligns to the sales culture. We’d love to just hear an open open in an answer from you on what that looks like and just the overall demo strategy across the globe.
Absolutely.
So demos are a key part of any of our sales motions here. Typically, it starts, as I’m sure everybody on this call who has ever worked with a solution engineer or a demo strategy person, the customer says I want a demo.
And then we say, okay. How quickly can we get to it? And the more complex I think that technology gets and, specifically, at Salesforce that our solutions get, the longer it takes to get to that demo.
And that’s one of the things that our demo strategy is all about. We want to show not just the feature functions, not just the click paths, but we want to be able to take the time, instead of just responding and saying, okay. Let me give you a demo. We want to be able to take the time to figure out what are the business problems, what are the obstacles, what are the things that are being blocked so we can then craft the demo story and the demo, what we’re showing, into something that will directly connect with our customers.
So there’s always the harbor cruise, those feature function demos. And about 80% of our demos are those harbor cruise and feature functions.
And the remaining 20% are more custom, in the weeds, maybe proof of concept type of demos. But there is not a single opportunity that goes through the doors here or anywhere that I’ve ever worked in technology that doesn’t have some type of demo component on it. And we spend a lot of time and a lot of energy, and I know we’re going to talk about that a little bit later as well, creating assets and spinning up Salesforce orgs, for those of you who know the Salesforce nomenclature, to be able to support these demos.
So it’s no small feat, whether it’s a demo for a small business or it’s a demo for an enterprise level customer. We are constantly repeating the same motions over and over 80% of the time.
I think one of the things that continues to impress me is the level that you guys go to deliver a really great demo, whether it’s the harbor tour, whether it’s a deep dive, discovery. We’ll talk about this.
You hear a lot about storytelling. You hear a lot about personalization, but the means and the MO behind you guys doing it is all around delivering a really great outcome.
It’s not just, I’m trying to tell a story. I’m trying to tell a good story because I want a good outcome for the buyer.
I want to achieve a certain result for the customer. It’s underneath the covers, if you will, that’s been really neat to see as it relates to the sales culture.
So personalization, obviously, something I’ve done a few webinars on in the past. We exist to do great personalization, but I think it’s one of those terms that could be thrown around flippantly in the market.
You can see it on every website, any vertical in the industry. It’s used heavily.
But I think it’s been neat to see how you all have actually executed personalization during the sales cycle. And so I’d love to hear your thoughts on any tactics, any approaches, how do you actually drive that relevancy and personalization as a demo strategy?
Absolutely.
I think it’s important to call out that we, as consumers, are seeing the shift that’s happening just as people who are buying things, into everything becoming more and more personalized. So instead of our go to market and how we used to go to demos of being like, we’ve got a shared org.
And for any of you who’ve been a part of any Salesforce events, you probably heard of Northern Trail Outfitters or our golden person, Rachel Morris. Right? And for years, it was like, yeah. Let’s get on a demo. Let me show you Northern Trail Outfitters.
I actually had one instance where I was talking to a lingerie company, and I was showing them the hiking and tents. And I said, you know, just picture that this is lingerie.
You know, it kind of goes to show too, that what used to get us by with demos and saying, okay. Just picture this, has become a little bit more of, can you really make this more sticky for me? Can you do little things like put my branding on this, maybe take some of the discussions that we’ve already had in our our discovery sessions and turn that into something that you’re showing me that connects directly with me as the buyer at the company just like you would connect with me as a consumer out out in the industry.
So I think that the personalization part of this is probably one of the most previously time consuming elements that Saleo has now helped us ultimately streamline. There should never be, and this is maybe my own personal mandate, but there should never be a time where I show anybody anything generic.
I always have enough time now, thanks to Saleo, to make whatever demo that I’m showing at least personalized in some way, shape, or form to the customer that I’m talking to. Whether that is as simple as the colors and the logos and and some of the labels or even going as far as, can I show dashboards and metrics that help connect the story of why Salesforce is the right solution for overcoming those business obstacles? And, again, it’s more than just filling in first name, last name. It’s really about being able to fill in the blanks.
