Salesforce Announces New AI Innovations That Help Sellers Turn Sales Calls into Closing Calls

New AI and data features pave the way for more productive calls and increased visibility into sales activity 

Salesforce today announced expanded capabilities to make sales calls more productive: Einstein Conversation Insights with Sales Signals and new Einstein Copilot actions for Sales Cloud. These innovations use AI, grounded in CRM context, to transform how sellers prepare for, conduct, and follow up on customer and prospects calls – saving them time while helping to increase close rates. 

Why it matters: Sales reps spend more than 70% of their time on administrative, non-selling tasks and just 20% on the phone selling to prospective customers – making every moment in a rep’s day critical to a company’s bottom line. To improve effectiveness and efficiency, many organisations are investing in AI to help improve how reps use their time, increase visibility into sales activity, and understand customer needs.

Go deeper: The innovations announced today use AI to accelerate call preparation and follow-up while automating non-selling tasks – freeing sellers to focus on ensuring the best sales experience for their customers and prospects with:

• Generative AI for Einstein Conversation Insights (ECI) will give sellers even more time to focus on customer calls and moving deals through the pipeline by automating administrative tasks currently performed by sellers. With new AI-powered call summaries and call exploration, Einstein generates post-call summaries that can be reviewed using natural language prompts. These innovations build on the existing capabilities of Einstein Conversation Insights that already save sellers’ time by transcribing meeting notes, surfacing insights and action items from individual sales calls, and automatically updating CRM systems to eliminate data entry. 
• Sales Signals, which will help sales teams identify actionable insights directly from their teams’ calls with ECI to unlock data-driven selling. With unified data from all customer meetings, sales and marketing teams can work together to easily identify cross-company collective themes, trends, and opportunities to augment and adapt their go-to-market strategies accordingly. 
• New Einstein Copilot for Sales Actions, which will help sellers start their day faster and accelerate call preparation and follow-up through automated creation of prioritised agendas and to-do lists, summaries of top leads and new accounts, and proactive identification of opportunities that need attention. With these actions, Einstein Copilot will also be able to send personalised follow-up emails to customers and prospects based on call data. What’s more, sellers can use Einstein Copilot wherever they are working, whether it’s a CRM, web browser, or business application. 

The Salesforce perspective: “Imagine a world where every seller can have a dedicated sales assistant joining them on sales calls to take notes, identify follow-up options, detect insights, and update their CRM. These new Einstein innovations do just that and, as a result, give sellers more time in their week to focus only on customer conversations and moving deals forward,” said Ketan Karkhanis, GM and EVP of Sales Cloud. “Einstein Conversational Insights works seamlessly with the conferencing solution of your choice, including Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams.”

Imagine a world where every seller can have a dedicated sales assistant joining them on sales calls to take notes, identify follow-up options, detect insights, and update their CRM.

Ketan Karkhanis, GM and EVP of Sales Cloud

Reaction to the news:

• “I’m excited about the potential these new AI innovations can bring to Dojo in the future. I see great opportunities for our sellers to be more productive so they can focus on the customer during customer calls and get time back to sell more. In addition, the ability to generate insights from our customer meetings will help us closely align our sales strategies to what our customers need, further helping us be trusted advisors with our customers.” – Nick Fryer, Chief Technology Officer, Dojo

• “Salesforce’s AI solutions streamline sales operations. The predictive analytics and personalised customer engagement strategies enable sales reps to work more efficiently and close deals faster. And with deeper insights and automated tasks, the focus can shift to building strong customer relationships and driving sales growth.” – David Gore, Salesblazer and Manager (CRM), Program Administration at Assurant, Inc.

Availability:

• Sales Signals will be generally available in summer 2024 for purchase through Einstein Conversation Insights. Existing ECI capabilities are available across 30 languages and support integrations with Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, Amazon Connect, and RingCentral.
• Generative AI capabilities in Einstein Conversation Insights, including Call Summaries and Call Explorer, are generally available now.
• New Einstein Copilot for Sales actions will be generally available in summer 2024.
• All innovations outlined above are included in Einstein 1 Sales Edition. 

Learn more:

• Learn more and see product demos on the Sales AI and Einstein Conversation Insights webpages
• Tune in to World Tour London on Salesforce+ and read more World Tour London news here
• Find AI thought leadership to drive sales excellence at Salesblazer.com
• Join the Salesblazer community and meet other sellers 

Any unreleased services or features referenced here are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.