Pro Tips

Is your CRM accelerating sales cycles or acting as an expensive roadblock?

For far too many revenue teams, the system designed to drive growth actually stalls it. Sellers spend over half their day wrestling with clunky admin tasks, toggling between spreadsheets, and operating out of “shadow systems” just to close deals. Meanwhile, sales leaders are left squinting at unreliable reports, unable to get the pipeline visibility needed for predictable coaching and forecasting.

If your team is struggling to transform tech overhead into real-world efficiency, you are not alone. During a recent fireside chat, I participated in with experts from Little Caesars Fundraising and Sandler. We unpacked how sales organizations can stop putting Band-Aids on broken processes and start accelerating sales cycles with technology.

The Little Caesars Fundraising Story: Exhuming the “Lead Cemetery”

Little Caesars Fundraising helps schools, sports teams, and community groups raise money through turnkey pizza kit sales. But behind their high-demand offering was a CRM system that simply wasn’t built for how their teams needed to operate.

As Andrea Fenton, Director of Marketing at Little Caesars Fundraising, recalled: “Our CRM wasn’t for us. It wasn’t set up for how we needed it to work. “

The Pain Points

• The “Lead Cemetery”: While marketing brought leads into Salesforce, a lack of clear statuses or follow-up rigor meant thousands of leads sat untouched.
• Bad Data, Blurred Visibility: A web of outdated, duplicate, and incomplete fields made list segmentation impossible for marketing and deprived leadership of pipeline visibility.
• Siloed Teams: Sales reps operated without structured guidelines, while marketing couldn’t track lead outcomes or return on ad spend.

The Solution

Partnering to rethink their platform holistically rather than applying quick fixes, Little Caesars Fundraising focused on three foundational pillars:

• Aggressive Data Hygiene: Purging aged leads, eliminating irrelevant fields, and standardizing mandatory capture criteria across sales and marketing.
• Defined Lead Journeys: Establishing clear, unified statuses with automated round robin routing, and balancing rep outreach with automated Marketing Cloud touchpoints.
• Actionable Leadership Dashboards: Building real-time reporting to measure conversion velocity, evaluate rep performance, and surface coaching opportunities.

The Business Impact

The strategic overhaul didn’t just clean up their database. It fundamentally reshaped their bottom line.

“We’ve seen our conversion rates on average across each rep for this calendar year increase 8% to 10%, and it’s continuing to climb… The data that we have, the ability to make better-informed decisions, and just the efficiencies that we’ve created between sales and marketing are invaluable.”

— Andrea Fenton, Director of Marketing, Little Caesars Fundraising

The Blueprint for Accelerating Sales Cycles: How to Approach Your Own CRM Optimization Project

To turn a clunky CRM into a scalable revenue driver, organizations must look beyond immediate surface pain and address root cause friction. During the fireside chat, I outlined with Seth Marrs, Chief Strategy Officer at Sandler, a step-by-step roadmap for evaluating and streamlining sales processes.

1. Evaluate Friction from Two Perspectives

Before changing a single field or buying a new tool, Heather recommends auditing your entire go-to-market engine through two distinct lenses:

• The Buyer Experience: Where does the customer hit speed bumps? How fast do they get a response after filling out a form? How many times do they have to repeat their story to different reps?
• The Seller Experience: Shadow your reps. How many browser tabs do they open to complete a single task? What data are they manually copying and pasting into spreadsheets?

Where these two friction points overlap represents your highest-priority quick wins. Typically found right during marketing-to-sales or sales-to-customer success handoffs.

2. Prioritize Data Hygiene and Contextual UI

CRM clutter often stems from years of ad-hoc “Band-Aid fixes”, adding fields for short-term projects without considering long-term maintenance.

Low-hanging fruit optimizations:

• Audit custom fields to remove duplicates and unused data points.
• Utilize dynamic UI features to surface fields only when relevant in the deal lifecycle, cutting down on visual noise.

