Latest / Talk Commerce / Leveraging Agentic Workflows for Smarter Commerce | Tim Johnson
Transcript
- Brent Peterson (00:02.818) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Tim Johnson. He's a VP of sales for Salesforce. Tim, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us in a much better way than I just did it. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions in life. Tim Johnson (00:17.965) Yeah, absolutely. I'd say over the last few years, I've been really focused on bringing AI to the workplace, really helping my team innovate how we're going to market, how we're working with customers around, know, especially the ever evolving market of AI, which almost seems to literally change month to month. And I'd say one of my biggest passions outside of work is I love outdoors, camping. I love hiking. Anything to get me out of the house is always a Brent Peterson (00:55.832) That's awesome, great. Tim, before we get started, you have volunteered to be part of the Free Joke Project. And I'm gonna tell you a joke, you just gave me a rating eight through 13. So here we go. I once asked a girl on a date and she said I had a face like the back of a boat. I didn't reply but I gave her a stern look. Tim Johnson (01:19.225) Alright, that's not bad. I'm gonna sit you with a solid 11.35. Okay. Brent Peterson (01:27.63) Okay, perfect. Thank you for the granularity. I appreciate that. Tim Johnson (01:30.617) No, no, and of course, I mean, that goes with the classics, you know, it's a classic dad joke, of course. And did you hear the one about the dad who invented the knock-knock joke? No, he actually won a Nobel Prize. Brent Peterson (01:41.461) No. Brent Peterson (01:46.496) Okay, that's good. I like that one. Thank you. I appreciate that. All right, so I think in our green room, we talked a little bit about how people see AI still, I think it's just generative, like, hey, let's make a blog post or a social post, but there's so much more to it, right? And you hinted at automations and how you're bringing it to your teams. Talk a little bit about the importance of looking at how Tim Johnson (01:51.769) Thanks Brent Peterson (02:15.594) AI can help automate your whole workflow in both from a macro level, more importantly on little steps. Tim Johnson (02:25.068) Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think both, both macro and, and, know, kind of the little steps intended to, to go there. think first, when we, when we look at automation and we look at the recent trends, it's important to take just a quick step back and look at kind of how the market has been changing as we move from, you know, what, what has been traditionally AI focused around chat bots. right around simple response and very basic questions to truly agentic workflows that connects enterprise, you know, tools and departments together. Right. So I think when we look at kind of these, these co-pilots and these messaging chat bots, they do a great job of helping to sell. at a faster rate, at very simple transactions, but they don't really help bridge communication from client to company, especially when it becomes very complex in nature. And I think what we've seen on small levels is really the ability to interact with our tools and do things like dictate around what we want, what kind of queries we may want, what kind of reports we may want, and more importantly, how we want the platform to think about the way that our internal platforms communicate and how data is transferred. So when we look at kind of those small bridges, what I've seen, I'd say in the last 12 to 18 months, is that tools are able to integrate into each other, not necessarily in the old-fashioned sense of integration, which is like a direct type of integration, but more of an overlay, agentic tool that is able to bridge workflows and bridge data through prompting and through just simple Tim Johnson (04:43.102) end business users, not necessarily technical IT users that are able to kind of craft some of these tools. you know, I think it takes little departments that are able to start to embed agentic tools inside of their tech stack. And then it goes kind of department wide when we're able to communicate holistically in those tools. Brent Peterson (05:08.622) Yeah, you I think you brought up prompting a couple times there and I think part of the biggest hurdle is getting people to understand how to prompt and what to prompt. I was on a jump start AI call yesterday and they really talked about the importance of learning how to prompt and how really you can get the most out of your tool by learning how to prompt. I think that's one part of it. Tell us a little bit about how you're educating your team on how to be better prompters. Tim Johnson (05:28.408) Mm. Tim Johnson (05:38.519) Yeah, I think for us, it kind of comes into a few different categories. And I think what I've tried to build out for my team is very easy to use and scalable templates, but for granular categories, right? There's a specific template that we have to prep the team for first calls. We have a specific template for first demos. Then we have specific templates to go into discovery, but it's discovery inside of a specific tool set, right? So if we know somebody is gonna be interested in one type of solution or another, it's gonna help my team