Salesforce embarked on a years-long sales transformation journey to prepare ourselves for a future grounded in agentic AI. We're already seeing 33% faster meeting prep and a 10% increase in win rates with Agentforce. Learn how you can get the same results.
Fundamentally, sales transformation is the strategic overhaul of a company's sales operations and tools to enhance efficiency. It's often prioritised when processes become too clunky and confusing, customer satisfaction rates dip and tech stacks become bloated.
That was our story. After over two decades helping companies modernise their sales operations, we realised it was far too challenging to do business. Hundreds of SKUs and products, complex contracts and many-layered pricing rules — all built on top of 20 years of software, integrations and code — had resulted in too much complexity. It slowed us down and frustrated customers.
Worse yet, tech debt threatened our potential to seize the AI moment and take advantage of the rolling innovations in agentic technology — including our own.
We needed to change or be left behind. So, in 2023, we dived headfirst into a sales transformation journey, rebuilding our sales operations and updating our technology and core sales processes. AI — especially agentic AI — was our north star and guided our work every step of the way.
As a result of this ongoing journey, we’re already seeing increased revenue, higher customer satisfaction and faster time to close. Even better: We’re better positioned to scale with agents, opening the door to new levels of efficiency and growth.
In this guide, we’ll share how we did it, what we learnt and our tips for executing your own transformation.
Fuel your sales transformation with Sales Cloud, a unified platform that boosts productivity from pipeline to paycheck — with AI and agents to help along the way.
When a business is new, the startup mentality of bandaid fixes and quick solutions is a great way to get off the ground, but over time results in ad hoc processes, spotty training and a slew of sales tools that require ongoing manual updates. This is when you need a sales transformation.
If you’re seeing the same downward trends in customer satisfaction survey results quarter over quarter, it could be a sign of endemic issues you need to address.
Sales teams are spending more time than needed on routine, everyday tasks — activities like prospecting outreach and quote creation. Or, they’re facing clunky approval processes that hinder deal momentum.
Missing fields, outdated information and disconnected systems lead to a lot of data porting and repairing — and low confidence in your reporting.
Data doesn’t populate where it should, messages aren’t sending and your support teams are constantly occupied with fixes, large and small. You see the same problems come up again and again.
You try to implement AI tools to help with sales, but between your current tech stack and integrations, they take more time to use or maintain than they save.
Our lightbulb moment came from a growing roster of complaints from sellers. We regularly conduct internal surveys to gauge seller experience and noticed that over the span of a year or more, complaints started to sound the same: It was taking forever to generate and approve quotes, our products and pricing were confusing and seller enablement couldn’t keep up with increasing product complexities. In the background, AI was gaining traction and we wanted to take an AI-centric approach to selling in order to speed up processes, but it was hard to deploy. Legacy processes, technical debt, siloed data and tool sprawl were getting in the way.
It was clear we needed to take an objective view of our problems - looking at our customer data, industry benchmarking and internal surveys to understand what needed to change.
Taking a step back, we saw a throughline: The problem was rooted in our patchwork tech and ad hoc processes. Our CRM, Sales Cloud, has always been ground zero for our sales efforts, but it had become clunky. It had seen decades of development, customisation and acquisitions. Combine this with third-party tools and we were facing a roster of integrations and workarounds that made every deal a slogue.
This isn’t just about process. It’s about helping sellers succeed and helping customers buy from us more easily.
Jay DesaiVP & Programme Lead, Salesforce
With evidence that there’s a problem, you have to dig into the specifics. The following actions can help to clarify those problems, turning them into an actionable framework.
First, use your “aha” moment to frame some questions that will get you to the root of the problem, digging for the who, what, where, when, why and how. In our case, the questions were largely tied to validation of our hypothesis: Tech was at the root of our struggles.
Next, set up meetings with sales and ops leaders in every product vertical across your organisation and ask these questions. Take notes so you have clear, qualitative feedback.
Separately, pull performance reports and sales data that will show you signs of when things start to lag — things like plateauing or dipping revenue, stagnant win rates, slow lead response times, increasing average deal cycle time and a decrease in the time sellers spend on customer-facing activities. This will help you pinpoint where things are really falling apart (and what needs the most attention).
