Kris Billmaier, Salesforce EVP & GM Sales Cloud on Agentic AI

**Grace Gong** (0:05)
Wait, we are live? Oh my god, sorry. I'm like today, I'm at a different location, so I'm not very, yeah, I'm just like...
Anyway, so it's been an amazing day in San Francisco. As you know, the weather is weathering, but Kris, welcome to Venture with Grace.

**Kris Billmaier** (0:20)
Hey, thanks for having me. It's exciting to be here. I'm in Seattle and the weather is not Seattle weathering, which is kind of awesome today.

**Grace Gong** (0:27)
I love it. To start the show, I want to give a quick shout out to our amazing sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Nebius, the ultimate call for AI innovators. Nebius provides AI infrastructure you can count on, combining reliability and engineering support and speed with flexibility all matched by hyperscalers. AI leaders like Meta, Shopify, and Higgsfield already partner with Nebius, run their AI workloads. Plus Venture Max Startup can save up to 150K on compute costs when they apply for access. Visit nebius.com or nebius.com/startup to learn more.
To start our show, I want to give the audience a little bit more background on you.
Obviously, you are a professional basketball player when you were young.

**Kris Billmaier** (1:12)
Baseball.

**Grace Gong** (1:13)
Yeah. Before you enter the career of BD, product management, being a founder, and working at iconic company like Microsoft and now EVP at Salesforce. What were some lessons that you've learned in the baseball era that shape you into who you are today?

**Kris Billmaier** (1:29)
Well, it's funny. I always think the team sports kind of guide you through everything you do. Because as you progress in your career, you're either a part of or you run a team.
I was lucky enough to have a lot of great coaches and a lot of great leaders and a lot of great mentors through my time playing sports. I think that's helped me progress both through the startup world, into Microsoft and the last eight years at Salesforce, which have been awesome. Now, it's a lot of fun trying to reshape how selling gets done.

**Grace Gong** (2:01)
For sure. I think Salesforce is such an iconic company, but maybe before we dive in, I want to start with thinking about your day-to-day as the EVP now.
Maybe we'll start from what does a typical day look like for you?

**Kris Billmaier** (2:19)
Yeah. As you mentioned, I'm EVP and GM of Sales Cloud, I get to run the original flagship product of Salesforce, which is a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun getting to reshape it. I think my day is pretty much spent trying to understand customer need, build product with the amazing team that I have, and then I like to spend at least 30 percent of my time every day with customers because I think that's where you really get the grounding and understand what the needs are that you are meeting or you aren't and that influences the flywheel and the roadmap.
That's a typical day for me. I'm sure there's a little bit of meeting nonsense that goes on in there as well as everybody deals with.

**Grace Gong** (3:08)
For sure. I really always said about spending 30 percent time with the customer.
I want to start with, I guess sometimes building a new product line or building a new feature is like, you have to also running the old feature and then the old functions. I wonder how do you spend time on debating about how much do you spend the time and energy and maybe engineering resources and team resources into focusing on serving clients with the existing product versus the new ones. We'll be talking about AI very soon. How do you think about as a GM that you probably runs everything, overseeing both product, sales grows and everything else. How do you spend the time there?

**Kris Billmaier** (3:57)
Yeah. I think it's a really interesting question. The balance between investing in legacy versus investing in new, it's not always simple and a lot of times it's take legacy things and reinvent them in the new. I think that's what we've been doing is, we've really looked at the overall sales cycle and we're fortunate enough to spend a lot of time with our own sales team and understand how they work, using our tools and it really guides how we build. I think a lot of time it's looking at the overall sales cycle, what are the jobs to be done and does a piece need a reinvention? Does a piece need just an additional feature? But in this era that we're in, I look at everything all up as being reinvented and streamlined.