How Behavioral Insights Help Agentforce Agents Understand True Buyer Intent

When I was a kid, David Hasselhoff’s Knight Rider was one of the TV shows we’d impatiently wait for to air every Monday night. KITT, his reliable partner in crime, was the star of the show: an artificial intelligence-powered car that could think and reason, autonomously. It knew just about everything! It could see through walls, stop villains, and could even empathize with its human partners.

At the time, it was the future. Today, that future has essentially arrived.

The Sales and Marketing Ops Battle of Agentic AI Is On

Your organization’s overall success will be increasingly dependent on your ability to deploy high-performing, AI-powered partners and assistants for your teams and customers.

One day, a team of 10 people may well have 50-100 agents working alongside them 24/7. Not long from now, there will be teams of agents, supervised by agents, collaborating with each other.

The promise of agents is this: to make your workforce smarter and your customers happier, all while increasing productivity and saving you money. But for that to happen, there’s a set of criteria that I consider critical to achieve agent success:

1. Creativity and a vision for relevant agent applications.
2. Defining KPI’s measuring agentic success.
3. A tool to build, host, run, and deploy them – like Agentforce.
4. Access to trusted data.
5. And a pinch of courage when trying out new things…

But one of the criteria on that list probably creates the biggest limitation for you and your agents today. Data.

Access to reliable data is what will make or break the success of your Agentforce agents. CIO.com calls it the “C-suite fantasy,” and it’s a key challenge expressed by many Salesforce professionals. But the reality for many companies remains this: the right data just isn’t always readily available.

Breaking Down Data Silos Between Marketing Teams and Agents

Nothing damages a business faster than data silos, and marketing hasn’t been doing a great job at tearing down its walls. The lack of marketing data available to sales teams has been a consistent problem, and that same lack of data access for agents will result in poor agent decision-making, underperforming outcomes, and – ultimately – less revenue.

If sharing data between marketing and sales alone leads to operational issues to start with, it’s the quality and integrity of the data that matter next. The case is no different for agents.

Customer data platforms (CDPs) like Salesforce Data Cloud provide a mature platform to aggregate data from across your organization and make it available to Agentforce-built agents. And let’s not forget, while Agentforce does require Data Cloud, it can access data straight from Sales Cloud and other Salesforce solutions, too.

Long story short: data is an agent’s knowledge base. Just like humans, agents don’t know what they don’t know. Compare it to when you tried asking ChatGPT about recent stock market news back in 2023. It didn’t have access to recent data, and because of it, failed to answer.

Agents need access to information about your company, third-party data providers, as well as first-party data about your customers.

The right data needs to be injected into the right agent for them to successfully complete their specific jobs.

What Type of “Agents” Need Access to Marketing Data?

• Agent: Agents are autonomous problem-solvers that will handle specific tasks depending on their role. Think of them as your trusted AI coworker that requires little to no human intervention. One example is Salesforce’s SDR agent which generates leads over email, SMS, and WhatsApp. Understanding prospect engagement with your (marketing) website and various campaigns points the agent directly to the challenges the prospect is looking to solve.
• Copilot/Companion: A copilot is an agent that works alongside you as an amplifier to your existing workflow. Think about them as your personal AI assistant, always at hand to help with a task. For example, the SalesWings AI Assistant helps sales teams surface critical insights faster. Acting like a coach, they need to be “in the know” and surface information that sales may miss otherwise.
• Bot: While traditional bots (like chatbots) can only operate in rule-based and structured environments, AI-powered agent bots are dynamic. Bots interact with prospects, leads, and clients over channels such as email, SMS, chat, or WhatsApp. Having direct access to marketing intelligence enables them to be customer-centric and always provide personalized interactions.

What Is First-Party Customer Data?

Broadly speaking, data can be classified in two ways:

• First-party data is data directly collected and owned by your company.
• Third-party data is data provided by external sources.

Data can then come in various shapes either structured data that’s easily searchable and recognizable (i.e. Sales Cloud data, spreadsheets) or unstructured (i.e. images, video, etc.).

As it relates to first-party data about your customers, we’re talking about the information you collect directly from your leads, customers, and accounts. It’s fair to consider it the more trusted and reliable data.

First-party data can then be categorized into profile data and behavioral data. 