3. Stop Buying AI Tools Before Fixing Your Data Foundation

With AI dominating tech discussions, it is tempting to view new tools as an instant fix. However, both Seth and I warn against layering AI over fragmented data.

“You shouldn’t even try to do GenAI if you’re not doing auto-capture of emails, phone calls, and web conferencing. If you don’t have that, you have no data to build context around… Pick the one use case that is going to have the biggest impact for the business and just myopically focus on becoming the best in the world at it.”

— Seth Marrs, Chief Strategy Officer, Sandler

Rather than spreading reps thin across dozens of AI features, master a single high-impact use case, such as automated call summarization or pre-call prep, before expanding your stack.

4. Treat Implementation as a Starting Line, Not a Finish Line

As Andrea highlighted, successful tech rollouts require four core operational habits:

1. Start with a detailed brief: Clearly define scope, success metrics, and pain points up front.
2. Involve seller champions early: Bring sales reps into the design phase to build buy-in and prevent launch-day pushback.
3. Document SOPs relentlessly: Build comprehensive training docs, so rep promotions and turnover don’t destroy system adoption.
4. Iterate continuously: Treat your CRM as an evolving engine that requires ongoing care and strategic adjustment.

Eliminate Friction and Accelerate Growth

Unlocking sustainable revenue performance doesn’t always mean buying more technology; many times, it means ensuring your current tech stack actively serves your sellers.

Is your sales technology powering your pipeline or holding your sellers back?

Request a Seller Experience Audit with Sercante l Trilliad to identify where your tech stack is causing friction, eliminate admin tax, and receive a customized roadmap for quick wins and long-term sales growth.

Attending Dreamforce in San Francisco? We’d love to connect with you in person! Learn more about Sercante’s Dreamforce events, including our Welcome Bash and Growth Lounge, and meet me and the team on-site.

For those of us who grew up in marketing operations, the promise of automation has always had a bit of an asterisk next to it, making the modern move toward agentic campaign operations feel long overdue.  I’ve worked with marketing automation platforms since the “platform” was a window with a black background and typewriter-looking white font, and you wrote SQL code to build your segments.  We’ve come a long way!  But can we all agree that the campaign production process is riddled with manual steps, button pushing, and just feels, frankly, mundane?  It honestly feels like Desmond from Lost (please tell me some of you know what I’m talking about) – pushing buttons, on a schedule, feeling like if we don’t keep pushing them, we’ll be out of a job. 

We were promised seamless campaign delivery. We thought we’d be spending most of our time ideating with our cross-functional marketing and sales teams about new campaigns to build, new ways to communicate with our segments, and measuring our influence.  But what we actually got was a mountain of manual assembly: building briefs, wrangling segment criteria, building out complex flows, writing multiple variations of copy, testing, double-checking, and troubleshooting why a trigger didn’t fire. The average campaign today takes roughly 47 steps just to build and launch—a figure that is, frankly, insane in 2026 (Averi). After 15 years in the campaign ops space, it’s clear: the process has very little automation, and humans were left doing all the heavy lifting.

That’s why the shift toward Agentic Campaign Operations feels like a genuine breath of fresh air. Early data shows that marketers who infuse AI agents directly into their build processes are cutting campaign time-to-market by up to 70%, saving 6 to 13 hours per week per marketer, and driving significantly higher campaign quality and ROI (Forbes, CMSWire, McKinsey & Company). We aren’t just talking about isolated AI use cases or simple task automation anymore; we’re talking about moving from rigid, manual workflows to truly intelligent, autonomous systems that act as real force multipliers for marketing teams.

Moving from Tactical AI Use Cases to True Systemic Thinking

To make the point crystal clear: we aren’t talking about AI use cases, we’re talking about truly understanding pain points in processes and redesigning the process and the experience, by introducing AI and agents to work alongside the marketers.  Tactical AI use cases, exit stage left.  Intelligent process redesign, enter stage right.  As Craig Dempster, CEO of Trilliad, highlighted in a recent conversation:

“We need to move from AI use cases to more system and process flow thinking… There is a difference between workflow automation and agentic processes.”