After compiling notes from your interviews and reports, break down your issues into clear, actionable categories based on the following:
We recommend tracking this in a simple table or spreadsheet. For each problem, note the category (aligned to the bullets above) and rate its impact on the following: hitting sales targets, maintaining internal efficiency and ensuring high customer satisfaction. The rating can be a simple 1-5 scale, with 1 being low impact and 5 being high impact. With all of your problems noted, add the scores together. The items with the highest combined scores (i.e., the highest impact on critical business priorities) should be addressed first.
With problems accounted for, map solutions to your problems. You don’t need to get too in the weeds with your solutions at this stage, but provide a high-level view that uses the “who, what, where, when, why, how” framework as a guide.
For example, let’s say one of your high-impact problems is swivel-chairing as managers pivot from the CRM to spreadsheets to third-party tools, trying to collect information on the status of deals. This makes it difficult to get a complete, accurate picture of sales performance. They don’t know how or when to change strategy to hit targets. You propose the following:
Pro tip: Be forward-thinking in your solution mapping; don’t just focus on today’s problems. For example, if you want to make the most of agentic AI (you do), consider tech solutions that allow you to grow into new agentic innovations without having to switch up your tech stacks again in a few years.
With problems identified and solutions mapped, engage stakeholders to gain buy-in on the need for a sales org-wide transformation.
At a minimum, set up meetings with your VP of sales or chief revenue officer, the head of your sales operations team and your IT lead or CTO/CIO. Share your outline of problems and solutions.
Start by aligning on the priorities you've established. Then, confirm the solutions at a high level. Listen to objections, take notes and adjust your plan accordingly. This step is critical for alignment across the business. Without leader involvement, transformation efforts risk misalignment, resistance or lack of execution.
At the beginning of our transformation journey in 2023, we ran a global discovery effort. We held interviews with our sellers, sent out surveys and conducted listening tours and voice-of-field research. We also engaged our leadership and teams across sales strategy, operations and IT. Once we completed discovery, we were able to map out our core problems and propose solutions.
While many smaller solutions were proposed to address the finer points of these problems, one priority solution was clear:
We needed a unified platform that could consolidate the functionality and data across our products — from sales process management in Sales Cloud, our CRM, to the quote-to-cash process in Revenue Cloud and incentive compensation management in our recent product acquisition, Spiff.
That meant rebuilding Salesforce technology with a single platform vision, allowing us to streamline workflows for our sales teams and giving us the foundation to build out AI capabilities — including agentic AI.
Importantly, this rebuild prioritised Slack as our virtual office — the place where our teams could address deal issues together and share ideas in real time, enabling them to close faster.
With a single platform in place, we could then layer on AI innovations, grounded in Einstein (our AI application that leverages predictive and generative AI capabilities to streamline work).
Solution in hand, we went to executives for their feedback.
Technical debt from 26 years of investment in our legacy CRM instance is hindering our ability to keep up with AI advancements. We need to start fresh rather than continuing to patch the system.
To minimise disruption to sellers during the transition, we propose a two-tier programme: one to improve the existing experience and another to build out our future state with extensive change management to keep sellers informed.
We plan to create dashboards to track factors like ACV gains, deal cycle time reduction and seller productivity (based on metrics like meetings booked) in the new instance of Sales Cloud.
See how we identified key indicators that prompted our transformation and how we implemented strategies to pave the way for AI and Agentforce.
Executive buy-in secured, it’s time to lay out the steps towards change. Below, we have a list of key considerations as well as our own pilot-to-execution approach, coupled with effective best practices for change management.
Before you dig in, create a cross-functional core team to lead the transformation effort. Include leaders and practitioners from sales, operations, IT, finance and legal to own the journey and ensure all POVs are represented.
Here are the elements you need to consider as you dig in:
Running smaller pilots with specific targets helps test the waters before preparing to scale. For example, pilots for specific segments or product lines or in certain regions, can protect revenue and ease the adoption of change, while still showing clear impact.
