Salesforce Expands the Sales Cloud Platform

Salesforce.com has enhanced the Sales Cloud platform to create a more integrated sales process from lead-to-cash. Now, companies can complete the entire sales process, from marketing to sales to billing, right within Salesforce.

"Automation, integration, and speed are essential to business success in the Fourth Industrial Revolution," said Adam Blitzer, executive vice president and general manager of Salesforce Sales Cloud, in a statement. "By extending our Sales Cloud platform with faster prospecting, flexible billing, and intelligent marketing automation, we're providing our customers with a comprehensive and unparalleled lead-to-cash platform."

The enhancements include updates to High Velocity Sales, which arms insides sales reps with insights and tools to identify the best leads, eliminate busy work, and boost pipeline. Updates to High Velocity Sales now deliver new levels of automation and intelligence to help reps with prospecting and managing leads. They include the following:

• Sales Cadences, which enable managers to create customized, pre-built activity sequences for their sales teams. With Sales Cadences, best practices are built right into the CRM, guiding inside sales reps through the prospecting process, including when to email a prospect, when to call, and even what to say, with call scripts and email templates.
• Work Queues, which create prioritized email and call lists right inside Sales Cloud. Based on insights from Sales Cadences and Einstein Lead Scoring, which uses machine learning to automatically analyze which leads are most likely to convert into opportunities, Work Queues guides inside sales reps with next steps to take.

Salesforce also added Salesforce Billing to Salesforce CPQ. Powered by Lightning, Salesforce Billing helps businesses build deeper, recurring relationships with their customers, automate renewals and adjustments, and streamline the revenue lifecycle without ever leaving Salesforce. Salesforce Billing includes the following:

• Usage-Based Pricing;
• Evergreen Subscriptions that automatically renew customer contracts; and
• Flexible Invoicing, which enables companies to automatically bill customers when predetermined intervals and milestones are achieved.

Salesforce also moved its Pardot offerings on Lightning and Einstein, aligning sales and marketing on a single platform using the same data sets, campaign insights, and customer engagement history. New features for Pardot include the following:

• Einstein Campaign Insights, which enables marketers to drill down into what drives campaign engagement. Powered by machine learning, Einstein Campaign Insights uncovers which marketing campaigns are most successful based on content and subject line engagement.
• Einstein Behavior Scoring, which identifies prospects most likely to convert, based on their website and email engagement behavior.

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