Salesforce adds process improvements to Sales Cloud, Einstein AI to Pardot

Salesforce is updating its Sales Cloud today to provide what the company said is a more integrated process, plus adding its Einstein AI to its B2B marketing platform, Pardot.

In the spring of last year, the company introduced High Velocity Sales, which offered several new features to help salespeople close deals faster. Several of the enhancements introduced Thursday are intended to build out the unified processes begun with High Velocity.

SVP of Sales Cloud Product Management Will Moxley pointed out in an interview that many new sales reps are right out of college, so the new Sales Cadences allow a manager to specify the exact process sequence to her team — such as calling a prospect within 24 hours of identification, and then following up with an email and attached brochure.

The new Work Queues turn the Cadences into a prioritized email and call list, defining a sequence of steps that the sales rep can take to follow the Cadences.

Moxley noted that, previously, sales reps had a variety of their own processes and steps to meet their goals, and the reps had to be trained manually on the correct sequence. He added that the Sales Cloud doesn’t provide methods for enforcing the Cadences or Queues, although the manager can see what the rep does via analytics.

Building on its acquisition in 2015 of CPQ (configure/price/quote) provider Steelbrick, Salesforce is also now introducing a Billing component to Sales Cloud.

Features include the ability to automatically deliver quotes, contracts and orders based on consumption. Evergreen Subscriptions automate renewals for recurring orders, and Flexible Invoicing enables automatic billing geared to predetermined intervals or milestones.

Although the company’s Einstein AI layer came to its Sales Cloud in February of 2017, it is just now coming to Pardot, the separate B2B marketing platform often associated with the Sales Cloud. Instead of marketers manually sifting campaign data to find key insights like which audience segments are responding best, Einstein does it for them.

Here’s a screen showing Cadences, Queues and some Einstein insights:

And a new Behavior Scoring automatically identifies which individuals in Pardot are the best prospects, based on such indicators of purchase intent as visiting a pricing page online. Before this new capability, marketers using Pardot had to write rules to increase potential prospects’ scores based on the actions they took.

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About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.