Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Dorian Earl, Salesforce Admin and Founder of Development Consulting Partners, LLC. Join us as we chat about the five steps you can take to prepare for Agentforce and AI.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Dorian Earl.
Dorian started his career as a medical and dental equipment sales rep. He had over 100,000 products and 300 clients to keep track of, and he was looking for something to replace his paper notebooks. That’s when he came across a new CRM platform called Salesforce and a new career in tech.
Today, Dorian runs a consulting firm that helps organizations leverage their tech stack to improve their business processes. The changes that are possible with AI are just as big as switching from paper planners to a CRM, so I wanted to sit down with him to find out how Salesforce Admins can get ready for Agentforce.
Dorian is seeing a lot of enthusiasm and curiosity from his clients about AI, but most organizations are unsure about how best to use it. He compares it to when search engines were first coming out. The idea of being able to search the entire internet with a query was so groundbreaking that it took time for people to understand the business implications, even at Google.
Since the possibilities of AI applications are so broad, the best thing we can do is to get any data that an AI agent might need into Salesforce. That can be anything from your operating hours to your company values to your brand voice. Essentially, the same sorts of things you’d go over with a new hire. That way you don’t have to start at square one every time you want to build a new agent.
AI implementation starts with finding quick wins for your organization. Dorian’s found the summarize record action to be particularly useful for just about everyone who works with customers. He also recommends taking advantage of AI’s ability to do quick reporting for users without the admin needing to get involved.
The biggest changes AI will bring are to internal business processes. Essentially, this comes down to saving clicks and smoothing out workflows. Dorian brings up the example of processing a return. An agent can take care of all the little steps, like creating a case, logging information, and authorizing a refund, instead of that being a multi-person business process.
The final thing to look at is whether or not any external-facing tasks can be outsourced to AI. Something like prospect nurturing can be handled by an agent that summarizes a record, drafts an email based on that summary and your business information, and then sends it. And then a second agent can schedule a phone call with an actual sales rep for anyone who replies.
Obviously, you want to be fairly confident in the agent you’ve built before you put it directly in touch with customers. But that’s why you need to get started now. For Dorian, Salesforce Admins are uniquely positioned to transform their businesses with new AI solutions.
There’s more great stuff from my conversation with Dorian, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you stay up to date.
Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I’m thrilled to welcome back Dorian Earl, founder and CEO of a thriving consultancy that has over 450 clients and just a massive wealth of Salesforce experience and knowledge.
Dorian has been the Salesforce ecosystem for nearly two decades. He started as a sales rep who needed a better way to track his deals and opportunities and really turn that into a career empowering companies to embrace better CRMs and smarter systems.
Now in today’s episode, we dive into Dorian’s five steps to prepare for Agentforce and AI. Now, from understanding the buzz around AI to implementing quick wins and long-term strategies, Dorian shares invaluable insights to help you, the Salesforce admin, and/or organizations you work for stay ahead of the curve this year in 2025.
Now, of course, before we jump in, I want to make sure that you’re following or subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so that you never miss a great episode like this. New episodes drop every Thursday morning. That way you’ve got them, boom, right on your phone before you head off for your dog walk or your commute to work. So with that, let’s get Dorian on the podcast.
Dorian, welcome back to the podcast
Dorian Earl:
Though this is an absolute pleasure more than you know and good to see you again at all of the events and a couple of weeks back at the World Tour. So good to see you and good to chat with you again.
Mike Gerholdt:
You’re one of the people that I’m happiest out in the world and we get to run into each other at different events, and you and I are such easy people to miss out in a crowd.
Dorian Earl:
Well, I don’t know if that’s the case. I’m the tallest person. You have the best beard and the most charismatic smile. Everybody who sees you go, literally.
Mike Gerholdt:
I don’t know about that.
Dorian Earl:
Yeah, well, yeah. When you walk past, and for the listeners who don’t hear this, Mike had walked past us at the World Tour and two people at the table said, “I don’t know who he is, but he has to be somebody.” I said, “You don’t know who Mike Gerholdt is?” And so you have a reputation. I’m surprised there’s not three people following you carrying your briefcase and just kind of handling all of it.
