After Salesforce reported a 2-cent first-quarter earnings beat and raised its guidance by $100 million for fiscal year 2018, Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said rival cloud plays simply cannot keep up.

Not only is Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff predicting that artificial intelligence will one day help run everyone's companies — he's already using it at Salesforce.

He has a special, unreleased version of Einstein, the company's artificial-intelligence tech baked into its products, helping him run his company, he told Wall Street analysts on Thursday during the company's quarterly conference call.

As more teams become bullish on smarter tech, the sales industry will experience an entirely new way of selling. Flexible cloud technology tools now let you chart your own course so you can spend less time trying to work around a clunky sales process and more time closing deals. These trends and changes are exciting, yet it makes the task of choosing sales technology endless. At the same time, the basics still apply. As shared by Gary Vaynerchuk in a recent Leading Edge webcast, “In sales, you have to be good at your craft, and you have to love your craft. If you don't love sales, you have no chance.”

Mistakes to avoid if you want to close the deal