Renaud Bizet

Good 4 minute investment to watch if Revenue Intelligence is important to you.

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"The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation." So true. Excellent take by Zeya Yang, Marc Andrusko, and Angela Strange at A16Z Unlike traditional data tools, new age tools, particularly those with Gen AI capabilities do not require a level of readiness in enterprise data systems and processes. Instead, they can work with incomplete and unstructured data sets to generate reasonable points of view to inform and enhance a sales conversation. These Gen AI tools are enabling and driving a seismic behavioral shift in the sales function and executive-level decision making - one that accepts and adopts reasonable inferences from an "unstructured" or "multi-modal" set up vs. fully explainable conclusions from "structured" systems of record. Opens up many interesting possibilities for next generation go-to-market models.

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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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"My Sales team did not use it"  A Tech Leader on their Copilot rollout Would your Salesforce+AI initiative work? What are you doing differently? Apparently, Success with AI goes  Back to the old usual suspects People, process, and Real-world stuff. Here's what I've learned from what My smart customers are doing: 1. Align use cases with your internal Culture What are your users keen on getting out? Efficiency? Effectiveness?  Anything else? 2. Identify + Enable internal Champion for user adoption These folks have usually been around for a while, Or have the Organizational Clout as well as An appreciation for the user's challenges. 3. Experiment, Pilot, and Scale gradually Start small, learn fast. Collect lots of feedback And focus on basics for a large-scale deployment Buying tech is the easy part, But internalizing it a whole another game. Have you faced adoption challenges? What am I missing? #AIadoption #changemanagement #innovation #AIstrategy #salesforce #gptfy

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Prepare for #Dreamforce2024 Catching up on the recent news on #AI Models and Salesforce ? https://lnkd.in/g9HKCm53 #Dreamforce #Dreamforce24 #DataCloud

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We’re breaking down annual #RevOps planning - the tools YOU NEED to crush 2025. 🎯 It’s Tomorrow! 🔥 Join RevGenius on Dec. 10th, where three RevOps pros: Tiffany Gonzalez, Head of Growth and RevOps at Microsoft, Prakash Raina, Co-founder at Subskribe, and Andrew Kodner, VP of RevOps and Enablement at Bazaarvoice, will walk you through a clear, actionable roadmap to crush your 2025 goals and will break down how to organize your 2025 strategy step by step. ✅ Straightforward insights, no fluff. Here’s what’s on the agenda: ▪ The must-track metrics for 2025 and how to stay on top of them. ▪ A straightforward guide to setting goals that actually align your team. ▪ Smart budget allocation tips to balance proven strategies and bold experiments. ▪ Plug-and-play templates for annual and Q1 planning to hit the ground running. Save your spot (It's free)! ➡️ https://lnkd.in/egXQAibN The event is powered by our partner: Subskribe #2025planning #2025goals #revenueoperations #2025sales #2025strategy #gtmteams #revenueteams #annualplanning #q1planning #strategicgoals #revenueplanning #B2B #revenueenablement #revenueleadership #salesorganizations #gotomarket #revenueperformance #gtmleadership #RevGenius #SaaS #onlineevent #freeevent #business #companies #startups #gtm #entrepreneurs #ceo #cxo #cso #founders #scalingup #scalingbusiness #businessexpansion #growthjourney #salesenablement #cro #cfo #organizationalleadership #growthjourney #growthdrivers #growthlevers #revenueboost #bestpractices #expertadvice #revenuegrowth #revenueintegrity #revgen #revenueengine #valueengine #expertpanel #freewebinar #gtmstrategy #gtmexperts #revtech #gtmtech #sales #marketing #cs #revenuestrategy #longtermsuccess #2025roadmap #gtmperformance #operationalefficiency #revenueoptimization #revenuestreams #growthmodel #teamalignment #goalsetting #budgeting #freetemplates #innovation #technology #strategicplanning #strategyexecution #playbook #revenuemetrics #salesmetrics #financialplanning #keymetrics #businessandmanagement #predictablerevenue #planninggtips #finance #foundersadvice #planningguide #startup #playbook #keymetrics #freetemplates

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Great article and areas to watch! The next frontier isn't just in using AI but in mastering its integration into sales workflows, turning predictive and personalized analytics into true competitive edge - all while blending human intuition with AI-driven insights.

