Driving growth in today’s pandemic world is a challenge. As in-person meetings transition to digital channels, many sales teams are closing deals virtually, Bill Patterson, GM of customer relationship management apps at Salesforce, noted in a press release. A recent ZoomInfo survey found that in 2020, 41% of sales reps stopped using events for prospecting and 19% started using video calls for the first time.
Salesforce announced new Sales Cloud features designed to provide customers with AI-powered insights and self-service options. The capabilities come on the heels of tighter Slack integration with Salesforce’s Customer 360 platform, as well as an expanded partnership between Salesforce and Amazon to launch integrations and no-code applications.
New Sales Cloud features unveiled today include Revenue Intelligence, which combines Sales Cloud, Einstein, and Tableau tools to analyze the health of a business. Einstein Deal Insights provides AI-powered predictions like deals likely to close or push and sales-closing KPIs, including attainment, win rate, and quarterly progress across customer interactions. Meanwhile, prebuilt analytics powered by Tableau highlight gaps in targets and recommendations to drive forecast accuracy, in addition to best practices from top-performing sales reps and deals.
Revenue and Sales enablement tracking
Beyond this, the enhanced Sales Cloud platform can handle revenue actions and access metrics for insights into a recurring business and integrate with ecommerce, in-app, or other self-service touchpoints. Via Einstein, it also now enables companies to prioritize collection efforts by predicting the risk of late payments or non-payments and recommends the next best action to ensure consistent revenue streams.
“Equipping sales leaders with insights throughout the entire sales and revenue cycle, from closing deals to setting forecasts to building new pipelines, is imperative as sales organizations evolve from relying on intuition to hard data,” Salesforce wrote in a blog post. “Smooth onboarding, training, and development experiences for sales reps are essential to creating engaged teams; retaining and attracting strong talent; and ultimately closing deals.”