Kaiser Mulla-Feroze

Why the Future of Sales Tech Needs an AI Makeover — And Fast.. 5 years ago, I wondered what would I do (as a sales and marketing professional) without SalesForce ... Having used the previous generation of CRM, SFDC seemed like God's gift ! But here's the truth: current CRMs like Salesforce — as deeply entrenched as they are — just don't cut it for a GenAI-driven world. They were built in an era where sales was primarily about logging activities, not generating insights. (Do Read the brilliant piece below by Andreessen Horowitz!) Over the past few years, last 12months in particular, lot of jaw dropping martech have surfaced .. currently point solutions and some yet to gain weaponisable level of maturity.. But the writing is on the wall.. Future belongs to platforms that are AI-native, multimodal, and continuously learning from every interaction — not just text but also images, voice, and video. At Zycus , we in sales and marketing have rolled up our sleeves and experimenting with in-house AI agents built on no-code platforms, to solve various go-to-market challenges... from research to insights to lead scoring and enrichment .. not for vanity, but embed it in the flow of our work. But let’s be real — we’re still leaning on these old-school CRMs that were never designed to handle the dynamic, data-rich workflows AI demands. The true game-changer? New-age, AI-first tools that will make go-to-market strategies more autonomous, personalized, and adaptive than ever. We’re in the early days of what’s possible. And while the tech is evolving fast, all we can hope to do is to stay ahead of the curve. The shift from manual to AI-driven, from data entry to insight generation, isn't just inevitable — it's happening now. And I'm excited to see where it takes us. PS: Marc Benioff should start a side hustle and build an AI native CRM with a vision to kill SFDC as we know it no later than 2027 - 3 years from now! https://lnkd.in/gseg94fy #Salesforce #Marketing #Martech #B2B #GenAI #CRM

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📉 Struggling with the limitations of traditional CRMs? Discover how AI is paving a path to a new era in sales technology! 🚀 Many existing CRMs, like Salesforce and HubSpot, face challenges in AI innovation due to their legacy architectures. 🌐 Now imagine a platform that integrates multi-modal systems (text, images, voice, video) to extract deeper insights from your sales processes to predict and guide every step of your revenue journey. Enter Aviso AI – the quintessential system of intelligent actions for sales teams: 💼 All AI Sales Applications in One Place: Enabling proactive sales motions and end-to-end revenue cycle management. 💡AI Agents Framework: Democratizing access to high-level knowledge work. 💰 Efficient CRM Spend: Helping businesses cut non-essential CRM costs and improve ROI. Trusted brands like Honeywell, Lenovo, New Relic, and others are turning to Aviso to streamline their revenue execution. Interested to know how AI will augment CRMs and replace point solutions? 🔗 Click here: https://lnkd.in/eiKe-kT9

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Hot Take… RIP #PLG, Long Live #SLG But before you throw shade, let me explain… 🔹 There are undoubtedly exceptions, I’m sure many will highlight monday.com, Freshworks, etc. 🔹 PLG works well for low ACV deals with low CAC… think SMB and mid-market customers. Target CAC payback <12 months 🔹 PLG is a fantastic top of funnel marketing channel for enterprise sales ⭐ But for 6-figure enterprise sales, you need enterprise salespeople pressing the flesh with customers

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'AI’s potential will not be limited to streamlining the sales activities we have today; instead AI will compel us to reimagine sales processes and workflows completely. The relationship between sellers and buyers will evolve, as will #GTM strategies.' the gist of it. @a16z Ai portfolio are looking into emerging Ai market beyond automation.

