Salesforce has agreed to snap up Bluebirds, the presales prospecting platform provider.
Its platform comprises out-of-the-box targeting, data enrichment, and signal scoring tools.
There is also a prospecting agent that takes intelligence from these tools and prospects on behalf of sales reps.
Soon, Salesforce will make the agent available on Sales Cloud and Agentforce.
In doing so, the CRM leader aims to reduce busywork for sales reps and help them spend more time selling and closing.
Kris Billmaier, EVP & GM of Sales Cloud at Salesforce, added:
Bluebirds’ technology will help us deliver smarter, AI-powered prospecting that makes sellers more productive from day one, right inside the Salesforce platform.
While the prospecting agent may attract most attention, Bluebirds’ tech centers around its targeting engine. That engine combines LinkedIn signals with first-party data, including warm contacts from a CRM and de-anonymized web traffic.
Bluebirds also enriches the data stored in that engine with its own data network. Customers can plug into this, run custom searches, and uncover which prospects are using competitive products.
From there, Bluebirds gives each prospect a unified signal score. The prospecting agent then utilizes the score to inform a curated shortlist of prospects that it sends to reps at the start of every week.
That shortlist comes with personalized outbound sequences for the sales team, with each prospect also given a clear explanation of why they’re a good fit.
The sequences may include a batch of tailored emails, which the rep can review, edit, and send.
Bluebirds also recognizes the changes made between its drafts and what the sales rep sends to the customer, adjusting how it handles future messages. It can also learn from feedback.
Interestingly, businesses may also scale that feedback across the team as it’s saved in the platform’s “Brain”, i.e., Bluebirds’ learning memory.
As such, Bluebirds offers much more than a preconfigured AI agent for Agentforce.
Rohan Punamia, CEO of Bluebirds, highlighted this when sharing the announcement.
“We started Bluebirds to help sales teams spend more time selling and less time stitching together disconnected tools,” he said.
Joining Salesforce lets us accelerate that mission and bring the power of intelligent, agentic prospecting directly into the platform customers already know and trust.
The acquisition, which Salesforce expects to close in Q3, is another sign of the times.
Indeed, from ServiceNow’s acquisition of Moveworks to NiCE’s roll-up of Cognigy, major players are snapping up AI startups.
As they do so, providers are racing to release AI agents that help employees move faster, think smarter, and eliminate routine tasks.
No provider was faster out of the blocks than Salesforce, with its September 2024 Agentforce launch. Now, with its trust layer, industry-/sector-specific Agentforce solutions, and out-of-the-box tooling, it continues positioning itself as “primetime ready”.
Adding “agentic prospecting” only furthers that framing.
Your Agentic, Your Agentic, & Your Agentic!
Salesforce and Bluebirds celebrated the announcement by lauding the addition of “agentic prospecting” to the Salesforce platform.
That follows the CRM leader’s “agentic analytics” and “agentic self-service” releases earlier this year.
Indeed, Salesforce coined the term “agentic analytics” upon the release of Tableau Next, the next generation of its Tableau solution.
With this announcement, Salesforce advanced the BI solution with a vision to push relevant insights into user workflows across first- and third-party systems.
Meanwhile, “agentic self-service” involves customer-facing AI agents that understand, adapt, and reason to automate customer queries.
Agentic prospecting is the next “agentic” term, but don’t expect it to be last, as Salesforce reimagines work for the AI-first era.
It’s starting where its customers are (i.e., in CX), introducing the future to its install base, and hoping to move more of its customers onto Agentforce.
Yet, Salesforce is also pushing further into HR and ITSM, so expect it to take an increasingly broad view of the organization and reimagine enterprise-wide work.