Agentic processes are fundamentally different. Instead of just following a static checklist, AI agents understand context, evaluate goals, generate assets, and orchestrate processes across systems. They don’t just execute steps; they help reason through the operation itself.

However, technology is only half the battle. As Dempster rightly pointed out, change enablement is critical. Updating software is easy. Changing historical behaviors and decades-old operational habits is hard. To unlock real value, teams must shift their mindset from “How do I use AI to write this email faster?” to “How do I partner with agents to manage end-to-end campaign operations?”  

The opportunity is clear – marketers are smart!  They understand their customer segments and purchasing patterns. They know how to identify the tactics that drive engagement.  Most marketers have no time to sit down and really think or to use their brains to drive value within their organization.  The technology that exists today helps pave the way for marketers to take back control of the strategy and to do so without fear.  

Fear Is A Natural Human Risk: Why Campaign Managers Shouldn’t Fear Agents

Whenever a technological leap of this scale hits an industry, fear naturally follows. I was at a conference earlier this year, and a parallel example was given, in an industry that is so different than marketing tech, but that really stopped me in my tracks.  We saw this fear play out years ago in medicine: when AI pattern-recognition models were first introduced to radiology, there was widespread panic that radiologists would soon become obsolete. Tech pioneers infamously predicted that we should “stop training radiologists.”

What actually happened? Demand for radiologists reached record highs.

AI didn’t replace the doctors. It eliminated the repetitive, low-yield manual labor of scanning thousands of baseline images. It elevated their role to focus on complex diagnostics, patient care, and high-impact strategy. The better the AI became, the busier—and more valuable—human radiologists were.

Campaign operations is facing its “radiology moment.” Campaign managers shouldn’t fear agents in their workflows. Think about how much of a campaign operator’s day is currently spent clicking buttons, copying data between tools, re-checking segment logic, and fixing broken triggers—rather than ideating new campaigns, experimenting with creative positioning, or crafting deeply personalized customer experiences. Agents aren’t here to replace the campaign marketer. They’re here to replace the manual button-pushing.

Agentic Campaign Operations: A Spotlight On The Tech That Makes This Real

This isn’t an abstract vision for five years down the road—we are living it right now with Marketing Cloud Next (Agentforce Marketing) and Anthropic Claude. The momentum behind this technology is incredible because it directly addresses the exact friction points campaign operators face every day.

Here is how agentic operations are taking shape inside the Salesforce ecosystem:

• Segment Builder & Flow Builder Agents (Available Today): The tedious work of manually mapping out complex logic and slicing databases is being transformed. Instead of spending hours building complex target segments or visual customer journeys step-by-step, operators can describe the target outcome in natural language, allowing intelligent agents to draft precision segments and multi-touch flows in seconds.
• Content Agents (In Pilot): The bridge between strategy and execution has historically been leaky. With Content Agents paired directly with the Campaign Brief, strategic intent translates directly into execution assets. Operators can feed a brief into the system, and agents generate context-aware, brand-aligned email, web, and social content variations tailored to specific segment nuances.

When you connect the Campaign Brief → Segment Builder → Flow Builder → Content Generation, you eliminate days of administrative ping-pong between strategists, writers, and ops managers.

Accelerating Marketing Workflows with Anthropic Claude

While native platform agents inside Salesforce provide incredible out-of-the-box orchestration, the modern campaign ops stack rarely lives in a single vacuum.  We know there are so many marketing teams still using Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement or Account Engagement.  If you fall into this camp, you can either start using Agentforce Marketing in parallel to use these agentic features or you can integrate a tool like Anthropic Claude to play a pivotal role in improving the campaign operations process.

• Integrated with Salesforce: Powered by Anthropic’s deep contextual reasoning and safety guardrails, Claude can act as the brain behind intelligent decisioning within Salesforce—parsing complex customer data, refining messaging nuances, and dynamically adapting campaign flows based on real-time customer intent.
• Standalone / Unintegrated Workflows: Outside the CRM, Claude serves as the ultimate campaign co-pilot for ops teams. From digesting unstructured strategy docs and generating detailed campaign architecture specifications to writing complex SQL queries for data teams and performing QA checks on campaign assets before launch, Claude drastically reduces technical debt and operational drag.

