Dean Robison

Workday's "Workday Economy" announcement and the $600M new ACV from the partner-first organizational shift is one of the cleanest case studies any enterprise ISV has produced in the last decade. Carl Eschenbach moved partnership transformation into the top-five companywide priorities. Partner-sourced ACV went from 3% to 9% in twelve months. Zero to 500+ formal sales partners. Q1 FY26 partner-driven pipeline exceeded the entire FY24 total. Quarterly partner pipeline reviews tied to compensation. Data-driven attribution frameworks tied to incentives. This is what the upper end of the maturity curve actually looks like when an enterprise commits to it. It's also worth stating clearly: most companies will not become Workday. Not because they can't . but because the discipline this requires is operational, not aspirational, and most leadership teams underestimate how much of the work is re-architecting how the company operates around partners vs. just signing more partners. What the Workday case study makes obvious to anyone reading carefully: • Compensation tied to partner pipeline reviews . not to total partner count. Most programs measure the wrong thing. • Data-driven attribution before incentive design . not after. Most programs design the comp plan first and try to retrofit attribution. • Partner enablement on AI modules at launch time . not afterward. Most programs launch features and hope partners pick them up later. • Partner pipeline integrated into the CRO's forecast . not parked in a separate dashboard. Most programs treat partner pipeline as a side report. These aren't strategic choices. They're operational disciplines. They live in the operating cadence, not in the deck. Workday's $600M didn't come from the decision to be partner-first. It came from the operating cadence that survived the executive announcement and got drilled into the GTM motion week after week, quarter after quarter. The cadence is what produced the result. The strategy was just permission to build the cadence. If your leadership team is reading the Workday case study and wondering whether the same outcome is possible at your scale: it is. The question isn't whether your strategy is right. The question is whether your operating cadence underneath the strategy is built. Most aren't. Yet. That's the bridge between knowing the case study and producing a version of it. The case study is free. The cadence is the work. Worth knowing the difference before you commit to the announcement. #partnerships #ecosystemledgrowth #cosell #operatingcadence #workday

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) found the answer by treating their "Lab-to-Market" pipeline like a high-growth #business. By moving away from siloed legacy tools and onto the unified Salesforce platform, they’ve turned a complex administrative maze into a streamlined #innovation engine. Here are the high-impact takeaways for any #leader managing a complex mission: 1. Velocity is a #Mission Requirement: Innovation loses its value if it sits on a shelf. PNNL standardized and automated their technology transfer workflows, drastically reducing the time it takes to get breakthrough research into the hands of commercial partners. 2. Kill the Silos, Save the Data: Fragmented spreadsheets are the enemy of scale. By creating a single source of truth for intellectual property and partnership agreements, PNNL eliminated redundant apps and gave their team real-time visibility into the entire innovation lifecycle. 3. Platform Thinking > Custom Building: The best practice for modern government isn’t building a one-off tool, it’s leveraging a scalable #platform. This allows agencies to stay agile, adapting to new regulations and mission shifts without starting from scratch every time. The Bottom Line: #Governmentefficiency isn't just about saving money, it’s about accelerating the solutions the world needs right now. 

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The playbook we were taught is a huge part why deals stall. It’s 2025, not 2013. We were told to “discover pain,” run discovery frameworks, and lead with demos. But executive level decision makers don’t get paid on pain. They get paid on returns, capital allocation, shareholder value, and fiduciary duty. That’s why effective sellers don’t act like vendors, we act like management consultants. It's about how we guide and lead decision makers in the intro call engagement with the posture and presence in terms of due diligence, business case analysis, and financial justification, to start. Traditionally, we’ve spent time and resources on a demo(s) even if we didn't know if there is a “real project” or “know the outputs required to get the project funded,” for example. There is a time and place for discovery and demo. We want frame conversations around cash flow, gross margin, SG&A leverage, IRR, payback, and hurdle rates. …the real levers executives live and die by. This isn’t theory. It’s the critical difference between being seen as “just another rep” vs. being trusted as a peer. Senior executives don’t want another product pitch. They want someone who can help them decide if a project deserves scarce capital because that’s what they’re paid to protect. If we want a seat at that table, we want to stop chasing “pain points.” We start speaking the language of capital allocation. That’s the difference that moves deals. This is "domain expertise." That's what it is. We learned the old way. It’s broken. It's 2025, not 2013. Change is uncomfortable. But "irrelevance?" That's worse. To process this content further, let’s talk around the what, how, and why. Ps. That’s why I created a financial fluency curriculum working 1:1, sleeves rolled up together working your accounts building financial fluency in our day to day messaging and motions. DM me for additional details. #CEO #AEs #StategicReps #B2BSales

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Salesforce just announced an acquihire of Moonhub. This is a small piece to the larger acquisitive play. The Moonhub Deal: • ~25 person team joins Salesforce • Moonhub is winding down operations • Focus: AI-powered recruiting technology. A few weeks ago, Salesforce announced Informatica's Acquisition. An $8B cheque to acquire metadata. Every 2-3 years they acquire a large platform company for foundation play and then a few tuck-ins. We have analyzed their M&A strategy for the last 5 years. Comment "AI" for a detailed M&A strategy teardown.