And we actually call it Mad Libs when we do the enablement on this side, but we tell SEs it’s like a Mad Lib. You fill it in however you need it.
But that level of personalization allows us to take that step back and then do a connected story in a way that we’ve never been able to do before.
But it all completely starts with what I know you guys are passionate about, which is the personalization elements.
Yes. You have such a broad platform. You have to drive a story that is personalized across multiple products, multiple tenants, multiple applications.
So being able to stitch it together, so it’s a piece of a story. Again, in the wild with one of your customers, Salesforce works as designed.
It works fine because it’s in a production setting. But to be able to do a demo like that and to prepare the demo data that’s relevant and personalized, it’s a whole different story.
So it’s been exciting to see what you all put out.
So speaking of that, go back to that Mad Libs concept. The token strategy has just been a true master class. I’d love to hear your thoughts on – how do we empower AEs, SEs to drive really quick personalization based on who they’re doing a demo with.
I think that this is one of the biggest wins, and something that we’re always kind of growing on. There’s no need for an SE or an AE or anybody who’s going to be giving a demo using Saleo, to have to go into the nuts and bolts and the nooks and crannies of Saleo.
Once things are set up, the concept of going in and switching out a token, the concept of going in and saying all I need to do is kind of fill in a few blanks to make this relevant to my customer, has taken our specific demo scenarios, even the most basic harbor cruises, of that end to end connecting all of these different instances and all of these different stories and all of these different solutions. Once those elements are set up, once those tokens are in place and they’re ready to go, as an SE, I can now log in to Saleo.
Even if I did it manually in Saleo, which we also have the ability to export CSVs, and I know AI is coming. We’re going to be talking about that in a bit.
I can really personalize and utilize the token library to go from what used to take me three or four hours to being able to create that personalized story with that Mad Libs concept in about fifteen minutes. And I’m not exaggerating when I say that.
I actually think I’ve gotten faster now than fifteen minutes, but I think fifteen minutes is still pretty fair.
That’s great.
Better to be conservative, but that’s a great metric, and it’s been neat to see how that’s been extrapolated across some other SEs and the time savings, over the past six months or so.
Going into tokens a little bit more, little bit of an audible here. What particular stories, industries, verticals, types of setup that you’ve seen, either from yourself or from other SEs in the field. Does anything stick out as it relates to how tokens are being used, some cool success stories?
Yeah. One of the biggest learnings that we had, initially, when we started using Saleo, tokens are not in the token library that are there now.
They were very scary, Justin. I’m just going to be completely honest with you. They were hard to organize.
The token library release literally jumped our adoption and jumped the utilization, that happened a few months ago now, by almost 100% once that token library came out. And since then, the ability to do things like add descriptions to what the tokens are used for, the ability to see not just what the token is, but what the value that matches that token is as you’re going through Saleo and you’re creating your demo and you’re testing things, has been great.
And one of my biggest takeaways and that the other parts of the organization who are building things into Saleo as we have new releases, is the ability to create tags. So as we’re talking about the token library, not to get too nitty gritty, but a token can exist in a folder, which we have used folder structures on our side based upon our product sets.
But tags allow you to do a one to many relationship. So if I have an SE who’s going in to do a product specific demo like our data cloud. All they have to do is go to the token library and click on the data cloud demo setup tag, and all of the tokens that they need to change to do a data cloud demo are right there.
So, again, why I said it takes me fifteen minutes to set up a demo. If I’m an SE and I need to get in, I literally make two clicks, and I’ve got the list of tokens that I need to switch out, and I can do that in five minutes.
I think a strong token strategy will only make you better. And we’ve actually changed our token naming conventions, our strategy, a couple times as we’ve gone.
But the token library itself has made that easy to do, and even easier for everybody to use. There’s no reason that anybody using Saleo can’t get to a personalized demo just by using the token library and switching out an image or two.
