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Salesforce, the #1 CRM for sales, today introduced two new fully autonomous AI sales agents: Einstein Sales Development Rep (SDR) Agent and Einstein Sales Coach Agent. Generally available in October, these sales agents are built on Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Agentforce Platform to help sales teams accelerate growth.

Einstein SDR Agent autonomously engages with inbound prospects to nurture pipeline 24/7. Unlike chatbots that can only answer specific programmed questions, Einstein SDR Agent makes decisions and prioritises actions that align with the desired outcomes and analyses a prospect’s question to autonomously determine what to do next — whether that’s answering product questions, handling objections, or scheduling a meeting. Each response is trusted, accurate, and personalised because it is grounded in a company’s CRM and harmonised external data using Agentforce’s retrieval augmented generation (RAG) service. Einstein SDR Agent seamlessly transitions leads to sellers and can handle multiple leads at once, across channels, and in various languages. This means sellers can offload time-consuming, top-of-the-funnel activities and focus on connecting with customers.

Einstein Sales Coach Agent coaches sellers by autonomously facilitating role-plays, tailored to each deal, providing personalised and objective feedback afterwards. During the role-play, Einstein simulates a buyer, using generative AI to convert text into speech. Einstein uses RAG to emulate how a buyer might respond, grounding every response in relevant information stored in Salesforce — such as information on the deal, account, and previous correspondence with that customer. This means sellers can practice pitching, handling objections, or negotiating before meeting with real customers.

Built on the Einstein 1 Agentforce Platform, the new autonomous sales agents can be quickly set up using no-code actions, workflows, and pre-built templates infused with Salesforce’s proven selling best practices. Using Salesforce Data Cloud, customers can further enhance generative models by uploading relevant external information such as existing selling and training documents, leading to more accurate, relevant, and contextual outputs from the agents. Both agents leverage the Einstein Trust Layer to ensure secure, trusted responses.

Customer perspective: “Accenture is committed to providing our sales practitioners with advanced technology and processes‌ — ‌fueled by AI, data, and insights‌ — ‌to drive more intelligent customer conversations and accelerate revenue. We are teaming with Salesforce to develop and optimise Einstein Sales Agents to improve deal team effectiveness, scale to support more deals, and allow our people to focus their time and effort on our most complex deals.” – Sara Porter, Global Sales Excellence Lead, Accenture

Salesforce perspective: “We are excited about the potential of humans with AI to scale and close deals faster with this groundbreaking AI innovation to close deals with greater velocity and value. By integrating AI agents that can generate high fidelity pipeline and provide personalized coaching, our reps will be able to focus on higher value deals and better prepare for them.” – Sam Allen, EVP & Chief Pipeline Officer, Salesforce

Dive deeper

Einstein SDR Agent: In a recent report, businesses shared that their sales reps spend just 30% of their time selling during an average week because they are bogged down by tedious and manual tasks. Einstein SDR Agent helps sellers maximise their selling time by:

• Automating pipeline 24/7: Einstein SDR Agent has personalised, intelligent conversations with inbound prospects. It uses its RAG to interpret and process information to answer questions, handle objections, qualify leads, and book meetings.
  • For example, if an inbound prospect recently downloaded a white paper off a website, the human seller does not need to tell Einstein SDR Agent to draft an email to this lead. Instead, Einstein SDR Agent can be configured to come up with its own action plan for leads that are routed to it. Einstein SDR Agent will autonomously reach out to the inbound lead.
• Giving accurate, personalised responses: Einstein SDR Agent grounds every response in your company’s trusted business data, including Salesforce CRM data. Using Data Cloud, companies can upload existing sales materials like product FAQs, sales plays, and case studies for Einstein to use to generate a trusted and accurate response to lead queries.
• Providing built-in guardrails and monitoring: Customers can customise the language and tone Einstein SDR agent uses with prospects. Customers can set guardrails for how often, what channels, and when Einstein should engage with inbound prospects. Customers also choose which leads to route to Einstein.
  • For example, customers might route all inbound leads that are less than $10,000 so their sellers can focus on higher value leads. All actions are logged back to Salesforce as tasks, and are measured within customers’ existing dashboards and reports. Out-of-the-box governance dashboards help monitor agent performance and inspect conversations, allowing sellers to intervene at any time.
• Enabling seamless hand-off from agents to human sellers: With each scheduled meeting, the agent performs a warm handoff to sellers by notifying and briefing them with curated meeting preparation that summarises critical lead information and previous interactions.
• Providing multi-channel and multilingual capabilities: Einstein SDR Agent can engage with leads on their preferred channels including SMS, WhatsApp, and in their preferred language.

Einstein Sales Coach: Enhancing sales enablement is a top priority for sales leaders, as 76% of reps believe it prepares them to meet quotas.

Einstein Sales Coach helps sellers improve their discovery, pitch, and negotiation with:

• Realistic role plays: Einstein Sales Coach Agent can be found on every opportunity record, ready to engage, converting text into speech for engaging role-plays based on the deal stage. Using RAG, Einstein finds the relevant information in Salesforce — such as previous correspondence with that customer or external files provided, like buyer personas and buyer journey documents — and generates contextual responses in the buyer’s tone back to the seller during the role-play.
  • For example, if a deal is in the negotiation stage, Einstein can create a role-play scenario sourced from the relevant context, including the opportunity record and buyer persona materials, to simulate the target buyer and engage in pricing negotiations.
• Personalised, objective feedback: Einstein Sales Coach Agent leverages LLMs to incorporate insights from thought leaders and reputable publications when offering seller feedback. Feedback also includes evaluation of next steps identified by the rep in Salesforce and any overdue tasks. AI agents can objectively apply the same standards to every role-play session, driving consistent feedback across reps.
• Connecting coaching to sales results: Managers can assess the impact of Einstein Sales Coach Agent on team performance by tracking the number of coaching sessions, identifying the most engaged reps, and analysing win/loss rates of deals with and without coaching to easily assess ROI.

Analyst perspective: “In sales, customers aren’t just buying a product, they are buying a personal experience. As sellers endeavour to meet the needs of buyers when it comes to speed and a desire for a relevant and personalised engagement, Einstein SDR enables a more streamlined initial outreach, which enables sellers to focus on each customer’s unique needs. Einstein Sales Coach then helps individuals to develop the skills necessary to become a trusted adviser and partner, so they can close deals sooner with greater success.” – Stephen Hurrell, ISG

Salesforce perspective: “Every AI conversation needs to be an ROI conversation, and that will happen only when AI augments your team to accelerate growth. Every sales team needs more at-bats and more enablement to accelerate close rates, and that’s what these new autonomous sales agents will help drive. The sales team of the future is humans working with AI to drive sales success.” – Ketan Karkhanis, EVP and GM, Sales Cloud

Availability:

• Einstein SDR Agent and Einstein Sales Coach Agent will be generally available in October and additional functionality will be added throughout the year.

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