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My biggest takeaway is Salesforce is trying to do for Agentic AI what SQL did for databases. By open-sourcing Agent Script, SF aren’t just giving away a language, they’re bidding to own the framework for Agentic Enterprise. Will the flexibility of LangGraph keep builders in open-source land, or will the ease of a standardised "script" win out for production? OOOORRRR do they all end up being Salesforce App builders…

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A few days ago, the entire AI industry watched Jensen Huang announce autonomous AI agents for 17 enterprise platforms. Salesforce. SAP. ServiceNow. Atlassian. Adobe. That was one of the biggest AI story o of the week. But there's one I think was more telling. The same day, a national survey of more than 1,000 workers found that 57% now rank skill erosion as the single biggest AI workforce issue. Above job displacement. Above privacy. Above everything else. The number one fear is not "AI will replace me." The number one fear is "AI is making me worse at what I do." One survey might be an outlier. Three independent sources are a pattern. Wharton and Gallup surveyed 2,500 workers. 62% said AI is making people less smart. Gartner predicts 50% of organizations will require AI-free skills assessments this year. AI-free. Because critical thinking is atrophying faster than organizations can measure it. And 63% of workers said AI will make the workplace feel less human in 2026. One side of the frame: the infrastructure for autonomous AI agents is being built into every enterprise platform on the planet. Other side: the human beings who are supposed to work alongside those agents are telling us they are already eroding. The technology is accelerating. The people are declining. Those two lines are moving in opposite directions. That is not a readiness gap. That is a structural failure. And it is now measurable from multiple independent sources. The question for every leadership team this week is not "what did Jensen announce." It is "where are our people right now." Not where you want them to be. Where they actually are. What are you seeing inside your own organization? Is the human side keeping pace with the technology side? #EnterpriseAI #Leadership #FutureOfWork

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Evan Blumenfeld (AE @ Salesforce) discussed how one of the early challenges he faced was getting up to speed with all the software tools. Once he figured them out, it became a real advantage. He was able to move faster, work smarter—and ended up being the person new hires went to when they had questions. #TechSales #SalesEnablement #Workflow #CollegeToCareer #GeniusZone

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There is a gap in the enterprise world that costs companies real money. In my opinion, Salesforce and ServiceNow are perfectly positioned to fix a problem most enterprises deal with every day. Salesforce typically owns the customer relationship. ServiceNow has risen in prominence to own the operational workflow. Yet companies still struggle because customer issues and internal processes do not talk to each other in real time. The blind spot is that both systems are powerful, but they operate in silos. The partnership everyone assumes exists does not actually exist where value is created. What is missing is an integrated, automated workflow that connects the moment a customer raises an issue to the moment a team member resolves it. Now imagine a unified incident resolution engine. Customer sentiment, service tickets, field teams, and operations all working off the same signal. Faster resolution. Less churn. Higher NPS. Lower support cost. And clearer accountability across the entire chain. Great partnerships eliminate friction. This is one that could improve performance inside every enterprise that touches either platform. If this aligns with how you think about growth, or even if you see a different path, feel free to follow, like, or comment. Thomas Dussarrat 🌏 Linkon Axon

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Strong perspective—completely agree 💯 I'm seeing the same shift: it’s not about replacing batch, it’s about aligning the right data strategy to the desired business outcome. At LumenData, we help clients combine: 🟢 Governed, trusted data (Informatica) 🟢 Real-time connectivity (MuleSoft) 🟢 Activation for AI use cases (Salesforce #Data360 / #Agentforce) That’s what separates AI experiments from real business outcomes. Matt DeTroia Kevin Carpenter Michelle Lindsey Mike Clark Will Oppedisano Richard Ganley

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You would not call rolling out Salesforce your sales strategy. Yet that is what most enterprise AI plans look like right now. A focused effort on getting white-collar employees access to Copilot or Claude, with light-touch training and templated CLAUDE.md files, a few automation pipelines, and some AI features from existing tech vendors. Super useful, with real efficiency gains. But only scratching the surface of what the technology can bring, and hyper-focused on employee efficiency. It is not a strategic effort. Mostly a procurement and licensing decision. Real value comes from changing business processes, driving growth through technology, and shifting how decisions get made. Is employee efficiency actually your biggest strategic pillar right now?