Yeah. I appreciate the authenticity. There was a moment, we had tokens in Saleo for a while, but it was hard to use. It was not easily consumed. And so big thanks to you and some of our other customers that that helped drive some of that impatience and bring it into a library that’s just much more accessible for an SE or for a sales rep.
And thanks for listening. You know, we came back and we said, oh, people are annoyed with this and here’s why.
You guys have all always been great with that. And we’re even excited for what’s coming next, the concept of having a token library of sorts for images.
So, I love that you guys are always innovating, and you truly are listening to the feedback that’s coming to you.
Yes. We appreciate that. It’s one of our core values, so I’m glad to hear it’s being lived out.
So, speaking of new features, you kind of alluded to the AI and tokens, I won’t spoil a surprise there, but as it relates to AI.
So notoriously difficult to demo. Right? You guys are known for Agentforce. You’re known for Einstein. Tell me tell me about that.
What strategies work well for demoing native AI within Agentforce and or Einstein within Salesforce?
Yeah. We’ve taken a hybrid approach and there’s a couple of reasons for this.
Again, anybody who’s familiar with Salesforce, knows that we are very data cloud driven. And with that, things like Agentforce, they consume credits, which was also something that was a a big red flag because every single time an SE would create a new demo or we call it spinning up a new demo, it would consume credits because now we’re loading in a bunch of data that the agents would use to make their decisions on and to come back with recommendations and letting AI do what AI is great at.
So we had to think about that from the demo center of excellence sort of thing. You know, how do we make sure that we’re being responsible, with the technology, with the way that it’s consuming credits? Because everything that we do ultimately costs money.
And so we want to be smart about that. The other thing that was very interesting as an SE was that when I would go in and I would demo something that would be agent driven, I would have to make sure that not a single word was off, that I knew exactly what a piece of data was called, that there wasn’t truly a a real kind of semantic type of layer at the time.
We’re getting better with that. But it was very hard as an SE to trust what you were going to get back from the AI.
Because if I didn’t load the right data in, the onus is on me as the SE to make sure I know what the data is and I know what’s going to come back. What Saleo has done for us from demoing AI, is the being able to really, as an SE, trust what’s coming back. I can determine the story that I want to tell, and I can work with Saleo to take that over so, A, it’s not consuming all of those credits, every single time that we’re doing something that’s heavily based on data.
B, I don’t have to, as the SE, think about loading tons and tons of data into a data model. And, C, I have an expected result.
And that has been maybe one of the biggest game changers. And I want to take another second, Justin, and point out why something like this is so important to us.
We have some SEs who are part of using Saleo at Salesforce who only use it for one small part of their demo, and that is simply an agent driven aspect that they couldn’t have control of before, or they didn’t know what was going to come back, or they didn’t know the data in the demo or that they were using well enough. So they didn’t feel confident in demoing it.
So the hybrid approach that you guys have let us do, of saying, yes. We want you guys to take over these parts and let us, as the SE, tell the story and solve the problem for the customer in a way that we can expect the results, has been great.
But because it is live software, I can still go off that path. Historically, demos were: if I create the story, that is the path I have to go.
Because Saleo is approaching this in a hybrid way. You guys are taking over this one piece, but I could still go over here and do something else with that same agent and go with the default data and never be caught off guard.
I could still say to the customer, absolutely. Let’s try that and see what happens.
And maybe the answer is it does come back bad, but we’re never stuck in a place where we can’t show them what good looks like.
Yeah. I love that.
I’ve said in prior calls and sessions that if you’re not in a live product and you’re doing kind of a mandated click path, or clone, or video, it’s just hidden brick walls and potholes. Right? You can’t go out outside of that work stream. You can’t go outside of that click path.
So being able to do a pivot, have a hybrid approach, where I am still in live Salesforce. I can show whatever I need to show, but by the way, I’m going to have this particular use case, which would work well in the real world.
Again, it’s that real world based upon an actually deployed customer instance with an LLM that’s been trained on that data that’s hitting a production back end, which is near impossible to emulate within a demo structure. Which, by the way, is not unique to Salesforce, its every one of our customers.