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Salesforce Sales Cloud just released its 6th State of Sales report last week aggregating insights from 5500 sales professionals across 27 countries 🌎 Sales growth is back where 79% of sales leaders say revenue has increased over the last year 📈 Sikkkk! But the "how" looks different this time around... For example: Partner selling is contributing to growth in meaningful ways. Enablement is rightfully emerging as a top growth lever 🔑 Another surprising stat: 83% of teams that adopted AI saw an increase in revenue over the past year vs 66% of teams without AI. Causation or Correlation? 🤷‍♀️ Yet another stark reality is that 70% of a sellers time is spent on non selling tasks. 😫 Everything from researching accounts to manually entering things into the CRM to sitting in hours n hours of internal meetings... I dream of a world in the future where AI can help us with rethinking : 1️⃣ Smart list building 2️⃣ Automated pipeline management and 3️⃣ Real time enablement in the future!! Just imagine a world where you don't need to trainings or the same forecast call every week!! 🔥 Check out the report in the first comment for more sales insights!! #stateofsalesreport #salesforce #genai #salesorgs

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Great article by Vernon Keenan talking about some of the new Einstein releases and the impact it will have on RevOps market. We've seen Salesforce recently take a number of steps to integrate more data sources between this announcement + Data Cloud and the deepening relationship with Snowflake. We think there is a big opportunity for an AI native company to help unite data across the enterprise sales data stack. That's where Myko comes in, as we build a proprietary knowledge graph of your data during onboarding so you have one layer than can communicate across systems.

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Salesforce is getting pummeled in the markets (-5%) on the announcement of late-stage acquisition discussions with Informatica, a cloud data management platform with a market cap of about $11B. With $1.6B of revenue at a 77% gross margin growing 12% YoY (ARR growing 30%+ YoY), Informatica is a very healthy business that seems well positioned from a market perspective with a product focus on Data and AI, two of the biggest buzzwords in tech today. In the last year, Salesforce has been pushing its Data Cloud product, repositioning the company away from traditional CRM and towards the data layer at the foundation of an enterprise's entire business. Informatica definitely adds to this narrative, focused on the ETL side of data movement and processing and comes with tight relationships with data warehouse players like Snowflake and Databricks, as well as the large cloud providers. Data Cloud is Salesforce's fastest-growing segment by far, up 90% YoY. It's surprising to see the stock getting beat up this bad on the news. Informatica seems like a solid acquisition consistent with company strategy and at a current trading price 7.2x revenue, not overly expensive given the solid margin profile of the business. We'll see if these two move towards a deal and where the price lands, but overall this seems like a good get for #CRM

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“The eye of the storm”, There are a dozen GTM motions in use today. The most popular GTM motions are Inbound, Outbound, Targeted (ABM), Channel, and Product Led Growth (PLG). In a SaaS business with $50M in ARR, we may find as many as five different GTM motions. Most of the companies fail at the moment they choose between them! Jacco van der Kooij explain the reasons why some many SaaS business failed in 2022 and 2023, Jacoob’s reasoning is still more valid than ever!

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What a GTM OS platform should focus on first and foremost… 🤔 Market problem that a business wants to solve! Too many orgs focus their GTM on revenue generation and “strategies” for revenue regeneration. Any GTM org that is not grounded on the market problem is not going to meet its objectives. The market problem and market strategy will drive everything else. I have seen this too many times where the focus is purely on sales and revenue. Had products climb G2 rankings in terms of customer reviews but growth was still hart to find. 🔎 That is why about 75% of products that are introduced fail to meet viable, profitable scale and are ultimately withdrawn from the market. My goal with GTM OS is to develop a lean and agile methodology/system for GTM leveraging the foundation of a robust GTM strategy - just the essential components that should be adopted by every org of every size - blended with the magic of data & AI (for transparency and efficiency). Some things that GTM Practitioners get wrong and that must be fixed for GTM orgs: GTM cannot start with defining the process or playbooks for revenue generation teams or  identifying sources of revenue or demand generation. It must start with defining what is happening in the market. You cannot define ICP before assessing the market opportunity and market landscape with direct and indirect competitors. Technically nothing is stopping you from defining ICP without that, but it most certainly can lead you down the wrong path. Understand first what the avenues are for achieving growth given the market focus - are you going to penetrate existing market, develop a new one, develop a new product or need to educate the market on a new concept - and how that maps to the product value prop for the market before defining metrics with which you measure success. Your metrics will depend on your growth strategy you pick. The alignment around metrics is not the hard part but alignment on what is the product, who is it for and how will we grow it and what competencies and resources you need is the hard nut to crack. Figure out your market strategy, ICP, product value prop, positioning, growth strategy, channels for messaging, and why you, and you have the building blocks of a solid GTM OS. The rest are details that can be executed with automation. Love to hear your thoughts 👇 #connectedgtm #gtm #b2b #productmarketing #sales

