Ep.173- Who’s Calling the Shots? Salesforce, Voice, and the Co-Sell Conundrum-Kristy Thomas, Vonage
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Transcript is auto-generated.
Josh Lupresto (00:00)
Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh, Lupresto SVP of sales engineering at Telarus this is next level biz tech.
Kristy Thomas (00:07)
Thank you.
Josh Lupresto (00:14)
Everybody welcome back. are back on today with the track entitled Who’s Calling the Shots Salesforce Voice and the Co-Sale Conundrum. How’s that for a mouthful? On with us today, Kristy Thomas, SVP Global Channel and Alliances at Vonage. Kristy, welcome on.
Kristy Thomas (00:32)
Hi Josh, thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here today.
Josh Lupresto (00:36)
We got a lot of good stuff. ⁓ Let’s kick it off here. We’ve known each other a long time. You’ve been in this space. For those that don’t know you, tell us a little bit about you, your journey. mean, you’ve had a front row seat to this whole evolution of cloud communication. So just walk us down your backstory and kind of what you got you into this role at Vonage.
Kristy Thomas (00:55)
Yeah, sure. So would love to. My story starts ⁓ at Masergy Communications ⁓ way back in the day. Now it’s a Comcast organization, but I was an individual contributor there that really focused on unified communications and service, working with ⁓ the amazing channel community that’s out there today. And that was really at the height.
top of the high curve of adoption for unified communications in the marketplace and really cut my teeth there. I grew up through working with a lot of the partners on bringing unified communication or cloud communications. And we had so many terms for it back then. Hosted PBX, IP telephony, all these cloud communications, et cetera, et cetera. Now we call it unified communications as a service. And so that’s where I really started.
⁓ in this industry and was such a channel forward ⁓ organization. So I had the opportunity to sell with a lot of the channel partners still that I work with today in my role at Vonage. And honestly, I’m grateful for a lot of them because they put the roof over my head. Being able to ride shotgun with them on these opportunities and trust me with their customers to bring forward at the time an emerging technology. ⁓
And, you know, I stayed there for quite some time, moved up to leadership and saw that price compression was happening in unified communications. And this thing called Contact Center as a service started to become front and center. And it was something that reignited my passion for going out there and solving for customers with business outcomes and solutions. And so I started to learn Contact Center at that particular time before I left Masergy
Realized it was a whole new language. The only thing that was the same was the as a service and, and had to learn that, had to learn the different stakeholders, what mattered to them. And, and really enjoyed kind of that engagement again, because I learned something new fast forward. I, I left Masergy and went to Vonage at that particular time. I, ⁓ was a part of the contact center strategy team at Vonage and, ⁓
worked with Reggie Scales, who’s now our head of sales and Alan Masarek who at the time was the CEO. And right at that time was when ⁓ we were about ready to acquire a contact center company. And I was part of that acquisition of a company called New Voice Media at the time and really got to go deep around contact center and the partnership with Salesforce that they had established over the years.
and built out enterprise sales. for most of that part of my career, and then I went off to Talk Desk as well, I was always more on the enterprise sales side. So I was building the bench that sold, I was either the one that sold alongside of the partner or built the bench that sold alongside of the partner. ⁓ Then I moved from there to a TSD, built the CX overlay practice for a TSD. I did seven months after leaving there. ⁓
and was on the partner side. So we worked for a partner for seven months and then I’m a board and it came back to Vonage, but in a different capacity. I now am overseeing all of global channel and alliances. And really what that means is our amazing channel community out there that is technology consulting services, but also our partnerships with eco technology, adjacent ecosystem partners like.
Salesforce, Microsoft, ServiceNow, etc. in the marketplace. So that’s been new. And those new partnerships, the Salesforce is not new to me, but the others have been new. And so it’s been great to embark on that as well.
Josh Lupresto (04:43)
I love it. ⁓ The channel just it won’t let you go. It’s like a just a giant really mostly safe gang that just you just can’t get out. It’s just impossible.
Kristy Thomas (04:52)
It’s
crazy. And what I think is so, so interesting now is, and this excites me, I’m now seeing our kids in the channel. ⁓ I go to events and I will get introduced to a channel partner’s daughter or son and they’re like, you know, he’s interning here or working here at whatever the supplier company is, or one of our TSD friends like at Telarus And it’s just, it’s weird, but it’s great to see. ⁓
Josh Lupresto (05:01)
Yeah, that’s weird.
