The News
A few days ago Salesforce announced an update
to its sales cloud that features Einstein powered predictions, insights,
and productivity. The press release is linked above or alternatively you can
read it below, along with some comments of mine.
Salesforce is (again) addressing the three
main issues that plague CRM implementations since Tom Siebel coined this term.
Let me paraphrase them>
1.
Salespeople do not find the
time to do their job, which is selling. Instead they are spending an inordinate
amount of time entering data that supposedly only helps their management
controlling them a little more.
2.
Sales managers do not have
enough visibility into what is going on in their area of responsibility, what
their team is doing (and why), whether they are doing the right thing. The same
problem, of course, applies to the Head of Sales, just at a bigger scale.
3.
Sales operations is charged
with creating meaningful reports that tell the one single truth. This they need
to do using data that resides somewhere, data that is distributed, instead of
some central consolidated place. Data that is essentially not fully
trustworthy.
Salesforce is doing this using a triple of
features:
·
The Salesforce resident AI:
Einstein to help sales persons identify the most promising opportunities to
work upon
·
The Salesforce Inbox that
increases productivity by attributing emails to the right accounts as well as
connecting to the calendar
·
Sales Analytics to help
salespeople and their management to visualize, interpret, and use the available
data
The Press Release
Ask any rep what their favorite part of the
day is, and chances are that their answers won’t involve the words “logging” or
“data.” Ask managers what they really want from their sales teams, and I bet
you that they’ll ask for more visibility into what their reps are doing and for
their reps to spend more time talking to customers, building relationships. As
for sales operations? They probably would prefer if answering business
questions didn’t involve four systems, two excel sheets, and a pivot table.
These traditional systems don’t set sales
teams up for success today or in the future. In fact, having all of these
disparate systems causes sales reps
to spend 25% of their time logging data instead of doing what
really matters -- building relationships and selling. Which is why we’re
introducing a supercharged Sales Cloud
Einstein. Bringing together Sales Cloud Einstein, Salesforce Inbox,
and Sales Analytics,
to deliver more predictions, insights and productivity gains than ever before.
It’s bringing the power of artificial intelligence to every step of the sales
process. So how does it all work? Great question. Let’s break it down.
AI
with Sales Cloud Einstein
AI is continuing to
take center stage, revolutionizing the way we work. With Einstein, AI
prioritizes focus on the most critical areas to help every sales rep increase
their productivity and win rates. Features like Einstein Lead Scoring can turn
mountains of data into critical signals that have the power of identifying the
leads that are most likely to convert, and Einstein Opportunity Scoring can
identify a poorly-performing opportunity proactively so a sales rep can keep it
on track -- before it falls off. Einstein Opportunity Insights give reps the
ability to address at-risk deals and learn best practices from the most
successful ones. And, when reps are armed with the right insights about their
accounts’ businesses, conversations become more efficient and effective,
enabling reps to sell more.
Productivity
with Salesforce Inbox
Did you know that
on average, sales reps spend 64% of their time
on non-selling tasks like data entry? With Salesforce Inbox
reps can maximize the time they spend selling by taking advantage of automated
data capture--all of those emails are logged to the right records,
automatically. With built-in email productivity, reps can eliminate the hassle
of scheduling meetings. Plus, they can see their top email priorities, right on
their phones, and, get visibility into their opportunities, leads, accounts,
and contacts.
Reports
and Dashboards with Sales Analytics
Instead of
exporting, collating, aligning and analyzing, sales teams can just click in to
built-in analytics, with ready-made dashboards that make it easy to understand
and explore whitespace and team performance. Reps can uncover pipeline trends,
and take action immediately. Sales leaders can understand how the team is
functioning across regions and products, and identify top sellers, as well as
those that may need more coaching. And, it’s easy to analyze deals from lead to
close with over 40 out-of-the-box KPIs.
By combining all
three products, we’re able to create a Sales Cloud Einstein that is a
predictive data scientist for every sales team. A constant companion that
drives productivity through efficiency and insights. No more point systems, no
more multiple contracts, no more copy-and-paste, no more switching. Just a
clean, easy, modern solution to make every company a smarter, more efficient,
more productive, customer-focused company.
Sales Cloud
Einstein (now including Salesforce Inbox and Sales Analytics) is priced at $50
per user, per month.
Click here to learn more
about Sales Cloud Einstein.
The Bigger Picture
Artificial intelligence / machine learning
will continue to permeate business applications. The good news is that there is
less and less talk about AI, if not in a kind of personal way, like Einstein or
Leonardo (and yeah, I know that Leonardo does not only cover AI). This shows
that the big vendors are more and more going away from a technology narrative
to a results narrative. AI is not a means by itself but a means to an end. And this
end is doing more with less effort.
My PoV and Analysis
By addressing these three pain points of
sales teams Salesforce is partly using some pages out of the Nimble playbook. Especially the mobile app
for the Salesforce Inbox looks remarkably familiar to me. I do not say that
this is a copy, but that moves like this one are actually inevitable, and that
CRM (and CEM) solutions will become ever more similar.
The combination
of these three features and how they are laid out now tells the same story that
I heard about the same time from clari, a
company founded in 2013 and that focuses on “transforming the way they
[companies] sell, make decisions, and grow”.
Now, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft are telling
the same story.
This, along with the observation that even
small companies are more and more referring to the term platform, reiterates that business applications are commoditizing
fast and that the main battleground is becoming the fabric of a business, i.e. becoming
the platform of choice.
For Salesforce this is an important move
as, all Salesforce “hype” taken away, there is a perception out in the market
that the Salesforce architecture is aging.
On top of this Salesforce is not a bargain
(judging by the list prices) nor is the company riding on a high profitability.
And the other 3 of the big four can tell end-to-end
stories that cover the full value chain. Plus all of the big four are clawing
their way from the enterprise market down to the midmarket and eventually the
smaller businesses, which is the place where the opportunity lies.
With that, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP being
able to tell a story of a more modern platform, and being attacked by small and
nimble players that can ride on Salesforce’s and other platforms, Salesforce
needs to continue to show that it is on the forefront of innovation with the benefits
of all user groups in mind.
I think that this worked out fine with this
release. Salesforce is at least on par with the competition.
But is this a super charged sales cloud?
No, it isn’t. Unless the previous engine was seriously underpowered – which it
wasn’t.
The race towards becoming the platform of
choice continues.
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