Mike Gerholdt:
There used to be. I say I’m kind of in my late ’80s John Travolta stage of Salesforce celebrityism where I’m doing the really bad B movies and nobody knows who I am.
Dorian Earl:
But that’s not true.
Mike Gerholdt:
I’m hoping for the next Pulp Fiction level role to come up and then I’ll be dancing around like a Santa Claus selling Citibank cards and stuff.
Dorian Earl:
I was going to say, if you just come out with a good costume, which at every event there are people with a really good… And dance moves, I guarantee you, you’ll be more relevant.
Mike Gerholdt:
And don’t forget, I got to shave my head. Travolta had that whole time where he shaved his head too.
Dorian Earl:
Ah, that’s true. I would just tell you, you should keep yours. You got good hair.
Mike Gerholdt:
I think so.
Dorian Earl:
You got a lot happening. You got a lot happening.
Mike Gerholdt:
You know what everybody who subscribes to the podcast didn’t want to listen to?
Dorian Earl:
What’s that?
Mike Gerholdt:
Was all of that conversation. So let’s talk about something that’ll provide business value to our customers again, and that is getting ready for Agentforce and AI. And when you and I ran into each other, well, to be fair, when you beelined through a hotel restaurant to find me horsing down my chicken fingers at the bar, you had this wonderful thing, you were like, “Mike, we got to talk about this on the podcast. I have these five things that I’m helping companies do to get ready for AI.” And I said, “You’re right.” So Dorian, let’s get into that. But let’s start off just because sometimes people don’t listen to all of the episodes of the podcast. What do you do? How did you come to be in the Salesforce world?
Dorian Earl:
Yeah, so I started almost 20 years ago as a sales guy. I needed a way to track my deals and opportunities, and if anybody’s around in the mid, I’m not going to give my age, in the mid 40s, we all used Franklin portfolio, Franklin Company Planners, and I would leave them at my client’s office and set them on top of my car and drive off and there goes my pipeline and all of my stuff and I couldn’t do that. So kind of being a forward-thinking salesperson, I said I need to have a way that I wouldn’t lose my notes, my deals, my opportunities, everything I had worked hard to build. Then I went to purchased programs and databases and lo and behold, I found a web-based CRM called Salesforce. That was 20 years ago. That was really became my secret sauce, Mike.
I was an average salesperson and getting good, but really my secret sauce was organization and to be able to stay on top of deals. And in my line of work as a salesperson at that time, we had over 100,000 products to keep track of. So what kind of promotion was going on? Who needed what? What was going on? I was a sales rep in the medical dental supply space. So we had a lot of manufacturers and four or five different manufacturers for each line. Like gloves, we had five or six brands of gloves and masks. So who had the promotion? Which one did my customer like? Oh, my doctor liked the left-handed glove from Crosstechs or from MedTech or from all those kind of companies. And I had to keep all those things straight because I had 300 plus clients.
The doctor would like one and their front desk would like another and the assistant, that kind of… And so all those things became really difficult for me to keep track of and I needed a better way to do that. And so lo and behold, I purchased Salesforce for myself, started to get some success. The down economy hit and I was of the few people that I could actually forecast my sales to my boss. I can go in and say, “This client mentioned this to me earlier on in the year. I think we can close them if we do these things.” I was one of the few people at our branch that could do that. Long and short of it, that grew to me going independent, started my own firm and then working with other companies, help bring in their sales or their product in the market. It was always, “Hey, I can help you lead your sales team, but you need to have a database or CRM.”
Again, 15 years ago, it was, “I have this in some spreadsheet or somebody in our office has this in a spreadsheet.” And I said, “You need to have a one, a better way to track your sales and deals.” And I would tell them, “You need to go out and buy the Salesforce thing.” And so I worked in tech startup helping companies take the product in the market. One of those products was acquired by Google. And so I became a contract sales manager for Google for a while and Apple for a little bit, and that’s part of my story. And six years ago, a company actually just reached out and said, “Can you help us with the CRM and sales thing?” And then my career helping companies from the inside out versus the outside in kind of worked. And so now, I’m the founder and CEO of a company with 450 plus clients and about 20 plus team members and things are really fun. So that’s the long story short, right?