Yeah.
Kristy Thomas (05:19)
And my daughter was with me on a trip. She’s now 20 and she’s grown up through all this too. so, you know, showing her back and introducing her to a lot of our channel partners and them knowing her from seven and now 20 is just a riot. It’s a riot. Cause we all stay the same age. Like they’ve grown up, but we’re the same age. Yes. Yeah. ⁓
Josh Lupresto (05:32)
it’s crazy, it’s crazy. I know, I know, right? It’s our 25th birthday again, that’s what my wife says, yeah.
So all those, let’s talk about kind of, you there’s a lot of lessons to be had from the field, right? Before we kind of get to the Vonage and Salesforce story, give me a good example, a lesson that you learned either from a tough deal, a mentor, or just something that kind of shaped how you do what you do.
Kristy Thomas (06:01)
So I will say probably there’s, ⁓ people always make fun of me because I go in threes. There’s probably three core quick ones that I’ve learned. ⁓ Number one is when I shifted and really started to lean in and engaging more around contact centers of service and then now, ⁓ and also building customer experience ⁓ transformation journeys for customers, I quickly realized that ⁓
the stakeholder depth was changing, meaning for the longest time we sold to an IT buyer. And now it’s much wider than that. It’s a wider range of stakeholders and have influence on the opportunities. But most importantly, the biggest learning of all of that was start with engaging early with the CFO. And I make a joke always of kiss the ring of the CFO early and often.
But it’s really important from an alignment perspective because people don’t buy technology because it’s cool. They buy it because it’s driving some type of business impact. It’s adding into positive EBITDA in some way, operational efficiencies, revenue growth, whatever. And so making sure that you’re aligned with the CFO early and often is a really strong learning for me. ⁓ Number two is really, really focusing on active listening and being curious with active listening.
So being curious in your conversations, but then when you ask something, actively listen to what they’re saying and then make sure that you understand the answer or the response that they’ve given you and reiterate it. Because I think we often as individuals hear what we want to hear or our brains are wired to where we want to make a point. And we’re so focused on making that point that we forget to actively listen to what the person’s telling us.
And I’ve learned that in my journey, ⁓ in my career. And then the third piece of it is that ⁓ don’t do any of this alone. And what I mean by that is that there were so many, so many talented, experienced individuals out there for resources. that whether that’s going to your bench of solutions engineering as a partner, ⁓ whether it’s me collaborating.
with other suppliers or TSDs or what’s working, what’s not, or helping a customer and making sure that we have the right bench forward there to help that customer. Just don’t be a lone wolf. Do this because the rate of technology is happening so fast, the innovation, and it’s so hard to keep up. And it’s impossible to know everything. So don’t kid yourself that you’re going to. So rely on your tribe or whatever you want to call that to help you be more successful in what you’re doing in your journey.
Josh Lupresto (08:52)
I love those, those are fantastic. The last one I think is interesting too because it’s funny to get on calls with new partners or partners that are maybe coming into this ecosystem for the first time and don’t know all these nuances, don’t know all the products, don’t know all the vendors, don’t know kind of the go to markets and they go, okay, I’ve got to do this part, I’ve got to do this part, I’ve to this part and we’re sitting here saying, I mean, you could hire all that if you needed to, if you wanted to, but you don’t.
Kristy Thomas (09:19)
Bye!
Josh Lupresto (09:21)
You don’t have to. Okay, well, what do I need to get started? You got to knock down some doors and you just got to leverage those relationships that you already have. We’ll help you with the discovery. We’ll help you with the details. We’ll help you with the notes. We’ll get you, you know, we’ll get you connected with folks like yourself. And often that question I think from people coming in is like, really though? Like, is this an MLM? Like, is that real? You know, like no, ecosystem.
Kristy Thomas (09:40)
Mm-hmm. It’s true. I think
it’s the really, and then it’s also, you know, oftentimes there’s a certain personality type. People that come into this and start their own business, they’re very much hunter mentality. And they’re also used to being that kind of type A leader and doing it all on their own and building it themselves. And you don’t have to, you shouldn’t.
Josh Lupresto (10:05)
Yeah, scale hits you, scale hits you quick and then you figure out how to get by. And so let us help, absolutely. ⁓ So let’s talk about Vonage, kind of where it fits in the ecosystem. what makes, mean, Vonage is obviously a name that’s been around for a while, but what makes it stand out in the voice and the communication space? Maybe just start us with what’s the Salesforce story and then maybe we’ll go a little bit deeper.