I think anyone who’s done a demo with AI can appreciate that. So it’s been neat to see how you guys have pushed us on the hybrid approach of letting us get some predictability on a use case that we want to show on Agentforce or Einstein.
But then, by the way, let the actual native product render and be used and do it at the back end if we need to. So it’s a great strategy.
You guys have pushed us there and it has rendered well.
The prompting. You can have predictability of keywords.
So you can say one particular keyword and it knows exactly what’s going to come through. And again, you have that predictability, which I think is the biggest demo challenge in the world today.
It’s just, in the demo I don’t know what’s going to happen. Having something predictable that emulates an actual real world scenario is so critical.
Alright. As it relates to storytelling, and I actually bolded this because we had probably 30 to 50 questions. So this is one of those, so I bolded it.
So it says, how do you fuse the tech into storytelling to help drive deals forward?
That is a great question.
So I would assume that, like most of the folks on the line, you always take that; I’ve got some of this stuff that’s flashy, you know, jazz hands! And I’ve got some that’s the software, which is what the software does.
We tend to take a hybrid approach when we do storytelling and demos, of showing the art of the possible. But I think that we’ve also taken a step back from that in making sure that we’re showing the art of the practical.
So while we still rely on things like, let me show you this grandiose plan. We now have no problem taking a step back from that saying, yes. We have this overarching plan in this story of where your company with Salesforce is going to be in five years.
But let’s talk about the things that you can do right now, and let’s make that really sticky. And that’s the 80% of our demos that we do.
The things that you’re going to be doing with the customer in three years, four years, five years, that’s the 20% that you probably need to do something more custom, more visionary, more working with your product team to say, you know, how are we going to be able to support them ongoing? But that 80% upfront when you’re telling the story and you’re saying, here’s how we’re going to transform your business, which we at Salesforce say a lot, does really need to tie back to that art of the practical.
So we’ve taken that pivot and we’ve gone from these large, grandiose stories that have a huge amount of vision, and vision will always be part of that, to being able to say, but let’s start with the crawl, walk, run. Let’s talk about what’s practical today.
Again, Saleo has helped us because it’s at 80% of that feature function, harbor cruises, that we show almost every customer every time. We just make sure that we tailor it to exactly how they’re going to be using it in that crawl, walk, run.
That’s very good. There’s actually a whole slew of questions around: how does change management manifest with sales.
And again, I’m pulling an audible over here on a question that you’ve not seen.
But I think you all have done an exceptional job of providing change management, highlighting success stories, not just doing external storytelling, but it’s the internal storytelling that helps drive adoption and change within the AEs as well as the SEs. And again, you and a whole slew of other folks, which I won’t name names, that are part of the team that drive that forward from the center of excellence.
I’m just curious, from an internal storytelling and trying to drive change management, either how SEs demo, strategies between the AEs and the SEs. But what’s worked well? You’re obviously a fantastic champion and being a distinguished strategic SE, people listen to you.
But I’m just curious if there’s any particular strategies or tactics or things that have worked well to try to drive change within the SE base, the overall presales base or otherwise.
That is a great question.
I will lean on something that I was talking about a little bit earlier, even before this webinar today, and I had no idea. And I am not a part of the demo CEOE team itself.
I’m kind of an SE that’s in the field that’s helping do the technical aspects of this. But I was really surprised to find out, and so was the demo CEOE, that we actually have a change management group here at Salesforce.
So, I would say if you have those resources available to you, you are very lucky and get them involved. Because nothing that you could think of, being one person, rolling out Saleo in your organization. Nothing that you do is a stand alone thing.
There are always going to be detractors, people who are going to be like, I’ve done it my way and here’s how I’m going to do it, and I’m happy with this. Right? And you’re always going to have folks who are eager to try something new.
And that’s where I kind of took an approach, as well as the CEOE folks to say, we are going to adopt these people who are very passionate about Saleo. We actually internally call them Saleo at Salesforce black belts. And we’ve got four or five of them who just wanted to get deep into things.
