How to Build Salesforce Agentforce Agents for Marketing

Rather than replacing the expertise of human marketers, Salesforce Agentforce agents complement your team’s strategic role, allowing them to focus on higher-value activities.

The first step? Learning how to build and manage Salesforce Agentforce agents, from customising them to fit your marketing needs, to ensuring they work effectively in your day-to-day operations.

Before you dive into implementation, it’s important to know the basics of how an autonomous AI agent works.

Salesforce Agentforce agents are AI-driven tools designed to automate tasks within the Salesforce ecosystem. They can handle a wide range of marketing functions, including lead generation, customer segmentation, personalising campaigns, and processing large datasets. These agents are fully customisable to meet the specific needs of your business and marketing team, using Agent Builder.

The great thing about Agentforce agents is that they don’t replace the crucial work that marketing leaders do. They’re built to work alongside your team, taking care of the repetitive and data-heavy tasks so your team can focus on the bigger picture, like crafting creative campaigns, refining your brand’s voice, or developing strategies that drive long-term growth.

How do they do all this?

Using the Atlas Reasoning Engine; the core intelligence behind Agentforce. It equips agents to respond naturally and adapt to various scenarios, making them faster, more capable, and able to handle more complex interactions. 

The Atlas Reasoning Engine ensures that agents not only follow instructions but also improve their responses based on context. To enhance their effectiveness, users can define topics, which categorise requests into specific areas with clear guidelines. Topics help the agents understand the scope of each request, including which actions they are allowed to take and which they should avoid. This functionality improves accuracy, allowing your agents to handle tasks with greater precision and reliability.

While setting up and managing these agents may seem complex at first, taking the time to configure them properly will pay off in the long run by improving efficiency and allowing your team to work smarter, not harder.

One of the key strengths of Agentforce agents is the ability to tailor them to your specific marketing needs. 

When you first create your agent, you have the option of using a template, or starting from scratch. You also input a description of the agent you need, their role, when they should escalate to a human, as well as defining the topics your agent should handle. 

Whether you need them to manage customer enquiries, create personalised recommendations, or track customer behaviour, customisation is essential to ensure the agents perform exactly as required.

To begin customising agents, start by understanding your marketing needs.

• What tasks are taking up valuable time within your team?

• Is there a way to automate repetitive activities, such as segmenting leads?

• Are there any manual processes that could benefit from automation, like updating contact records or sending follow-up emails?

• How can you use data to personalise customer interactions at scale, such as automating content delivery?

• Are there areas where real-time decision-making can be enhanced with AI, such as lead scoring or campaign performance tracking?

Once you’ve identified these areas, Salesforce provides a number of low-code tools that allow you to build your agents without needing advanced technical knowledge. Simply follow the steps in Agent Builder, which include:

• Defining topics to create a job for the agent

• Giving natural language instructions for your topics

• Creating a library of actions for it to choose from

When it comes to actions, these can include Flows that align with your marketing objectives, such as setting up triggers based on customer actions or using custom scripts to guide the agent’s responses. You can also use prompt templates and existing Apex or APIs. 

Complete customisation allows you to ensure that your AI agents are aligned with your brand’s voice and tone. By adjusting their responses, you can maintain consistency in customer communications and make sure that all interactions feel natural and human-like.

Actions are a fundamental part of setting up your Agentforce marketing agent. These define the tasks your agents will perform, such as automating lead qualification, sending follow-up emails, or updating customer records. Properly configuring actions ensures that your agents operate effectively from the outset.

How to setup actions for your Salesforce agents

1. Create custom actions: In Salesforce Setup, navigate to ‘Agent Actions’ and select ‘Create a New Action’. Here, you can choose to create a new flow, Apex class, or prompt template that aligns with the task you want to automate. Clearly describe the action, including its inputs and outputs, as this description guides the AI in executing the action appropriately.

2. Assign actions to agents: Once your actions are created, you can assign them to the appropriate agent. This step ensures that your agents are capable of performing the tasks you’ve identified in the previous steps. By linking actions with your agent workflows, you ensure they function as intended.

When you use actions well, your agents will be empowered to take on tasks such as nurturing leads, responding to customer queries, or even adjusting ad campaigns based on real-time data. The beauty of Salesforce Agentforce is that once the actions are defined, your agents can operate with minimal human oversight, allowing your team to focus on tasks that require more creativity.

Oh and don’t worry, you also have full control over when the agent should handover to a human. Again, using natural language topics, you can create what Salesforce calls ‘guardrails’ for your agent.

Once you’ve built and configured your Agentforce agents, testing and monitoring them is crucial. AI tools are powerful, but they need to be fine-tuned to ensure they’re performing as expected. Testing allows you to identify any issues early on, while ongoing monitoring helps you optimise your agents for better results over time.

How to test your agents

It goes without saying that testing should be done before the agents go live. 

Thankfully, Salesforce has covered this base extremely well with a built-in Agentforce Testing Centre. Here, you can simulate interactions and run tests at the same time, to see what topics and actions Agentforce chooses. Early on, you can iron out any issues that may arise and ensure the agents are fully ready for production use.

Ongoing monitoring

Once your agents are live, it’s essential to monitor their performance regularly. Salesforce provides built-in tools to track agent activities, measure efficiency, and analyse outcomes. By reviewing reports and metrics, you can identify areas for improvement and tweak your agent settings accordingly.

Continuous monitoring also allows you to adapt the agents as your marketing needs change. As your campaigns evolve or your data set grows, you may need to adjust the tasks assigned to your agents or modify how they interact with your CRM. 

The flexibility of Salesforce Agentforce agents makes it easy to adjust to these shifts without requiring a full overhaul of your system but you should also be pre-empting how your needs may change with a documented AI roadmap from the start.

1. Do I need technical expertise to use Salesforce Agentforce?

No, Salesforce Agentforce is designed to be user-friendly, with many customisation options that don’t require advanced technical knowledge. Salesforce’s drag-and-drop tools and intuitive interface make it accessible for marketing teams, even if you don’t have coding experience.

2. Can I integrate Agentforce agents with other Salesforce tools?

Yes, Agentforce agents are fully integrated into the Salesforce ecosystem, which means they can seamlessly work with other Salesforce tools such as Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud. This integration enhances the overall efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing workflows.

3. How can I ensure my agents stay effective over time?

The key to maintaining the effectiveness of your agents is continuous testing and refinement. Monitor how they perform, gather feedback from your team, and make adjustments to the actions or settings as needed. Over time, this will ensure your agents remain aligned with your changing business needs.

4. What are the main benefits of using Salesforce Agentforce agents in marketing?

Using Agentforce agents can save time, reduce human error, and streamline processes. Tasks such as lead generation, segmentation, and personalised customer engagement can be automated, allowing your team to focus on strategy and creativity. These agents can also improve the accuracy and consistency of your marketing campaigns.

5. Can I track the performance of my Agentforce agents?

Yes, Salesforce provides detailed analytics and reporting tools that allow you to monitor your agents’ performance. By analysing the data, you can identify areas for improvement and optimise your agents for better results.

By investing time and effort into properly building and managing Salesforce Agentforce agents, you can improve internal processes, increase efficiency, and generate greater ROI.

If you’re unsure where to start or would like support in setting up and managing agents, working with a trusted Salesforce partner can help guide your team through the process. MarCloud will ensure that your agents are aligned with your business objectives and help you maximise the potential of your Salesforce investment. Request a call with the team.