Agentforce Sales Coach
Although it isn’t GA yet, Sales Coach Agent is available in partner demo orgs and I’ve been able to spend a little time with it this weekend.
This is probably the agent that I’m most interested in, as it’s moved us outside of automating tasks into an area that is close to my heart - training.
The setup for Sales coach is surprisingly easy - you need Data Cloud and Copilot turned on, but then it’s just a matter of creating an agent user, assigning a couple of permission sets to that and yourself and then configuring a Sales Agent in Agent Studio. Thus far I’ve stuck with the default Topics and their instructions around:
Opportunity Coaching
Proposal Quote Role-Play
Negotiation/Review Role-Play
which the agent has been able to perform very well.
Unlike Copilot you need to add this to an Opportunity page via a Lightning Web Component - I’ve put this into it’s own tab so that nobody will start it off by accident:
Next I choose the kind of interaction that I want :
And off we go - in a nice change of pace, the AI is telling me the role I’m going to play:
The questions asked start off fairly standard - what differentiates the product, why should we buy from you, what is the support on offer. As an aside, I’m slightly surprised that Salesforce haven’t trained the AI better to recognise the word ‘Agentforce’, but it’s a work in progress.
Where the generative AI really shines though, is it’s ability to react to what I say rather than follow a script. I’ve mentioned that our support is all automated, so it asks a follow up question about what happens if they need to speak to a human, putting me on the spot to explain the handover process.
Once I end the role play, I get feedback:
The speech recognition isn’t 100% there yet - 8 milliamp hours turned into 8 million hours, for example. An extremely impressive battery life, if a little reminiscent of Rhod Gilbert and the one million candle power torch.
All-in-all, an impressive first experience. What most excites me though is the potential - I can see this being used in all kinds of training scenarios outside of Sales, especially if I can leverage my existing Salesforce data to train users on past activities.
As I’ve written before, if all the junior level work is handled with AI agents, where are the seniors we need in ten years going to come from? The answer to that may be that they are rapidly trained up by AI agents rather than learning their trade organically as they encounter real world customers and problems.
One Downside - The Name
Let’s leave aside the fact that name has clearly been lifted from one of my early experiments with prompt templates from Apex - I mean mine was trigged via a Lightning Web Component on the Opportunity page too - come on Salesforce, at least pretend to come up with your own ideas 🙂
No, the problem I foresee is the word “coach” will have connotations that will be off-putting to experienced employees - they’ll see this as a reflection on their performance rather than a tool to help them.
I’m starting most conversations around the Sales Coach with the advice to ignore the name, instead see this as an opportunity to practice your pitch whenever it’s convenient, with an automated prospect who never gets bored and won’t run out of questions.