Salesforce’s sellers close more deals in less time with Agentforce.

Salesforce’s sellers were overwhelmed by too much information in too many places.

With three major product launches a year — and a rapidly growing portfolio fueled by AI innovation — Salesforce sellers had to move fast, stay sharp, and keep deals moving. But scattered information made that nearly impossible.

Sellers were constantly swivel-chairing between tools to find what they needed: Basecamp folders for enablement content, Slack threads for product updates, wikis for how-tos, Org62 — Salesforce’s internal CRM — for customer history, and shared drives for decks and pricing. 

Hunting through multiple systems just to complete everyday tasks hindered every stage of the sales process:

• Prioritizing leads: Tasked with turning a high volume of inbound interest into pipeline, sales development reps (SDRs) spent hours researching and emailing prospects who weren’t a fit — while stronger opportunities were missed simply due to time constraints.

• Finding information: Whether onboarding a new hire or prepping for a call, sellers lost valuable time trying to locate the latest product details, internal processes, and customer insights — all buried across different systems.

• Prepping for sales conversations: Building executive briefs for sales leadership — pulling together company research, deal history, and competitive intel — could take over an hour per prospect. 

• Assembling quotes: Tracking down the latest pricing and packaging for each proposal was entirely manual. With more than 142,000 quotes generated annually for small and medium businesses alone, those delays added up.

• Coaching and development: Sales managers, each overseeing 7–10 reps, didn’t have enough time to provide the personalized coaching their teams needed to grow. That gave account executives (AEs) fewer opportunities to refine their pitches and approach ahead of customer conversations.

Salesforce needed a way to streamline these everyday tasks and equip every seller — no matter their role — to move faster, work smarter, and spend more time with customers.

Prioritizing leads: Agentforce helps SDRs be more strategic when prospecting.

To help SDRs focus on the most promising leads, Salesforce is deploying Agentforce — the agentic layer of the Salesforce Platform — to handle early outreach and qualification. Working behind the scenes, Agentforce engages lower-intent leads at scale, nurtures interest over time, and passes along only the strongest opportunities. Integrated with Org62, Agentforce sends outbound introduction emails, responds to multitouch product questions, books meetings directly on calendars, and handles opt-out requests. It’s designed to keep the pipeline moving even when SDRs are off the clock.

To provide strategic communications to prospective leads, Agentforce uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) through Data Cloud to draw from structured and unstructured data like pricing pages, product specifications, messaging guidelines, and internal sales articles in real time. 

For example, if in response to Agentforce’s initial outreach a prospective lead requests a free e-book about Data Cloud implementation best practices, Agentforce will respond with the e-book and then automatically send an email one week later to follow up. It will answer the lead’s questions in conversational, friendly language, suggest helpful resources, and, when the lead decides they’re ready to talk to an SDR, Agentforce will schedule that meeting. Built-in guardrails ensure Agentforce keeps sensitive information private so it doesn’t surface deal information or share anything it’s not authorized to.

Most importantly, Agentforce knows when its job is done and it’s time to hand a lead off. If a lead is ready to have a meeting or reaches the next level of maturity, Agentforce will include a link to schedule time with an SDR, seamlessly transitioning them to the seller with recommended actions. When an SDR clicks into a lead, they can see all the auto-logged actions that Agentforce took on their behalf. If a meeting is scheduled, the seller will be included on the confirmation email and the meeting will appear on their Google calendar. Now instead of chasing leads that may not turn into prospects, SDRs can focus their time on high-quality leads who are ready to take the next step.

With a digital labor force managing initial outreach, Salesforce’s SDRs are spending more time on strategic prospecting and less time writing emails or fielding routine questions. Speed-to-lead is improving, more meetings are being booked, and SDRs are able to focus on high-quality touchpoints.

“Agentforce will be transformative for sales development,” said Leah Muller, SVP, Sales Development (AMER). “We’ll be able to scale our capacity, boost productivity, and maximize pipe and annual contract value by deploying agents against our lower-converting leads until they’re truly sales-ready.”

