Almost every small or medium business (SMB) could benefit from a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), but few can realistically justify the cost of hiring one. CROs are high-value executives who deliver big benefits but also come with a hefty, six- or seven-figure price tag. That’s fine for enterprise-level brands. However, for companies just starting out or lean operations who count their employees in dozens rather than thousands, the sticker shock is real.
Salesforce partner Cloud23 is one of those companies that normally might not be able to justify a CRO, but they’re also among the earliest Salesforce AI and Agentforce adopters and experts. They realized that just because you can’t hire a CRO doesn’t mean you can’t build one.
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Who is Fallon?
Fallon, the CRO for Cloud23, is an AI agent who serves in their C-suite. Like any other employee, she is reachable in Slack. Unlike most CROs, she responds instantly to queries with full access and awareness of all relevant accounts, customer profiles, metrics, and ongoing campaigns.
Why was Fallon created?
Cloud23 recognized the need for increased operational efficiency and more effective payroll management. After whiteboarding solutions, Cloud23 concluded they could not justify the over $140K yearly expense of hiring a traditional CRO. However, they could automate large portions of a CRO’s responsibilities via Agentforce for an annual cost closer to $12K per year.
They realized an Agentforce CRO could do things a human CRO couldn’t, thanks to constant, instantaneous access to all customer and business information. Fallon doesn’t merely manage their payroll and balance the budget. She also solves the issues of data overload and siloed information sources that can bog down operations departments. Additionally, she’s an invaluable resource in terms of increasing revenue and managing client accounts in real time.
What can Fallon do?
While Fallon performs most tasks of a traditional Chief Revenue Officer, her AI-powered capabilities elevate her role to a driver of analytics, efficiency, and innovation. Here’s how she delivers value across four key areas:
- Accelerated revenue growth: With full access to historical sales data and client behavior patterns, Fallon identifies revenue-generation opportunities, along with strategies to ensure those opportunities are pursued as efficiently and profitably as possible.
- Enhanced client engagement and retention: Fallon generates real-time client health scores, enabling the team to engage proactively to prevent client loss and increase retention.
- Operational efficiency: Fallon dramatically decreases manual workload by automating routine payroll and revenue tasks, and by streamlining the sales cycle. She takes the monotonous process tasks out of the pipeline, freeing up the rest of the team to focus on high-value tasks.
- Innovative brand positioning: As an AI executive, Fallon is an ideal brand ambassador for Cloud23, demonstrating not only their expertise in the field, but proving that they practice what they preach. While others talk about AI, Cloud23 has an AI executive in its C-suite.
Key Features and Functions
Fallon, like any executive, wears many hats—but her AI-driven capabilities let her excel in ways human CROs can’t. Built in Agent Builder, here’s how she delivers unique value to provide:
- Predictive revenue analytics: Using sophisticated machine learning models that factor in both historical and real-time data, Fallon is able to forecast revenues, anticipate trends, and prevent churn. She can also score opportunities using criteria like deal size, client interest, and historical close rates to help the sales team prioritize leads.
- Client health monitoring: Fallon ensures consistent client engagement by constantly monitoring client activity and satisfaction levels, and providing real-time insights and alerts to account managers. She generates client-specific health scores from a wide variety of factors from service feedback to engagement history to usage frequency. She also tracks interaction patterns to understand each client’s specific engagement cycle, so account managers know exactly when and how to follow up.
- Sales process optimization: Fallon identifies bottlenecks and automates routine workflows to optimize sales. She evaluates each stage of the funnel and identifies blockers, then suggests process improvements to solve them. She also tracks deal velocity, offering the sales team insights to accelerate closures for high-priority accounts.
- Real-time alerts and notifications: Fallon delivers instant updates on metrics, milestones, and client engagement via Slack. She warns teams of at-risk revenue targets or emerging industry trends and prompts timely actions to capitalize on opportunities or mitigate risks.
- Interactive revenue dashboard: Fallon’s dashboard offers a centralized visualization of revenue performance and customer engagement. She allows teammates to select key metrics like revenue growth or client satisfaction scores, and tailor the display, metrics, and visualization to their specific role. Her dashboard includes charts, graphs, and trend lines for a snapshot view of the metrics. And she segments clients by revenue, engagement, and industry so Cloud23 always knows which accounts are providing the most value, and which might need a little more attention.
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How Agentforce’s deeply unified platform makes Fallon possible, practical, and effective
The early versions of Fallon were email-based, and much more limited, confined mostly to payroll tasks and simple queries. Cloud23 had identified theoretical next steps and glaring needs, but the GPT tech stack couldn’t support those innovations.
Upon discovering Agentforce at Dreamforce, Cloud23 realized that Fallon’s destiny was to become an agent, and that doing so would dramatically increase her effectiveness. Agentforce’s capabilities and interactions with Salesforce’s data layer would allow her access to far more information. And being an agent would allow her to do far more with it than answer basic questions, up to and including complex analysis and strategic insights.
“We should all be superhumans; not with kevlar and whatnot, but intellectually and technologically. Fallon makes our company superhuman.” – Ram Ramakrishnan, CEO, Cloud23
Agentforce’s flexible API allows Fallon to access every system she needs within Cloud23, from Xero to Slack to Salesforce’s #1 trusted AI CRM to Data Cloud. With that wider view, Fallon had insight into both operations and finance. She quickly synthesized those views, identifying outstanding debts and collection opportunities a full year earlier than a normal system would have. So she could instantly solve a variety of accounts receivable pain points that had been slowing things down. She also generated customer satisfaction scores that helped her divine the ideal times to close those debts.
Agentforce also makes Fallon fully portable. Any company, with Cloud23’s help, could implement their own version, tailored to their own business needs, by combining Agent Builder’s flexible functionality and Cloud23’s expertise. Her natural language processing (NLP) and Slack presence means there’s virtually no training required for the average team member to benefit from her. They simply need to ask her a question, and she’ll answer.
“The promise that it starts with is so huge: Save money, increase efficiency. Imagination drives the project. Salesforce Foundations is the most important reason we were confident in Fallon. A sure return of investment: If we do XYZ, it’s going to have definite, provable benefits. Investing 10, getting back 2,000. It was a no-brainer to invest in Agentforce,” said Ramakrishnan.
The future of Fallon, Salesforce AI, and digital labor
At present, Fallon is 70% autonomous. Cloud23 is doing their necessary due diligence to make sure her error rate doesn’t increase as she scales up. They expect to have her up to 90% or 95% autonomous soon. They’ve already seen a tremendous return on investment at 70%, with conservative estimates of her net impact—including sales improvements, operational efficiencies, and her relative “salary” to a traditional CRO at well over two million dollars per year, with large increases expected as she continues to learn and build her information library.
The other clear future frontier for Fallon is helping out Cloud23’s clients. Nearly every company has a need for a CRO, and Fallon removes the main barrier to hiring one. Two Cloud23 clients have already signed up to build their own versions of Fallon with Agentforce. She is, in essence, the personification of Agentforce’s core value prop, providing companies with more value for less time, effort, and expense.