Our transformation is being carried out in multiple stages across a few years in order to avoid disruption. Early on, we created a cross-functional transformation team to oversee the changes. Representatives across the C-suite, operations, IT and sales were responsible for change management, aligning vision and overseeing the execution of the transformation journey.
In 2023, we began developing a new workspace for our sellers, starting with a smaller pilot group to enable real-world validation, before progressively rolling it out to larger teams.
As any AI expert will tell you, data is the foundation of accurate, impactful AI outputs. When clean and comprehensive, it allows AI reasoning engines and large language models (LLMs) to generate highly relevant, personalised outputs (like deal recommendations or prospect emails).
That’s why, before digging into development, we prioritised cleaning and harmonising our siloed, multichannel data. We created a cross-functional team responsible for data auditing and governance and asked them to make sure our data was ready for funneling into a newly built CRM.
In house, we rely on Data Cloud to harmonise all of our data. Since Data Cloud is designed to bring together data from these different sources seamlessly, it improves the quality of AI outputs. To learn more about Data Cloud for sales, click here.
Data cleaning in process, we first focused on how we could improve inefficiencies in our existing processes, prioritising opportunities to add automation to existing workflows.
Knowing a true sales transformation would require longterm tech overhaul, we also mapped a rebuilding plan for our internal sales CRM. We identified critical feature updates to include in early product development, aligning to our solutions in step 2 and mapped these out over the upcoming fiscal year. (Note: Most teams will not focus on deep product development as part of their transformation like we did, but will lean on outside tools that better serve their needs.)
To pilot our new developments and help us frame our work, we selected a controlled segment of SMB account executives who tend to be earlier in their careers and less resistant to change. We shared our pilot plan and asked them about potential sticking points. Their feedback helped us tweak the timing and scope of our “jobs to be done.”
Finally, we planned quarterly check-ins with our pilot group to assess new feature releases.
To know this was working, we needed to tie clear value to our efforts. We made dashboards to track ACV growth, deal cycle time reduction, user adoption and seller productivity (using metrics like activities completed). We reported on these each quarter to give our leadership a snapshot of our progress.
(To learn more about the KPIs you need to track for sales success, check out this guide.)
To understand what was happening with our sellers and to empower them to succeed using this new CRM, we maintained proactive communication with sales teams, training them before rolling out new features and creating support for real-time questions. This included process documentation, enablement material and open feedback channels on Slack. We also mapped out new workflows to make sure sellers knew where this updated tech would affect their work.
With every release, we baked in time to fix issues our sellers surfaced and adjusted the next roll-outs based on what worked and what didn’t. We conducted seller transformation surveys and review sessions ahead of quarterly drops to help validate pain points and prioritise fixes. We measured feature adoption to assess what was working and roadmap adjustments were made in response to insights.
Use a structured launch cadence with automated reminders to build awareness and readiness.
Equip leaders with messaging to tell a consistent story, highlighting successes and connecting changes to business impact.
Keep sellers energised with a mix of enablement events and training programmes while keeping channels open for feedback.
Align updates to major release moments and create tailored enablement resources in accessible hubs to support adoption.
The next step in the sales transformation is the fun part: bringing in agentic AI, like what we offer with Agentforce. Agentforce is already making waves across industries, unlocking higher levels of productivity for sales teams by taking on manual tasks so humans can focus on high-value work like relationship-building and strategy.
Before you start using agentic AI, you need to find where they can have the biggest impact based on your problem and solution mapping. What manual, cumbersome process can you offload to AI sales agents now that your system is ready to handle them? Or, to be more forward-looking: Where do you need to scale your work quickly?
It can be helpful to use this framework: AI agent capabilities — what we call “skills” within Salesforce’s autonomous AI application, Agentforce — slot into sales teams to work a lot like humans. Some skills, like people, focus entirely on one particular area in their department, like capturing and arranging data. Others work cross-functionally, doing work across the business (by connecting service and sales teams, for instance). And some come with a highly specialised skill set configured for a specific use case.
With Agentforce for Sales, built on the Salesforce Platform, there are several sales skills available out of the box that can be customised and deployed in under 30 minutes. Once built and deployed in Salesforce, these are also available directly in Slack, where a lot of sales teams conduct critical deal work.
