Salesforce today extended the reach of its Sales Cloud platform to provide tighter integration with finance and marketing processes.
Will Moxley, senior vice president for Sales Cloud product Management at Salesforce, says it’s become clear that sales management software the company delivers as a service needs to, for example, be integrated with various types of billing systems employed in the accounting department. To achieve that goal, an update to Sales Cloud now supports both usage-based pricing models and subscriptions. A Flexible Invoicing module then makes sure invoices for products and services are automatically generated at specific intervals.
“This capability enables sales people to automate what is the most difficult last mile of the sales process,” says Moxley.
At the same time, Salesforce is also adding support for the Salesforce Einstein artificial intelligence framework in the Salesforce Pardot marketing software the company makes as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. Einstein AI will be employed to both score sales leads as well as better identify what types of marketing campaigns have been most successful.
Finally, Salesforce is moving to further automate sales processes. The latest edition of Sales Cloud includes a Sales Cadences capability through which sales managers can create custom, pre-built activity sequences for their sales teams. There is also a new Work Queues capability through which sales managers can create a prioritized email and call list right inside Sales Cloud. Work Queues employs insights from Sales Cadences and Einstein Lead Scoring to inform sales teams what steps to take next based on pipeline processes defined by sales managers.
Moxley notes that most sales people only spend just under a third of their time selling. The rest of their time is consumed by other processes that should be automated, say Moxley.
Tighter integration between sales, marketing and finance is at the heart of most digital business transformation initiatives. The challenge many organizations face today is figuring out where to start those transformations in a way that creates a better customer experience. Most organizations will soon discover the best way to invariably get started on any digital transformation project is to follow the money.