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Recently at the U.S. Open, I had the incredible privilege to interview tennis legend Monica Seles for a Salesforce customer event. It was more than just a conversation — it was a lesson in history, resilience, and what it truly means to be a champion. For me, it was also deeply personal because tennis was an integral part of my childhood. My mother played her whole life and fought many obstacles for the chance to play, so I was truly honored to have the opportunity to speak with Seles in person. Her tennis achievements are well known. At just 16, she was the youngest-ever French Open champion. She won eight major singles titles before she was 20 and nine overall. Leading up to this conversation, I was clear we would not be talking about my accomplishments before the age of 20. Seles is also a passionate advocate for equality and the role sports play in driving progress. She shared her emotional experience meeting Nelson Mandela in 2006 at a Laureus Academy Forum. President Mandela has spoken inspirationally about sport's power to change the world, and his patronage helped found Laureus Sport for Good to help children and young people overcome violence, discrimination, and disadvantage in their lives. We also talked in depth about the impact and evolution of women in sports since Title IX passed in 1972, and Seles highlighted barriers that pioneers like Billie Jean King helped dismantle. King's victory in the 1972 U.S. Open, where she earned $10,000 less than her male counterparts, set the stage for King to co-found the Women's Tennis Association, secure equal prize money, and famously defeat Bobby Riggs in the "Battle of the Sexes." It’s tough to fathom that Title IX was only passed 52 years ago. Before then, stellar athletes like my own mother had no way to shine in athletics because there were zero high school sports for girls in many states. In today’s Caitlin Clark era, it feels impossible to imagine what the landscape would look like in sports — or business or society — without the contributions and leadership of women. Business leaders have both the opportunity and a responsibility to create greater opportunity and access for all. Equality is a core value for Salesforce and there is a history of action behind it. Back in 2015, Marc Benioff personally reviewed salaries across the company and invested $3M to eliminate pay disparities between men and women. Today, it’s an ongoing focus across our organization. And while there is still work to be done in the name of equality, it's important to remember how far we've come. Sitting down with Seles was profoundly inspiring, and it reinforced my gratitude for the trailblazers who continue to push boundaries and move us forward. #Equality #USOpen #Salesforce #WomenInSports

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We LOVED the insights from Ashley Alebiosu, Manager CxO Experiences at Salesforce, about how to overcome some of the classic challenges to driving change. 1. Leverage the power of influence. 2. Knowing when to let go. Listen to more amazing insights from Ashley here: https://lnkd.in/gEYHKcWy

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Salesforce's crucible moment Salesforce is poised to enter uncharted territory. Q2 will be the slowest revenue growth quarter in their history, and crucially, their first ever single digit YoY revenue growth quarter. (They project a max revenue growth of 8% YoY in Q2). Durability of revenue growth has historically been the #1 driver of valuation for growth technology companies, and investors typically look for an enduring growth rate in the high teens, at the very least. Now that SFDC is entering sub-10% growth rate, they potentially morph into a free cash flow story, i.e. they need to target 30 – 40%+ FCF/EBITDA margins. But are Marc Benioff and his team ready to go down this path? Or are they going to push hard to capitalize on the Gen AI wave, continue to do big acquisitions and get growth back up again? At 10%-ish growth rate, they're basically in line with a lot of the PE-backed legacy software plays. And the question for investors becomes: why invest in Salesforce if some of these other companies can deliver mid – high single digits (or even 10%ish) growth but with much higher margins? So Salesforce has to choose a path: either reaccelerate growth back to at least 10%+ YoY (likely low teens) and still get credit for growth OR focus on making FCF margins much stronger and be valued on FCF. Just to be clear, I'm rooting for SFDC. I hope they can get growth back up. They have been an iconic technology company for decades and one should never count Marc Benioff out. But the grim reality facing them is that the longer they stay in the no man's land of low growth coupled with low FCF margins, the more challenging it will be to sustain investor interest.