And then those black belts actually adopted some of those detractors, not to badger them constantly about how great Saleo is, because it is. But, how can we help you overcome the things that you’re spending a lot of time on? How can Saleo help you work smarter and not harder?
So one of the things that we’ve learned is that you’ve got to have not just one person internally, but a group of folks who are passionate about this to help amplify that message. And you cannot be afraid of those detractors who might pop up and be like, well, how I do things works just fine. Okay. Great. Maybe it does, but could this work better?
And then to the point of the success stories, Saleo’s got a lot of amazing metrics that we’ve actually been able to take out and translate those into how Salesforce is measuring success with Saleo. We’ve been able to look at who are the people who are using it the most, not just those black belts.
And we’ve been able to say, oh, they’re spending the most time. They’re making the most edits. They’re creating new demos. They’re presenting them. They’re playing them the most. And we’re able to reach out directly to them and say, hey. We noticed this. We’re not big brothering you, but we’re just saying, hey. You know, we noticed that you are doing something above and beyond what others are doing, and can you tell everyone more about that?
So we’ve turned that into a weekly spotlight where we call out those SEs and we talk about how they are actually using Saleo on the day to day, demo to demo. And that’s in addition to things that you guys probably already do with other things like leaderboards. We call out metrics and we give people rah-rahs, and let your managers know and give them pats on the back.
But the change management portion is really about embracing the fact that this is a process and that this is a way of changing the way that your team works for the better and not to be afraid of that. Embrace it.
Adopt those people who are detractors. Really pull in those people who are passionate about it.
And more importantly, connect those stories one to one. My story with Saleo is going to be different than everybody else’s, but what I will tell you is that every single person who uses Saleo at Salesforce has a different story, but every single story that they tell resonates with every other user of Saleo at Salesforce.
I mean, I think that’s fantastic.
I probably only see a sampling of some that you’ve seen internally, but it goes back to the internal story time. The structure of which you lay out the actual customer or prospect you’re demoing to, the SE and the AE involved, the collaboration, what they were trying to accomplish, the value they were trying to derive or the story they were trying to tell.
You do an exceptional job of trying to build internal excitement, but also knowledge share, which if you can do great knowledge sharing, you can tie it back to roles, whether it’s a sales rep or the SE, you’re going to drive change management.
So you guys have done just an exceptional job at that end. I’m always encouraged to see those and, of course, the formatting.
We have AEs on our side banging down our doors to get access to this because they’ve seen the SEs and the results that we’re getting and the confidence in the demos and lack of errors, smoother connected stories. We’ve been talking about it all day, that the AEs are bursting down the doors, to get their hands on it. We’ve actually had to hold them off, but we can’t wait to open those floodgates as well.
That’s amazing.
That’s actually the first time I’ve heard this, but I’m sure Christina is pleased to hear it and excited as well. So that’s great.
Yeah. I was just going to say it’s been so great to see those success stories, the organic growth of interest that has fueled. The results speaking for themselves when you see a teammate saving time or able to present a really great demo and get great feedback from the customer.
And I think another thing you all have done so well is really listen to your end users and get that feedback from them. So it’s not just pushing things down for people to use, but really asking for that feedback and surfacing where we can spend more time enabling or training or educating. And I think you guys have done a wonderful job with some of your surveys as well.
Absolutely.
We are always asking for feedback and part of it, I think, is that Salesforce has a culture of, if you’re going to call the baby ugly, just call the baby ugly. I don’t think that’s officially in any of our documentation or our handbook or anything.
But if there’s something wrong, call it out. And the other part of it is that when we have people involved in things like this, I love it when people bring problems to me, but I also love it when they say, hey. This doesn’t work for me. Here’s what might work for me.
So that’s also how we approach it with you guys. Right? Whenever we submit a feature request or we submit a bug, it’s like, hey. You know, here’s what’s not working for us, but here’s how it could work for us. I think fostering that type of collaboration, communication internally will benefit you, not only when you’re doing something like onboarding something like Saleo, but across the entire business.
