Salesforce released updates to its Sales Cloud Platform designed to help companies execute the entire sales process within the platform. The announcement includes three key features, High Velocity Sales, Salesforce Billing and Pardot for marketing, which aim to streamline and integrate the process from marketing to sales to finance.
High Velocity Sales builds on Salesforce’s Einstein High Velocity Sales Cloud release last year. The updated tool includes two new offerings designed to help sales become more productive and generate greater pipeline:
- Sales Cadences to help the sales team create best practices for prospecting, including when to call, what to say over the phone and what to include in an email; and
- Work Queues, which empower sales representatives to create prioritized email and call lists for outreach.
Salesforce Billing is a new add on to the Salesforce CPQ that aims to bridge the gap between sales and finance so sales can automate subscription renewals and streamline revenue all within the Salesforce platform. It includes three main components:
- Usage-Based Pricing, with which the sales team can deliver customized quotes, contracts and orders based on customer consumption;
- Evergreen Subscriptions that allow customer contracts and billing to be automatically renewed; and
- Flexible Invoicing, where invoices can be automatically sent when predetermined intervals (i.e. monthly/quarterly) or customer milestones are met.
Pardot is now available through Salesforce Einstein and Lightning. By bringing AI-powered insights to marketing, the company aims to create alignment across sales and marketing departments. The release also includes new Pardot features, including:
- Einstein Campaign Insights, which can identify factors that drive higher campaign engagement; and
- Einstein Behavior Scoring, which uses machine learning to analyze previous campaigns and engagement to detect prospects that are likely to convert.
According to Will Moxley, SVP of Sales Cloud Product Management at Salesforce, the updates will be rolled out over the next few months. Some features, such as Flexible Customer Billing are available to Salesforce users immediately, while others such as Evergreen Subscriptions and High Velocity Sales will be released in October and February, respectively.
“We’ve tried to deliver a complete CRM since we started the company,” said Moxley in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “As time evolved and as the company evolved, what it meant to be a complete CRM has changed. These announcements are about continuing that evolution and delivering the most complete lead-to-cash solution for sales.”
