Making the Case for Agentforce Early Adoption

At Dreamforce 2024, Salesforce announced their major initiative for the remainder of the fiscal year ad beyond: Agentforce, an AI-driven chatbot that can be deployed on websites, your Salesforce CRM and elsewhere. You can read more about Agentforce in a pervious blog post of ours.  

As a follow up to the Dreamforce buzz, Salesforce this week announced the official launch of Agentforce – their answer to AI and what Marc Beneioff speaks to as the future of Salesforce. 

This week’s announcement included two direct product announcements and a webinar full of insights. You can find the recording here. 

Launched this week: 

• Agent Builder – how an ISV builds custom Agents, 
• Agentforce Service Agent –  a customer-facing AI agent built to help customers deliver self-service

If you’re on the fence about jumping on the Agentforce bandwagon, know that Salesforce has put a major focus on the success and adoption of Agents. Not only does Beneioff see Agentforce as the future of Salesforce (ie renaming World Tours to Agentforce World Tours), but the internal teams at Salesforce are being highly motivated and pressured to bring Agents to market before the end of Salesforce’s fiscal year. 

Stated on the 10/30/24 webinar, the goal is 1,000 new Agents before January 31st 2025. For those ISVs willing to jump in before January 31st with Agentforce, there are benefits which we will dive into. 

Standout in a crowded Salesforce ecosystem with Agentforce

For those ISVs who were not first to market on the AppExchange in 2006, you know that getting the attention of prospects, SIs and Salesforce sellers can be a challenge. With thousands of apps on the AppExchange, the early adopters like Conga, DocuSign, FinancialForce and more had the advantage of being first to market and therefore top of mind for Salesforce sellers and customers looking to fill whitespace in the CRM. It was easier for them to build their brand, as well as  capture both the market and mind share of Salesforce. 

The opportunity to be an early adopter with a trusted ecosystem is rare and one that ISVs have a chance to jump at now with Agentforce. As of 10/30/24, there were only a handful of live Agents – and just half a dozen in security review.  

Build your internal Salesforce street cred with Agentforce

Getting the attention of Salesforce sellers, partner account managers (PAMs) and key internal stakeholders at Salesforce can be a challenge for the same reasons mentioned above –  it’s hard to get the attention and mindshare when there are so many options.

Each sales rep and SE is looking at sometimes dozens of solutions that can solve similar customer challenges or fill similar Salesforce whitespace. Human nature is to suggest “what you know” aka working with an ISV that you know is easy to partner with. That means if your brand is not top of mind to internal Salesforce folks, you could be losing out on pipeline. 

Similarly, each partner account manager might manage dozens to hundreds of ISVs. Getting the attention, the mindshare and the support of these potential advocates can be daunting – but less so when you have something unique to offer. By leaning into early builds of Agents, you benefit from having a window of opportunity to be top of mind for a group of individuals who are being motivated and driven to bring more Agents to more customers. 

An easier path to market with Salesforce

To motivate and incentivize ISVs to take the Agentforce leap, Salesforce is creating an easier path to market than I have seen in my decade working in the ecosystem. 

• Security review fees ($1K USD) are waived for partners building and submitting Agent actions before 1/31/25.  This includes new and existing apps with actions. 
• Technical hands-on support often reserved for top-tier partners are more widely available for ISVs building out Agent actions.
• What looks like near guarantees of front page promotions on the AppExchange / Agentforce Partner Network. 
• Co-marketing advantages and the opportunity to be highlighted in newsletters, customer stories and more.
• Virtual and in-person hands-on learning / building days where you can work along with Salesforce on your build. In-person events are in SF, Chicago, NYC and London.
• Removal of the paywall to access Salesforce AI tools. This is a freemium offer that increases access to many more ISVs.