Throughout the sales life cycle a company faces innumerable challenges. One of the most overwhelming moments takes place at the end of the cycle, when the x-ended takes place. At that moment, and under time pressure, the inconsistencies of the operational system and the insufficiency of systemic norms tend to emerge. This is how contradictions arise, mainly between your sales and finance departments. Most times, these also extend to the rest of your dependencies, even moving up to your partners and end customers.
To minimize this recurring cascade of adverse effects, Salesforce has integrated several tools from its ecosystem into the Revenue Cloud. These make up a powerful arsenal of solutions that, as part of the Customer 360 Platform, can provide your company with an automated coupling between all your teams and customers at a critical stage of its operation.
The positive effect of Revenue Cloud on your company can be seen from a Salesforce survey in 2021 according to which there was a 29% increase in cross-selling and speed in generating quotes, a 21% improvement in forecast accuracy and a 11% reduction in billing claims.
What is Salesforce Revenue Cloud?
Revenue Cloud is a solution that integrates tools aimed at facilitating the management and optimization of the life cycle of your revenue. It’s designed to make checkout processes more efficient and monitor revenue growth across all your sales channels in real time. In addition, it provides centralized information of a customers’ transactions.
This platform, as part of Customer 360, allows you to connect different areas in your company, through the integration of CPQ (Configuration, Price and Quotation), Billing software, as well as Subscription Management, with Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. In addition, the potential of Partner Relationship Management (PRM) and B2B Commerce are fully exploited, always keeping the customer at the center of the process.
Revenue Cloud is based on establishing a single source and structure of information, it integrates functionalities of the following tools:
Salesforce CPQ
A super tool at your disposal! CPQ stands for Configuration, Price, and Quotation. And it provides answers to the questions: What products does the customer want to buy (configure)? How much do those products cost (price)? How to give the client details about the sale (quote)? CPQ provides centralized access to all your company’s products, services, available prices and customer data, enabling a significant increase in both sales and productivity.
Salesforce Billing
The growing diversity of sales channels increases the complexity of billing to levels never seen before. Among other modalities, your company’s billing can be associated with direct sales, assisted sales, sales through partners, self-services, product groups and even highly complex sales to specific sectors (telecommunications, energy, insurance, etc.).
Salesforce Billing can manage your company’s collection process in real time. With this tool, Salesforce harmonizes the relationship between your Finance and Sales departments. This will allow you to reduce the cash collection cycle and improve the payment experience of your customers. Salesforce Billing makes it easy for you to generate revenues without errors, guaranteeing that the quotes are correct, as well as the prorated amounts between various antecedent contracts. It also manages to accurately reconcile orders with applied credits and discounts.
Subscription Management
The subscription-based business model is focused on generating recurring revenue. In this mode, customers pay periodically for access to a product or service. A recent survey found that 75% of customers prefer to use digital self-service and remote negotiation rather than face-to-face selling. Subscription businesses, in the 2012-2020 period, have grown 6 times more than those linked to the S&P 500.
Salesforce’s Subscription Management solution employs technologies that automate and streamline this process. Its success is based on self-service, it understands the possibilities for customers to buy and update their subscriptions, as well as get online help if they need it.
Advantages of using Salesforce Revenue Cloud
When you start using this product from the world’s leading CRM, you’ll be ready to:
- Unify data and processes associated with revenue throughout your company: With Revenue Cloud you can manage and monitor each step in the entire offer-sale-revenue cycle. This gives you much more impact than Sales Cloud and Service Cloud used in isolation. In addition, it includes operations for automatic renewal of contracts. It allows to permanently interconnect all sales channels with the Finance area, facilitating accounting closings, leaving behind those long days where night and day combined trying to calculate if you had obtained profits or losses.
- Provide your customers with exceptional experiences: According to the State of the Connected Customer report, published by Salesforce in 2020, 80% of B2B buyers considered that the experience a company provides is as important as its product or service and 74% had used multiple channels to start and complete a transaction. Providing an exceptional experience in these conditions becomes complex. However, by adopting Revenue Cloud your customers can move between different sales channels, fill their carts with products and contact a sales representative, to request information or discounts. During that interaction, your sales representatives will be able to consult the history of all the products associated with the client, as well as the contacts of the same client with other sellers.
- Enhance the efficiency of your company with the automation of the entire life cycle of your revenue: this ranges from product to quote to cash (product-to-cash), even a little beyond, reaching the automatic renewal of contracts. Revenue Cloud has everything you need to leave behind intermediate forms, manual data collection and approvals, emails, outdated contracts, and loss-making errors of all kinds. The automation of processes and the integration of work tools in your company shorten the collection cycle, making it possible to close more deals, increase inventory turnover and increase revenue.
- Give customers more flexibility: Revenue Cloud makes it possible for your sales teams to quickly implement new monetization strategies. This makes it possible to insert your business in multiple sales channels, as well as the implementation of various forms and payment conditions. All this with a constant update regarding market changes.
- Increase revenue: This is possible with the acceleration of your sales cycles, the enrichment of customer databases and the introduction of business models that generate recurring income. The step-by-step guided sales option helps your sales representatives make direct sales faster and more accurate quotes. Likewise, having well-structured databases enhances the increase in cross-selling. In addition, with the automatic management of subscriptions you will facilitate sales for this concept and therefore a predictable growth.
At SkyPlanner we have consultants happy to collaborate with companies that intend to comprehensively manage their sales cycle using Salesforce Revenue Cloud. Contact us at hello@theskyplanner.com.