Mike Gerholdt:
Right, right. It’s interesting because we’ve known each other for a while and we’ve both been the ecosystem for a while and we’ve CRM and Salesforce change and add new features to the time. I think what we’re seeing now with AI everywhere, what is your level of, let’s start off with your five things, what is your level of awareness that you’re seeing with your clients on being AI ready or even having thoughts of how they would use that?
Dorian Earl:
Everybody knows about it. As I said, I see articles at my desk. My team is using this. There are everyday products that they are seeing now that are becoming more intelligent or adding AI. You can’t turn on a TV today every… If you’re watching football and there’s a break, one commercial will say, “This is the product with AI now.” So there’s a lot of buzz and really awareness, and now it’s starting to really be embedded into other products.
What I’m finding out with our clients is they don’t understand the real impact of what this means for their business yet. They know it’s out there, but they just don’t know how to leverage that, how LMMs work, which ones to use, use cases, but they are seeing AI being embedded into their everyday tools. They are seeing email plugins, they are seeing these things and they’re starting to encounter it. So our role is really just to say, “Look, let 2025 be the year of intelligence at your company. Let’s make everybody 10% smarter. Let’s make everybody roll in your work, let’s make everybody 10, 15, 20% smarter this quarter, this six months this year.” And they’re really getting excited with that.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. It’s kind of like the early 1900s with cars. I mean, there’s how many people making an AI product right now? And I guess we’ll find out how many survive and don’t because the early 1900s, there was over 300 car manufacturers and now there’s what? 5, 10 arguably?
Dorian Earl:
Right. Maybe. Right, yeah, maybe. Right.
Mike Gerholdt:
I’m sure more, but you know. So in the five things admins can do to get ready for Agentforce and AI, you list number one is awareness. So I feel like maybe last year that was like, “Oh, we kind of need to wake up.” And most people, I don’t want to say most people, most people I know became AI aware at the consumer grade level. I think it’s another to think of AI at the enterprise level, which is where Salesforce operates because we’re an enterprise CRM. We’re operating immediately with millions of rows of records and sometimes even data lakes or multiple organizations. So I’m sure that you probably run into a few that are aware. Let’s go on to number two, which is the preparedness. Where do people fall there?
Dorian Earl:
They are not because one, if they are aware, and I think you hit it on the head, and I don’t want to bury what you just said.
Mike Gerholdt:
Sure.
Dorian Earl:
Really, most technology comes out as a consumer facing application to catch what’s called a user adoption, right? And I remember when I was in college and Google first launched and literally people going out and say, “You can ask Google anything and it would just come back with an answer.” Or as Amazon, you can go put in any book you want. Well, it took a few years for people to understand the business implication of having all the data on the internet to ask a question. It even took Google really by storm or Amazon if you would’ve asked them when they started what their business would look like. They didn’t know. So we are in early days, but the people that are understanding, okay, there is an entity or there is a program out there that can ingest data and then come back to you with patterns, use cases, ideas, analysis, and that could have some ramification for us as a company. So how do we get prepared to use this?
And so when we start telling our clients about this, they said, “Wow, this could be really exciting. What do we do then to prepare to really turn these features on?” And so I’m going to mention this. I’m going to kind of go backward and start to go forward. This analogy I start to tell is I think it’s maybe going to ring true. So I was a previous athlete, and if I was going to ask you, Mike, “Hey Mike, my knee is swollen and it’s a little sore.” You would probably tell me rest it, elevate it, ice it. These are common things that… this is generalized intelligence, right? If my three-year-old son falls and scrapes his hand and it’s bleeding, you’re going to go wash it, you’re going to go let it air, obviously you’re going to put some things on it, you’re going to wrap it up in a Band-Aid. That’s generalized intelligence.
