Test launch tactics before committing to a strategy

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 18:31

   how to get people to pay attention. Just looking back at that success, I guess just any lessons from what you did right to get the word Salesforce out, to get people to pay attention at all to what you were doing? Well, it's a noisy world, Lenny. And you can see that you can get on Twitter. It's like, I mean, there's a lot of noise. And how do you break through? And we have that challenge today. We're introducing a huge new product called Agent Force.

2. 18:56

   And I've only been working on it for a couple months now. I introduced it at our Dreamforce conference. And that was one way, you know, to break through, which was I took our conference and said, it's just going to be about Agent Force. And I really, you know, and I'm trying to think about what are all the things I need to do to get my company 100% on Agent Force, my customers, everyone. Because I know I have a window of opportunity here.

3. 19:24

   And we're first, we're ahead. You know, we have hundreds of customers on this now. We're on it, which is amazing. You know, we've moved our whole help infrastructure to agent force. We're seeing incredible results. We've, you know, cut our human escalation from our support infrastructure down by 50%. We're resolving 83% of all of our inquiries robotically. It's incredible. So now how do I get that message out?

4. 19:53

   How do I do it globally? How do I, how do I find my KNMS moment, you know, where I can come up with something that's viral and exciting? And I'm trying lots of different things. I'm even having, I have Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, who are two friends of mine helping me. So they said, we'll cut ads for you. They have not been together in an ad ever, and they haven't done anything together since True Detective.

5. 20:20

   And they're friends of mine. And I'm like, again, very generous people to agree to do this. And we've shot three ads so far. I put them out on Twitter to get feedback from folks. Is this a good idea? I am running this help.salesforce.com to show what we can do with it. Is that a good idea? I'm training all my salespeople on how to sell it. Is that a good idea? And I'm running aggressive marketing against Microsoft because they have really a terrible product, co-pilot that I'm have to position against and market against. So, and is that a good idea?

6. 20:55

   Should I be marketing and, and, and positioning against them? I'm trying lots of things. And what I'm trying to do, Lenny, is when, what I recommend to all entrepreneurs and the, the message is really in the medium here, which is that I am looking to try to find the winning tactic and turn it into a winning strategy. I don't know actually which one of those things is going to be the most important thing in launching this product. So I'm trying a lot of things, you know, with that old expression, I'm throwing everything against the wall and looking at what's going to stick. And then once I find that thing, I will then grow that as my strategy.

7. 21:31

   And that is what I'm trying to do. I'm even expanding my distribution organization. I'm trying to hire an additional one to 2000 account executives just to focus on agent force. So I'm trying to do everything I can to get that light switch to go on where I can show customers, this is an incredible opportunity to lower your costs, to make things better, and to show that for the first time, we can have digital labor, that Salesforce isn't just managing your data, but we're a digital labor provider. So this is that moment.

8. 22:03

   There's so much there that I love. This idea of trying a bunch of things, looking for the tactic that becomes your strategy. It feels like also there's this focus of just like go all in and focus on this one thing and then try a bunch of different ways for this one thing that you're focused on to win. There's also an element of I just had Seth Godin on the podcast and one of his big lessons is be remarkable and create something people remark about.

9. 22:26

   So this celeb sort of oriented ad that you're working on, I think is a really good example of that. Well, that's a good, that is a key thought though that he's saying, which is you've got to find it. But finding that is the hard part. So you got to be like, you have to be like, um, one of my friends is Chris rock, the comedian. And so, you know, what he'll do is he just doesn't go out and do a Netflix special, right.

10. 22:47

    With all of his jokes, he's out there testing his jokes in clubs and doing all kinds of crazy things. I won't go through all the crazy stuff he does to test his jokes, but by the time it gets to the big Netflix special, right. He knows what works and what doesn't work. So that is something that we all have to do as entrepreneurs. We need to be testing lots of things. We need a lot of