say, hey, this is the template that I need, X, Y, and Z template are what I'm gonna need. And I actually built that into an AI agentic platform where the team can interact with that and say, hey, I'm coming up. for a first time discovery call, what are the few templates that I need? And it'll give the top, you know, generally three or less is what we try to kind of consolidate it to. And I think it's literally needs to be broken down as simple as here's your template. All you need to do from an account executive perspective is put your client name in there. And it'll literally generate everything, right? Everything from financials to investment to funding to organizational changes to what it's doing inside of its tech stack, you know, public, public facing documents, stock changes, extrapolating every anything that might not be public from other companies of its size, industry, geography, right? So It's great to understand all of that public facing. You also need to bring it more to a strategic connection on, okay, let's say it is a private company. What do the other companies of this size do? and it's owned by this particular VC company. What do they usually do from an investment strategy and all of these things that are interconnected? So I think that's the first key is those templates. And then I think kind of supporting those and underlying those Tim Johnson (07:58.965) is playbooks that help map wind themes around specific clients, around if you go into a manufacturing company, these are going to be the top three things that your CFO is going to care about, right? Or whatever it may be, the title that you're talking to, whether it's supply chain or operations or business functions, right? And so we have very tailored playbooks that are industry, geography, and size, right? They need to be all of those three things to encompass what we consider an industry specific playbook, which is a heck of a lot more detailed than your overarching generic sales playbook, which I think we can agree that are going a little bit of the wayside as we need to continue to be very, very tailored to our customers. Brent Peterson (08:53.294) Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head there with the idea of really tailoring these playbooks and AI allows you to do that. And I think that from a sales standpoint, if anybody's going to take anything out of this podcast today, it's getting your boss to get on board with getting those playbooks more granular. Cause it is so easy now to create them. Tim Johnson (09:00.524) I knew where we going. Brent Peterson (09:21.002) And if you have like we talked about Copilot and ChatGPT those tools are just so great to go out and then put that together for you and even then customize it specifically for that vertical. And having a way to do that over and over again is so important, especially as your organization gets bigger. What are some other other tools that you see beneficial, especially maybe in the sales workflow? Tim Johnson (09:33.964) Mm-hmm. Tim Johnson (09:49.526) Yeah. So I'd say just a quick note on that granularity around specifically with verticals and vertical specific language and jargon that will help increase your value proposition from a seller's perspective. What I have found very valuable is that I have my sales engineers and subject matter experts that will go through a a playbook and have a company right next to it and they will dictate, hey, you didn't focus on these aspects that are very specific for my product and will help understand and uncover value levers. And so while it's very important to have, you know, kind of the latest AI tools, they need to be augmented with subject matter experts who can help teach. your specific AI instance around what matters to your solution, to your customers, and to your geography that you're going into. And I think this is something that companies are losing here in the last 12 months as we see this overhaul kind of of the IT organization and reorganization of our industry from a go-to-market perspective. companies are feeling like they can just put an AI tool in place and it'll run all the gears for them. And I think we're seeing in a number of instances that these AI tools kind of go haywire sometimes and there's a higher percentage of hallucinating or we see them getting in the news like recently with Grok and other things of that nature. And so we want to make sure that one of the things that I Tim Johnson (11:48.729) mandate is that our subject matter experts are almost on a weekly if not bi-weekly subject kind of reiterating and making sure that they continue to pull out those value levers. And I'd say in terms of a repeatable sales process that I'm seeing really go into effect is that these AI tools are helping my team kind of coordinate with our other business units, I think specifically marketing when it comes to like account based marketing and specific ICP persona targets, right? You're going after an ideal customer persona when you're targeting your accounts. And I think that's one of the most important things to be able to really pick up on how to personalize your approach. how to garnish the attention of what's going on in the industry. And I think that while we're seeing every company invest in AI and claim to be AI experts is creating a bit of an AI bubble