Now, if I told you as a 40-year-old male that’s 50 pounds overweight, that played basketball at a very high level for many years, that over exercises in my yard and my knee swells probably once a month. And you would say, “Given that relative information about you, you should probably go see a doctor. You may have a micro tail, you may have tinnitus, you may have some other things. All I did was I just gave you further background and relevant information versus general. And that’s exactly how AI works. Most people are just going asking it generalized questions and getting generalized answers. But the more relevant information you can give AI, just in general, through prompting, then it can come back and say, “Based on information you told me and the background and the person and this issue, I’m going to recommend these things.”
And really AI in general is as good as the data you give it. And so one of the things we are telling our clients is to prepare to use lists. In order for this to work at an enterprise level, where are all of your company data? Are you giving AI all the background you can on your company? Where would it find it? Do you have it in PDF? The origin story on your company, the history, the industry, how you service, the founders. So all of those things, the company data, the user. Tell us about the sales reps, their roles, their unique skills, the images on them. Products and services, where does that data set and how do we adequately get it into a place where AI can read it? One, if it’s not, obviously of course, on the internet, then we should put it there. But two, it should be in a place that’s up-to-date so AI can go in and read those things and answer questions.
And so we just want to give it as much relative information as you can. That way, it doesn’t give general answers or general information, which of course could be issues. So we want to prepare our clients and say, “If you don’t have this, let’s start to gather it. If you need help gathering it, we’re going to help you put it in a way that AI can read it. Your company data, the user data, your products and services, your customers, and any systems you would like AI to have access to.”
The good part of it is a lot of this should be in their CRM. It should already be in Salesforce. What most people don’t know is you can go into the user records and pretty much put in these custom fields about roles and background and info. And obviously, you can fill out information on the company. This is actually the good part, what a lot of people don’t really know. Your company data is stored in Salesforce, your NAP, your name, address, phone, number of the business, the website, the social. We can start enriching Salesforce with your company data. Images, logos, all of those things.
And so if we do that, we are really preparing AI, we’re really just teaching it. So what can we teach it and how much can we get AI to know about your company? And then this is what I call that preparedness stage, Mike. It may take people weeks to do this. They may say, “Wow, how much data should we give AI?” As much as you want given the relevant tasks. So sometimes it takes our clients weeks to do this. Sometimes we’re putting together an entire process on what do we want AI to have access to and learn on. So that’s kind of step two.
Mike Gerholdt:
No, I like that. I’m thinking of all of the use cases my team puts together. When we put out the Agentforce Decoded series, a lot of it is thinking from the sales or service perspective of, hey, how do you summarize this account or summarize this case. One part that you brought up that’s very salient that I think is, not to look ahead, but is like a good quick win is also what is your company about? What is your brand voice?
Dorian Earl:
Yes.
Mike Gerholdt:
What are your, kind of if you had a front door, what are your window information? What’s your address? What’s your mailing address? What’s your hours? I say that because if you’re thinking of creating an agent to help your salespeople write better emails, well, it needs to be grounded in some information that it knows what it is and it knows what company you are and how to sound, right? I think it’s always important that brands have a voice, and even the admin relations, we have a brand voice. That they’re constructing that so it’s sounding cohesive. And that can just be a simple PDF or a knowledge article that an agent could reference.
Dorian Earl:
Absolutely.
Mike Gerholdt:
A lot of things, including data cleanup is important, but it’s also where do we go to get repositories of this information that’s just kind of the basic window sticker of your company? So that’s really good.
Dorian Earl:
Well, and that’s that preparedness phase. Because if you do this well, now again, I’ve thought this through because as every company you work for, you start with, “Let me give you background on the company.”
Mike Gerholdt:
Right.
Dorian Earl:
And then, “Let me tell you what we do.” And, “Let me tell you who we service and who our ideal customers are. And then let me tell you about the task you’re going to be doing.” AI is almost no different. “Let me tell you about the company that you’re going to do these work. Let me tell you about our background. Let me tell you about our products and services.”
