Salesforce has announced two new autonomous AI sales agents, the Einstein Sales Development Rep (SDR) Agent and the Einstein Sales Coach Agent, aimed at helping sales teams accelerate growth. Both agents are built on the Einstein 1 Agentforce Platform and will be available in October.
The Einstein SDR Agent engages inbound leads autonomously using natural language to answer questions, handle objections, and organize meetings for human sellers. Key functionalities include the ability to automate the pipeline round-the-clock with personalised and intelligent conversations. These conversations are grounded in company-specific CRM data and harmonised external data, ensuring accurate and relevant responses.
"In a recent report, businesses shared that their sales reps spend just 30% of their time selling during an average week because they are bogged down by tedious and manual tasks. Einstein SDR Agent helps sellers maximise their selling time," stated a report.
Einstein SDR Agent offers multi-channel and multilingual capabilities, engaging with leads through SMS, WhatsApp, and more. Customers can also tailor the language and tone, as well as set specific guardrails and monitoring rules for the agent's interactions. The agent provides seamless handoffs to human sellers by summarising essential lead information and previous interactions before scheduled meetings.
The Einstein Sales Coach Agent, on the other hand, assists sellers through realistic role-play scenarios, helping them improve in areas such as discovery, pitching, and negotiation. The agent converts text into speech to simulate buyer interactions based on the deal stage, providing objective feedback grounded in insights from thought leaders.
Managers are able to connect the coaching to sales results by tracking various metrics, such as the number of coaching sessions, the engagement level of reps, and the win/loss rates of deals with and without coaching. These features enable an assessment of the ROI on coaching sessions.
"Einstein Sales Coach Agent can be found on every opportunity record, ready to engage, converting text into speech for engaging role-plays based on the deal stage. Using RAG, Einstein finds the relevant information in Salesforce, such as previous correspondence with that customer or external files provided, like buyer personas and buyer journey documents, and generates contextual responses," detailed the press release.
Both agents can be set up using no-code actions and pre-built templates infused with Salesforce's best practices. The agents utilise the Salesforce Data Cloud to enhance generative models with external information, ensuring outputs are accurate and contextual. Security and trust are maintained through the Einstein Trust Layer.
Accenture's Global Sales Excellence Lead, Sara Porter, commented on the adoption of these agents: "Accenture is committed to providing our sales practitioners with advanced technology and processes fueled by AI, data, and insights to drive more intelligent customer conversations and accelerate revenue. We are teaming with Salesforce to develop and optimise Einstein Sales Agents to improve deal team effectiveness, scale to support more deals, and allow our people to focus their time and effort on our most complex deals."
Sam Allen, EVP & Chief Pipeline Officer at Salesforce, added, "We are excited about the potential of humans with AI to scale and close deals faster with this groundbreaking AI innovation to close deals with greater velocity and value."
Salesforce's announcement outlines that the Einstein SDR Agent and Einstein Sales Coach Agent will be available generally in October, with additional functionalities expected to be added throughout the year.