Yes. Totally agree. The true partnership and collaboration. We always say we get our best ideas from our customers, and it’s very true.
Well, I know we went a couple minutes over as it relates to the Q&A portion, But, Christina, I want to hand it to you, I know there’s probably tons of live chat and real time questions that are coming in.
So give an opportunity for the audience to ask questions.
Absolutely.
This one is thinking a little bit more about KPIs. I know we’ve had a lot of conversations around this, especially as the group that’s been leveraging Saleo has grown and some of that has shifted. But, if you could share a little bit about how you’ve been measuring the effectiveness of Saleo or its impact, I think that would be great.
Great question.
I think that this is a really good place for me to call out somewhere where we were lacking. When we first brought in Saleo, we got excited and we said, let’s bring it in.
It’s going to transform our demos. But we didn’t really think about how we were tracking things upfront.
Right? If you’re going to have something to say Saleo made something better, you have to be able to track where it was. So that’s one of the things that we’re kind of backing into right now.
But our main KPIs are in opportunities where Saleo is used to help tell those stories. Is it speeding up the time to close? That’s really important.
How is it impacting overall, AOV of a deal? And the reason that’s important is because when you have something like Saleo, you’re not just confined to those demo story click paths. You can go off the path.
You can, as an SE, be more prepared or at least know and have trust that things are still going to work if you have to go off the path. And that has really been empowering to our SEs to be able to confidently show what they plan to show.
But if they get taken off the path, it gives us an opportunity to show other things that maybe we weren’t thinking of. So it increases the basket size, for lack of a better word.
But what else can we put onto it? Oh, I didn’t know that that could also work with this because we didn’t plan that. That wasn’t part of our demo talk.
The other part of it is just what’s the adoption. Right? How many times are people actually logging in and how are they using Saleo? Are they creating new demos? Are they reusing things that are already there? How long are the demos? You’ve got some amazing metrics.
I won’t go into it, but there was also a big effort that I just did where I had to take the Saleo metrics and try to translate them into Salesforce leader speak, and how we look at those. And that was actually a pretty easy process when I figured out what people wanted.
So we can see down to an individual user, who’s using it, how they’re using it, how much time they’re actually spending editing versus presenting. All of that has been really integral to having meaningful KPIs.
But I will go back to the one thing that, as you guys are walking in and you’re thinking about bringing Saleo in, I think you should absolutely do. You should absolutely get excited about it like we did. But make sure that you know where your benchmark is to go from so that you can figure out how to get back to those KPIs that really matter to the leaders.
Is it just about how many folks log in? Is it just about how many times they push play? Or are there other elements that you need to tie together with the analytics that Saleo brings to the table to be able to really show the value of the solution like we have internally?
I know demo prep time has been a big API that you’ve measured as well.
It’s going to be a good one.
Yeah. We have shown that on average, and this was really just from surveys.
SEs who use Saleo save on average two to three hours per demo prep. And those are pretty standard harbor cruises.
So think that folks were spending, you know, two, three, four hours for a forty five minute demo that they might end up only being able to talk for twenty minutes on. We all know how those demos go.
And cutting that down to fifteen minutes, thirty minutes has been huge even with the learning curve. Right? Because we’re still just a year in.
The demo prep time has gone down.
Also just the confidence level of the SE. We asked a lot of questions about, when you’re going out and you’re using, for example, the NTO demo org, which is one that a lot of people would use, how confident are you that that demo org is going to work every time? And the previous score on a five point scale was a two. And when I looked at the recent score, it was up to a four.
Because with Saleo on it, they know that the data is going to come back and that it’s going to be – let me tell the story that I want to tell and that I’m in control of the data. And I feel like I’m more choosing my own adventure as the SE rather than just holding on and hoping I make it to the finish line.
That’s great.
There’s another question about time to excellence with Saleo for you all, and I know that’s another thing that I think the way that you all have approached it, a very intentional kind of phasing of growing it, and learning and applying lessons as you roll out to more and more, but maybe speaking a little bit to that piece.
