Salesforce's Secret Weapon: How Values Underpin Its AI Vision and Impact
Salesforce's Secret Weapon: How Values Underpin Its AI Vision and Impact
Plus: Benifoff's Keynote Template
Does selling values work, or is it a waste of time?
Many companies establish corporate and brand values and magnify them in company strategy and marketing, but few do it as substantially, as effectively, and for as long as Salesforce has - Salesforce even re-shaped corporate planning into V2MOM for Vision, VALUES, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures.
Salesforce has innovated in product, leading the cloud revolution, dominating applications share, and this year, positioning itself as “the best AI Agent platform in the world.” The unified architecture, unified data, security, and trust positioning were exceptional in their Dreamforce keynote. Benioff effectively de-positioned other AI/Agent vendors’s solutions as DIY (Do it Yourself) and untrustworthy data vampires.
And, the one-two punch of their long-track-record of values orientation made the product claims of trusted data and AI for social good even more believable. There have always been buying audiences who want to feel good about their vendors - and the AI world, with its deep and terrifying trust risks drive that need further.
Is he full of it?
Are all of Benioff’s promises here today? Probably not - it took several years for its Einstein predictive analytics to realize the vision. Did Benioff make a snafu here or there? Yes: the Saks customer feature and Saks adorned executives felt a bit privileged vs. inclusive. Is he the ultimate ringmaster, bragging about Salesforce’s dominance and track record? Yes, but despite his hyperbole, many of his claims have come to fruition, and he has meaningfully taken action on all of them over time.
Dreamforce Keynote Breakdown
Salesforce CEO Benioff welcomed 45,000 people to Dreamforce last week. Many of the elements were similar to the CEO Keynote Template I detailed from Snowflake’s Summit, but Benioff doubled down on his trademarks of vision, values, and customer examples. You can watch the whole keynote here. I detail his template below.
Why Should You Care What Benioff Does?
So few of us have the budgets or scale to do anything like Salesforce. But they are truly best-in-class. They pay top dollar for top business people. They have invested in a full stack developer, data and application and AI ecosystem with real promise. They have done amazing marketing focused on customer stories - and have built strong communities of evangelists. Could they be better, grow faster, have a more integrated stack that delivers even more? Yes. But they are still a marvel to watch and provide a helpful structure to follow.
Salesforce Keynote Template: Vision, AI, and Giving Back
Benioff has followed a similar structure for years and this year it was again effective. (Length warning, okay to scan!)
Claim the Product and Market Category for the Next Era - Benioff has successfully co-opted the trend of the moment and themed his product and companies strategies around it starting with cloud, but moving throgh every major tech inflection. In a landscape of AI where Agents were the coming “next,” Benioff claimed it as his now, and somewhat credibly shared how his integrated platform, integrated data, processes capture across business units (Marketing, Sales, Success etc), makes Salesforce the best and most-credible Agent option for companies today. “We help you future-proof your business”
Tease the Theme with Out-of-Home Advertising Around the Conference - Salesforce’s SF 101 Unit had the Agentforce billboard up a week ahead of time.
Open with a Pump Up Video Summarizing the Theme & Highlighting Customers - Salesforce has a budget the rest of us would die for. Their bumping video featured a super effective ear-worm “Secret Agent Man,” several customer stories and a Matthew McConaughey voiceover - (:08-2:18)
Express Gratitude - This is a notable difference to Benioff’s keynotes, and one of his core elements — he thanks customers, he thanks employees, he thanks partners, he thanks local firefighters and police, he thanks nonprofit leaders. He has them stand up and has everyone clap for them. Every year, he makes this a huge, several minute show of gratitude. It makes you wonder why we don’t all do this more often.
Highlight Fun and Giving - It’s easy to highlight the amazing musicians (Pink / Imagine Dragons this year) but the Dreamforce Concerts are also fundraisers that have raised more than $120M for the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital.
Share Company VALUES - He shared the values Saleesforce has had the last 25 years “Trust, Customer Success, Innovation, Equality, Sustainability” — reinforcing how these deeply and long-held values underpin their differentiation in trustworty, responsbile AI.
Share Incredible Record of Giving and Add New AI Giving - Under the headline “Business is the Greatest Platform for Change” - Benioff shared the many and substantial donations of equity, time, product and money they’ve given, nearly a $1B in equity, nearly 1B volunteer hours and this year, $23M donations to public schools and NGOs to support the AI generation. Further, Salesfoce founded Pledge 1% - where more than 18,000 companies have pledged and together have donated almost $3B to make the world a better place. Amazing, not just lip service.
(*Disclaimer, I co-founeded Pledge 1% with them, so while I may be biased in some ways, it’s from watching their sustained giving over decades)Share Company Credentials - #1 CRM, #2 Enterprise Softward, long track record of AI innovation
*He did claim they invented prompt-engineering. Can I get a fact check here?
Name The Category and Share a Bold Vision of the Future - Benioff showed that Agents are the 3rd wave of AI, here today. Note that Robotics is next #DF25…
Share the Real Customer Pain Points & Customer Stories - There was a lot of customer meat in this keynote. He went through so many great customer examples- Wiley ( 25:45), OpenTable, Disney, at Saks (46:57) — all of the live demos were a visualization of the Saks use case - online phone support, in-store support, low-code agent building in the Saks platform. The customer integrations Salesforce pulls off are amazing.
Describe the New Architecture - He showed how all of the products and layers work together (zooming in required…) And he had slides for each of the verticals and functional aspects of AgentForce.
Deposition Competitors - Benioff went hard against the AI providers that use customers’ data to train their own models. He went hard after AI providers that require you to configure and train them yourself. “Don’t Do It Yourself” “They are spilling your data” he claimed.
“Our agents will be the lowest hallucination agents you have ever experienced because we have the data, the metadata, the workflow, the business process, the security model and the sharing model to make a more accurate AI”
“The agents will be on the platform you already know and use every day, inside the configurator. The more interactions you have with our platform, the more our AI can learn and supoort you…You can create agents with the business logic, roles, processes and data you’ve already had in Salesforce…”
Show Demos - Whereas other CEOs shy away from live demos - Salesforce goes hard at what looks like live demos - featuring three or four in last week’s keynotes. They even recommended that every attendee build their own agent this week at the event. They pulled it off again without a hitch.
Announce New Pricing - Salesforce announced a “free upgrade” to all of the Sales, Marketing, Service, Commerce, and Data Clouds - with a new pricing model based on $/agent interactions instead of platform fees. Much more to say on the AI changes to pricing here in another blog!
Save this for later
Writing CEO keynotes can be a painful process - especially when you compare yourself to the best of the best. But it’s helpful to see the tried-and-true template and examples when you’re embarking on your biggest moment of the year.
Benioff’s presentations remind me it’s not just about what you SAY but who you ARE, what you’ve done all year, and the ten years before. It adds up. A keynote ideally isn’t where you message the strategy, but where all of your strategy comes together.
Do you like Benioff’s keynotes, or do they rub you the wrong way? Have I had to much Kool-Aid?
Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing that took Atlassian public. She currently advises CEOs and CMOs of high-growth tech companies. Carilu helps leaders operationalize the chaos of scale, see around corners, and improve marketing and company performance.
