Salesforce reimagines Sales Cloud to drive growth in a sell-from-anywhere world

Salesforce has introduced the next generation of Sales Cloud — new technology to support a digital-first selling world. Sales Cloud 360 is the complete growth platform for the new world of digital sales, with flexible technology and the world’s largest sales partner ecosystem that companies of every size can rely on to grow revenue and boost productivity.

Sixty-one percent of sales people believe their roles have changed permanently since COVID-19 began. Even when salespeople are able to get back on the road and into offices, 51% expect to travel less than they did pre-pandemic, and fewer than half expect to go back to the office.

With business optimism at an all-time high as CEOs expect a return to growth in 2021, companies must quickly create new sales processes and adapt to new technology to ensure they can lead in this competitive landscape. Sales organizations will be tasked with measuring business health where there is no sales baseline, benchmark, or year-over-year comparison to track performance against.

“Salesforce created the playbook for sales 22 years ago, and today we’re rewriting it for an all-digital world,” said Warren Wick, EVP AMER Commercial Sales and Chief Revenue Officer, Sales Cloud. “Over the past year, we held more than six million calls with customers to understand what they needed to be successful as they worked to transform their business with more urgency than ever before. We’ve reimagined Sales Cloud to guide every company as they rethink the digital sales experience, from leads to coaching to processing revenue.”

As teams blend virtual interactions with face-to-face meetings, reimagine processes to be more efficient and provide the new, self-service buying experiences that customers have come to expect, the reimagined Sales Cloud 360 will deliver:

Virtual Selling: Seamless, virtual interactions will continue to be a critical part of sales and enablement in the year ahead.

• Salesforce Meetings is now generally available and makes virtual conversations more engaging. Ahead of a meeting, salespeople have a 360 view of all attendees on a single screen — including account history, open service cases and bios. Once the meeting starts, both the presentation and the presenter are shown together for a more engaging, human connection. After the call, automated action items prompt the salesperson to schedule a follow-up meeting or create a contact for a new decision maker.

• Only 38% of salespeople say they’ve received training on virtual selling over the past year. With myTrailhead, Salesforce’s digital skilling platform fully integrated into Sales Cloud, sales teams can view relevant enablement materials, like competitor analyses, and new reps can onboard quickly with training resources, all surfaced right in their workspace.

Sales accountability, anywhere: With fewer face-to-face interactions, sales managers will need to rethink how they track sales rep performance, provide meaningful coaching and build trust with their teams.

• Pipeline Inspection uses AI to narrow focus on the deals that matter most while tracking pipeline changes week by week, pinpointing which deals may need their support or coaching.

• Einstein Conversation Insights analyzes video call transcripts to visualize trending keywords, such as product names, or types of interactions, such as competitor mentions. By understanding where teams are struggling or what customers want to discuss, managers can customize training and 1:1 coaching to better align to the team’s precise needs when they can’t walk the sales floor.

Artificial intelligence for everyone: Sales will be increasingly data-driven as selling cycles shrink. Teams will need to understand the information at their fingertips.

• AI-powered predictions, insights and automated explanations with Tableau Business Science lets sales teams analyze data and make smart decisions, faster, without relying on a data scientist — for example, when updating quotas, looking at forecast accuracy or reassessing selling strategies — all using clicks, not code.

• With Einstein Opportunity Scoring, each salesperson sees a score representing the likelihood that an opportunity will be won. Einstein shows the factors that have contributed most to the score, both positively and negatively. For example, when extra steps are added to an enterprise deal, it means the deal is progressing. For an SMB customer, a delayed close deal warrants a lower score.

Easy, fast and flexible setup: The pandemic is a clear reminder that successful businesses must be able to easily react in real time to changing market conditions — just 25% of salespeople rate their workflows and processes as excellent⁴. 

• MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce connects data and apps without writing code so sales operations teams can connect apps and systems to Salesforce, automate sales processes, and unlock richer sales insights without waiting on development resources.

• Global Models for Opportunity Scoring use aggregate, anonymized trends across Salesforce customers to empower teams with AI before they have enough of their own data to drive intelligent opportunity scoring.

• Salesforce global strategic partner Accenture is helping customers deliver growth by reimagining the buying experience across industries and is using its industry and functional expertise to create unique AI-powered and data-driven solutions for selling in today’s anywhere environment.

• Customers can find ready-to-install apps integrated with Sales Cloud on the Salesforce AppExchange — the world’s leading enterprise cloud marketplace. In addition, customers can connect to the right consulting partner to implement scalable Sales Cloud solutions for their specific business needs through the Consultant Finder on AppExchange.

These innovations are already enabling Salesforce customers to sell from anywhere:

Since the pandemic took hold, companies are turning to Salesforce to drive their business’ recovery — now creating 21% more sales leads daily in 2021 compared to 2020.

• One of the catalysts for Snowflake’s rapid growth is its channel partner network. Thanks to the flexibility and easy setup of Sales Cloud, Snowflake was able to transform its partner sales process in just nine weeks, saving 1,500 hours of development time. Now, instead of manually onboarding partners, Snowflake has a completely digital process for partner sales to drive growth.

• Honeywell uses Salesforce to empower its employees to work regardless of where they are located. “Our sellers were able to continue their sales process virtually without skipping a beat,” said Victor Abelairas, GM of Tridium Innovation at Honeywell Connected Enterprise. “But more importantly, we were able to empower the rest of the company to stay engaged with the sales team and know what was happening with customers at all times, without having the day-to-day interaction in the office that they were used to. At the end of the day, we want to provide a better customer experience by understanding our customers more holistically than we would have otherwise.”

• Jet It, a growing business disrupting the private jet space, saw sales revenue increase 3X year over year within the first 12 months using Salesforce. “We are in an industry where failure is not an option. We didn’t have time for a misstep, so it was smart to leverage Salesforce to ensure we were off and running from day one,” said Glenn Gonzales, Founder & CEO, Jet It.
• Cytiva is a global provider of technologies and services that advance and accelerate the development and manufacture of therapeutics. During the COVID-19 pandemic, customer demand spiked and progressing new opportunities and orders as quickly as possible was key. In a matter of weeks, Cytiva implemented a dedicated dashboard in Sales Cloud, enabling Cytiva’s leaders to track opportunities by customer, country and product, and then share this information with finance and manufacturing teams. “Salesforce has helped our teams collaborate more effectively in a highly virtual and data-rich sales environment, within the Salesforce platform,” said Conor McKechnie, CMO, Cytiva. “This has improved our account planning efforts as communication across teams is instant and real time. We are more effective, more productive and better informed about what is happening.”