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🚨💸 Salesforce's jaw-dropping $8 BILLION bet on Informatica to clean up CRM data for Agentforce is big… but wait, that’s just the noisy headline! 🥁 🤫 The potential real game-changer? Their stealthy acquisition of Convergence. Here's why: 🧠 Informatica gives Salesforce a MEMORY Now, AI knows where data came from, how it changed, and if it can be trusted. That’s the context every automation craves—without it, things break and nobody knows why. 🕵️‍♂️🔍 ⚡ Convergence gives Salesforce a NERVOUS SYSTEM Think AI agents that can jump between tools, learn new interfaces on the fly, and execute across systems like a pro—fast, smart, and adaptable. 🤖💨 This isn’t just another AI advancement / upgrade. It’s Marc Benioff & Co. quietly re-wiring Salesforce for an AGENT-POWERED future. 🚀 So what does this mean for Salesforce sellers, SF Admins & RevOps heroes? 🦸‍♀️🦸‍♂️ ✨ Agentforce might finally stop being just another exciting but hasn't delivered tool…and start becoming a teammate you can actually trust. Imagine this: 🔎 No more reverse-engineering broken flows—metadata knows what went wrong. Just ask. 🖱️ No more juggling five browser tabs to fix one record—AI navigates across tools just like you do. Functional AI in action. 🙋‍♂️ No more being the only one who “knows how the system works”—because now, the system starts to know itself! It’s early days in the AI race, but their direction is crystal clear: Salesforce is building toward AI you can RELY on—not babysit. 💬 What’s ONE task you wish AI could take off your plate (without making things worse)? Drop your wildest wish below! 👇 #Salesforce #Agentforce #AI #RevOps #CRM #FutureOfWork

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Massive ! Salesforce has announced significant expansions of its partnerships with AI model developers Anthropic and OpenAI. Key highlights include: - Agentforce data will now be accessible in OpenAI's ChatGPT, allowing mutual customers to sell products through the assistant's instant checkout feature. - Salesforce is deploying Anthropic's Claude Code across its engineering organization. These developments mark a notable step forward in enhancing AI capabilities within Salesforce's ecosystem. #Salesforce #Agentforce #OpenAI #Anthropic #AI

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"The folks who are ‘getting it right’ are the ones who are actually trying it."   My conversation with Meredith Brown, SVP of Trailhead & Community at Salesforce covered what AI agents mean for people, where leaders should start, and why she chose to rejoin Salesforce earlier this year. #sponsored   With so much talk about AI, it’s surprising how few people are actually diving in to try AI, and even fewer companies committing resources to building/deploying AI.   Meredith shared what she, as the global leader of Salesforce’s 60K+ community of Agentblazers, is seeing firsthand as organizations navigate their first steps into the era of Autonomous Transformation.    🚫The Digital Transformation playbook won’t work in the era of Autonomous Transformation.   We’re in a new era, and autonomous agents are a core pillar for how organizations can create more value than ever before.   Leaders who want their organization to retain or expand their market position by 2030 need to have: 1) A robust vision for how they will create more value with AI 2) A vision for the future of work within their organizations 3) A strategy to make those visions a reality   Meredith outlines some important points about how to get started and what to expect in this next era. 🎬Watch the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/gEycepBi   #SalesforcePartner #Agentforce #AutonomousTransformation   For more leadership insights in the era of Autonomous Transformation, Subscribe to #FutureSolving here https://lnkd.in/g-KmNnVq or my new YouTube channel here: https://lnkd.in/gFhD-jDh

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Median ARR growth rates by category for the 35 SaaS Co's we track. Breakdown of the companies in each category below: Business Apps: PegaSystems Klaviyo Monday Atlassian Veeva ServiceNow Hubspot Procore Appian Workday UIPath Asana Docusign Salesforce Box Zoom ZoomInfo Security: Cloudflare SentinelOne Zscaler Crowdstrike Palo Alto Networks Okta Data: Confluent Snowflake MongoDB Pure Storage Dev Tools: DataDog Nutanix Elastic PagerDuty