Kristy Thomas (10:08)
It does. Right.
Sure, ⁓ I’ll start with Salesforce and then we can kind of go broader across the entire communication stack and strategy that we have around our five year plan. So our partnership with Salesforce, believe it or not, is 19 years old. So we have the longest standing partnership with Salesforce today and the company that we acquired, New Voice Media, was actually a Salesforce VC investment company. So we’ve been doing this for a very long time with Salesforce and
Some of the three differentiators around this partnership are we have over a thousand reviews ⁓ on their app exchange that are 4.9 or higher. So why that’s important and why you should care about that is that we’ve got a high level of customer satisfaction with our technology that’s integrated into Salesforce. But when you look at that, that really means that the lifetime value of a Vonage plus Salesforce customer.
is high because they rate us high and they stay with us. Our average tenure for customers is five to seven years with Salesforce integration. So we really differentiate on the integration and how deep it is and easy and frictionless for the end user. We also are part of what’s called, so we’re in the independent software vendor ecosystem for Salesforce and they have a status.
that’s called summit status. And what that means is that you’re in the top 5 % of those partners in the revenue that you generate in that partnership. So we are a long standing summit partner. We continue to have the benefits of being in that partnership. And then the other thing that I think is really important is we understand the co-selling motion with Salesforce. And why that’s important for partners to understand is
we have this better together strategy wherein we really make sure that if Salesforce is involved in engagement with a customer and there’s also a partner involved in the customer and Vonage in the middle, that everybody truly understands their co-selling responsibilities, but also the added value that everybody brings. Because for that trifecta,
Why it’s important for a channel partner is Salesforce has access to stakeholders typically that that channel partner doesn’t have access to. ⁓ On the other side of it for the Salesforce account executive, the channel partners added value is they typically have services that we cannot provide at Vonage or they cannot provide at Salesforce. So think Josh, project management services.
the ability to go and do a technology assessment to cut costs to free up budget for initiatives around a CX strategy, going into a wireless assessment maybe. Those types of things, those value-add services that a technology partner or a channel partner might have, we don’t have that advantage and neither does the AE at Salesforce, account executive. So there’s this great strategy around how when we’re together, we have a higher win rate. Our win rate when we really team on this.
is in the 85 percentile. Typically that 15 percent is a status quo do nothing, right? Where the customer just completely just said, we’re not going to do nothing for some reason or that we can’t break through.
Josh Lupresto (13:54)
Yeah, you know, it’s just been funny. This TST ecosystem, you know, we sat here and VARs and resellers sat here and the SaaS companies and the hyperscalers sat here and we’re all chasing, somehow we, you know, high tide raised all boats. We all chased similar accounts and we all sold different products and we all stayed in whatever lanes we needed to stay in. And so I’d love seeing these come together right now that Salesforce is the size and where they are.
Kristy Thomas (14:14)
Right.
Josh Lupresto (14:21)
It’s awesome to see that you guys have the relationship to understand how to go to market with that. Because the old way we would go, all right, we got to compete against this direct trap. let’s OK, you let’s let’s tell the customer why this option is not the right option. We’re going to, you know, so we’re not going down that route. I mean, maybe so just help the help the advisors understand if I’ve if I’ve got a deal and I think this, you know, this has got some kind of onage meets Salesforce chemistry.
Kristy Thomas (14:35)
Right.
Josh Lupresto (14:50)
What’s the avenue in that? What are you seeing the sellers do that are successful? it bring it to you, you go map and find the AE from a Salesforce perspective and we lock arms? Like how does that deal cycle go?
Kristy Thomas (15:02)
Yeah, so you set the foundation of that initial engagement. That’s exactly right. They bring it forward to us. We get an understanding of what the engagement is from the channel side of the house. Now, the thing that we’re very sensitive about is that ⁓ why it’s so important for a channel partner to bring forward a customer that is deeply invested in Salesforce to us is if we don’t do that, we don’t do some due diligence on their behalf, there’s a chance that they’re going to be competing.
against Amazon Connect and they don’t even know it. Right? And so their deal is actually at risk because there’s been no Alliance that’s been made on the Salesforce side. And so what we do is, we typically will go through with the channel partner. What’s the opportunity? Who do you have relationships with? What have you sold in the past? And then we keep, we keep a, you know, a very conservative conversation when we engage with the account executive at Salesforce.