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Salesforce (SFDC) has been synonymous with seat-based pricing for the last 25 years. Here's why that's about to change. Like most other software companies, SFDC is investing big into AI offerings. Specifically, they're doubling down on AI *agents* (which automate tasks) rather than AI *copilots* (which assist people). One massive enterprise customer recently deflected 90% of consumer inquiries with SFDC's new AI agent. If this continues, they'll need far *fewer* support personnel. Fewer people = fewer seats = less $$ for SFDC. That's not so great for a company generating >$30B in annual revenue... much of which comes from seat licenses 😲 How SFDC will respond: usage-based pricing. CEO Marc Benioff specifically called this out during last week's earnings call. "When we look at pricing, it will be on a consumption basis. And when we think about that, we think about saying to our customers, and we have, it's about $2 per conversation." There's a lot to like about usage-based pricing: 1️⃣ Less friction for customers. They'll start adopting the product, see value, and then can scale up on their own terms. 2️⃣ No shelfware. Customers will no longer pay for folks who never (or rarely) log-in. They only pay then they get results. 3️⃣ Built-in expansion. As SFDC's AI agents get better, they'll naturally make more $$. Enthusiasm for usage-based pricing cooled off in 2023. It looks like it's due for a rebound. — 🎁 For more growth & pricing insights, subscribe to Growth Unhinged — my free weekly newsletter: https://lnkd.in/exTbjKaM #saas #ai #pricing

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Salesforce won’t invest more in CPQ. The market sentiment says so. Since the launch of RLM (Revenue Lifecycle Management), the market sentiment for CPQ has gone down. People are speculating: → no new advancement → differences b/w RLM and CPQ → CPQ as an outdated tool and more. Here’s the most absurd yet believable speculation: In light of RLM, Salesforce will discontinue CPQ in 2-3 years. But all of this may be just that - speculation. There is nothing to worry, yet. Because RLM isn’t ready to use. It is still in beta. I’ve been getting a lot of queries around - how to migrate from CPQ to RLM. My answer - There is no straight forward way. Even if we do, the migration is going to be costly. What do you think about the future of Salesforce CPQ? #cpq #salesforce #salesforcecpq #rlm

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CPQ is hard and it's about to get SO much harder. A ton of companies will need to re-architect GTM infrastructure. Rev Ops is about to get hit with an AI tsunami 👇 TLDR: We're moving into a world where the default is usage-based pricing. The CPQ piece of your Go-to-Market Stack is highly unique. You can’t just treat CPQ as an extension of the CRM. It’s an entire Product discipline. Making CPQ work requires involvement from EVERY team: • Sales • Revenue Operations • Finance • GTM Systems • CS & Renewal Strategy But here’s the kicker. CPQ is about to get SO much harder 🔥 The main driver is the seismic shift we’re about to see in pricing. A move from seat-based to usage-based models is all but certain. • Customers would already prefer to pay for outcomes, not seats. • Emerging AI tools deliver capabilities DIRECTLY tied to outcomes. • And those outcomes (i.e. the VALUE) will be aligned with cost. It’s a fundamental shift in how we price, sell, bill and, recognize revenue. And CPQ is the glue that sits between Front Office & Back Office applications. It will require a large scale overhaul on both ends of the infrastructure. For Sales team, it will need to be able to handle things like: • Predictive usage forecasting for segmentation • In-app notifications for usage thresholds and upsell opportunities • Real-time ROI calculators based on actual customer usage For Finance & Rev Ops teams, it will need to handle: • Real-time revenue forecasting based on usage trends • Dynamic pricing based on consumption • Flexible dunning processes for usage-based overages • Integration of usage data into lead scoring models There are tools that handle portions of these capabilities. But there will be countless gaps to fill in. This is the last segment of Internal Tooling where you want a sprawl of vendors. THE GOOD NEWS This pricing transformation is coming. Adapting to it will take a huge cross-disciplinary effort. • Rev Ops & Finance to re-imagine the underlying processes and strategy. • GTM Systems to identify the right tools and design, implement properly. But most CPQ issues are actually more of a process problem. The fact that implementing it on top of immature processes spells disaster. Well, you're about to be gifted with a hard reset. Companies will NEED to re-think pricing strategy from the ground up. They will need to implement large scale change to the GTM infrastructure. And this time, you can build on a far stronger foundation. My Prediction: 1. This will be an area where making the investment is not an option 2. A stronger overlap between pricing and product will form 3. As a result, visibility into the role and value of Rev Ops will increase 4. Investment will flow to these teams with less budgeting headache 5. We will see a hiring surge across all teams involved in Quote to Cash __ #SaaS #Pricing #AI