right now. And I think what we're gonna see over the next 12 to 24 months is really the emergence of probably, know, anywhere from five to 10, you know, kind of super gigantic companies, what I call them that specialize in this. in kind of overarching AI and connectivity. And then you're going to start to see that every little niche inside of AI, whether it's, you know, an AI inside of manufacturing or this AI specific use case, there is going to be more companies that are starting to attach onto those specific use cases. And I think that's going to continue to push the advancement. further in terms of what specific tools our organizations can use to be effective ongoing. Brent Peterson (13:50.274) What are you hearing from clients right now? think, you know, if we look back five, well, yeah, five years ago, six years ago, even, well, pre-pandemic, let's say, clients thought it was creepy if you knew so much about them, right? If you personalize too much, they thought it was kind of creepy. I'm seeing a changing now where they're expecting you to know at least what's in your LinkedIn bio. What are you seeing from clients and what they're expecting? Tim Johnson (14:19.522) Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to be very well researched and understand a client not only from their business goals and aspirations, but from a personal lens, right? You need to be strategic and tactful about where you interject those comments, right? And they need to lend to the overall relationship. and increasing of that relationship. So I think that it's not so much creepy anymore, but what I see is that where I see folks losing is that they are doing the research, but they're not using it in a way that's most effective with their audience. And so kind of our clients are coming and expecting us to have all of these answers with AI at our disposal. Like I already mentioned, AI on a generic sense is fantastic, but you still need humans to really craft that message. And I think that when we don't kind of come with a carefully crafted message and a very sound hypothesis, that we tend to lose ears. And as we go kind of go through that conversation with our clients, I think it's very important to interject kind of personal things. Just a quick story, I was having an executive meeting even in the last week or two. And I did a little bit of looking at the folks and I noticed that one of them on their LinkedIn, they had a soccer game. post with their daughter because they coached her team. And about halfway through the conversation, we were kind of mentioning this and I mentioned my daughter also plays soccer and kind of mentioned that I saw that he was a coach and how he got into it. And it totally just kind of enhanced the conversation. He didn't think twice about the fact that I mentioned. Of course, I said, I noticed from your LinkedIn that you're coach of your daughter's team. Tim Johnson (16:37.484) You know, I mentioned the town that he was in and the team, the team mascot. And it was, it was like kind of this energy was, was forged inside of, know, this conversation about halfway through where you might otherwise typically hit a low and other people, you know, my, my drift off and kind of got them re re brought in and, know, my follow-up note kind of. contained a little, they had a game coming up in the weekend. came to, contained a little well wish and, and, and I just think it was really well received. not creepy, but you need to understand where to interject that into the conversation and how to drive the value. Brent Peterson (17:22.614) Yeah, I mean, I you've also brought up another great point. I'm not going to use the hit the nail on the head again because I already screwed that up. But the idea that you're just going to automate something, and I think salespeople are more at risk now of getting data wrong because they use some tool to find something out about people. For example, that LinkedIn one, if you were to get that completely wrong, hey, I saw on LinkedIn that you were just at You you're at a football game and, and you know, whatever, like, and it's like, no, that's not me. All right. you know, then you kind of have to backpedal. And if you were to automate that in a work, like in a work email, that makes it even worse. Right. So without that sort of that secondary kind of checking of a lot of that data, you run the risk as a salesperson of kind of screwing up the relationship rather than making it better. Tim Johnson (17:56.246) Yeah. Tim Johnson (18:13.944) Yeah, no, I mean, I think that, you know, when you, when you don't have the ability to kind of check numbers and understand the data that's coming out, it can oftentimes make you sound misinformed or like you're prepared for somebody else or, or, worst case that you just say something that might be totally wrong. And they're like, wow, this is, it, it almost shoots up a red flag, right? If you bring this. this misinformation, what does that say about the product that you're toting and the team that you're claiming is so great? And I think that, you right now it's so important to distinguish, you know, personalization without sacrificing trust and relationship, right? It's important to understand that buyers are filtering out more noise than ever. Sellers are increasing volume. more than ever. AI, I