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“Death of a Salesforce”: Why AI Will Transform Sales. New post w/ Zeya Yang and Marc Andrusko 👇 AI is set to revolutionize sales so profoundly -- both the system of record AND the workflow -- that no incumbent is safe! Instead of a text-based database, the core of the next sales platform will be multi-modal (text, image, voice, video), containing every customer insight from across the company. The LLM powering the platform would be constantly ingesting data to create the most up-to-date context. Workflows will fundamentally change too, some may disappear entirely: e.g., AI will compile a ranked list of primed buyers, create personalized collateral etc. Your AI wingman may even be your live coach on sales calls. The implications will be broad: 📍Sales, marketing, and customer success will blend together 📍Per seat pricing --> outcome based pricing 📍Multiple GTM strategies will exist in the same company (target different buyer personas with highly customized sales journeys) In our post, we map what some of the best new companies are doing today. If you’re building towards this future, we would love to hear your thoughts! https://lnkd.in/g7wXYQ3X

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15 years ago, we saw numerous remarkable enterprise SaaS companies struggling to raise capital during the financial crisis. So we created Salesforce Ventures to invest in them and support our ecosystem of partners that do so much to drive customer success. From these origins, we could never have imagined the impact Salesforce Ventures has been fortunate enough to have on the enterprise ecosystem. The numbers tell an extraordinary story: → $6B+ invested in groundbreaking enterprise SaaS companies → 630+ visionary companies backed across 32 countries → 35 IPOs and 175 exits, including industry leaders like Zoom, Docusign, Box, Stripe, and Wiz → $1B committed to the next frontier: responsible AI development. We’ve grown from writing small checks to big ones, from participating in rounds to leading them, from keeping pace with the market to helping create it, and from the cloud computing revolution to today’s agentic AI era. I’m proud of the foundation we’ve built by serving enterprising founders with the patient capital, coveted community, and unparalleled access they need to build industry-defining companies. In honor of this milestone, we're sharing some thoughts on our journey to date, and what we have in store for the future. Thank you to Marc Benioff, my team, our partners, and most importantly, our founders, for making all of this possible! https://lnkd.in/gfqNJaRT

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From a governmental side, there is a tremendous opportunity to unleash high quality governmental data sets (across ALL agencies / domains / locales). This can spur advancements across governmental processes, problem areas, etc that, in many respects can be part of a Digital WPA / CCC program. This is done in some pockets already to an extent, but there is not a broader effort insofar as I'm aware that serves as a problem-solving platform that can enable tremendous innovation opportunities. “Despite the rapid progression of open-source LMMs [large multimodal models], there remains a pronounced scarcity of large-scale, diverse open-source multimodal interleaved datasets. The release of MINT-1T breaks down barriers in AI research. By making this huge dataset public, Salesforce has changed the power balance in AI development. Now, small labs and individual researchers have access to data that rivals that of big tech companies. This could spark new ideas across the AI field. While larger datasets have historically yielded more capable AI models, the unprecedented scale of MINT-1T brings ethical considerations to the forefront. The sheer volume of data raises complex questions about privacy, consent, and the potential for amplifying biases present in the source material. As datasets grow, so too does the risk of inadvertently encoding societal prejudices or misinformation into AI systems. Moreover, the emphasis on quantity must be balanced with a focus on quality and ethical sourcing of data. The AI community faces the challenge of developing robust frameworks for data curation and model training that prioritize fairness, transparency, and accountability. As datasets continue to expand, these ethical considerations will only become more pressing, requiring ongoing dialogue between researchers, ethicists, policymakers, and the public. The release of MINT-1T could accelerate progress in several key areas of AI. Training on diverse, multimodal data could enable AI to better understand and respond to human queries involving both text and images, leading to more sophisticated and context-aware AI assistants. In the realm of computer vision, the vast image data could spur breakthroughs in object recognition, scene understanding, and even autonomous navigation. Perhaps most intriguingly, AI models might develop enhanced capabilities in cross-modal reasoning, answering questions about images or generating visual content based on textual descriptions with unprecedented accuracy. As AI continues to evolve, datasets like MINT-1T serve as both a catalyst for innovation and a mirror reflecting our collective knowledge. The decisions researchers and developers make in using this tool will shape the future of artificial intelligence and, by extension, our increasingly AI-driven world. The release of Salesforce’s MINT-1T dataset opens up AI research to everyone, not just tech giants." https://lnkd.in/giD7T_gY