So we found very, very quick wins.
And when I say quick wins, I mean the ability to go in and an SE to understand and comprehend how Saleo works from the aspect of being able to take over a text and image replacement, wherever your demo is. That was really simple.
That’s the first thing we asked the folks who were early on in our pilot to do. We said, okay. We’re going to teach you the basics. We’re going to teach you text and image replacement. We’re going to teach you about tokens. Now we want you to go into your typical demo path and set that up.
Here’s the guide on how to do that. And we had folks who are industrious and wanted to get there, be able to do, I don’t mean to keep saying the eighty-twenty rule.
It sounds like I’m sticking to that. But it was 80% of their demo.
They were able to just go in and set it up by themselves without any extra help. That other 20% were, okay, Saleo. There’s gotta be a faster way, a better way to do this with some of the table and graph takeovers that you guys do, that we work with you in collaboration on.
But the time to excellence when it came to most use cases was about 80% of the time, we could get to it without getting any additional support from Saleo. Any of the advanced types of takeovers like the tables or graphs. And we have seen SEs just be able to go and create what they need and just be like, okay. I get it now. And then they just come back to the center of excellence or the technical hands on leadership and say, hey. There’s some things that I think, if we could do it this way, it would be better. And that’s what we pull you guys in.
I would say that overall, it probably took a month or two for people to get really confident with Saleo and how it works. And so you wrap your head around it because it’s just something new and different.
But the time to value it was remarkably fast. Again, 80% of what an SE wanted to take over was text and images.
And the minute that they completed a couple trainings internally with everybody. The minute that they watched an hour and a half of session, they were able to go do that themselves and with very little need for extra support outside of that.
That’s great. Well, I know that we are coming up on time here.
We have a couple more questions, but we’ll be able to follow-up with people one-on-one after the webinar because we had some great stuff come in.
Justin, do you want me to share the key takeaways and then wrap us up?
That’d be great. I know we got a minute here, so maybe you can even walk through this as well if you want to pull it up?
More of a highlight, summary, Amelia. And by the way, thank you so much for doing this.
You’re very welcome.
Forty-five minutes out of your day, maybe sacrificing your lunch, but we appreciate you doing this.
No problem.
If anybody ever wants to reach out direct too, let me know. Happy to answer any questions.
Good, bad, or ugly, but I gotta be honest. I don’t have a lot of bad or ugly.
Everything’s been really, really, really good.
We appreciate that.
It’s been fun to be immersed in a catalyst as part of the overarching demo strategy at Salesforce.
So I won’t go through these line item by line item, but I think it’s a live strategy first. We have our alignment on live demo, live Salesforce, live technology has been a big unlock for you guys.
Glad that we’re in agreement on that philosophy, it has worked out well.
AI features.Talked about Agentforce and Einstein. They require great data. They require predictable data. And so being able to have that at your fingertips, I know it’s been huge.
Then efficiency accelerating deals, I think that was one of the metrics that you guys are talking through. But how do we solve business problems? Instead of spending time preparing, how do we engage, solve business problems, actually engage with the prospect.
And then personalization, we got this from you all. I think it’s just a better way of saying it. Personalization for us is always the wow factor, but I think you guys really made it more material. It’s about trust. It’s about driving trust in the process, helping the buyers, our customers, understand that we get them. We understand them.
So you can see some of the stats there below. Obviously, we talked about two to three hours of demo prep time. We don’t need to get into that, but it’s been neat to see the KPIs and metrics that you all have been tracking and delivering.
Amelia, thank you very much. I know we’re two minutes over.
We appreciate you and all the folks at Salesforce, all the folks behind the scenes that are helping out driving the partnership and the overall demo strategy. But, thank you for your time, appreciate it.
Look forward to seeing you next week.
Absolutely. Thanks, everybody.
Thank you all for joining today.
Thank you for the great questions.
Hope you have a great Thursday.
