Talking the Future of Small Business Sales With EVP & GM Kris Billmaier

Key Takeaways

• Kris Billmaier, the EVP and GM for Sales at Salesforce, shares a look at AI and agentic tools assisting, not replacing, sales teams.
• AI acts as a great equalizer for SMB sales teams, allowing them to “do more with less.” Modern CRMs are giving small teams the efficiency and predictive power to compete with larger enterprises.
• For AI adoption to succeed, unify all customer data in one CRM platform — a necessary first step for deeper insights and automation.

Kris Billmaier knows a thing or two about teams and growth. Now the EVP & GM of Agentforce Sales at Salesforce, his path to leading the company’s largest cloud has been anything but conventional. From team captain to on-stage keynotes at Dreamforce, Kris runs a team that is making waves for the future of business. 

We sat down with Kris to get his unique insights on the future of sales, how artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally reshaping the landscape for small and medium businesses (SMBs), and the strategies they can adopt to leverage new agentic tools. We’ll dive into his origin story, explore current sales trends, discuss the powerful combination of AI and CRM, and close with his lasting advice for growth.

Get to know Kris 

Teams have been a constant throughout Kris Billmaier’s life. In college, he played baseball at the University of Notre Dame, where he was team captain. After graduation, he played right field in the Detroit Tigers organization. Not long after leaving professional sports, he founded a fantasy sports startup, where he built his product with a small team of employees for four years.

Following his time as a founder and CEO, he spent close to eight years at Microsoft before coming to Salesforce in 2018. He currently resides in the greater Seattle area with his family, continues to be an avid Seahawks fan, and coaches his daughter’s softball team.

Billmaier’s experience as a startup founder informs his philosophy at Salesforce. One of his key mottos that his team knows well is “easy by default, advanced by choice.” For him, it’s crucial for products to not only deliver value to customers but to also bring them delight.

Current sales trends and impact on small businesses 

Under Billmaier’s leadership, Sales CRM has evolved to embrace AI-driven transformation, positioning Agentforce Sales at the company’s forefront. The future of sales is moving fast, with AI and agents leading the charge. AI agents are poised to reshape every phase of the sales cycle, from prospecting and deal management to post-call follow-up.

The core vision is to empower sellers to spend less time on repetitive administrative tasks and more time on what they do best — building human connections.This shift is especially impactful for small businesses and startups, allowing them to focus on innovation instead of being bogged down by administrative work.

AI, CRM, and customer insights with Kris

AI has been and will continue to be groundbreaking for all businesses. It allows companies to do more with less, shifting time spent on menial tasks to connecting with customers and innovating.

When people think of Salesforce, they often think of an enterprise company. However, about 70% of Salesforce customers are small or medium businesses. The wide range of customer relationship management (CRM) offerings ensures that businesses never have to worry about outgrowing their platform as they scale. Salesforce’s Starter Suite and Pro Suite offerings make it easy to start and grow, and Kris and team launched Salesforce’s first-ever free CRM, Free Suite. In fact, many companies that have since IPOed have been using Salesforce since their early startup days.

Agentforce Sales provides growing businesses with a comprehensive platform to simplify their sales processes and fuel growth. By unifying sales, service, and marketing data, it offers a true 360-degree view of every customer, enabling startups to personalize interactions and build stronger relationships. This integrated approach simplifies lead management, automates routine tasks, and provides valuable insights through AI-powered analytics, helping smaller teams operate more efficiently. 

As Kris puts it, “[we’re] building a connected platform to solve for all aspects of the sales cycle so that our customers can come in, start with a CRM, and grow up with our company, and at every step of the process, be engaged with their customer with the right data, at the right time, with the right AI.”

Kris believes that AI will augment the sales cycle – and the next generation of sellers in the best way possible. “What if we were to move to a world where every phase of the sales cycle became agentified?” he asks. “You have tools out there that allow you to prospect 24/7, so that your SDRs or your salespeople wake up with a full lead funnel without having to do all the manual searching through third-party applications to fill and to start a pipe-qualifying process. What if you had an agent that looked at those prospects, had conversations with them, and turned those conversations into meetings of significance, where you had all the data at your fingertips to have the great conversation as a human?”

Adoption and best practices for SMBs

The foundation of great AI is great data. Many businesses struggle because their customer information is scattered or inconsistent. Kris recommends ensuring that business data across teams like sales, service, and marketing is organized in one place, before implementing AI.

The goal is to leverage AI tools and agents to multiply your workforce and automate repeatable processes, allowing your people to focus on innovation, customer relationships, and strategy.

Walking the agentic walk

AI can help boost seller productivity by engaging with leads around the clock, surfacing insights, guiding next steps, and automating administrative tasks.

Speaking to the power of the right tools, Kris notes how Salesforce has transformed its own sales processes with Agentforce’s Engagement Agent which nurtures leads with personalized outreach and books meetings with sales teams when they’re ready.

Previously, Salesforce sales development representatives (SDRs) could only follow up with one in four leads due to the large inbound volume the team received. “We faced capacity issues, but solved them by partnering our human SDRs with a digital workforce to unlock massive productivity.” By grounding the Engagement Agent in its own sales CRM data, Salesforce has been able to extend the expertise of its sellers, so no leads were left behind.

Lasting sales advice for growing businesses in the agentic era

Kris’s final advice reinforces the human-centric future of sales: “The agentic era isn’t taking the human out of sales, it’s arming sellers with the data, context, and insights they need to make every human moment count.”

The future of sales isn’t about selling sales technology; it’s about selling sales teams, surrounding an individual with all the adjacent support they need to do their job efficiently. And, the future is now.

Explore your AI CRM journey to more sales today

Ready to put AI to work for your sales teams? Check out Salesforce’s SMB offerings to start your journey with Free Suite or a free trial of Starter Suite or learn more about Agentforce Sales.

Not sure where to start? Fill out this form for an expert to contact you with more information.

AI supported the writers and editors who created this article.