Transforming Marketing Automation: How Salesforce Uses Data Cloud and AI to Increase ‘Speed to Lead’

Legacy systems can create sizable gaps between operations and employee needs, slow lead processes, and even result in siloed, out-of-sync data - crippling business efficiency until they're modernized. When businesses respond to inquiries within five minutes, there's a 75% chance of turning those leads into customers, making it essential for marketing to handle opportunities quickly and efficiently.

Salesforce's mission is to help customers grow relationships, boost productivity, and expand margins with its best-in-class AI CRM for sales, service, marketing, and commerce, but the company must also achieve those goals across its own sales force.

Recognizing it had a 10-year-old process that had become highly complex, with lead assignment happening across three different systems and 2 million lines of custom code, Salesforce embraced its role as customer zero, leveraging Data Cloud internally to create a single view of its customers, known as a "Customer 360 Truth Profile." By bringing its disparate data and metadata together, Salesforce built a foundation for enterprise-wide AI and automation, improving marketing automation and reducing time to lead by 98%.

As Michael Andrew, SVP of Marketing Decision Science at Salesforce, explained, this allowed the company to deliver high-quality leads to its sales team with enriched data and AI scoring while increasing speed to market, reducing the time required for code changes, and enhancing data quality.

Embracing customer zero

"Almost exactly a year ago, we set out with a beginner's mind to transform our lead automation process with a new solution that would send the best leads to the right sales teams within minutes of capturing their data and carry us through the next 10 years," said Andrew.

The first success metric was "speed to lead," which is a measure of how quickly businesses hand off marketing leads to sales teams. The goal was to improve from 20 minutes to less than 1 minute.

Secondly, there was a focus on integrating customer and lead data to create a more robust 360-degree profile for each prospect. Doing this would enable better lead assignment and overall productivity of the sales reps.

Lastly, the aim was to dramatically improve business agility - specifically decreasing the average time it took to implement assignment changes from four weeks to days.

Almost exactly a year ago, we set out with a beginner's mind to transform our lead automation process with a new solution that would send the best leads to the right sales teams within minutes of capturing their data and carry us through the next 10 years.

Michael Andrew, SVP of Marketing Decision Science at Salesforce

Accelerating success with AI

"With trusted data from Data Cloud, we have been able to use AI, machine learning, and automation on the Salesforce Platform to reduce our speed to lead assignment from 20 minutes to 20 seconds, allowing our sales teams to take action faster," Andrew said. "And through the power of Flow, we've also made it much faster to adapt our processes to business needs, going from 2 million lines of custom code down to 40,000 inside Salesforce, which allows us to implement changes in a few days instead of weeks."

Andrew noted that lead quality also improved as the team integrated the data with AI and machine learning models to evaluate leads and gauge product interest in real time across various customer interactions.

They used two machine learning algorithms that processed customer information from Data Cloud with AI to intelligently score each lead 1-5 based on quality and interest across 11 different Salesforce products each prospect is likely to buy.

This allows sellers to focus on the "hot leads" most ready to speak to Salesforce, as 93% of all leads that are converted to an opportunity are scored 3 or higher. It also helps sales reps identify lower-quality leads and nurture prospects who are not quite ready to buy with AI agents, automation, and other experiences until they see customers are ready to engage.

Powered by trusted first-party data

To get a trusted data foundation, Salesforce built the Customer 360 Truth Profile on Data Cloud, which provided a 360-degree view of customers across their sales, marketing, and customer success departments.

The Customer 360 Truth Profile consists of over 15 billion records flowing in from over 290 data streams, including Salesforce CRM data, Marketing Cloud, Google Analytics, and Trailhead. All that data is then harmonized in Data Cloud, generating more than 120 million unified profiles.

With that holistic view of data, Salesforce has been able to craft more than 550 segments across more than 165 activations, including email, Slack, and paid media. This continues to grow as Salesforce teams build out more experiences from Data Cloud.

Powering the future with Agentforce

Data is the backbone of Salesforce. By connecting all of its data on a single platform, the company is paving the way for future success with AI agents, as it helps them personalize customer experiences, work more efficiently, and predict what customers need next.

"Data Cloud is at the center of a Customer 360 strategy - it is the foundation that integrates every customer engagement and enables all types of automation, including AI agents," Andrew said. "Data, automation, and AI combine to create fully autonomous or semi-autonomous AI agents that boost productivity and work hand-in-hand with human agents."

Go deeper:

• Discover how Salesforce is unlocking trapped data with Data Cloud
• Power your Agentforce with Data Cloud, and make every cloud better
• Build and customize autonomous AI agents with Agentforce to support your employees and customers 24/7

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