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The first version of the SaaS GTM playbook was written twenty years ago. Salesforce championed it. Mark Roberge published The Sales Acceleration Formula about Hubspot’s journey. Over the next two decades, we analyzed, quantified, instrumented, & optimized many aspects of the SaaS GTM. Account executive to SDR ratios, sales cycle lengths, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, customer lifetime values, net dollar retention. The new software GTM playbook has yet to be written. But the companies who figure it out will become the next wave of massive businesses. On Tuesday, Theory held an event with [Dave Morse] formerly at Hebbia & Scale AI, Flo Crivello from Lindy, Paul Yacoubian from Copy.AI, & Chris Changfrom Gradient to discuss how AI changes these practices. These were my take aways : - Selling AI is being discovered because the technology is new. Buyers don’t know how to use it or how to buy it. - Because the sales motions are new, we can’t apply the previous playbook to the new sales process. The CEO/founder should hire a sales leader that they fully trust who focuses on ultimate success. The sales process is a part of the product : using both the customer’s language & the ultimate use of the product through success efforts - Between PLG vs sales led, more companies were sales-led. If starting with PLG, the template sells the product. Fight the empty box problem with great concrete templates that demonstrate how to use AI. If selling top-down, most of the conversations today are at the C-suite rather than the mid-market predominantly because the buying process is new. - Figuring out how to consistently produce wow moments with non-deterministic software is essential. - The room was split on pricing model : seats, usage, or some hybrid. Ultimately, pricing captures 15-30% of the value the software/AI creates. Developing a strong case for this with buyers will be key because the ROI question from buyers is real especially as the broader software market feels pressure. - Only VCs care about the word agents / agentic : for most enterprises, agents mean a customer support agent. Many teams don’t care about the underlying technology, they seek a solution to their problem. Tomorrow, we’ll be publish the results of the 2024 GTM Survey which we’ll reveal at Saastr in which we dig into the use of AI on sales processes & the impact to efficiency. Thanks to the panelists & attendees for a great discussion.

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Back to back two major product announcements, y'day {zeppa} and today Multi-entity support. We are now ready to support complex enterprise CPQ needs including seperated product catalog for each entity, roels and permission, base currency + reporting currency, ARR and other metrics for one entity as well as for combined company - all managed from ONE SUBSKRIBE INSATNCE. And you can write your {zeppa} rules scoped for a specific or multiple entities. I am absolutely thrilled about what we are gonna achieve with these advanced features. Ping me to see a demo. #cpq #revenueoperations #quotetocash

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Notes from David Schmaier, President and Chief Product Officer at Salesforce, speaking at HBS Reunion weekend ➡️ “AI changes everything” ➡️ 430 portfolio startups in Salesforce VC fund. Salesforce started using RunwayML for TV advertising and it was so impressed that Salesforce invested in RunwayML ➡️ Salesforce Dreamforce is now the largest technology conference in the world AI history: Wave 1 – predictive AI Wave 2 – copilots Wave 3 - agents “The 3rd wave of AI is Agents “ ➡️ “Digital workers are coming quickly to the enterprise” ➡️ “What if your workforce has no limits? What if you could run the companies with digital workers?”  ➡️ Case study is Wiley, who handled 40% of customer service requests with Salesforce AI agents Salesforce internal AI usage ➡️ 25,000 meeting summaries per month ➡️ 93% case deflection (Basecamp) for internal support request ➡️ 4,000 developers use AI; 20,000 hours are saved per month Dan Slavin Noam Ben-Ozer John Sviokla Lucinda Linde Chip Hazard