Whether embedded directly in your tech stack or running alongside your daily workflows, models like Claude allow operators to work at the speed of thought rather than the speed of manual execution.

The Verdict: Reclaiming the Strategic Heart of Marketing

Agentic Campaign Operations isn’t about replacing campaign managers. It’s about freeing them from the operational quicksand that has bogged down marketing teams for the last decade.

By pairing powerful platform ecosystems like Agentforce Marketing with advanced reasoning models like Anthropic Claude, we are finally reaching a point where campaign operations can scale exponentially without burning out the human talent behind the keyboard.

The shift is happening right now. Is your organization ready to stop just managing workflows and start orchestrating intelligent agents?  What would you do with an extra 10 hours in your week?  

To start answering these questions and plan your next steps toward agentic campaign operations, reach out to the Sercante l Trilliad team. We’ll listen to your goals, guide you toward the solution that makes the most sense for your organization, and help you plan and execute a clear roadmap that accelerates your time-to-value.

Too many marketers today are trapped in “survival mode.” Day after day, marketing ops professionals churn out campaign after campaign, wading through rigid data silos, manual list exports, and tedious workarounds that sap their creative and strategic brainpower. Solutions like Agentforce Marketing give marketers a clear way out. But while many marketing leaders have watched the impressive platform demos, most are left asking the critical tactical questions: “How do we actually get started?” “How are other marketers using the platform, and what successes are they seeing thus far?

To answer those exact questions, I sat down for a fireside chat with Brittany Cowan, Director of Marketing at Denver Public Schools (DPS). We talked through how she and her team took a pragmatic crawl, walk, run approach to adopting Agentforce Marketing. Eliminating manual workarounds, deploying multi-channel journeys, and tracking true attribution.

Get the highlights from our conversation below, or check out our full discussion on-demand.

Laying the Foundation: Starting the Journey

When Denver Public Schools first started thinking about adopting a new marketing automation platform, their goals centered around driving enrollment. Like many urban districts, they faced student population declines from rising competition with private schools, families having fewer children, and more families moving out of the city.  

To reach their goal as seamlessly as possible, and to ensure they engage families with personalized messaging, DPS needed a way to centralize family data, streamline communication during major district initiatives like Round 1 and Round 2 school enrollment, and reach families through their preferred channels without drowning them in irrelevant emails.

When Brittany and her leadership team were first considering Agentforce Marketing, those early conversations focused heavily on alignment, technical readiness, and bandwidth. Critical success factors were top-of-mind, but instead of trying to rebuild their entire marketing ecosystem overnight, leadership focused on immediate, high-impact needs.

Ultimately, DPS chose Agentforce Marketing because of its native scalability. Since they were already using the Salesforce platform for their enrollment application, it was a natural evolution. The ability to unify customer data, leverage native multi-channel tools like email and SMS within a single Flow, and lay a foundation for future AI enhancements made it the clear choice for the district.

Setting the Stage: First Use Cases & Multi-Channel Deployment

Once the platform was implemented, the team immediately jumped into their highest-priority initiative: student enrollment campaigns. Rather than overcomplicating their initial setup, they mapped out essential segmentations and structured core messaging flows to ensure families completed their application steps on time.

A major benefit of Agentforce Marketing is the ability to build seamless multi-channel journeys combining email and SMS. They did not use a lot of SMS communications previously, but when they surveyed their families, they found that many of them prefer this channel, and decided to lean in. Before adopting Agentforce Marketing,  this would have involved tedious, manual processes such as data uploads. Now, DPS leverages Flow Builder decision paths, such as the example below:

• Email First: An initial email goes out to families regarding enrollment deadlines.
• Smart Logic: If a family doesn’t open the email within 3 days, the system automatically triggers a targeted SMS reminder.

