Siemens transforms sales through data, AI, and trusted partnerships.

Siemens needed a unified sales approach across hardware and software and a smarter way to prioritize sellers' time.

Siemens serves critical industries like infrastructure, transportation, and healthcare with innovative technology solutions, helping shape the everyday environments of billions of people globally with hardware and software. Their expansive offerings include everything from physical parts like energy-efficient valves for HVAC systems to IoT solutions like digital drivetrains that accelerate engineering and time to market. 

While Siemens has been around since 1847, they’re entering a completely new era because of the business opportunity created by AI. “Siemens has a long, long heritage,” said Frederik Janssen, Chief Information Officer of Siemens Digital Industries. “We’ve had to reinvent ourselves multiple times to stay relevant. We now have this ambition to combine the digital and the real worlds, the software and the hardware, like no other.”

Siemens is strategically positioned to lead the integration of physical infrastructure with digital counterparts – digital twins, edge computing, even the metaverse. Until recently, however, Siemens sold and managed these offerings across siloed divisions in a "fleet of ships" model. New product lines and customer needs are driving demand for a cohesive offering – but with a sales team largely made up of engineers whose time is expensive, Siemens needed to be smart about servicing that demand. 

While Siemens received 2,800 inbound leads a week from software downloads and trade conferences, all were unqualified. Sellers often lacked context around each lead’s budget, purchasing authority, needs, and timeline (BANT), and whether another business unit was already engaged. Without that context, they spent valuable time chasing low-priority leads and left many leads untouched due to the sheer volume, resulting in low conversion rates and missed opportunities. 

To sell across the continuum of hardware and software spanning tens of thousands of products, Siemens needed a unified, efficient go-to-market (GTM) approach — what they call a “one tech company” – spanning seven core business units, 18,000 sellers, and thousands of resell and implementation partners.

“We are the world's largest industrial technology company, but our customers want that to be more integrated,” said Scot Gardner, Executive Vice President of Sales for Siemens Digital Industries. “We have to make sure that our internal processes and operations really deliver our brand promise.” 

Siemens saw an opportunity to redefine how global technology companies connect customers, partners, and portfolios through digitalization — and to set a new industry standard.

Siemens unifies 18,000 sellers on a single CRM to drive cross-divisional growth.

To transform from a "fleet of ships" into a unified approach, Siemens selected Sales Cloud as their global CRM and consolidated sales and services from Digital Industries, Smart Infrastructure, and Siemens Financial Services into a central Sales org. This single source of truth helps 18,000 hardware and software sellers show up as one company to their shared customer base, accelerate deal cycles with consistent processes, and bring their extensive partner ecosystem along to drive more revenue. 

“Siemens is a big company with many divisions, but we want to have a 360-degree customer view,” said Ralf Spanheimer, Head of Sales Foundation within Smart Infrastructure. “That’s where Sales Cloud comes into play. It’s where we exchange our information and make it transparent to the other systems, so that every seller knows all relevant information when approaching a customer.” 

“Where Sales Cloud works for us is it helps people understand their customer better,” said Gardner. “And if you understand your customer better, you are more successful.”

Siemens equipped nearly 10,000 employees across their commercial teams to streamline configuration, pricing, and quote creation. And with planned expansion of Revenue Cloud, the teams will have even more efficient quote-to-cash processes for complex revenue streams like software with recurring revenue models and nuanced pricing structures. To scale through partners, Siemens deployed Partner Cloud across their ecosystem. Today, 14,000 ecosystem partners drive revenue from a unified CRM – a number Siemens expects to grow to 60,000 in the near future. Partners will be able to get the same certifications and trainings, execute quotes for complex bundles with a consistent approach, and identify white space and upsell opportunities of existing clients with installed base analysis. With all sellers and partners marketing, selling, servicing, and quoting from the same sales data foundation with aligned incentives, Siemens is transforming their GTM model more expansively and more effectively, faster. 

Agentforce will respond to 100% of inbound leads and pass only high-quality opportunities to sellers.

Building on their Sales Cloud foundation, Siemens deployed Agentforce, the agentic layer of the Salesforce Platform. Agentforce will autonomously qualify more than 2,800 inbound leads weekly from Siemens customers and prospects, ensuring a 100% response rate within minutes and helping Siemens sellers prioritize high-quality leads with Agentforce-led discovery and qualification logic based on budget, purchasing authority, needs, and timeline.

“Salespeople today have a lot of demands,” says Spanheimer. “They want to be well prepared when they interact with their customers, but time-wise, it's sometimes impossible. And this is where Agentforce comes into play – hinting at the right moment, and the right information, so they can show up well.” 

Siemens is building an orchestrated, multi-agent approach to lead qualification with Agentforce to ensure customers get attention fast and sellers get what they need to succeed. For example, if an existing Siemens customer registers for an upcoming webinar around data center operations, this creates a lead in Sales Cloud that immediately engages the first Agentforce agent for lead nurturing. Agentforce provides a personalized email response within minutes using a dynamic sales template that pulls in lead data, like name and company, and a link to a landing page to gather additional information via chat. Each email contains a secure, unique public key to identify the lead so that marketing outreach, sales data, and Agentforce are all connected to this specific opportunity. And, if the lead doesn’t respond within three days, the Agentforce nudges with a reminder up to two times to encourage a response. 