Finding information and prepping for sales: From onboarding to brief generation, Agentforce is giving sellers valuable time back. 

From onboarding and training to brief generation and competitive research, Agentforce helps new AEs get up to speed faster — and gives experienced sellers more time to focus on customers. Instead of bouncing between different systems, they can now find everything they need through Agentforce operating in Slack and Org62, where they already spend most of their day.

“We are the first Agentforce company, and we are on a mission to make our customers Agentforce companies,” said Andy White, SVP, Salesforce on Salesforce Technology. “Onboarding at any company is challenging, and one of the ways we are going to radically improve the way we onboard AEs at Salesforce is with Agentforce.”

For new hires, Agentforce answers questions like, “What are my Week 3 onboarding tasks?” or “What do I need to do to complete the ready-to-sell training?” by pulling structured and unstructured content from internal documentation, Quip, Google Docs, Slack, and other Salesforce sources via Data Cloud. Instead of wasting time hunting for resources, new AEs get instant answers tailored to their role and progress.

Agentforce can also help new AEs build their product knowledge faster. For example, if a new hire is confused about the difference between Data Cloud and MuleSoft, they can ask Sales Agent in Slack and get a detailed, conversational answer in seconds.

After AEs are onboarded, Agentforce continues to deliver value by simplifying everyday sales tasks like researching prospects and building deals. Executive briefs, which used to take over an hour, can now be generated 98% faster. One AE even generated a brief in Slack during a live meeting with a prospective customer’s CFO, who was immediately struck by the speed and depth of the response.

Agentforce enables customers to ask specific questions in natural language and get precise answers on demand. To date, Agentforce escalates just 5% of inquiries to a human support rep and has handled more than 1 million conversations — managing over 55,000 support requests weekly.

Kaylin Voss, EVP of Sales, Agentforce & Data Cloud, said: “Agentforce gives sellers the time back to be in person, driving agent workshops, building, and guiding. Not trying to search across hundreds of apps or getting stuck in quote approvals. That’s just not the best use of our sales talent.”

Assembling quotes: Agentforce makes it easy for AEs to build SKU-specific, customer-ready quotes in seconds.

Creating quotes used to be a time-consuming task for AEs. Now, with Agentforce, it’s as simple as typing a request into Org 62, Salesforce’s internal CRM.

Agentforce pulls live data from Revenue Cloud and Sales Cloud through Data Cloud to help sellers build complete, accurate quotes in seconds — all with natural language. AEs can type things like, “Create a new quote starting today for 1 year with qty 100 — Sales Cloud — Professional, and apply a 10% discount,” and Agentforce takes care of the rest. Agentforce can even provide multiple variations of quotes to give sellers options to share with customers. 

Powered by the Atlas Reasoning Engine, Agentforce is capable of creating complex, nuanced quotes with specific start dates, billing frequencies, terms, and discounts. It does this by automatically pulling in details like product configurations, pricing, quantity, discounts, and billing terms. For example, AEs can type, “Create a new quote starting the day after Thanksgiving for 18 months, convert oppty lines to quote lines, apply a 10% discount and semi-annual billing,” and receive a customer-ready quote in seconds.

Since its launch, Agentforce has made quote creation 75% faster and reduced clicks throughout the process by 87%.

“Sales is the best job in the world when you can remove the drudgery of work,” said Voss. “Trying to find the SKUs, what’s the latest promo, how do I get all the pricing approvals, how do I chase down the next 19 approvals, change one thing on the quote, and send it all back again...Agents doing the pricing approvals and quote creation is what all of us have always wanted.”

Coaching and development: With Agentforce, AEs get personalized feedback on demand for faster deals and more wins.

With the Agentforce Sales Coach, every AE now has access to personal, real-time coaching any time, right inside their flow of work in Org62. Agentforce helps AEs prepare for high-stakes conversations by providing instant, customized feedback based on the actual deal they’re working on. Whether it’s refining a pitch, handling objections, or practicing negotiation, Agentforce gives sellers a place to learn, rehearse, and improve — all on demand.