Because families receive endless communications from various sources, this multi-channel strategy ensures urgent reminders land on the device they actually check, fostering better engagement.

When it came to reporting, DPS approached attribution by establishing baseline metrics early on. Unified campaign tracking allowed them to connect outreach activity directly to application completions, proving ROI across both email and SMS. 

Looking Back: Lessons Learned & What’s Next

Reflecting on how far the team has come, Cowan shared that she is most proud of their ability to deliver tailored, relevant communications while leveraging smart exit rules. Instead of blasting generic district news, messaging is now personalized based on geographic zones, student life stages, and specific program interests.

Even better, automated exit rules remove families from reminder flows the moment they complete an application. Families appreciate not being bombarded with irrelevant information once they’ve taken action, creating a far better overall experience for district families.

“The ability to cater our messages more specifically—both to specific programs and not bombarding people with comms once they’ve already taken action—has been wonderful.” 

– Brittany Cowan, Director, Marketing, Denver Public Schools

Looking ahead to the next phase of their journey, DPS is excited to tap into more advanced capabilities:

• Language-Based Routing: Delivering fully automated Spanish-language communications to Spanish-speaking families.
• Send Time Optimization: Sending messages at the precise day and time an individual is most likely to engage.
• Path Experiments: Testing different channels and messaging sequences to continually optimize conversion rates.

When asked about the biggest lessons learned along the way, the marketing team emphasized the importance of respecting the crawl, walk, run process. Focusing on super-advanced features in year one would have been overwhelming. The real win was establishing clean segments, setting up Flows, and securing baseline reporting.

Your Strategic Roadmap for Adopting Agentforce Marketing

Whether auditing a current tech stack or preparing to launch advanced AI automations, adopting Agentforce Marketing works best when structured in defined phases:

Phase 1: Learn & Plan (Crawl)

• Audit existing data structures and align stakeholders on immediate business requirements.
• Pick 1–2 initial use cases (like event registration, lead nurture, or enrollment).
• Build core competencies across your team.
  • Take the Next Step: Join our upcoming Agentforce Marketing Flow Fundamentals Workshop on August 13 to build hands-on skills with Flow Builder.

Phase 2: Explore & Deploy (Walk)

• Draft campaign briefs and define cross-channel decision paths (Email + SMS).
• Establish baseline performance metrics to track against legacy manual processes.
• Deploy core journeys using native target segmentation and dynamic content rules.

Phase 3: Optimize & Evolve (Run)

• Einstein Engagement Frequency: Dynamically suppress sends to saturated contacts to avoid burnout.
• Einstein Send Time Optimization (STO): Deliver communications when individual recipients are statistically most likely to open.
• Path Experiment: Scientifically test journey variations (e.g., SMS vs. Email follow-ups) to evaluate top-performing paths.

Ready to Take Your Next Step?

Successfully adopting Agentforce Marketing isn’t about replacing your strategy with AI, it’s about giving your team the operational foundation needed to eliminate manual workarounds, engage your audience, and drive measurable growth.

• Explore hands-on tools, real-world use cases, and customer stories over at the Marketing Hub for Agentforce.
• If you’d like to get expert guidance on planning your next steps with Agentforce Marketing, or figure out how it can be used alongside your existing platform, reach out to the Sercante l Trilliad team.   

A broken CRM seller experience acts like a tax on your pipeline, dragging down deal velocity and rendering new AI investments practically useless. Identifying the friction is easy, but executing the cure is where most teams get stuck. So, how do you transition from diagnostic firefighting to actual, scalable optimization? The answer isn’t a full rebuild, it’s a Seller Experience Audit. It pinpoints exactly where your system is broken, and then applies a practical CRM optimization framework that targets high-friction areas first, proves fast ROI, and builds momentum.

To help you map this out, we’ve broken down the core architecture from our full 2026 CRM Optimization Playbook. Here is the exact 6-step roadmap to transform your CRM from a roadblock into a high-velocity revenue engine.