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🔥 Act fast to prevent your tech stack obsolescence! 🔥 🤖 Is Ai killing your current SaaS solution relevance? There are some 70,000 Ai startups in the US alone! From R&D, through product solutions, partnerships, product marketing, to enablement, & field sales onwards to successful client outcomes ☎️Contact Mission Intelligence or DM me to explore a strategic health checkpoint, and commercial execution plan #SaaS #AI #SalesStrategy #MissionIntelligence #EnterpriseSales #RevenueGrowth #ProductMapping #FutureProof

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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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Last year was given a book at the Gainsight Pulse 2023 event - Customer Communities, written by Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, and Robin Van Lieshout, Chief Strategy Officer. Ive finally got round to reading it - within a few pages i read a stat about loneliness and it got me thinking. Onboarding new employees should be more than just a handshake and a tour of the office kitchen. Its like being thrown into a pool without knowing how to swim. That’s exactly how many new hires incliding mysefl in my early career feel when onboarding is treated like a mere formality rather than a way to set you up for success and integrate you into the business/org. Here is the stat from the book - Research has shown that loneliness can have a severe impact on health, equating to the damage caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day. When employees start a new job, they are especially vulnerable to feelings of isolation and disconnection. This is why a well-designed onboarding process is so crucial—it’s not just about equipping new hires with knowledge and tools, but also about creating a sense of belonging and community that can literally be life-saving. It’s your first real opportunity to demonstrate your company’s culture, values, and expectations. Most importantly, it’s your chance to make new employees feel connected and valued right from the start. More stats - a well-structured onboarding process can reduce employee turnover by up to 82% and increase productivity by over 70%. But when you skimp on this crucial phase, you risk leaving your new team members feeling lost, unsupported, and, worst of all, lonely—a state that could severely impact their well-being and lead them to question whether they made the right choice in joining your company. Employee onboarding is pretty much my day job recently - for people who don't know, i joined Cognexo as Head of Customer in January after being a customer of theirs for a year previous. We launched Cognexo Connect this year and now most of our conversations with customers are around protecting employees, supporting their well-being, ensuring they're integrated into the business through onboarding within Cognexo. Some of our customers have it down! some of the onboarding flows i see on the daily are just lightyears ahead of some i've had in the past (like being given my windows password on day and left for the week and this was one of the better ones). Don’t let your new hires sink—give them the support they need, give them the structure they need, give them the community they need! and for those responsible for managing attrition, it makes you look good too ;) #Onboarding #EmployeeExperience #WorkplaceWellbeing #EmployeeEngagement #CompanyCulture #EmployeeRetention #WorkplaceLoneliness #Attrition

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For those billing hourly, this is work that you are already doing that is lost to manual timekeeping. For those that work in a fixed fee model, this is work that is being missed to manual timekeeping. Stop trying to recreate your day, AI can and should do this for you. Get credit for the work you are doing using AI to automate your timesheet.

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"Why do you like working at Salesforce" My response has always been "We're a product market leader, and our culture" And that's even more so true today as we become the #1 Agent-First Enterprise. The company that augments human capabilities with AI Instead of trying to replace humans, will win the AI race! Hiring Technically inclined Enterprise AE's in major hubs to lead the Charge! I'm an InMail away let me know you applied! Link in the comments! #recruiterinahoodie #salesforce #AI #AIagent

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The #SAAS revolution of ever growth of sales & market cap is not working for most users The impact of unspent licenses and unused tools are becoming an eye sore The use it or lose it philosophy with users are being used for many IT tools by business focussed IT departments I see decommissioning of SAAS tools becoming a trend as many companies see taking out systems that are just protecting old ways of doing work a value driver Those providers that try to arm twist customers into staying may succeed in the very short term, but are well served to remember that SAAS was sold on " pay per drink", rip and replace and their ilk #Salesforce #Microsoft

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