Salesforce unveils autonomous agents for sales teams

Salesforce today announced two autonomous agents geared to help sales teams scale their operations and hone their negotiation skills. Slated for general availability in October, Einstein Sales Development Rep (SDR) Agent and Einstein Sales Coach Agent will be available through Sales Cloud, with pricing yet to be announced.

Both agents are built on Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Agentforce Platform, a forthcoming low-code/no-code platform for building autonomous AI agents that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is expected to detail in his Dreamforce 2024 keynote in September. SDR Agent supports sellers by autonomously answering questions from inbound leads, handling objections, and booking meetings. Sales Coach Agent helps sellers develop their skills by simulating a buyer during discovery, pitch, or negotiation calls.

AI autonomous agents go a step beyond AI copilots, which support humans in their work, offering advice without executing tasks. Autonomous agents, on the other hand, perform tasks and make decisions on their own within set parameters.

Benioff teased Salesforce’s first fully autonomous agent, Einstein Service Agent, in June, promising, “intelligent customer support with seamless collaboration between digital and human workers for rapid case resolution.” Service Agent is intended to make conventional chatbots obsolete by understanding and taking action on a broad range of service issues without preprogrammed scenarios. With SDR Agent and Sales Coach Agent, Salesforce is aiming to bring that power to sales teams.

Whereas chatbots can only answer specific, programmed questions, SDR Agent uses retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to access trusted business data (such as product FAQs, sales plays, and case studies) to interpret and process information, enabling it to have personalized, intelligent conversations with inbound prospects.

Pipeline expander

“There is barely any sales team in the world that will tell you they have enough pipeline,” said Ketan Karkhanis, EVP and GM for Sales Cloud at Salesforce. “Everybody needs more tools to qualify the pipeline and engage with the right customers at the right time. What we are doing with Einstein SDR is launching an autonomous agent that is going to help you qualify the pipeline, answer the questions of your prospects, give them contextually relevant, personalized engagement, and even schedule a meeting, handing it off to you as a human seller.”

For example, SDR Agent could detect that an inbound prospect has recently downloaded a white paper from a website. Without involving a human seller, it could draft and send an email to the lead, answer questions, and schedule a meeting. With each scheduled meeting, the agent performs a handoff to sellers by notifying and briefing them with curated meeting preparation that summarizes critical lead information and previous interactions.

Salesforce notes that customers can customize the language and tone the agent uses with prospects. They can also set guardrails for how often and through which channels the agent should engage with inbound prospects.

The agent can interact with prospects through their preferred channels (including email, SMS, and WhatsApp) and in their preferred language.

Pitching coach

As for Sales Coach Agent, Karkhanis compared it to a personal trainer, but for sales.

“Every seller will benefit from sales coaching, and most of the time they do this in front of a mirror before their sales calls, especially the newer sales team members,” he said. “Imagine you’re working a deal and the Sales Coach pops up and says, ‘You have a meeting coming up. Do you want to practice your pitch?’ Imagine having the ability to role-play with Einstein and it’s giving you sales best practices and methodologies.”

Sales Coach Agent uses RAG to find relevant information in Salesforce (including previous correspondence with a customer, buyer personas, and buyer journey documents), enabling it to simulate a buyer (and their tone) as the seller role-plays a deal stage. For instance, in the negotiation stage, the agent could create a scenario from relevant context (like the opportunity record and buyer persona materials) to simulate the target buyer and engage in pricing negotiations.

Karkhanis said the agent leverages LLMs to incorporate insights from thought leaders and reputable publications to offer sellers feedback, including evaluation of next steps. Managers can track the number of coaching sessions, identify the most engaged reps, and analyze the win/loss rates of deals with and without coaching.