The future of small business sales is not about replacing your people with AI — it is about surrounding your sales teams with a digital workforce that quietly does the busywork so your humans can do the meaningful work.
On December 16, 2025, EVP & GM Kris Billmaier sat down to unpack how AI (Artificial Intelligence), agentic tools, and modern CRM (Customer Relationship Management) are reshaping the sales cycle for SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses) — and why this shift could be the biggest competitive equalizer your business will see in the next decade.
From Right Field to Agentic Era: A Leader Shaped by Teams
Before leading Agentforce Sales at Salesforce, Kris was a team captain playing baseball at the University of Notre Dame, then patrolling right field for the Detroit Tigers organization. After leaving professional sports, he built a fantasy sports startup with a tiny team over four intense years, then spent nearly eight years at Microsoft before joining Salesforce in 2018. Today he lives in the Seattle area, cheering on the Seattle Seahawks and coaching his daughter's softball team.
That journey explains his product philosophy: "easy by default, advanced by choice." For Kris, your sales technology should drive business growth not only by delivering value, but by creating delight — tools that are powerful when you need them, but simple the moment you first log in.
The New Reality of Small Business Sales
Under Kris's leadership, Sales CRM and Agentforce Sales have been rebuilt around AI‑driven transformation. The result: the entire sales cycle — from prospecting and lead generation to deal management, post‑call follow‑up, and renewals — is becoming agentified.
In his words, we are "moving rapidly into the agentic future of selling… allowing sellers and go‑to‑market individuals to be closer to the customer, and to focus on the things they love doing most — engaging with the customer."
For small businesses and startups, this shift is profound:
- AI agents can run 24/7 prospecting, filling your lead funnel without manual list-building or hopping between third‑party apps.
- Sales automation manages repetitive administrative tasks like logging activities, updating opportunities, and scheduling follow‑ups.
- Your sellers reclaim hours for what only humans can do: building customer relationships, navigating nuance, and closing complex deals.
Instead of hiring more people just to keep up with inboxes and data entry, you use a digital workforce to stretch the capacity of the team you already have.
Why AI Is the Great Equalizer for SMBs
When people hear Salesforce, they often picture global enterprises. But roughly 70% of Salesforce customers are SMBs. That matters, because it means the platform is being shaped around the realities of lean teams and constrained resources, not just Fortune 500 budgets.
With Starter Suite, Pro Suite, and the first‑ever free CRM, Free Suite, small businesses can begin with a simple Sales CRM and grow into sophisticated sales technology without ever "outgrowing" their platform. You don't have to rip and replace systems every time you hit a new stage of business growth.
The through line across all of this is AI:
- It delivers predictive power to small sales teams, surfacing the right account, right contact, and right message at the right time.
- It transforms scattered customer data into actionable customer insights and sales analytics.
- It lets a company of 10 sell with the efficiency and sales productivity of a company of 100.
AI, in Kris's framing, is not a luxury add‑on for enterprises — it's the new baseline for sales efficiency in small business sales.
The Power of a Unified CRM and a 360‑Degree View
Kris is clear on one thing: the foundation of great AI is great data.
If your customer information is fragmented across spreadsheets, inboxes, and disconnected tools, your AI will be shallow at best and misleading at worst. The first strategic move for any SMB is data unification — pulling sales, service, and marketing data into a single CRM platform to create a 360‑degree customer view.
With Agentforce Sales, that unified view becomes the backbone for:
- Richer customer engagement with context at every interaction
- Smarter lead management and qualification
- Automated sales processes that keep deals moving without manual chasing
- AI‑powered sales analytics that highlight risks, opportunities, and next best actions
Kris describes it simply: "We're building a connected platform to solve for all aspects of the sales cycle so that our customers can come in, start with a CRM, and grow up with our company — and at every step of the process, be engaged with their customer with the right data, at the right time, with the right AI."
The message to leaders: you don't adopt AI first; you organize your data first. Then AI becomes a force multiplier, not a band‑aid.