Groundwork: Uncovering Where the Friction Lives

Before you change a single validation rule or field setting, you have to gather your boots-on-the-ground intelligence. A successful CRM optimization framework relies on two distinct discovery exercises:

• Walk your funnel like a customer: Take a handful of recent closed-won accounts and map every single technical and human touchpoint. Did the buyer experience a massive lag between marketing handoff and sales outreach? Did they have to repeat their pain points? Funnel walkthroughs surface your biggest gaps faster than any dashboard.
• Shadow your sellers: Sit down with your sellers and watch them navigate a typical day. Ask the direct questions: Where are you clicking too much? What fields feel completely pointless? What context are you keeping in a shadow spreadsheet because the CRM is too slow? When you design the process for the front line, you have to hear it from the front line.

The 6-Step CRM Optimization Framework

Once you know where the drag lives, work through these six execution steps in order. 

1. Define Stages and Strict Ownership

Alignment is the bedrock of any CRM optimization framework. Get your Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success leaders in one room to establish absolute clarity around buyer journey milestones.

Define exactly what qualifies a lead at each stage, and more importantly, who owns the record at every handoff. Clear operational boundaries stop lead leakage before it starts.

Another key team to align with is IT. For alignment to actually be actioned, data must be able to flow seamlessly from one department to the next to provide the right context. That data can sometimes be owned in systems where IT needs to collaborate for access. Therefore, ensuring that all teams are aligned ahead of time will help to make the execution easier.

“Bringing IT into the conversation and creating a collaborative relationship across departments when defining stages and strict ownership is critical. Friction when unlocking your data can often be due to department silos rather than just technology silos.” 

– Austin Frink, Director, Data Technologies, Sercante l Trilliad

2. Cleanse and Trim the Fields

Audit your current fields and page layouts with one brutal question: Does this field help a rep move a deal forward right now? If a seller is in early discovery, they shouldn’t be forced to look at 40 blank legal or billing fields. Use conditional visibility to show the right fields at the right deal stage. The answer to “can we track that?” is always yes, but the smarter question is “should we?”

3. Automate the Administrative Burden

Identify the repetitive, manual tasks that drain your team’s energy. Logging basic activity, routing leads, progressing stages, and triggering standard follow-ups. Let your system handle these based on real-time buyer engagement. This is what the technology was built to do. Don’t pay premium seller salaries for manual data entry.

4. Close the Handoff Gap

Map out the exact second a lead passes from marketing to sales. Ensure all marketing context, intent signals, and engagement history travel with the record. Fixing this single point of friction rebuilds cross-functional trust between Marketing and Sales faster than almost anything else.

5. Layer in AI and Advanced Automation

Now that the foundation holds, your data is clean, and your workflows are automated, AI becomes an incredible asset rather than a liability. This is where you can confidently execute an Agentforce or agentic roadmap. Start with a single high-friction use case, like auto-captured activity, next-best-action prompts, or signal-based prioritization—prove the time savings, and expand. For additional insight on the strategic approach to creating an effective AI roadmap, check out Jenna Packard’s blog, The AI Roadmap for Enterprise: A Framework for Identifying Value-Driven AI Use Cases.

6. Build Continuous Feedback Loops

CRM optimization is a continuous rhythm, not a one-time project. Establish a monthly cadence where your RevOps, Sales Ops, or Marketing Ops teams shadow an account executive to look for new layout errors, system speed bumps, or shadow spreadsheets.

 Getting Started with Your CRM Optimization

Every technical change in this framework directly drives a business outcome. That is how you justify the work to leadership, and it’s how you ensure the changes actually stick. The ultimate goal is simple: transition your tech stack from a static tracking system to an active revenue producer.

But if the friction has been there so long that it has just become background noise, it can be hard to know which of these steps to prioritize first.

That is exactly why the Sercante l Trilliad team guides revenue teams through a structured Seller Experience Audit. We assess your systems, data quality, and cross-functional handoffs to turn guesswork into a prioritized, impact-driven roadmap tailored to this exact CRM optimization framework. Reach out to the Sercante l Trilliad team to schedule your Seller Experience Audit.