What are you working on? We have a partner that’s potentially wanting to work with us and we get a feel for are they open to it or not. Also confirming that they are in an active buying cycle because often they’ll know as well. And then if there does seem to be synergies between the two, then we start to make the match happen ⁓ and then start to engage properly with the customer, ⁓ allowing that lines. I think the other thing is, is that one of the…
Josh Lupresto (16:07)
yeah.
Kristy Thomas (16:24)
One of the areas where channel partners are often hesitant to engage sales forces is that they think that it’s going to limit their wallet share of a contact Center deal. And it just depends. Sometimes that is the case, right? Other times it’s not the case. And so we can be sensitive to that, but you still want to have this in your pocket from a competitive landscape and then, you know, let the customer make an informed decision because at the end of the day,
If they’ve invested heavily in their CRM for service cloud and other clouds with Salesforce, that’s way more expensive on their line item of operating expenses than the context in our technology. And the board is going to ask, did you look at who the integration partners are for Salesforce? And so you want to make sure that you’ve checked that box from a due diligence perspective.
Josh Lupresto (17:17)
Love ⁓ it. Let’s get into a little bit maybe here. Let’s think architecture for just a second. So we’ve got Vonage’s platform, we’ve got Salesforce. Can you maybe kind of, know, where some partners might be used to, ⁓ full suite, everything’s in this product set, you know, all encompassing UCaaS CCaaS offering. Now we’re talking about Vonage plus Salesforce. So walk everybody through kind of what’s unique in that. Is it APIs? Is it automation? What does the product look like?
Kristy Thomas (17:22)
Okay.
Yeah, sure.
Yep. So what we like to do, and I’ll start from, you know, we have the full end of a communication stack that’s accessible ⁓ with our channel partners in the Vonage portfolio. And so when we talk about back office workers or knowledge workers, our solution, our unified communications solution is called Vonage Business Services. And where we really differentiate and we always have on that solution is through integrations. And that’s because our entire technology stack
⁓ Through the acquisitions that we bought, Josh, what we did is we took all that code and we uncoupled it and then we rewrote it and put it in a hyperscaler, right, in AWS. And so why that’s important to know is one, it gives us the elasticity and scalability of our platform. But two, when we did that and we put everything into the infrastructure of AWS with microservices and containers, we also had an API forward approach. And so all of our platforms, whether it’s
Bonnet, Unified Communications, VBC, or the Contact Center, it’s all extensible through API. So the integrations is why it’s a differentiator. It’s because there’s no middleware to do that. It’s fully extensible. ⁓ So we’ve got the Unified Communications solutions for our back office ⁓ users. Then we have our Contact Center suite. Historically speaking, where we’ve always differentiated is the embedded experience with Salesforce.
and the ability to really drive that rich experience of a contact center, not even knowing it’s Vonage, honestly, that just lives in Salesforce. But we just recently launched ⁓ the enhancement of our contact center solution that’s standalone. And it’s really the interface and the extensibility of this enhancement. So it’s a full omni-channel contact center solution that is integrated into over 13 third-party platforms.
So integration beyond just Salesforce, it’s all these others that are out there in the market place. So Zoho, HubSpot, a lot of these emerging ones. And so that’s truly the differentiation of this solution. And then ⁓ it is highly secure and hyper secure. And there’s a whole other track around that from why we’re so secure because of the governance around our platform from Ericsson, because we’re owned by Ericsson company.
And then the third piece of it is that we now call network API, but it’s our API part of our solution. And why that’s important for customers is it allows them to embed ⁓ different types of communications into either their development stack for applications, software that they do, whatever, or internal projects. And so really that extensibility of communications across all different types of ways in which ultimately the customer is trying to communicate to their customers externally.
Josh Lupresto (20:31)
Yeah, I love it. There’s just, think that what I get out of that is a lot of modularity, right? You guys have built this thing the right way. You gotta meet people where they are, right? I mean, it’s hard enough to win a deal. It’s harder to win it when you’re rigid. So meet them where they are.
Kristy Thomas (20:38)
Yes!
Yes, I love
that. And you one of the things too, that I’ve learned over the past, I guess, almost nine months that I’ve been here is when we tell that story, people also often hear that we are a platform of as a service and you have to, you have to eat the whole elephant of the platform. And that’s actually not the case at all. Our solution is very much capable of solving for business use cases based on point solutions.
