Calls for a faster, more frictionless B2B buying experience are nothing new. The process has been far too complicated for far too long. But the disruption we’ve seen this year as a result of the pandemic has renewed the focus on these calls and accelerated the need for organizations to respond.
That’s where the new Salesforce Revenue Cloud comes into play. Unveiled at 2020’s Dreamforce to You, Revenue Cloud brings together CPQ and Billing, Partner Relationship Management and B2B Commerce capabilities to help businesses better control revenue growth across channels, including direct sales partners and digital commerce.
The Top 3 Features to Look Out for in Revenue Cloud
As a longtime Salesforce consultant with a focus on CPQ, I was highly anticipating the launch of Revenue Cloud and it did not disappoint. While there’s a lot of exciting stuff coming out of this new launch, three things in particular stand out as the top features to keep an eye on.
1) Completely coordinated buying experiences through Customer 360
What do you need to know? Revenue Cloud is the only revenue management solution built entirely on Customer 360, which provides a strong foundation to transform the complete end-to-end buying experience. For example, your customers can start browsing products online and if they need help, they can simply click a button to connect with a sales rep who can provide contextual guidance without missing a beat.
Additionally, Revenue Cloud promises to improve one of the most forgotten customer touchpoints — paying bills — by consolidating all of a customer’s charges into a single statement, regardless of the sales channel or revenue model.
What does this mean for the future? Quite simply, Revenue Cloud fully unifies the lead-to-revenue process. Equally as important, it does so directly in Salesforce, a platform your teams already trust and know how to use.
Why is this important? In our modern environment, companies often interact with their customers and partners in a multitude of different channels (direct sales, self service, partner portals, etc.). However, each of those channels typically uses their own varied set of technologies, whether it’s CRM, web stores, custom portals or anything else. This makes it difficult to create a connected experience for customers and leads to challenges around managing the various types of data and processes.
Revenue Cloud aims to solve this problem by bringing all those channels together. In doing so, it allows you to sell different types of products through various methods to different groups of people — all using the same set of tools. This standardization of tools can increase the accuracy of quotes and pricing, provide a unified invoice even if those products were purchased in different ways and bridge the gap between the front office and the back office.
2) Centralized customer asset lifecycle management
What do you need to know? Revenue Cloud offers a customer asset lifecycle management feature that automatically converts and stores every purchase a customer makes onto their account. This provides a single view of everything each customer purchases and how those assets change over time. It also provides a single location to manage the lifecycle of subscription or time-based products.
Importantly, this feature also allows reps to monitor how customers are pacing against their current contract (e.g. are they at risk of hitting overages?) and manage any upsell or renewal processes from a single place. Bringing this type of contract change into Salesforce makes the entire process more efficient and accurate.
What does this mean for the future? Giving sales teams easy access to actionable information about their customers’ purchases and product usage will help them get ahead of any potential issues and drive additional revenue.
Why is this important? The seemingly simple question of “what has my customer purchased and how has it changed over time?” has always been difficult to answer. Revenue Cloud changes that by creating a place to see it all in one, easy-to-understand place that gives users the context they need to keep customers happy and buying more. And it doesn’t just work for standard one-time purchase products, but also for subscriptions and even usage-based products. Ultimately, putting this information directly into the hands of your account managers will empower them to head off issues before they start and drive additional sales.
3) Support for customer-centric sales processes through digital channels
What do you need to know? Revenue Cloud touches more than just direct sales: It allows for fast connections across a variety of digital channels and touchpoints. Specifically, because Revenue Cloud ensures that all products originate from the same price book on a unified platform, what used to take months can now happen in a matter of clicks. Sales teams can produce quotes right away and even make products available for customers to buy in a self-service way through branded B2B storefronts (and a very important capability to note is that adding new products and channels requires only clicks, not code!).
For instance, customers can visit a fully branded B2B storefront and view products to purchase on their own time and even on mobile. They can easily add those products to their cart, including things like additional user logins that they can purchase based on consumption, and see rates for those products. And if they want to get in touch with a sales rep, they can easily do so from the same experience by requesting a quote for the items in their cart. Overall, it’s a very customer-friendly experience that eases friction in the buying process.
What does this mean for the future? The options for growing revenue are endless when your business can handle online sales and rep-driven sales through the same technology. Additionally, offering customers the option to buy directly from an online store fulfills a long-awaited expectation.
Why is this important? So many companies want to offer self-service buying options for their customers on top of their existing direct sales, but managing both sales tools is expensive and time consuming. Revenue Cloud reduces this friction by allowing you to sell the same baseline products through these different channels.
Are You Ready to Accelerate Growth with Revenue Cloud?
Revenue Cloud brings together a number of key revenue-driving tools under one roof, and having held a front-row seat to how businesses previously handled these activities, it’s exciting to see all the pieces come together in such a coherent, solid platform.
Ready to learn more about Revenue Cloud and how you can start taking advantage of these capabilities and more in your own business? Contact AllCloud today to discover how we can help.