So if this data is not in a place where Agentforce or an agent can read it, then the challenge is it’s going to make it up. It’s going to make up the answer or it’s going to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know.” And both of those items you don’t want. And so exactly to your point on brand voice, imagine a sales rep says, “I want to craft an email.” And you don’t tell the AI what the brand voice is, so then you have to prompt it. So if you can pre-ground Salesforce or your AI in this data already, then it’s that much further ahead, which is really kind of the secret sauce of this though. Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
Thinking ahead, moving on step three because we’re in a five-step program, got to get through our steps. But rightfully so, and even my team tries to do this, we try to come up with super complex use cases and stuff and really show the breadth of what some of these tools and features can do. But we all live in the real world. And in the real world when you’re a project manager, it’s what are the quick wins? What is the low effort, high result stuff that we can return? I think implementing Agentforce, we’re looking, as an admin you’d be looking for that too. So when you talk through quick wins and usage, what do you talk through as examples with some of your clients?
Dorian Earl:
Yeah, so this was really the thing that kind of got me excited about this because as I look at all new pieces of tech, I said, okay, who can use it and what’s the level of effort does it take to really get something out of it? And so when I turned on Agentforce and trails, one of the first trails, one of the first examples I saw were record summaries. And my mind immediately went back to, “Wow, as a sales rep, I wish I had this.” And those that haven’t seen this yet, you can literally, inside of Salesforce, pull up a record and prompt and say, “Summarize this record.” And it will read the record and it will read the related records and then give you a summary of what that record is.
Now, I’m going to go back to my previous example. I was a sales rep with 300 clients. Some days my boss would say, “This is a new client, go visit them.” I wish I could click and summarize what the previous rep was doing with them in the last three, six, nine months. How do you do that? And so if you are a sales rep, this is great. If you’re a sales manager and somebody says, “You need to do an account plan for this client.” And you haven’t seen them, or a classic, the client is upset, “I want to talk to your manager.” They talk to the sales manager or service manager. And of course, we’ve all made that phone call of, we’re calling in and they say, “Please hold. I need to look at the notes.” Record summaries save us… I know you’re laughing, but even when I’m happy, I called in and I said, “Hey, I have a question.” “Hold on please, sir, I’m going to pull up your account. Let me read the notes.”
Mike Gerholdt:
Let me get up to speed really quick here.
Dorian Earl:
Exactly, exactly. Let me get up to speed. And that person skims through as quick as they can to try to answer, “Oh, I see you called in on January 6th and you were asked about this issue. Was it ever resolved?” Do you have an open case about… ” Well, you have the data sitting right in front of you.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah.
Dorian Earl:
So record summaries are the quick wins, I think at every company you can use. And as an admin, it’s great because it comes out of the box. As a user, these things are huge because if you’re working with a mass amount of records, any individual record, or again, a large amount of related records to a parent record. Cases, tasks, notes, all of those things, and related to an account, opportunities, the record summaries are huge. It’s actually one of my favorite features if I could say. That would be one of the very first quick wins.
The second one, I would say quick reporting. I know it’s a little bit lower on my list, but I found this out just by accident. You can just query, you can ask AI to say, “How many accounts do I have in New York?” And it could come back based on the state that’s on the account. It will say, “You have 967 accounts in New York, you have 300 in Illinois.” Now imagine if you are the Salesforce admin, and I used to get this question, “Can you pull a list of leads in this city for me? I’m just curious.” I would get those questions all the time from an executive or from a manager or somebody.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, yeah.
Dorian Earl:
Now, you don’t have to ask your admin. You don’t have to go in and learn how to build a report. You can just ask, “How many of certain record do I have?” And AI can answer that question, which is pretty cool. How many leads do I have in nurture? How many leads do I have in New York? That’s in the working status? These are huge things when it comes to quick reporting. Marketing should be able to do this, sales should be able to do this. I mean, just a sales rep, “How big is my pipeline based on this product?” It could answer that question for you. So really cool. Those are just two of the quick ones I would say, which are huge.
Mike Gerholdt:
I think sometimes people confuse like, “Well, that should just be a list view.” Yeah, it could be a list view, unless it’s the one time you need that data or you also need that data plus something else. Because everything you were asking for, I could create as a list view. Why have AI do it? Well, because it can probably do it faster and I can also just add a quick filter to it. And it’s a one-off use case that’s just faster than creating a list view in your example.
