Configure and Activate Your SDR Agent
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Configure and activate your agent.
- Prepare to test your agent.
Configure Your Agent
The next part of setup is configuring the details of how your agent operates, including its working schedule, timing, and frequency of outreach, and how it drafts initial emails and answers to lead questions. Once you complete the previous unit’s steps, the Agent Builder button is available for you to begin configuring your agent. Time to get started configuring your agent using Agent Builder.
- On the Agentforce SDR Setup page navigate to Step 4: Configure and Activate Your SDR Agent.
- Click Go to Agent Builder.
- Select Agentforce Sales Development Rep as the type of agent you want to build and click Next.
Review Topics
Agent topics and actions define how the agent uses AI capabilities to do specific jobs, like drafting an email. In the Review Topics section, you can see the topics and actions the agent uses to interact with leads. You won’t need to do anything with these now, but later you might want to make customizations to suit the specific needs of how the agent works in your business.
- For now, notice that all available topics (Send Outreach, Respond to Prospect, and Manage Opt-Out) have been added.
- Click Next.
Define Settings
The Description and Company fields help ground the prompts, so it’s important to fill them with as much accurate detail as possible.
- The Name autopopulates but should look something like:
Agentforce Sales Development Rep
- The API Name also autopopulates and should look something like:
Agentforce_Sales_Development_Rep
- For the Description, Role, and Company fields, fill in as much detail as possible.
- Agent User: Select the Agentforce SDR user record you created.
- Check the Enrich event logs with conversation data box to allow for auditing specific SDR engagements later within Agent Builder.
- Click Next.
Language and Tone
These settings let you control the language your agents use and how formal or casual your agent sounds in emails.
- For now, we're going to skip the Select Language and Tone section. You can customize this later.
- Click Next.
Upload Files
This section is where you can upload your organizational information so it's usable by your agent to answer your customers questions accurately.
- Click Upload Files.
- Upload text, HTML, or PDF files containing specific information like product descriptions, price sheets, white papers and more. For more information on files you can upload and size specifics, check out this Salesforce Help article.
- Click Next.
Engagement Rules
Engagement Rules determine when and how your agent interacts with leads. Automate outreach by adding conditions for assigning leads to the agent, connecting an email account, and setting an outreach schedule. When an assigned lead meets the conditions you specify, the SDR agent begins performing task sequences on a seller’s behalf.
- Select an option for Assign Lead to Agent When.
- Select Field, Operator, and Value to determine when the Agent will take action. For example, the Field is set as Lead Rating, the Operator is set to equals and the Value is set to Cool. You use this example again shortly.
- Select Email Account.
- Select Maximum attempts, time between attempts and maximum number of replies.
- Choose how many email attempts, including the initial email and subsequent nudges you want the agent to perform.
- Choose the amount of time between attempts.
- Choose the maximum number of replies the agent can send in response to a lead’s questions. Set an outreach schedule for the hours and days the agent performs its outreach.
- Choose how many email attempts, including the initial email and subsequent nudges you want the agent to perform.
- Click Connect an Account to connect an email account to your Agentforce SDR. Accept the terms and then enter the email address you used for the SDR agent’s user record. This is the email account the agent will use to nurture leads assigned to it. Note that this email account connected here must be the same address that’s included on the SDR agent’s user record.
- Click Connect Account.
- Select your Outreach Schedule. This is also covered in step 4.
- Click Create.
- Click Activate.
Great work! You activated your new agent. Now it’s time to test it out.
Prepare to Test Your Agent
To prepare for testing, you need to complete a few more tasks to get your agent ready. First, you add the Activate Agentforce SDR Action to your Lead page layouts. You can manually activate the SDR agent on lead records using the Activate Agentforce SDR action. Do that now.
- From the home page, click
and select Setup.
- Navigate to the Object Manager tab.
- In the Quick Find box, search for and select Lead.
- Select Page Layouts from the left-hand menu bar.
- Select Lead Layout from the list of Lead Page Layout options.
- Click Mobile & Lightning Actions.
- Select the Activate Agentforce SDR action and drag it to the Salesforce Mobile and Lightning Experience Actions section.
- Click Save.
Great job! Once added to the lead page layout, you see Activate Agentforce SDR in the Actions menu on the lead record page. Now you need to create a lead record to test with. This test lead can be used to test agent interactions.
- From the home page, click
.
- Search for and select Sales.
- Click the Leads tab.
- Click New to create a new Lead.
- Enter your test lead information, such as first and last name, Company, Lead Source, and Industry fields. These fields help the agent personalize its outreach.
- Set the lead email address to one you can access for testing so you can monitor and respond to emails from the SDR agent. Note that the lead email address can’t be in the same domain as the agent’s email.
Test Your Agent
Next, you test the agent by sending an initial outreach email. You can test the initial outreach email by activating the SDR agent on the test lead record you created. You can do this manually or you can test the auto-lead assignment. Here’s how you can test the auto-lead assignment.
- From the Sales home screen, navigate to the Leads tab.
- Select a lead from your All Leads list.
- Click in the Rating field and update the rating to Cool or Cold to match the assignment criteria set in Agent Builder. This field triggers the SDR to begin outreach to the lead. An initial outreach email is scheduled and appears in the lead’s Activity Timeline. If you don’t see the email, don’t worry. Simply adjust the activity filters to show all activities.
If you'd like to reschedule the Outreach Email for faster testing, check out this help article for more information on how to edit, reschedule, or cancel an SDR agent email. Once generated, the scheduled email appears in the Activity Timeline approximately 60 minutes before being sent to the lead. If the email is scheduled to be sent outside the predetermined work hours, the agent sends it during the next available working hour.
Nudge email
Once you receive the initial outreach email that you just used, don’t reply to it. After the Time Between Attempts has passed, the agent will send a Nudge email.
The schedule nudge email appears on the Activity Timeline 1 day before being sent. You want to reschedule the Nudge email so you can test faster. To do this:
- Navigate to the Lead Record page you'd like to test with.
- On the Activity Timeline, click View, Edit, or Reschedule Email.
- Click Edit Send Time on Email Compose popup.
- Set the new send time to 2 minutes from the current time.
After sending the initial email, the agent immediately generates and schedules the follow-up email. It appears on the Activity Timeline. If a customer replies, the agent replaces the follow-up nudge email on the Activity Timeline with a replay email. The timing of the nudge email is based on the Time Between Attempts you set in the Engagement Rules of the Agent Builder.
Nice work! You have successfully configured and activated Agentforce SDR. Then you took the steps necessary to set up the agent for testing, and ran some tests. In the next unit, you learn how to customize agent prompts.