What an "Agentified" Sales Cycle Really Looks Like
Kris invites sales leaders to imagine a fully agentified revenue engine:
- Prospecting: AI agentic tools scan markets, enrich records, and prioritize accounts, so your SDRs start each day with a curated lead funnel instead of a blank screen.
- Qualification: Digital agents engage prospects in early conversations, answer basic questions, and capture intent signals — turning raw leads into meetings of significance.
- Deal management: AI helps track stakeholder engagement, highlight risks, and suggest next best actions, so nothing slips through the cracks.
- Follow‑up and post‑call workflows: Calls are summarized, tasks are generated, emails drafted, and next steps scheduled automatically, freeing reps from manual administrative tasks.
You still have human Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) and account executives. But they show up to conversations armed with context, not scrambling for it.
Walking the Agentic Walk Inside Salesforce
This is not just theory; Salesforce has re‑engineered its own go‑to‑market motion using these same agentic tools.
The Engagement Agent in Agentforce Sales now nurtures inbound interest with personalized outreach and books meetings when prospects are ready to talk to a human. Previously, Salesforce SDRs could only follow up with one in four leads due to sheer volume. By pairing them with a digital workforce grounded in Salesforce's own sales CRM data, they removed that capacity ceiling — ensuring no qualified lead is left behind.
The lesson for SMB leaders: if your own team is only touching a fraction of your inbound interest, you don't necessarily have a "demand problem." You may have a capacity and process problem that AI agents are uniquely positioned to solve.
A Playbook for SMB Adoption
For SMBs looking to adopt AI and sales automation without getting lost in hype, Kris's implicit playbook looks like this:
Unify your customer data
Bring sales, service, and marketing data into one CRM, creating a single source of truth before layering in AI.Start with repeatable processes
Target areas like prospecting, lead routing, and routine administrative tasks for early agentic support.Use AI to augment, not replace
Think of agents as capacity multipliers, not headcount reductions. The goal is to give your humans more time with customers and more insight in every conversation.Design around the human moment
Every workflow should answer: how does this help a seller make the next human interaction more relevant, empathetic, and effective?
When you apply this lens, sales technology becomes less about tools and more about enabling a different kind of workday for your team.
The Human-Centric Future of Sales
Kris's closing perspective is blunt and reassuring: "The agentic era isn't taking the human out of sales, it's arming sellers with the data, context, and insights they need to make every human moment count."
The real future of small business sales is not about selling more software — it is about selling more empowered sales teams. You surround each individual with AI, agentic tools, and integrated sales processes so they can:
- Show up more prepared
- Respond more quickly
- Build deeper customer relationships
- Drive more business growth with less friction
For leaders, the question is no longer whether to bring AI and Agentforce Sales into your revenue engine, but how fast you want to move.
If you're ready to explore that journey, you can start small with Free Suite, experiment with Starter Suite or Pro Suite, and grow into a fully AI‑driven, agentic Sales CRM — at the pace that matches your ambition, but with the confidence that you won't need to start over when you scale.
For businesses looking to implement similar AI-driven sales strategies, consider exploring proven sales development frameworks that can accelerate your team's adoption of agentic tools. Additionally, comprehensive customer success strategies can help you maximize the value of your AI-enhanced sales processes.
For teams considering alternatives to traditional CRM platforms, Zoho CRM offers powerful automation features and AI capabilities that can complement your agentic sales strategy. Similarly, Zoho Projects can help manage the implementation and tracking of your sales transformation initiatives.
To further enhance your sales automation capabilities, consider integrating Apollo.io for advanced prospecting and lead generation, or explore Make.com for creating sophisticated workflow automations that connect your sales tools seamlessly.
What does "agentic" or "agentified" sales mean?
An agentic or agentified sales approach embeds AI-driven software agents into the sales cycle to perform repeatable, high-volume tasks (prospecting, enrichment, routing, follow‑ups, call summaries). Humans remain responsible for nuanced, high‑value interactions while the digital workforce handles busywork and scale.
Will AI replace salespeople?