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if you know, you know Salesforce 'hard pivot' to auto ai agents. hmmmmm. now this is exciting. marc benioff. bestie to sam i am whatev you say i am sam (alt)man. owns TIME. surprise surprise. sam i am whatev you say i am (alt)man makes the cover as ceo of the year. wonder if that helped the bottom line for OpenAI. me thinks not. or perhaps this helped elevate others outside of silicon valley to shed light on this worldly (un)known. we forget about our navel gazing. either way marc has the president of the u.s. on speed dial. is a friend to the wef. not sure why. except to be wherever his customers are. he is a consummate deal maker. overall super friendly guy. and to boot his Salesforce tower is an iconic sf building. marc loves status. he does. and why not? marc also loves tech. hello. salesforce was a play to create the ultimate sales tool. right. focus on the sales. the customer. how do we upsell. what's changed in terms of behaviour. keep a lot of smart people on speed dial. and hopefully you'll manage to create your own billy. and he did. so this 'ting about (ai) agents means he is going hard. why. well. of you haven't noticed a combination of the 2008 great financial crisis coupled with the 2020 global pandemic impacted his customer's customers. which means that's a prob. a big prob. benioff represents the very best of being an entrepreneur. he is affable. he is committed. he is loyal. he is political. he knows how to throw a great party. he does. not that i have been to one. just checkout how they splash out the marketing budget. it's the cost of doing business. Salesforce without question much like Tesla and a few other companies will reap a large windfall from (ai). ultimately it looks like first productivity. then perhaps becomes strategic. this will take years in the making. the tech, weeks. the culture. months. although we anticipate that Salesforce to win big. 25 years. $ 34.9 billys in fiscal year '24 revenue. up 11% year over year. the crm (customer relationship management). said another way the data we find, evaluate, store to know about our customers and how we are doing ....is about to become t.o.a.s.t. with (ai). this old a** sh^ts tons won't be required. marc knows this. and so it's not so much that this is a hard pivot as much as this is a wake up reality check. the numbers speak for themselves. watching the stock price since nov 5 2021 Salesforce has been getting back to it's footing. and is navigating the financial engineering of walls street, client budgets. if sf is the center of the world for (ai) startups. and it is. if sf is the hq of mr. sf ... benioff. and it is. then expect whatev happens to Salesforce to be a leading indicator as it applies to agents. and the every changing way we inform and communicate about ourselves & customers. source: https://lnkd.in/eFExGq_A source: https://lnkd.in/eJRywTiD

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This Salesforce blog by Amber Armstrong (Oberg) is 💫 . Stat below but TL;DR: 86% of buyers want their goals understood but nearly 60% say sales reps don't understand them. SELLERS: if you take the time to understand your prospect's goals, you will win. Good old fashioned being a good human and working hard ALWAYS wins the day. Buyers demand personalization* 18. 86% of business buyers are more likely to buy if companies understand their goals. 19. But 59% say most sales reps don’t take the time to understand them. 20. 84% of business buyers expect sales reps to act as trusted advisors. 21. But 73% say most sales interactions feel transactional. *The data in this section comes from from the Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report.

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Good content here if you are weighing the journey from #salesforcecpq to the #RevenueCloud.

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𝗥𝗲𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿: The most significant growth opportunity in SaaS is hiding in plain sight: 🚀 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗹 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆 🚀 Here’s why it’s a game-changer: ✅ 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵 by tapping into partner networks ✅ 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲-𝘁𝗼-𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 with trusted channels ✅ 𝗦𝗹𝗮𝘀𝗵 𝗮𝗰𝗾𝘂𝗶𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘁𝘀 using shared resources ✅ 𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲 𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗹𝘆 through partner expertise and infrastructure ✅ 𝗕𝗼𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘀𝗳𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 with localized support Unlock the potential of your channel, and watch your growth take off!  

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