• Profile data is what defines who the person engages with and includes things like firmographic information (i.e. company size) or data defining the person (i.e. seniority, job title).
• Behavioral data unveils the buyer’s intent, interests, and engagement, is authentic, and provides crucial commercial intelligence. It’s about the interest your customers express by the way they interact with your website, the videos they watch, the information they download, or the marketing campaigns they have shown the most interest in.

Because first-party data comes straight from the source, it’s considered highly reliable and indispensable for understanding customer behavior, preferences, and needs – for both humans and agents.

Understanding Customer Needs on a Deeper Level

There’s nothing more frustrating than when an agent or bot engages you, but then simply isn’t good enough to “get it.”

Despite all the new AI tools available, I frequently have interactions with agents that still don’t understand what I’m trying to achieve. They show me information that isn’t relevant to me and product recommendations that are far from accurate. Again, that’s a data issue

So how can we help agents truly understand your Leads and Accounts? What data provides the ability for agents to be relevant and customer-centric, while also enabling them to go beyond basic agent tasks? Enter first-party behavioral insights.

This data is key to building a deep understanding of your buyers’ intent and interests. Because it comes directly from your customers, it’s considered highly accurate.

First-party behavioral insights provide the most reliable insights into real preferences and needs. Because of it, this data is what will allow agents to genuinely understand customers, be more effective in their interactions, and create better agent experiences. 

Ultimately, a copilot for sales reps won’t be of any use if it doesn’t know what the Leads and Accounts want. Don’t expect an SDR agent to generate and qualify Leads if they don’t understand what’s relevant to them. And a service agent can’t operate cross-functionally and identify upsell opportunities for sales if they can’t correlate help requests with solutions that the customer has explored on their own.

By collecting Lead and Account behavioral data and offering distilled insights to your agents, the ultimate outcome is a strong ability to effectively leverage AI to grow and scale your business faster.

Use Case

By leveraging behavioral insights, you can turn your Sales Copilots into a true competitive advantage…

Stand-Alone Agents vs. Agentforce-Powered Agents

Salesforce customers have several options when it comes to making the most of agentic AI directly within Sales Cloud. On the one hand, sales teams can make use of purpose-built, stand-alone agent solutions, such as our SalesWings AI Assistant.

Stand-alone solutions are great for companies that don’t have a need to invest in a fully fledged CDP like Data Cloud, or have the resources to build, deploy, and maintain more complex agents through Agentforce.

On the other hand, Salesforce’s AI platform Agentforce allows users to build and manage more complex agents tailored to specific use cases. Agentforce is the world-leading platform to build agents that execute tasks to support your business with possibilities that will soon be only limited by your own creativity.

Leveraging Behavioral Insights for Sales Companions With Agentforce

Whether you call it a copilot, companion, or assistant, sales agents are here to support your sales and account management teams to maximize revenue.

Providing an overview of an Account for reps who are looking to quickly wrap their heads around the new Accounts they are assigned to? Easy.

Identifying the right timing to reopen a closed-lost Opportunity? Harder.

What about uncovering a timely up-selling Opportunity that aligns with the Account’s potential while understanding the topics of interest of an entire buying committee? And let’s not forget about crafting a relevant talk track for SDR agents and adding key contacts to the most relevant marketing journey? Impossible! 

Well, not if agents understood the buyers’ true intent. Intent-driven agents support sales reps with marketing-powered insights that unlock a range of powerful use cases:

• Increasing response rates: AI agents that understand an Account’s topics of interest will highlight the right content to share with buyers that have gone silent.
• Growing customer lifetime value: AI copilots that can correlate interest in services with a clients purchase history will proactively create up-selling opportunities at the right time.
• Shorter sales cycles: AI companions who detect growing buying interest, will schedule follow-up tasks sooner, and prioritize calls over emails.

And the examples above don’t even scratch the surface of what’s possible.

Think about great AI agents as coaches that will provide guidance and instructions – turning benched players into A players, and A players into outperformed.

Transform Your Data into Dollars With SalesWings

Agentic AI has developed faster than anyone expected, and an old wisdom is more true than ever: what got you here, won’t get you there. The race to revenue will now and always be won by companies that take data seriously and know how to leverage insights – whether that’s agents or humans doing the work.

Whether you’re in sales, marketing, support, or ops, empowering your agents with the right data, is what will drive results.

Want to know more about Agentforce and how you can use it to drive revenue? Join our webinar on February 27th at 5 pm GMT.

Ready to power up existing agents with better data? Learn more about SalesWings-powered agents on the AppExchange.