Dorian Earl:
Well, yes, yes. And one of the things our clients always ask is, should I build a report for this or should I build a list view for this? Again, if you’re just doing analysis, just build the report. You may say, “Okay, there’s 900 accounts in New York.” You say, “Okay, based on that, I can assign those accounts to a person to do certain action.” To call, to follow up, to send a postcard, to do certain things, invite to an event, start targeting for this. Then you would create a list view then to take action against that. However, before you get to the action stage, you still need to do some analysis. Not every report is going to turn into a list view, something to take action on.
Mike Gerholdt:
And I’m sure you’re finding too that a lot of the quick wins are, the examples you gave, somebody could be listening like, “Well, that’s not going to work for me.” Right, the quick wins, I anticipate for what you bringing up are department specific and/or company specific. So as an admin, I may go to a department and show them record summary, and they’re like, “Well, but that’s not going to work for us.” Great. Well, here’s three other things that we can do as quick wins. That might not work. So record summary may be a quick win for a customer service team or a salesperson, but might be completely different for somebody else that has to do deal ops or a deal desk kind of thing.
Dorian Earl:
Well, you know what? I’m going to challenge your users because I’m going to ask them, send me a message on LinkedIn and tell me when a record summary would not work, would not be relevant.
Mike Gerholdt:
Okay, good. Please do.
Dorian Earl:
Because I’ve never pulled up a record of Salesforce and said, “I don’t want a summary of everything happening here.” I’ve never had it happen. I’ve never pulled up a record in Salesforce and said, “I don’t want to see everything related to it and really have that knowledge.” Now, not every single time, but I can foresee anybody that’s ever used Salesforce, you want to pull up a record and you want to know as much as you can about that record. Now, you don’t have to know everything and to take action, but I can see every user in Salesforce can take advantage of the record summary feature. That’s really my point there.
Mike Gerholdt:
No, it’s good.
Dorian Earl:
And so somebody could say, “You know what? I’m using Salesforce. I would never want a summary of a record.” I’m like, intriguing because I’ve never worked with anybody in Salesforce that would never find that feature useful.
Mike Gerholdt:
I don’t know. We’re going to find out. I’ve got some edge case listeners, man. There’s dark corners of the internet.
Dorian Earl:
Yes, please find me on LinkedIn. Now, if somebody is like a lawyer doing auditing, “Yes, I never get in there and do it.” Okay, okay, I got it. But again, I am really, really curious who would not use or who does not find that feature useful.
Mike Gerholdt:
So I guess my point was quick wins could be different wherever you go. I’m betting number four is the thing you probably run into a lot, which you have down as internal process improvement.
Dorian Earl:
Yes. And so this is what really gets people to start moving. They’re really not adopting technology for record summaries, even though it is important. I would say internal process improvement is the first place AI will show up. It’s what everybody’s talking about in articles. We are becoming so much more efficient. We don’t need to hire that many people to do this now because internal process improvement would mean you could cut tasks down from eight or nine clicks down to two. You can have AI augment the workflow or work that is being done because it is doing things on the background that would cost you time, energy, effort, all of that.
This is where the big ROI is coming in AI that a lot of people do not understand. You could say, “Please create a case. Please schedule an appointment. Please create a record. Please send a sample. Please issue a return for this record.” And just speaking of the last one, chargebacks, returns. Those usually take multiple records being opened up, some analysis being done, five or six clicks, related optics, and then emails going out, approvals. AI can handle that stuff, which is really cool because they could say, “Great, this is all done for you.” As opposed to, “Okay, give me one second, let me see which order this is from. Let me see what product this was. Let me find this view. Okay, how did you pay? Would you like a return on your card?” You could say, “AI, please go in, issue a return for this item and credit it back to their credit card.” Okay, done.
And so instead of eight or nine clicks, five or six minutes of downtime on a call, all those things. And in some companies I worked with, they just was one person that just issued returns, which is crazy. Now AI can do those things or create a case. So now you’re talking about imagine one person having the benefit of saying, “I can do my job and a quarter of another job.” If you have five people doing that, you really have five people working, getting the benefit of six. That’s huge.