AEs can launch Agentforce directly from the opportunity they’re working on in Org62. They start by recording a video of their pitch. From there, Agentforce analyzes the video using rich deal context, including deal size, stage, product line, and past activity. It taps into Data Cloud to assess the accuracy of the AE’s product knowledge and uses insights from top-performing sellers and internal knowledge articles to evaluate delivery and tone. With all that context, it provides detailed, structured feedback, including coaching on presentation skills, knowledge gaps, areas to improve, and even suggests relevant Trailhead modules to help the seller improve before the customer meeting.

“Agentforce is an immediate game changer,” says Marcie Laderman, EVP of Global Business Strategy and Ops. “Our sellers now have a coach with them, at all times, helping to close deals faster and improve their sales skills. This will completely change our enablement strategy.”

Salesforce AEs are now talking to customers not just as Agentforce sellers — but as Agentforce users. That firsthand experience is leading to more informed conversations, faster deals, and better support for customers trying to adopt agentic AI themselves. “We are not just selling Agentforce,” said White. “We’re running our company on it.”

Salesforce deployed its first sales agent with remarkable speed — going from concept to live deployment in under four weeks. Their goal was to use Agentforce to support sellers in real time, starting with onboarding and access to trusted information. By focusing on high-impact use cases, grounding the agent in Data Cloud, and collaborating closely with sales, operations, and governance teams, Salesforce created agents that enhance productivity without compromising the user experience. Along the way, they uncovered valuable lessons that any organization can use when implementing Agentforce for their sales teams: 

1. Uncover the pain points of your future Agentforce power users. “The journey started by understanding personas and jobs to be done. We asked: ‘What are the repetitive, data-driven tasks sellers are spending time on? And what can agents handle intelligently without compromising the user experience?’” said Sada Siva Rao Kanneganti, Senior Director of Architecture.

To answer that, the team partnered with sales operations leaders and AEs to identify friction in sellers’ workflows. Rather than replace people, the team built an agent that increases their capacity — so they have more time for the higher-value work that closes deals.

2. Start with low-lift, high-impact use cases. Salesforce prioritized use cases that would quickly deliver value at scale. “Salesforce is hiring a lot of new AEs, and helping them onboard is a priority,” said Lissa Smith, Director of Product Innovation & Architecture. “We knew an agent could help them ramp up more quickly by connecting them to answers and coaching.”

They focused on two specific tasks: simplifying onboarding and making information easier to find. These clear goals made it easier to define requirements, test agent responses, and measure success.

3. Ground the agent in trusted, real-time data. “Agents are only as smart as the data they can access,” said Kanneganti. Rather than connecting Agentforce to static content sources that would quickly become outdated or inaccurate, the Salesforce team used Data Cloud to give their agent access to live, real-time product and pricing data. This ensures that Agentforce is always pulling from the most up-to-date information, which is especially in high-stakes sales scenarios where incorrect information could derail a deal.

4. Treat your agent like a team member — and keep training it. “An agent is like a new employee: You don’t just train it once and let it run. You are constantly teaching and adjusting for business needs and innovating,” said Smith.

Every new topic added to Agentforce requires regression testing to prevent “cross talk” — when the agent might respond with content from the wrong topic area. For example, when Salesforce introduced competitive intelligence to Agentforce, they revalidated all pricing and product-related responses to maintain accuracy and coherence.

5. Build feedback and governance into the process. Salesforce involved IT, governance teams, and early pilot users from the start. That collaboration helped set quality standards and ensured the agent’s behavior aligned with company policies. Feedback loops were essential for refining prompts, detecting errors, and shaping the roadmap.

6. Be ready to evolve your systems and processes. Working with agents changes more than just tasks — it changes how teams work. “We knew that the agent lifecycle is different, a new way of working. But I didn’t expect how much it would impact our old processes,” said Smith. “The constant testing and tuning has really changed how we work, and the ongoing seller feedback continues to help us improve.”