How much time do you believe sales and sales operations teams actually spend in Salesforce? At least a few hours a day in all likelihood, and that’s how it should be. As a CRM, Salesforce should unify all of the data sellers need to attain their quota (deals, customer information, team collaborations, etc.); after all, it is a one-stop shop that propels your revenue stream forward. But what if this was just the beginning?
Let’s explore exactly how Salesforce’s solutions can allow your sales teams to focus on what’s most important: nurturing customer relationships instead of struggling with admin work.
What Is Salesforce Revenue Intelligence?
Even before the generative AI revolution took the tech world by storm, Salesforce had invested in multiple AI-powered products over the years. A few of them, as you would expect, are big parts of the Revenue Intelligence offering – alongside industry specific, actionable insights. Additionally, as you may have already heard, the Service Intelligence app (also launched recently) provides a comprehensive experience to support leadership and teams.
The ultimate goal of the two apps in Revenue Intelligence, Revenue Insights and Einstein Account Management, is to supercharge teams’ productivity while offering actionable insights and visibility into the items that matter most through dedicated dashboards.
Revenue Insights and Sales Rep Command Center
The CRM Analytics powered Revenue Insights Dashboard provides your sales leadership with all the information they need, at a glance. While there are multiple tabs to choose from, the Overview page includes a high-level overview of all key metrics.
While the Revenue Insights Dashboard does offer a much-needed bird’s-eye view of the pipeline and attainment, what if sales leaders want to dive into particular scenarios based on pipeline changes while getting ready for their forecast calls? Well, search no further than the Commit Calculator, which became available in Winter ‘24!
This calculator provides a real-time, interactive view, allowing scenario modeling based on different what ifs, such as different Opportunities moving in or out. Leaders can also repeat different scenarios as many times as needed, as this exercise will in no way affect the existing data.
For the forecasting call itself, the new Forecast Insights tab can help drive the right conversations based on clear metrics – metrics that contribute to the full picture, as well as various details including a YoY analysis of the team’s velocity for historical comparison.
Let’s go back to the available Dashboards and views. With Einstein Discovery models, you can also bring the power of machine learning to your analytics with a click of a button (as long as there is enough data to be evaluated). Descriptive, Diagnostic, or even Predictive answers can be obtained with the use of this functionality.
Sales Rep Command Center
With Revenue Intelligence, Salesforce is committed to offering insightful and actionable analytics to everyone – especially important as different roles within the same organization might have polar opposite needs. While, in this situation, the data would be quite similar, let’s look at what is available for a seller.
While the Revenue Insights app is an amazing resource for sales managers or sales leaders to drill into data, a frontline sales rep may notice that some items won’t even display data, such as the direct reports, and that this view is not really tailored for them.
Before the Summer ‘23 release, customers would generally go down the customization route to provide the tailored seller experience. This is no longer the case, as Salesforce introduced an out-of-the-box option: the Sales Rep Command Center. This view brings to sales reps the insights they need, such as how their forecast has changed over time and how their current pipeline coverage looks (including a What If Calculator!). In addition, reps can easily view highlighted Opportunities that are stagnating and waiting to be actioned.
These are only a few of the readily available out-of-the-box Dashboards included with Revenue Intelligence, feel free to take a look over all of them here. Additionally, if none of the out-of-the-box ones are exactly what your company can make use of, there’s no limit as far as what you can continue building directly in CRM Analytics.
Pipeline Inspection
Perhaps my favorite of the accountability features Salesforce has made available for sellers is Pipeline Inspection, which can be made available to all users easily. More recently, this has been made the default Opportunities view (instead of the list view) for ease of access.
The advantage of this functionality is that it gives the familiar spreadsheet-like feel due to the inline editing functionality, enhanced with Einstein Scoring and Insights, as well as clear highlights for Close Date, Stage, and Amount changes – just to name a few.
Additionally, Pipeline Inspection makes available the Push Count field, which comes in handy in reporting. It also counts how many times an Opportunity’s Close Date has been pushed out by a calendar month.
The Revenue Intelligence user license enabled the additional Flow tab within the Pipeline Inspection window, which allows sales managers to seamlessly visualize how their pipeline has shifted over time.
Einstein Account Management
Here’s another out-of-the-box offering renamed and enhanced as of Spring ‘23: Einstein Account Management leverages both CRM Analytics and Einstein Discovery to clearly highlight Account potential and offer a streamlined way to take action on whitespace accounts. Model-based predictions will be made available within the Inspector tab, as well as what impacted the calculation of the actual score.
Accessible from the Account list view in a similar way to how Pipeline Inspection is accessed for Opportunities, this functionality will help sellers review upsell possibilities on their Accounts. It will even allow access to those valuable metrics resulting from benchmark analysis between similar accounts – all within a single page!
In addition, the Whitespace view below (which was introduced as an enhancement) is sure to help sellers easily assess and visualize any other products or services a customer may need on top of what they already have.
The view can be broken down by different metrics, as well as by Product Name or Product Family, hence removing the need for the sellers to go around the Account and check these items prior to generating new deals for their Territories.
This functionality can be easily used alongside the Product Insights Dashboard (added in Winter ‘24) to identify the success of different products and what worked well for other opportunities and industries.
Get Started With Revenue Intelligence
Salesforce ensured that, from an implementation perspective, it’s mainly about installing the templates. There is no prior experience needed in CRM Analytics at this point, as the views will become available based on the data you already have in your organization and automatically generated models. This approach makes it straightforward to integrate best practices directly in the flow of work, without the need for extra development.
Of course, the predictive models can be further enhanced based on the business requirements and specifics of your company. However, this does mean that the change itself will ultimately be treated as an Einstein Discovery project.
Summary
Finally, the Revenue Intelligence suite of products really is worth considering to ensure visibility and accountability across the end-to-end revenue cycle. Reliable reporting, trustworthy insights, and a straightforward, Salesforce-specific user experience is sure to drive deal closure through the roof!