And so for many customers right now, you can’t go in and sell the entire stack. They’re just not ready for that. ⁓ For many different limitations and reasons. Sometimes they’re technology related, sometimes they’re contract related, but you can beach head into these customers with a solution within the Vonage portfolio and build credibility and trust and then grow from there. So land and expand as we call it, right?
Josh Lupresto (21:43)
Love it. Let’s think about, ⁓ my favorite thing is to talk about discovery calls, questions. You’ve been in a lot of deals, right? You’ve seen a lot of different scenarios. And to your point, earlier we talked about active listening. We’ve all seen that where the customer just feeds you the absolute answer to everything that you want. And you were so focused on just saying the next thing that you just like, dude, you missed it. They told you how they’re going to buy. So.
All these discovery calls, what would you say is either the most overlooked question when we’re talking voice or CRM or the best question? mean, I don’t know, either way.
Kristy Thomas (22:22)
Well, I’d say, you
The obvious question from a technology perspective on the technology stuff that people still don’t ask is understanding their technology stack beyond just the communications layer of it. So going extensible into understanding what they’re doing for CRM and ERP, all of those things, because the integration is often what drives a richer ROI analysis around this.
and you really get the improvement within the people and the process of your organization. So really understanding the full technology stack is so quintessential today. And there’s a lot of tech franken out there through pandemic, post pandemic, selling, buying, growing in acquisitions. so understanding that tech franken is where you as a partner bring value because you can uncouple that. ⁓
with a solution that’s more seamless and integrated. So the technology stack assessment’s really important, not just how many seats, what features do you want, talk to me about the use cases and talk to me about, you know, what are your KPIs for contact center? Those are standard. So get that all aside. Just go deeper on the technology stack, but most importantly, start at the business level.
Understand what is the company’s number one charter? Is it growth through differentiated customer experience? Is it growth through acquisition? Is it growth ⁓ through alternative channels? Or is there strategy to drive operational efficiencies and operational agility?
like understanding where they are on the quadrant of growth and then correlating that to how is that individual that you’re talking to being measured on that charter.
Josh Lupresto (24:19)
It’s deep.
Kristy Thomas (24:19)
We often,
go, we, and Steve, but we go, we go so quick into wanting to solution, number one. And so we start asking all of these technology questions, but we forget like what’s important to the company and what’s important to the individual that you’re talking to. Because if you can unpack that, then you can start to get to the other parts of the, of the real solutioning, right? Of the tech, the tech solution is easy. It’s how do you drive value to the company and how do you drive value to that individual?
Josh Lupresto (24:22)
Good,
When you go down this discovery call, this kind of process, and you’re asking them these, I guess some of these questions, I guess, how often do you find that people know what’s possible? I mean, when you get into it.
Kristy Thomas (25:04)
it’s a great question. Yeah. And that’s really interesting because ⁓ oftentimes they don’t. again, there’s different types of customers that you’re dealing with, but let’s just remind everybody that there’s still a lot of prem out there. A lot of premises based solutions that people haven’t moved off of and they don’t know what’s possible because they’ve had this solution in place for a decade.
literally some people. so for them, they don’t know what they don’t know. And that’s what’s always really exciting is, is they might go out there and get informed because that’s most of what people do. But today, I remember this one statistic when I was at Masergy and they told us that by the time you talk to a buyer, they’re already 30 % informed down the path of making a decision. I think that that actually is declining, not increasing. And here’s why there’s so much noise out there.
It’s overwhelming. It’s just, it’s too much. And so they don’t know.
Josh Lupresto (26:10)
can’t imagine. I mean, I think we forget how spoiled we get into some of these conversations. I can’t imagine, you know, flipping the table to being on the other side of it and trying to be a buyer, you know, now here we are fast forward to, okay, modernization happened, digital transformation happened, now AI is happening, now agentic AI is happening. It’s got to be so hard, know, SEO, is SEO going to win out, right? Who’s, are we back to an SEO race, a gen AI?
