Salesforce is making quite a few changes to its platform lately, in an effort to support marketing and advertising.
On Thursday the company announced features in Sales Cloud to help chief
revenue officers (CROs), and the marketing and sales teams that report to them, overcome the unique growth challenges they face, especially as businesses expect to return to pre-pandemic growth
levels.
CROs are being pressured to generate and bring in additional revenue, but to do that they need to forecast predictable revenue growth against current sales and marketing initiatives.
It’s all in the data. If CROs can’t get a clear view into disparate data across the business--in spreadsheets, customer conversations, pipeline data, forecasting calls, and marketing
funnels--then how can they accurately predict growth. More importantly, how can they rally their teams to make their forecasts a reality.
Salesforce wants to change that with a suite of
revenue intelligence tools in the Sales Cloud platform. It unlocks data to determine what works.
By building this new suite of tools into Sales Cloud, Salesforce developers think the
platform can solve a massive pain point for teams tasked with growth and help those in charge build accurate annual forecasts for up to five years.
For example, an energy company can now
easily factor in expected megawatts that changes seasonally; or a web service company can base forecasts off monthly active users or monthly recurring revenue, rather than vanity-driven annual
recurring revenue that is typically used, but far less accurate.
These tools are designed into Sales Cloud for employees tasked with generating revenue, namely chief revenue officers.
Marketing and sales teams typically report to them, but the data informing their campaigns can be all over the place.
These new features plug in data from various different channels to predict
more accurate revenue projections, so that activity across the business can be aligned to meet those forecasts. Think of it as a tool to optimize revenue that heavily relies on
information from marketing and sales campaigns.
New features include managing the pipeline, improving forecast accuracy, revenue analytics templates, and getting a better understanding of
customer signals with actionable insights and data.