SalesTechStar Interview with Haley Gault, Senior Account Executive, Salesforce

Haley Gault, Senior Account Executive at Salesforce highlights more on how sales and marketing teams should look at AI powered platforms and AI agents as partners and teammates to propel processes ahead in this SalesTechStar interview:

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Hi Haley, tell us about your journey at Salesforce and what you love most about being in SaaS?

Thank you for having me on the SalesTech Interview Series! I joined Salesforce in February 2022 and have been growing ever since. What I love most about SaaS is that it never stands still. No day is the same.  We are at the front line of new ideas, AI innovation, and customer challenges that require us to think fast, pivot often, and stay endlessly curious.  I get to partner with customers across a mixed bag of industries to help solve business challenges that are evolving in real time. It keeps the job fresh, fun and meaningful.  I also LOVE to learn, so this is exactly where I am supposed to be.

We’d love to hear some of the top benefits and strongest features of Salesforce’s latest Agentforce release.

Agentforce has fundamentally changed how I sell. It’s helped our team save more than 50,000 hours through automated call summaries, generate over 43,000 outbound emails, and add over 800,000 leads and contacts into sales cadences.

Sales reps used to spend just 30% of their time selling. The rest? Admin work—research, follow-ups, POV building, deep industry research, and scheduling. With agents handling those mundane, but necessary task – we’re back to what matters: building real human relationships and closing business.

And it’s not just us. Customers like Goodyear are seeing big results. Legal and financial reviews that used to take 90 days? Agents now cut that down to a few hours.

My favorite feature is the on-demand coaching. Agentforce creates custom scenarios based on your pipeline and product, then gives live feedback to help you sharpen your pitch. It’s like having a personal sales coach built into your workflow. I rely on it daily to stay sharp and productive.

As sales and marketing teams open up more to agentic AI to drive processes and goals, what best practices do you often see them missing?

The biggest mistake is treating AI like a side tool instead of embedding it directly into your workflow. If it’s not where you work, it won’t work. Embedded AI pulls from the right data sources and understands your context, which makes the output faster, more accurate, and more actionable.

Another miss is failing to train or upskill the team. Dropping new tech without support just creates confusion. At Salesforce, we all learned how to build a bot which demystified the tech and gave us confidence. That kind of enablement creates shared momentum across the team.

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How, in your view, will Sales agents impact the future of sales?

We’re already seeing it. Sales agents are no longer a future-state concept — they’re reshaping how we sell today. Agents are handling the manual, time-consuming tasks that used to dominate our day: researching prospects, logging notes, drafting emails. That gives sellers back hours to focus on what actually moves the needle — connecting with customers, solving their problems, and closing.

Personally, I used to spend hours trying to understand a new industry before a call — scouring YouTube, reading reports, trying to sound credible. Now, I can prompt an agent to surface key insights in seconds. What once took two hours now takes two minutes, and I go into conversations significantly more prepared (and confident 🙂).

As more teams adopt agents, we’ll see sales shift from transactional to deeply consultative. The reps who embrace this shift will be the ones who succeed — because they’ll spend more time doing what humans do best: building trust and delivering value.

In what ways should sales leaders today build teams in an age where salestech and AI-powered sales agents are influencing a great change in roles

Start by hiring for adaptability and tech fluency. Curiosity is more important than a perfectly polished sales resume. Your top performers will be the ones who can learn, pivot, and take advantage of what AI brings to the table.

Five tips and thoughts you’d leave everyone in SaaS sales with before we wrap up?

1. Treat AI like a teammate. It can (and will) make you faster, smarter, and more efficient.  Plus, it is not going anywhere.  It is only going to evolve and get better.  Stay ahead of the pack!
2. Sell the outcome, not the product. Customers don’t care about dashboards or automation—until they understand what those things do for them. Frame your pitch around real business impact: time saved, revenue gained, etc.. whatever your customer is looking to solve for.
3. Embrace the pivot. In SaaS, priorities shift daily. Be ready to shift with them. Ask questions, listen more than you speak, and don’t be afraid to peel the onion back further if you don’t understand the customer’s world.  Nobody knows it all, so if you want clarity, speak up!  They will appreciate it.
4. Stop focusing on closing deals and focus on helping your customer solve their problems.  The results will come.
5. Lean. on. your. team. Selling is a team sport.  The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.

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