Kristy Thomas (26:37)
Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (26:40)
know, LLM race of marketing, how, you’re right, like people, it’s a thrive in complexity. ⁓
Kristy Thomas (26:48)
It
really is. And so that’s why I think now more than ever, now more than ever, there is the value of a technology advisor in these discussions because they need somebody to help them, help them mitigate all the noise and understand really what’s the right solution for, what they’re trying to accomplish. And, and even talk to them about, that’s again, this is why you don’t do this alone. You rely on, on
Telarus you rely on other suppliers to get wind stories and understand like use cases so that you can bring forward the customer say, this is the transformation that a light company went down like you, right? Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about what we focused on from a technology of current state to future state, and then what were the impacts and how did they do that? And then they start to visualize what is that possible art for them and then get them on some of them, it’s a crawl.
walk, run strategy because they’re not ready. Josh, most of these companies aren’t ready for AI. They don’t have a knowledge base. They’re not ready, but they know that the boardroom is telling them they’ve got to have it because it’s going to solve all of our world’s problems. ⁓ so you’ve got it, again, that’s the value that an advisor brings is that they can help them on that journey along the way and take them from that current state and also take them through, start small, but here’s the art of what could potentially be possible.
Josh Lupresto (28:16)
Yeah, it was interesting. We did an episode probably, I don’t know, it’s maybe 50 episodes back at this point, kind of right at the wave of when OpenAI released their first model and kind of everything went crazy. And we looked at, ⁓ you know, we looked back at the Y Combinator, the amount of companies, AI based productization that have jumped into Y Combinator that were already coming out with products, like right as AI had started. And so now you have, you know,
Kristy Thomas (28:40)
Right.
Josh Lupresto (28:44)
tens of billions of dollars into private equity, into the next big product. So again, to exponentially cause pain to the customers of what’s the next big thing that’s going to be vaporware or is it real? Because it’s going to be really hard to differentiate a one employee AI product startup from a very well established, just purely from a marketing perspective, right? Some of the marketing is so good and some of the demos are so good.
Kristy Thomas (29:09)
Correct. Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (29:13)
diligence and advice. Like can’t push that enough for sure.
Kristy Thomas (29:18)
Yeah, that’s actually the diligence piece, think is ⁓ you’re going somewhere with that, Josh, because I think there is value to start to bring some type of diligence algorithm framework that you take to a customer and say, you know, Mr. customer, I understand you’ve got an AI strategy just like everybody else. ⁓ But when it comes to sourcing these technologies, this is the framework that I work with customers to make sure that you’re making not only an informed decision, one
but also one that is mitigated from a risk perspective for your business.
Josh Lupresto (29:51)
Yeah. Agree. You have to have to yeah, just I think the more I’m always surprised. mean, I am and I’m not of when we ask some of these questions and like, my gosh, I didn’t even I didn’t even think of that, you know, so it’s like, cool. We’re adding writing even more value, right, even a deeper layer of that into the conversation for sure.
Kristy Thomas (30:06)
Right.
Yeah.
Josh Lupresto (30:11)
All right, we got to think of a really wild example here. So as we kind of get to the final couple thoughts, what’s maybe just a wild or just interesting story in a Co-Sale engagement or in a Salesforce engagement that you’ve seen ⁓ that came to fruition?
Kristy Thomas (30:30)
Well, what we’re seeing right now is that, and I just came back from Salesforce’s event that they call World Tour, and it used to be called Salesforce World Tour, but now it’s called Agent Force World Tour, tint tint. So ⁓ if you were stepping away at Superbowl and you missed the Matthew McConaughey Agent Force commercials, ⁓ or you’ve
you know, not getting the feeds on your YouTube’s like I do on agent force, agent forces, Salesforce is the gentic AI solution that they just released at their dream force at the end of last year. And ⁓ they, they launched, I think it was, you have to quote me, it’s in the thousands of customers don’t quote me, thousands of customers that the year that are signing up for agent force use cases. And ⁓ I think, you know, for us, the most interesting
play of all this is that Agent Force is actually the entry point to their other solution that’s called Data Cloud. And both Agent Force and Data Cloud are consumption-based solutions. They’re no longer licensed SaaS-based solutions. So why I say this and why I think our channel community should care about this is that they are shifting to a consumption-based
business. They are going through a transformation from SaaS licensing to consumption based. ⁓ And there’s opportunity for channel partners there because a lot of customers don’t know how to buy that. But we’ve been selling that in a cloud environment for years and we can help customers predict costs around that, cetera. ⁓ But the interesting use case that I saw last week was leveraging agentic AI.