No — the prevailing model is augmentation, not replacement. AI agents multiply capacity by handling administrative tasks and early outreach, freeing sellers to focus on relationship‑building, negotiation, and complex deals where human judgment matters most.
Why is AI considered a competitive equalizer for SMBs?
AI gives small teams predictive insights, continuous prospecting, and automated workflows that scale capacity. A company of 10 can operate with many of the efficiencies of a company of 100 by using agents to surface the right accounts, route leads, and automate follow‑ups.
What should SMBs do first when adopting AI for sales?
Start by unifying customer data into a single CRM to create a 360‑degree view. Only after data is organized should you layer in agentic tools. Then pilot agents on repeatable processes like prospecting, lead routing, and post‑call follow‑ups for fast wins. For comprehensive guidance, consider exploring proven sales development frameworks that can accelerate your team's adoption of AI-powered tools.
What are the most effective early use cases for agentic tools?
High‑impact early use cases include 24/7 prospecting and enrichment, automated lead qualification and routing, call summarization and task generation, and templated outreach that personalizes at scale. These deliver quick capacity and time savings.
How important is data quality, and how do I prepare my CRM?
Data quality is foundational: AI is only as good as the data it uses. Clean, consolidated records across sales, service, and marketing are essential. Focus on deduplication, consistent fields, enrichment, and clear ownership before deploying agents.
How do I measure ROI for agentic sales initiatives?
Track metrics tied to capacity and revenue: number of qualified leads handled, lead‑to‑meeting conversion, average response time, sales cycle length, win rate, rep time reclaimed for selling, and pipeline velocity. Compare before/after baselines and run short pilots to quantify impact.
How quickly will an SMB see results after introducing agentic tools?
Some wins (automated prospecting, enrichment, basic follow‑ups) can appear in weeks. Broader behavioral and pipeline improvements typically emerge over months as data quality improves and workflows are optimized.
What are common pitfalls when implementing AI agents?
Pitfalls include layering AI on fragmented data, over‑automating human moments, not defining clear success metrics, ignoring privacy/compliance, and failing to monitor agent behavior. Address these by organizing data first, starting small, and designing for the human interaction.
How should teams design workflows so AI augments rather than replaces human judgment?
Design around the "human moment": use agents to collect context, draft messages, and triage leads, but route high‑value decisions and nuanced conversations to humans. Ensure agents surface recommended next steps and rationale, not blind automation.
What about data privacy and compliance when using AI agents?
Treat privacy and compliance as design constraints: enforce access controls, consent mechanisms, retention policies, and vendor‑level security standards. Audit agent interactions and logs to ensure regulatory compliance and customer trust. For enterprise-level security, consider implementing SOC2 compliance frameworks.
Can agentic tools integrate with existing sales stacks?
How should a small business choose between Free, Starter, and Pro CRM tiers?
Begin with the simplest tier that consolidates your data and supports basic automation (Free or Starter). Use pilots to validate agent use cases, then migrate to Pro as you need advanced AI, analytics, and automation. The goal is growth without painful replatforming. For teams considering alternatives, Zoho CRM offers powerful automation features and AI capabilities that can complement your agentic sales strategy.
What internal changes are needed for successful adoption?
Prepare change management: train reps on new workflows, define handoffs between agents and humans, set success metrics, and maintain continuous monitoring and refinement. Leadership should champion data hygiene and iterative pilots instead of big‑bang rollouts.
Do you have an example of agentic tools in practice?
Yes — Salesforce re‑engineered its go‑to‑market with an Engagement Agent that nurtures inbound interest, personalizes outreach, and books meetings. This helped SDRs handle far more leads by ensuring qualified prospects are engaged before human follow‑up.
How should I prioritize which sales processes to agentify first?
Prioritize repeatable, high‑volume tasks with clear success criteria: prospecting/enrichment, lead routing and qualification, post‑call summaries and follow‑ups, and scheduling. These yield measurable capacity gains and quick ROI. For additional guidance on optimizing your sales processes, explore comprehensive customer success strategies that can help you maximize the value of your AI-enhanced sales workflows.
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