think, helps improve that relevant relevance, but it doesn't make it spot on. And we need to be aware of things like data hallucinations. We need to be aware that there are millions of people that put all kinds of data into this tool. And I actually sometimes almost use the Wikipedia analogy that It's a great reference point, but don't you ever go writing a school paper based on Wikipedia, right? It's, know, AI is a great starting point, but you need to reference it with the true experts who actually know what they're talking about. And you need to make sure that you're coming prepared with very relevant information. Brent Peterson (20:04.566) Yeah, that's such great advice. So we're looking into this next year now. What is your outlook on e-commerce and how that's going to connect and how we're going to be able to maybe accelerate the way brands can get online and developers how they're working? What's your outlook on this year, on 2026? Tim Johnson (20:27.8) Yeah. You know, I think that we're saying we're seeing in every department, you know, put sales to the side, look at, you know, let's say product development, for example, products that used to take, you know, one, two, three plus years to get to get developed and get to market are not getting to market in 12 months or under. And we're talking about development, marketing, sales motion. Right. So the agility with which products are coming to market, number one. And then I think number two, the agility that we're seeing updates and innovations. mean, almost on a monthly basis, we're seeing huge changes. I think at the end of 2025, we saw true dictation added into GPT. And here in early 2026, we're seeing deep thinking. being added to where it's really giving you the ability to have AI start to innovate for you, which is something that previously was thought to be a capability outside of a lot of AI functionality. But I think in terms of brands coming online, what we're seeing in almost every IT category is that companies are being able to be spun up and go to market in a very relevant and material manner. You know, if I just think about, you know, when we talk about workflows and automation, even just in the last, six to 12 months, we're seeing companies that specifically specialize in overlay agentic platforms where you don't need to have any of your true, enterprise IT ecosystem connected. This AI agentic overlay can kind of bring all the data connect together and then filter it. using the AI and filter it to your specific goals and metrics and KPIs. So, you know, I think that we're going to continue to see agility increase. Now, I think that that also brings the risk component to bear where you're going to see perhaps Tim Johnson (22:54.306) companies that are not necessarily making the right decision and their risk is increasing because of how quickly they're going to market and they're trying to capitalize on something that almost may literally be gone in three to four months or maybe standardized in three to four months, right? Just taking a step back to that dictation example. That was fantastic back in October and November. Like nobody else had it when GPT brought it. Now you'd be hard pressed to find a solution that doesn't have a dictation aspect either already in it or part of the very near term roadmap. Right. That's being a that's that's starting to look at being a commoditized feature. Right. So those companies that started in in November, December thinking, we're going to specialize in dictation. And it's like, all right, there may be a few of those that are going to take off, but by and large, that's going to be commoditized. And now we're on to kind of the next thing on deep thinking and innovation and things of that nature. So I think the ability to get spun up rapidly is definitely increasing with that. rapid go to market, I think also comes an increased risk factor. Brent Peterson (24:17.536) Yeah, wow. Yeah, that's good. Can't agree with you more. Yeah. So, Tim, we have a few minutes left. We've gone through 15 minutes like it's been 25. As I close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today? Tim Johnson (24:36.312) Yeah, no, I really appreciate everyone for listening and I think to their attention to this matter, it's so, so important to stay relevant. And that's one of the things that I really pride myself on is staying relevant on those even weekly changes and updates to major platforms. So, you know, I do everything from consulting, training, coaching, IT purchasing, negotiation and advisement. Regardless of your level in an organization, I've generally worked with someone in the past that might be similar. So please reach out to me through my LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/timnjohnson/ directly message me. I'd love to continue the conversation. And Brent, thank you for having me. Such a pleasure. And thank you to your community for tuning in. Brent Peterson (25:29.262) Absolutely. Tim Johnson is with Salesforce. And by the way, this podcast will be out in February, but Tim had a guest post on my agent to commerce guy site, LinkedIn page. would encourage you to go back and look at it. We'll make sure we get that in the show notes as well. Tim Johnson, thank you much for being here today. Tim Johnson (25:49.825) Excellent, thanks so much, Brent take care.