Mike Gerholdt:
Wow, I wasn’t thinking about that. But your point five. So expand on this. External tasks outsourced to AI.
Dorian Earl:
Yeah, so what I mentioned for number four, this is where a lot of companies are a little scared to say, “I would not have AI talking to my clients.” Okay, I got it. But if you have internal process, if AI is handling, if an agent, and we’ll mention the Agentforce in this case because it has all the relevant context on your company, all the relevant context on your products and services, the people using it and your clients. You can enable it to do narrow tasks such as, “Hey, here are a list of leads.”
So imagine this workflow, Mike, and then I’ll get the external case in. You would say, “Pull up a lead, summarize the record, draft an email based on the record summary and their needs for this lead.” Okay, email draft. “Okay, put the email and send it out for me please.” So that could be five or six clicks. Pull up the record, click summarize the record, click draft an email, click send the email, right?
Mike Gerholdt:
Uh-huh.
Dorian Earl:
And then move along. Or you could just say, I will have an agent. I will program an agent or ask an agent in Salesforce to do that for all of my 30 leads in the New York area. Pull up, summarize, create an email, send off. Now, if it’s watching you do it for the next year, it would’ve learned what you’ve liked, what you don’t like, what the replies are like, information to add in because it gets smarter. This is the thing a lot of people aren’t realizing with AI is that it becomes smarter over time. And so you can allow it to do these narrow tasks. “Hey, follow up with these 30 leads that were nurturing in New York and do this for me.” Those are external facing AI agents that are taking action on your behalf.
And then you can say, I will have an agent for those that are interested that reply back. I have a second agent that’s just a scheduling agent. So the Salesforce Scheduler, which allows people, external people in your email to look in, look at your calendar, look at your availability, schedule blocks of time based on their availability. All you do is really send the email with the link in there. They schedule. Now, do you have to send an email, Mike, or can you have an AI agent send the email? Okay, great. Now that’s a narrow task, but that’s an external client facing that you don’t have to be involved. They can schedule. So now we have two agents. We have one that’s doing the nurturing, we have one doing the scheduling. Okay, great.
Now imagine previous to this appointment scheduling, you can say, “Summarize the record. Give me some bullet points. I want to do an account review.” Maybe that’s not a lead, maybe it’s an account in this case. Let’s do an account review of what they previously ordered or most likely to order, our recent comms, open tickets, open cases, anything that’s going on with them and give me three things that could be beneficial for us to mention. Maybe have an AI to summarize the record, come up with those things, pop that data into a field for you. So now we have the third agent that somebody nurtured, somebody followed up, somebody scheduled, somebody summarized records, prepped in account plan for you. We have three external facing agents just in the sales motion or maybe account planning motion. Those are external facing AIs because they’re dealing directly with your clients or your accounts. And just in the sales motion, those are three. Now you can have one agent to do all three. You can have three different ones. So imagine having an external facing AI that just does those three things. That’s huge, right?
Mike Gerholdt:
Absolutely.
Dorian Earl:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, again, I’m talking about just sales motion, but there’s a whole nother workflow in there. The marketing motion, there’s a whole nother workflow and the service motion. But those are just really, really cool things though. Either way.
Mike Gerholdt:
Well, going back to point three, it’s always looking for the quick wins. How do you make sure you go through each department and get them up and running and then come back? Because that’s what I always like to do as opposed to spend too long in one department and they’re fully vested, and another department is like, “Well, where’s our love?”
Dorian Earl:
Well, true, true. And this is where if we can step back, I know this is kind being prepared for Agentforce. To my understanding, there is not an agent that can prepare a client for Agentforce. It would be great if it could, but it’s not. But there is one. It’s called the Salesforce admin or the Salesforce product order, or whoever is in charge or forward looking for the client and saying, “Hey, in 2025, what are we going to do with our technology stack center it around Salesforce to grow our business, make us more efficient?”