⁓ to go through and collect ⁓ information for an insurance environment where you’re going to go in and sell additional insurance to a customer. ⁓ But then take all of the information collected and really create this white space profile on that particular customer of what are the opportunities within the portfolio solutions that you can sell.
and then leverage bondage for human in the loop when connecting those two. So it’s a personalized experience. And all of the stuff that was collected in front was not through prompts. wasn’t through, it was natural language with the agent collecting all this information. And then so then when you actually connected the person human in a loop for the high value rate, it warranted the upsell and cross-sell that typically you wouldn’t see. And I think that’s where like we’re seeing a lot of use cases that
are valuable. The other one that’s really interesting is ⁓ matching for job hunting talent profiles. think of these organizations that are out there recruiting and matching people to open jobs. So they’re a third party company that they’re outsourced for that kind of thing. Historically speaking, Josh, there was a human that was going in and looking at the open job racks.
and then through their manual intervention saying, Josh is a good fit for this or Josh is not based on his resume that you were reviewing. Now all of that bias is gone because what has happening in his agent, the agent force or the Sygenetic AI tool is just going through and looking at different types of language or learning models and saying, actually, not only Josh is a good fit for this, but think of Kristy, even though her resume doesn’t show that she actually could actually really solve for this job. And so it’s doing
a lot of work and actually matching people up better beyond just looking at a one dimensional resume. ⁓ Yeah, it’s really interesting to watch. And so we’re in the middle of all of this and doing things like agent actions with Vonage for like fraud prevention, control and different scenarios. And it’s fun to get involved with Salesforce because we’re that early adopter of leaning into the exposed APIs that they’re giving us and really embracing it. And so it’s been fun.
Josh Lupresto (34:25)
Yeah.
Kristy Thomas (34:48)
and then now talking to customers about how it can solve with it.
Josh Lupresto (34:51)
Well, yeah, and I mean, I think the spot that we’re at is it’s all the things that you talked about, I think compounded, right? know, listen, active listening. ⁓ That’s key. beyond the tech stack into the business drivers, make sure that you’re talking to the CFO, like all these really, really important, absolute must haves in a deal. And now not only do you have great examples and a great platform, I think the value, the additional value comes in of, my gosh, this is going to create
85 different ways to solve the problems that the customers are not ready to envision on their own. Again, more guidance, more examples, more use cases. I think all these things will be great to help customers go, I didn’t even think of trying to have this solve it that way.
Kristy Thomas (35:27)
Right. Yeah.
Yeah, a hundred
percent. And I’ll also say one of the things that I am super excited about for this, the launch of our intelligent workspace contact center solution is, that also, you know, we’d be like naive to think that there’s only Salesforce users in a business environment, right? There’s, there’s other types of users. And so now our contact center solutions extensible to other different types of users that are out there again.
and the ability to leverage integration into those third party platforms that that particular subset of users are using. ⁓ I think it’s people always talk about, is voice dead or not? And what I’m learning through a lot of discussions with customers, partners and our technology, ⁓
alliances like Salesforce is, that voice is definitely not dead. It’s more important than any, because what you’re doing now is, is you are, um, taking all of those jobs to be done in a mundane fashion and really connecting to people for human in the loop to have a real conversation when it’s really important, when it matters the most.
Josh Lupresto (36:47)
Yeah, I agree. I agree.
Kristy Thomas (36:49)
And that’s how companies make money is by communicating.
Josh Lupresto (36:54)
And it’s not gonna change. It’s gonna get different, but it’s not gonna change. I love starting to hear that human in the loop. was a big talk of with Salesforce and Google Next and some of the agent to agent communication and things like that. Love the human in the loop, right? All of this automation and the agentic stuff is great. And we still can’t forget the human connection and that human in the loop, absolutely.
Kristy Thomas (36:56)
It’s going to get different, but it’s not going to change.
Yeah, yeah,
that’s really important.
Josh Lupresto (37:18)
Awesome. Great place to wrap it. A lot of good nuggets in there. Kristy, ⁓ glad we could get you on. Thanks for coming on doing this.
Kristy Thomas (37:27)
Thank you for having me. This is the best part of my day. I really enjoyed our dialogue.
Josh Lupresto (37:30)
Woohoo!
Love it. All right. Everybody that wraps us up for today, as always, just remember these are dropping every Wednesday wherever you’re coming to us from Spotify, Apple, be sure to go out and as long as you’re subscribed and you’re liked and all
good stuff, you’ll get these as soon as they drop. ⁓ until next time, this has been Who’s Calling the Shots, Salesforce Voice and the Co-Sale Conundrum. Kristy Thomas, SVP of Global Channel and Alliances at Vonage. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of Sales Engineering.