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My Take: What does Salesforce’s acquisition of Informatica mean for MDM? Salesforce is again acquiring legacy technology with a significant installed base, prioritizing revenue scale over innovation. Here’s my candid take on the implications of Salesforce's acquisition of Informatica: It underscores the importance of trusted data:  Having begun my career at Siebel, I've witnessed firsthand how CRM solutions struggled, not because of lack of functionality, but because they became YET ANOTHER data silo. Similarly, during my time at Qlik and Celonis, it became clear that even the most sophisticated and visually engaging analytics solutions fail to answer business questions if they’re based on low quality data.  The move to adopt AI has lit a fire under the challenge of crappy data – trusted data has never been more critical. Missing the data movement trees, through the business context forest:  Ok, that’s a mouthful, but hear me out.  Data people care about moving data around, because that’s what they do all day.  Someone wants “a cut” of the data in a slightly different way, so a script is built and yet another database table is stood up.  But this is a huge mistake, and a missed opportunity.  The opportunity is to organize data into business topic areas (“entities”) that matter to the business (“customer”, “supplier”, “product”, “part”, “facility”, etc.).  The world doesn’t need more new ways to move data around; it needs trusted data organized to answer questions.  There is only one way to do this:  use AI (Tamr) and don’t rely on rules. Clearing away the cruft:  The enterprise software business is like a forest, it benefits when a fire clears away the dead growth and lets new growth flourish.  Informatica’s acquisition clears away some of the biggest dead wood in the data management forest.  This is akin to IBM buying Cognos or SAP buying Business Objects in opening a market opportunity for Qlik and Tableau 10 years ago. 

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“It’s always go faster with Marc." That’s something Bill Patterson, EVP of Corporate Strategy at Salesforce, and I both see when working alongside Marc Benioff, our Founder and CEO, a leader who knows that meaningful change requires both urgency and vision. It’s not just about inspiring teams to move; it’s about setting the boundaries that make bold thinking possible. In this new episode of Executive Conversations, Bill talks about the role of CEOs in moments of AI transformation - why the best leaders don’t just approve innovation, they ignite it. Great CEOs give their teams permission to experiment, set the guardrails for progress, and bring their own unique point of view to the change ahead. Marc leads this way. Demanding speed, but pairing it with clarity of purpose. We also explore the rise of autonomous agents, the shift from ‘bring your own device’ to ‘bring your own AI,’ and what it takes to bridge the agentic divide between consumer and enterprise technology. Bill unpacks how the next wave of AI will transform work itself - when every employee has an AI-powered co-pilot. Wild times. Watch the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/gdE6gC7Z

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Are you paying tens of thousands a year to back up your Salesforce org? I've been through the full Salesforce backup journey: manual Weekly Export to a file server, then a commercial solution at $3-5 per user per month, and finally building my own. After running a custom bash/Python backup in production for nearly three years, I rewrote it from scratch in Java with Spring Boot — fixing everything I'd learned the hard way about error handling, file deduplication, and checkpoint resume. Then I open-sourced it. Heimdall is a self-hosted Salesforce backup that runs on AWS for $5-15/month. It uses the Bulk API, stores data in S3 and PostgreSQL, and includes a web GUI for browsing history, viewing field-level diffs, and related records. Some highlights: - ContentVersion deduplication saved 320 GB (38%) on an org with 3.5M files - Checkpoint resume survives crashes and container restarts - The database auto-starts/stops to minimize costs - Record archiving with configurable criteria - One-command AWS deployment via CloudFormation It's AGPL-3.0 licensed — free to use, modify, and deploy for your own org. GitHub: https://lnkd.in/deeRHpA7 Full writeup: https://lnkd.in/dEU4_b_K If you're running a Salesforce org and want to stop overpaying for backups, give it a look. PRs and feedback welcome. #Salesforce #OpenSource #AWS #Backup #Java #SpringBoot #Trailblazer

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Today, Sigma announced $80M Series E funding at a $3B valuation—with new investors including Princeville Capital, Databricks Ventures, ServiceNow Ventures, and Workday Ventures. This news comes on the heels of other Sigma milestones: - $200M ARR surpassed in April - >100% YOY growth in the last fiscal year - Sigma Agents became the fastest-adopted product in company history As our CEO Mike Palmer puts it, "Customers vote with their dollars, and they are voting for Sigma.” https://lnkd.in/gRsD8t7s

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Salesforce job massacre continues--now eliminating critical sales, marketing & product development roles, as Ai is praised? (See San Francisco Chronicle article below). My industry colleagues & I are hearing that some of the tech giants are struggling to find high-ROI deployment use cases to justifiy their immense Ai investments. If Wall Street is less than thrilled with SF revenue growth, I fail to understand how slashing revenue generating sales & marketing jobs will address that challenge? I would expect that analysts will soon begin asking deeper dive questions. History seems to have proven that, "slash & burn" is rarely a path to sustainable, profitable, growth acceleration. Conversely, solving marketplace important (not invented) problems with real solutions--has generally been viewed as the proven path to shareholder, customer, and employee satisfaction. (See article below) Salesforce slashes San Francisco jobs after Benioff touts AI https://lnkd.in/g3Bz7rMp

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