This is where some intelligence, some wisdom, some understanding some business analyst skills, some requirements gathering skills. This is what our team is doing with our clients. Actually maybe this new era of really intelligence, this is where Salesforce is really excited for all of us working in the ecosystem because they are saying, we now have a tool that you can make yourself more efficient. And we are all kind of shepherding them into this new era of really intelligence. So this is really fun.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s why you work in tech, right? Every day is a little bit something different. I never would’ve predicted this, but I remember back when it was social and mobile and it’s like, where are we going? And we’re talking about connected toothbrushes, and now I don’t know. Now the toothbrush maybe is going to start giving me advice.
Dorian Earl:
Well, it could. I mean, with all the things that are happening, obviously I used to work in the medical dental space. I give you a lot of thoughts and advice there, but I cannot wait to see in the next year as we enable customer facing agents that have been trained. There is something to that. Now, I wouldn’t put a customer facing agent out there without training. I wouldn’t put regular people out there without training. But in the next year or two, with every company that I deal with becoming smarter, the places I order pizza from, they say, “Hello, how can I help you?” I’m like, “You don’t know what I previously ordered?” “No.” That’s a lack of intelligence, right?
Mike Gerholdt:
Right.
Dorian Earl:
And so how many places that we go to and solicit, and they’re not as intelligent, that an agent can help the person on the other end do their job better, which is really cool. So I am super excited. I wish every company that we worked with, big and small, would adopt technology like this. And trust me, I’ve been singing the song to everybody going, “Hey, hey, I don’t know what systems you have internally, but let me help you.” And everything from athletics, to restaurant, to food, to the travel, to all of those things. So I’m looking forward to it.
Mike Gerholdt:
It’s going to be good. Dorian, thanks for coming by and helping admins out again. You’re always in our corner giving us advice and setting us on the right path. So I appreciate it and can’t wait to connect with you again later this year at all of our events.
Dorian Earl:
Yeah. Well, and I’ll let you know how this goes because as we shepherd clients into this new era of intelligence, I’ll tell you which ones on step two, step three, and step four. And Salesforce is really doing a good job of telling the story of what people are doing with agents and AI, which is really cool. I cannot wait. This is really, really fun. But thanks for all you do with helping us in the ecosystem. I think I mentioned to you, when I started with Salesforce 2017, I was listening. I went back and listened to all of your previous podcasts and just to get caught up, and I listened to one a day, one every other day and listened to them on one and a half or two speed. And so it was a really, really, really cool thing. One, you’ve got a great obviously voice, and you know-
Mike Gerholdt:
Even at two speed, I do?
Dorian Earl:
Even at two speed, you’d be surprised what Mike sounded like at two speed. Yep, yep, yep.
Mike Gerholdt:
I sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks. Mike, and Gillian at one and a half or two speed was something, right? And so yeah, that was really good. But still having a place where people can stay up to date and knowledgeable. On behalf of me and everybody else, we thank you for having a place that where we can learn and obviously stay up to date here. This is really cool.
Mike Gerholdt:
I appreciate it. Thanks so much.
Dorian Earl:
Yep. Yeah, thank you.
Mike Gerholdt:
Well, that was another fun discussion with Dorian. I always love running into him at events. And if you’ve ever checked out his breakout sessions, they’re one for the books. He is an incredibly powerful and passionate presenter and knowledgeable, huge fan of Salesforce admins.
I really loved his five-step approach for preparing for Agentforce. I think it gave us some actionable insights for us to think about and look forward to bringing more intelligence and efficiency to our organizations.
Now, have you found this episode helpful? Hey, do me a favor, share it with somebody. Put it out on social. I’m on Bluesky. Everybody’s on Bluesky. And if you’re on Apple Podcasts, all you have to do is tap the three dots to click share episode, and it’ll take care of posting the rest. Now, don’t forget all the links, everything that we mentioned on the episode, including a transcript, is available at admin.salesforce.com. You can find everything there, including a lot of blog posts. Tons of information.
Now, as always, if you’d love to join in the conversation, and I’d love to be there with you, jump over to the Admin Trailblazer Group. That is in the Trailblazer community. You know where the link is. It’s in the show notes, which is at admin.salesforce.com. Look at that. It’s like, “Toot, toot, toot, here we go.” Anyway, thanks again for tuning in and we’ll see you next Thursday in the cloud.
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