Education technology provider Carnegie Learning is a long time Salesforce customer. The company first began using Salesforce back in 2016 and Marissa Scalercio, Vice President of Sales Operations, Carnegie Learning says the company wouldn't have been able to sustain its rapid growth without it.
Since first implementing Salesforce we have grown significantly. This is like a million projects combined into one. We've acquired a couple companies and it's just been a huge boom. If we hadn't adopted Salesforce when we did, we wouldn't have even been able to grow with the system we were using, which was very much home built and custom. It's become more and more of the system that the sales team primarily uses.
A recent project has consolidated the company's sales systems on the Salesforce platform, so that the sales team only have one system to deal with.This meant shifting its disparate systems to the platform, including CPQ, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Einstein Copilot and Prompt Builder.
Scalercio is already looking forward to future innovations within the Salesforce AI product stable, most notably Agentforce, the main announcement at this week's Dreamforce. She says:
I really think the way that AI is, the quickness of new, innovative tools coming out, I don't see that this is ever going to be a complete project. I also want us to grow along with all these really cool tools that are emerging. I want to make sure that we're always on top of the most exciting innovations that actually do make it different.
She adds:
Agentforce will be a game changer. I'm really excited to see what the next phase is, and look at the details but think it'll definitely be a game changer.
Scalercio believes that AI agents working in sales will allow her staff to reach many more customers in a day than they do currently, and that robot or AI agents are really going to be the way that people market cold calls in future.
Carnegie Learning is a long time AI pioneer, having integrated AI into education by continuously refining its education products from millions of customer data points. Scalercio explains:
We have AI in the game as a company, which we started building 26 years ago. There has been a huge push this year to bring AI into sales. But not just for AI sake. We're being very thoughtful about how we are using AI tools and we're doing a kind of a slow rollout. Sales teams can be stubborn, so we're really working on the change management piece.
The AI sales project started in March where the company started to redesign how the sales teams use Salesforce. It then rolled out the system in phases that were worked around making the tool more efficient for sales users, and also cleaning up its data to make the most of AI efficiencies.
The sales team has started using opportunity scoring and Einstein forecasting. Scalercio says this has also given direct managers the ability to see where opportunities are, where there are gaps, and where they can make some improvements:
We're piloting prompt builder, field summaries, we're piloting the email templates, so all of the really cool gen AI stuff. Everything's AI. We're really trying to think about what a rep does, could more easily be done, or more efficiently. How can we use AI to just get them more time back so they can do what they do best, which is talk and be in front of customers.
Carnegie Learning has three different departments for sales. Account managers who are mostly focused on smaller accounts, account executives that work in high level, larger accounts, and a team of sales development reps that are mostly outbound, and trying to find time with decision makers for the account executives. Scalercio reckons that sales staff in every company spend 10-20% of their time doing research and admin:
Using Salesforce AI can give sales staff 10% 20% back in their day, so we're going to hopefully see 10 to 20% more pipeline and more conversion and more sales.
Scalercio thinks customers are seeing a more streamlined approach, since the company started using Salesforce, including personalized emails, and faster response times in customer service calls:
Our customers are going to notice that we really do understand their accounts better, and that we have a more personalized touch when we're both on the phone and then also through our email.
Among staff, adoption is going well. Scalercio says her sales team is beginning to realize that AI is a tool and it is really going to be an exciting new way to sell:
I think we have a couple stragglers, as probably any company does, that are a little more hesitant about AI in general, and are therefore wary of it in the sales process. So we're trying to roll this out in a piloting group, and also trying to roll it out in very small chunks, instead of a huge change of the platform. But I think as those people will start to see their colleagues using it and seeing the impact it's having in their day and their efficiency pretty quickly."
Scalercio says she is pleased with the progress of the AI implementation, but is impatient to move forward:
