Every year, marketers all over the globe get together at Salesforce Connections (CNX). And this year is no different. Live in Chicago on June 3rd and 4th and streaming on Salesforce+, CNX is packed with sessions built around agentic artificial intelligence (AI) tools and strategies that lean teams can actually put to work.
Whether you’re a startup founder, a solo marketer, or someone at a small and medium business (SMB) trying to compete with large companies, here are some Salesforce Connections sessions that are made for your growth and success. Get ready to get hands on.
What small businesses can expect from Connections
Connections features hundreds of sessions — the highest count in the event’s history — centered on marketing and its collaboration with commerce, service, and sales.
The central thread running through nearly every session is agentic AI and how it can help you. For SMBs, that isn’t a futuristic concept — it’s a competitive advantage available right now. According to the Salesforce Tenth Edition State of Marketing Report, only 13% of marketers are currently using agentic AI, which means early adopters — including small businesses — have a real window to pull ahead.
The sessions below span Agentforce Marketing and how it addresses something real: How to get more customers, keep the ones you have, and do it all with a small team. To register or see more information about these sessions, visit the CNX 2026 session catalog.
Connections 2026 is here!
Don’t miss out on CNX — focused on agentic AI, CRM, and practical strategies you can apply right now to grow your business.
Sessions on AI-powered marketing for small businesses
Scale Ad Sales Coverage Without Scaling Headcount
This session is built for SMBs in media, publishing, local advertising, or any business that sells ad space and needs to stretch a lean team further. You’ll learn how to use Agentforce Marketing and Data 360 to deliver proactive, personalized campaign communications to SMB consumers and boost renewal rates. For growing businesses managing advertiser relationships manually, this is a direct blueprint for doing more with what you already have.
Scale Lead Engagement and Measure Marketing Performance
Align marketing and sales to empower your team with warm leads by using automated journeys to engage cold prospects, build pipeline, and prove marketing’s impact on revenue. If you’re a one-person marketing team or a founder writing your own content, this session shows how AI agents for marketing can take a brief and produce a live campaign — no agency, no extra staff required. It’s one of the most practical sessions on the schedule for SMBs who need to move fast without sacrificing quality.
Messaging in the Age of AI: Scale and Deliverability
Search is changing fast. AI is reshaping how customers find businesses online, and SMBs that rely on organic traffic need to understand this shift now. This session covers how to stay visible and relevant as the future of small business gets increasingly shaped by AI overviews (AIO). Optimize your messaging strategy by using predictive insights and autonomous agents to ensure high-scale email and SMS deliverability while adapting content in real time.
Two-Way Marketing Is Here. Now What?
For decades, small business marketing meant sending newsletters and hoping for the best. This session challenges that model entirely. According to Salesforce research, 83% of SMB marketers say customers increasingly expect two-way conversations — and more than half admit their current tools can’t deliver that at scale. This session shows what two-way, AI-powered customer engagement actually looks like in practice.
Sessions on customer growth and retention for SMBs
The Experience Playbook: Winning Hearts of Fans and Guests
Getting customers, keeping them, and turning them into repeat buyers — this is the trifecta every small business is chasing. This session focuses on how agentic marketing experiences across sales, service, and commerce can help SMBs and startups move buyers through that entire journey without a large team managing each step. It pairs well with Salesforce’s agentic marketing guide for teams ready to go deeper.
Stop reacting. Start acting.
Loyalty programs aren’t just for big-box retailers anymore. This session covers how to shift from transactional rewards to the kind of emotional connection that keeps customers coming back — and how AI can automate the moments that make that loyalty feel personal. For SMBs trying to compete with larger competitors on experience, this one is worth a spot on your agenda.
The 360° Customer: AI-Powered Sales and Marketing in Action
Your customers are giving you signals every time they visit your site, open an email, or click an ad. This session shows how to act on those signals across every channel in real time — without a dedicated marketing operations team. For retail shops, service businesses, and ecommerce startups, the marketing strategies covered here are immediately usable.
AI in the Inbox: Building Interactive Email Agents
Email remains the highest-return channel for small businesses, with up to 70% of marketers reporting it’s their most effective channel for generating revenue. This session covers AI-powered tools that optimize subject lines, send times, and content variations automatically — the kind of personalization that used to require a team of analysts, now available to any SMB.
Your marketing CRM for small business is here.
Automate your marketing campaigns with a CRM built for growing businesses.
Sessions on AI tools, data, and smarter selling for small businesses
Scaling 1:1 Personalization in Workflows with Agentforce
Small businesses can’t manually create a hundred versions of a campaign in a short time — but AI can. This session focuses on how to use AI to generate personalized content variations at scale, so every customer feels like the message was written just for them. It’s one of the clearest examples of how SMB marketing technology trends are making enterprise-level personalization accessible to any size team.
Your Ad Metrics Are Broken — Here’s the Fix
Every dollar counts when you’re running a lean team. This session tackles the death of last-click attribution and replaces it with a practical framework for knowing what your ad spend is actually doing. For SMBs investing in paid channels, understanding how small businesses are strategizing with AI and data is the difference between smart growth and wasted budget.
Build AI Marketing Campaigns with Agentforce
You don’t need a development team to build an AI agent. This hands-on session gives small business owners, solo admins, and startup founders the chance to build with Agentforce in real time — guided and supported. Pair it with the AI Trailhead certifications available for SMB teams, and you walk away with both the skills and the confidence to keep building after the conference ends.
Build your session agenda now and get ready to get connected.
Make the most out of Connections 2026
Whether you attend in person in Chicago or stream sessions on Salesforce+, the throughline across all of these sessions is the same: AI is no longer a tool just for large enterprises. With Agentforce, SMBs can, personalize marketing, automate service, manage sales pipelines, and run commerce experiences — all from a single connected platform. CNX is where you go to see exactly how to put that advantage to work.
For more information, check out these free resources:
- 3 Ways Salesforce Connections Has Boosted My Career
- Join Us in the Community Hub at Connections 2026
- Get Ready for Connections 2026: Top Sessions and New Reveals
Get your sessions lined up on the Agenda Builder for CNX 2026 and start connecting today.
AI supported the writers and editors who created this article.
What is Salesforce Connections?
Connections is Salesforce’s annual marketing and commerce conference, live and streaming on Salesforce+. The event features more than 280 sessions focused on AI, agentic marketing, personalization, and customer growth strategies for businesses of all sizes.
Do I have to attend in person to get value from these sessions?
Not at all. Every session is available to stream on Salesforce+, which means SMB owners and startup founders can watch live or on-demand from anywhere. You can build your own agenda using the Connections 2026 session catalog to filter by topic, role, and product.
What is Agentforce and how does it help small businesses?
Agentforce is Salesforce’s AI-powered digital labor solution that can autonomously handle customer inquiries, run marketing campaigns, manage service cases, and more — around the clock. For lean SMB teams, it means getting the output of a much larger workforce without the overhead of hiring one.
How can a small business with no technical team use AI tools?
Salesforce is designed to be accessible to non-technical users, and Trailhead offers free AI for marketing courses that walk you through the basics step by step. The Agentforce Hackathon session at Connections is also a great starting point for hands-on learning with no coding required.
What Salesforce products are built for small businesses specifically?
Salesforce offers tools across its full portfolio — sales, marketing, service, commerce, and productivity — designed to scale with SMBs from day one. Salesforce Suites offers a free CRM that scales with you through Starter Suite and Pro Suite, enabling SMBs to work like enterprise companies.