Once the lead clicks through to the landing page, the second Agentforce agent takes over to assess whether the lead is seller-ready. Based on the secure public key, Agentforce greets the lead by name and triggers a flow automation to access the lead's existing data from Sales Cloud. Agentforce asks the lead for any missing information, then proceeds to qualify the lead based on approximately 50 lead qualification rules.

If the lead responded with more than two positive answers, Agentforce sets its status to “qualified,” triggers lead assignment rules, and updates the opportunity record with a lead summary in Sales Cloud. The relevant territory rep within the Smart Infrastructure division now sees a high-quality lead sourced from webinar registration. And because the rep has a 360-degree customer view across business divisions, they can also see a related opportunity with Digital Industries for upgrading data center power distribution. 

“Agentforce can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and always at the same level of quality,” says Spanheimer. “You can have an agent watching hundreds of accounts, constantly scouting their latest needs and pinging you to say, ‘I need your attention here. This is an opportunity.’ That is the magic. Agentforce can be there all the time for our customers.” 

With its initial deployment, Agentforce is expected to respond to 100% of leads and qualify over 12,000 B2B leads monthly with a 2% conversion of previously untouched leads. This will unlock new customers for Siemens and reduce response time to customers from days to just minutes. 

In the near term, Siemens also plans to deploy more AI agents across sales and service to prioritize and summarize opportunities, draft sales emails and service replies, create close plans, and eliminate manual data entry with automatic activity capture. And while Agentforce will respond to leads reactively with the first deployment, Siemens also envisions Agentforce as a way to proactively reach out to the high-potential yet fragmented small and medium business market. 

“One of the advantages of Agentforce is you can choose to do some things that you once decided were too much effort for not enough return,” said Gardner. “But when it's AI doing it, it becomes a great opportunity.”

Siemens’ future vision for a data orchestration layer with Data Cloud will supercharge Agentforce Sales use cases.

Siemens built its AI strategy on connected data. Having unlocked productivity gains from unified sales data, Siemens is now expanding this architecture enterprise-wide.

Siemens aims to build an org orchestration layer that harmonizes all their critical data housed in remaining Salesforce orgs, external data lakes, and legacy systems into a single, actionable model in Data Cloud. Not only will this deliver a 360-degree view of opportunities, contacts, and accounts across business divisions, it’ll also take advantage of Siemens’ strategic data investment in Snowflake, their primary data lake. 

Snowflake contains critical account info like installed bases and order details that could be activated for cross-sells and follow-ups across every Salesforce org if pulled into Data Cloud. And, because Siemens is a global and multi-industry company, they can use companion orgs to pull from a central Data Cloud instance while preserving their unique data governance requirements across geographies and sectors.

“We currently count 18 different data domains across Siemens globally,” said Janssen. “So it's not only about making the data available, it's really about creating data products that are curated and quality assured for our people, our applications, our API calls, and our AI use cases. That’s how we’re looking at Data Cloud.”

As a longtime Salesforce partner, Siemens continues to expand their implementation across a broader digital ecosystem, integrating Salesforce with platforms like Snowflake and Mendix to build scalable, data-driven sales and service processes.

“Salesforce is innovating very, very quickly,” said Janssen. “We are using it across the board, not only for CRM and configure, price, quote elements, but also e-commerce and service. Our vision is to provide a seamless experience across our software and hardware portfolio. Salesforce is one of the key platforms enabling that.”

Siemens achieved rapid time to value by deploying Agentforce on their existing Sales Cloud foundation. The Siemens team applied existing sales flows and lead logic, using no-code Agent Builder tools to accelerate implementation. The initial lead nurturing agent was built in just two weeks, with several months of testing to get to a production-ready agent that met Siemens’ high standards. 

For their lead nurturing agent, Siemens set a high bar, aiming to deliver an intelligent experience comparable to an in-person sales conversation. Working alongside Salesforce Professional Services, the Siemens team redesigned their qualification process to enable agent-led conversations that maintain the quality standards customers expect. Ultimately, the team created a two-agent approach, configuring the lead nurturing agent to hand off to a specialized qualification agent that could evaluate leads and take action in Sales Cloud – just like a human sales rep. 

This is just the start of Siemens’ plans. Looking ahead, Siemens is exploring how to implement agent-to-agent use cases that combine Agentforce with existing agents built in-house. For example, Siemens has already built a product recommendation agent that helps customers find relevant products faster on their website. As this agent interacts not only with customers but also prospects, it could autonomously hand the product conversation off to Agentforce to qualify and assign leads to sales reps for follow-up. 

“I hope we are moving to a world where we don't have to ask anybody anymore to fill out a form,” said Spanheimer. “I hope it’s purely a natural interaction between the machine and the human being to do the right things, in the right moment. That's where agents will help humans the most.”

Through their partnership with Salesforce, Siemens continues pioneering industrial digital transformation — simplifying, harmonizing, and scaling sales and service processes that serve customers worldwide and establish new industry standards.