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At first glance, business leaders often view customer relationship management (CRM) platforms as tools solely for customer engagement. In the early 2000s that might have been accurate. But today, in the wake of relentless technological advances, the most successful leaders are using automation techniques and integrating AI into their existing tools to power the full arc of their sales operations. This trend is increasingly reflected across industries, and this year’s Inc. 5000 CEO survey—underwritten by Salesforce—underscores the shift. Entire Productions, an event planning company based in San Francisco—and five-time Inc. 5000-honoree—exemplifies the kind of creative problem solving that sales teams need today in order to stay competitive. The company has made Salesforce the backbone not only of its sales and contracting processes, but of end-to-end event planning itself. In an era where data-driven agility means competitive advantage, Entire Productions’s strategic approach offers a glimpse into a future where automation and analytics are the new cornerstones of sales success. Here are some of the strategies the company is using to push the boundaries of CRM automation. Find tech that boosts end-to-end operations When Natasha Miller, founder and CEO of Entire Productions, tells other business leaders that her event planning business completely runs on the Salesforce platform, they are sometimes confused. After all, Salesforce is a CRM platform, not a project management system. But after Entire Productions adopted Salesforce in 2012, Miller began customizing her Salesforce tools to not only handle contracting and customer relationships, but also to manage vendors’ entire sales—and many marketing—tasks as well. In the early days of her company Miller used the Salesforce platform to automate several processes that are pivotal in the events business, from vendor communication protocols to managing onsite contacts to loading dock information for deliveries. “I was trying to replace email, PDFs, sending contracts by mail, and getting checks and contracts back by mail,” says Miller. “With automations crafted with specific cadences and timing, no one has to remember to send an email.” Early in its use of Salesforce, Entire Productions had just two junior-level operations staffers. And despite being understaffed at the time, the automations the team implemented via Salesforce helped them successfully run 777 events in one year. This remarkable feat proved to Miller that making Salesforce a central pillar of her organization was the right move. To this day, much of the company’s information continues to flow through Salesforce, from historical customer and event data to inbound and outbound sales processes—and every full-time employee uses it daily. Survey says: The CRM and AI dominate today’s sales landscape It’s now been several years since generative AI became widely accessible to businesses, prompting large-scale experimentation. However, new use cases are still being discovered across all business functions, making it difficult to measure the progress made for sales teams. But this year’s CEO survey harnesses deeper insight into the shifting AI-enhanced sales landscape. For example, 83.1 percent of CEOs surveyed expect AI to help with sales-related tasks, up from the 63.2 percent reported in last year’s survey. This year’s findings also indicated that when adopting AI, CEOs expect time savings (33.4 percent), increased seller productivity (26.6 percent), a maximized existing workforce (18 percent), and improved customer experience (11.9 percent). “Nearly nine in 10 respondents say they’re relying more on technology solutions, especially AI, for sales-related tasks, compared to a year ago,” says Kris Billmaier, EVP and GM of Sales Cloud and Growth Products at Salesforce. “There’s a really strong feeling that AI is going to be super important for making sales teams more productive, as 64% of companies are actually planning to boost their sales tech budget and see AI as a top tool.” At Entire Productions, Miller’s team is using AI to help with tasks that are traditionally tedious when performed manually, such as prospecting, data scraping, and identifying target customers. Since the company maintains its client directory on the Salesforce CRM platform, managers can search for prospects on LinkedIn and other databases. With Salesforce’s AI-powered data tools, the information that Miller’s team gathers on other platforms can be directly integrated or programmed to push information to their Salesforce platform for later reference. “I actually mandate that our team learn how to use AI in their roles,” says Miller, noting that they conduct regular prompting exercises and experiments to get the best recommendations for how to streamline their processes. Miller’s AI integration experience aligns with that of other Inc. 5000 leaders who were surveyed. In the CEO survey, AI was by far the top CRM data integration CEOs expect in the near future, three times as high as email marketing. A peek into the future of tech-enhanced sales Entire Productions is one of many fast-growing companies using Salesforce’s comprehensive suite to help its sales team meet the challenges of identifying, winning, and serving new clients. And as technology continues to drive competition across industries, business leaders will feel even more pressure to define not only a company-wide AI strategy but also to identify how it can best serve their sales teams. “AI and other tech are going to seriously shake up sales teams in the next five years,” says Billmaier. “The biggest change is that sales reps won’t be bogged down by all the manual, admin stuff anymore. Instead, they’ll use AI tools as their personal assistants so they have more time to focus on the really important work, like building relationships and solving strategic problems.”