Additionally, Agentforce skills can be built and configured on the platform to meet specific use cases, leveraging preexisting workflows.
Agentforce skills are available for almost any sales use case, but prebuilt skills are the easiest to set up and deploy; you can use these to help with prospecting and coaching. With a bit more customisation work, the quoting skill can help you build custom quotes in a few minutes.
Helps you to engage inbound leads, nurturing prospects by asking targeted questions, handling objections and booking meetings with reps.
Provides personalised feedback on recorded sales pitches and role-plays sales conversations to help sellers overcome likely objections and improve sales-call performance.
Creates complex quotes with plain-language prompts leveraging pricing, packaging, compliance and sales data from your CRM.
We took a holistic look at our lead-to-cash flow to understand where humans and Agentforce could best work together. We focused on identifying the core opportunities for productivity improvement across sales roles, then we identified clear use cases. Quoting, one of our most time-consuming sales process tasks, was a clear winner — it involved cumbersome sourcing of product and pricing information, plus a clunky approval process that frequently caused delays.
Using our pilot group, we customised and deployed the Agentforce quoting skill to see how quickly and accurately it could build quotes for our reps using simple, plain-language prompts.
We are already seeing success. Thanks to our clean foundation of data, Agentforce can surface the right information, generate quotes in seconds and deliver these quotes to customers — all in a matter of minutes. Even better: We bypassed much of the approval process by adding in guardrails when setting up our Agentforce skill, ensuring quotes aren’t created that counter finance guidelines.
We’ve deployed other prebuilt Agentforce skills, too and are seeing rapid scaling as reps and agents work seamlessly together to prospect and prepare for sales calls.
Agentforce can act as a team member, creating multiple variations of quotes, giving sellers more flexibility when presenting options to customers.
Meredith SchmidtEVP & GM, Revenue Cloud, Salesforce
(as of April 2025)
Sales transformation is complex, expensive and touches every part of the organisation. Clear metrics and a regular review cadence make it possible to know what works and what causes friction. Below, we highlight what you need to track and how we measured the impact of our own transformation.
At this point, you should have dashboards and reporting structures in place to help you to track critical transformation KPIs (this was part of your work in step 3). Report on these to your core transformation team and key stakeholders monthly (at a minimum).
When you present the latest metrics, give stakeholders just the information they care about and link out to the rest so they can review on their own time. Also, make sure that you include a plan for addressing any KPIs that are below target.
As noted above, our KPIs centred on activity metrics for reps and adoption. We also paid attention to time delays caused by the transition from our old CRM instance to the new one.
We made sure performance data was accessible to leadership via executive dashboards in order to track value realisation with every quarterly release. That value was based on time savings, process simplification and compliance improvements.
As we onboarded sellers to the new CRM, many still had one feet in the old one. To minimise extended impact to workflows, each quarterly release was designed to move more functionality and users into the new instance, with the ultimate goal of bringing in all of our sellers within the next year.
During the roll-out, we tracked user activity in the old system and the new system, looking for evidence of swivel-chairing and friction in workflows.
We kept sellers and operators at the centre of the change by making sure we constantly gathered qualitative feedback via readily accessible channels. For example, we gathered feedback from Slack polls and formal quarterly surveys. We also created seller panels to surface common issues and walk through pain points.
Our years-long sales transformation journey started before the agentic AI zeitgeist. But the rapid proliferation of AI tools helped us to realise where we could use AI to solve for inefficiencies and future-proof our product. We’re still exploring this area and rolling out new Agentforce skills regularly.
We also piloted functionalities with different seller segments, making adjustments based on key KPIs like adoption rates, with qualitative feedback.
Like we mentioned above, Agentforce skills slot into teams a lot like humans. They need onboarding, regular check-ins and management. With Agentforce deployed, we monitor its activity and report on it weekly to make sure it’s on the right track.
We’re only two years into our multi-year transformation, but we’re already seeing significant wins — and gathering many insights. Below are some high-level learnings you can apply as you begin your own transformation.
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