At the last Salesforce True to the Core, Salesblazers like you wanted to hear about the exciting future we have planned for Salesforce’s flagship product, Sales Cloud.
I lead Product for Sales Cloud. I am excited to share a sneak peek of the capabilities my team is building to help you accelerate growth from pipeline to paycheck. The best way to learn more is to join us at Dreamforce either in-person or online on Salesforce+ for our keynote Wed Sept 18th 1:00pm PST and our in-depth roadmap session later that day at 2:45pm. We’ll follow up with a live Q&A with the community to deep dive in November 2024. Webinar details coming soon!
Selling Transformation in the AI era
Whether you’re a 5-person startup that just landed your first customer or an enterprise with billions in revenue, Sales Cloud has been here for the past 25 years to help you run your entire sales organization and accelerate growth. Everything that my team and I do and build is grounded in feedback from you, our customers, across industries around the globe.
In our recent State of Sales report, 83% of sales teams with AI saw revenue growth last year vs. 66% of teams without AI. There’s a clear business advantage for teams that embrace AI. In addition, 98% of the sales leaders we surveyed say their organizations should be getting more value from their data. The rise of AI has elevated the need for trust-worthy data, and leaders are eager to extract maximum value from their company’s data.
Fortunately, helping sales teams do more with AI and data is the focus of our roadmap. Based on conversations with customers like you, our roadmap will help you achieve:
- Increase seller productivity with AI everywhere
- Forecast anything and grow revenue with unified data
- Run sales organization on a complete growth platform that is flexible and easy to set up
Our Roadmap
Increase seller productivity with AI everywhere
Sellers tell us they want help decreasing the non-selling activities that clog up 70% of their time – manual tasks, data entry, managing email. We want to help eliminate manual data entry so you can spend time doing what you do best: grow relationships to drive revenue.
New Einstein Copilot actions help you easily get product pricing, research accounts, prioritize deals, and prioritize your day with a conversational assistant. Sellers no longer need to go digging for this information across multiple locations to get them prepared to sell. Einstein Copilot surfaces it from wherever you are working, whether that is in Salesforce, or on Gmail, Outlook, or on the web with the Sales Cloud Everywhere extension.
Another area we are investing in is conversational AI. There is a treasure trove of insights within customer calls that you want to leverage to unlock data-driven selling. The new Sales Signals proactively aggregates and surfaces insights and themes from across all of your sales calls including impacted opportunities, competitors and call snippets. Einstein Conversation Insights (ECI) also automatically transcribes calls and surfaces keywords and customer sentiment, directly from those calls.
To make it easier for teams to see and access data across all interactions – emails, voice calls, video calls – from one place, we built Conversation Hub. Conversation Hub is the new command center that unifies all conversational intelligence across your reps and channels. Your team can see which conversations need immediate attention, top competitors in your deals, and key signals all in one place.
And we are introducing Agentforce Sales Agents to increase selling capacity. Every seller can work with an SDR Agent that is trusted and enterprise ready to help them qualify inbound leads 24/7. These agents work across multiple channels and in multiple languages to help you scale. In addition, Sales Coach Agents help every reps be the best reps by offering real-time role play and personalized, deal-specific feedback. These agents are built on Salesforce Agentforce—a platform that brings humans together with autonomous agents powered by AI, data, and action. We are very excited to usher in the future of selling, where humans and Agents drive customer success, together.
Forecast anything and grow revenue with unified data
To identify, win, retain, and grow business, sellers must deeply understand their customers’ needs and goals. Successful account-based selling (ABS) strategies demand shared information, constant alignment, detailed planning, and structured workflows. With our new Account Plans, sellers can execute ABS with a standardized framework and a delightful user-experience. Account teams can get started fast with out-of-the box templates to consolidate sales data, simplify account research, and define clear account objectives to align the sales team around a unified strategy.
Every sales organization tracks their business via forecasts. But new revenue and pricing models make it challenging to achieve accurate forecasts. Many of you, especially in tech, get revenue from multiple sources including usage- and consumption-based products (such as pay-as-you-go software, services hours billed, or any other uncapped product). Soon, you can forecast across all of your revenue models in a single tool. In Winter ’25, join our Consumption Forecasting pilot to forecast with consumption data from any system connected to Data Cloud. We enable sales reps, managers and sales leaders to collaborate in real time on estimating continuous sources of revenue alongside their opportunity-based revenue. And AI predictions will help you guide revenue estimations, too.
We continue to deliver forecasting flexibility and customization so your forecasts match your business model. Sales teams can allocate opportunity and product revenue by territory for accurate pipeline management and forecasting. In addition, we are adding enhancements to manager judgments so leaders can see how front line managers judge opportunity risk and roll these numbers up in their forecast. Judgements give all layers of your organization another reference point when assessing the quality of your forecast.
Run on a complete growth platform that is flexible and easy to set up
When I think about how Sales Cloud stays “true to the core”, it is grounded in the fundamentals of customer relationship management and evolves with feedback from all of you who use Sales Cloud every single day. Your feedback is paramount in shaping what we build, so my team makes sure to include top IdeaExchange ideas as a part of every release.
We’re excited to be increasing the number of custom fields on activities from 100 to 300. This top request with 23,000 points is especially critical for customers with many AppExchange package installs. We know that tracking custom data is key to your success.
We are also enabling task and event support in UI API so you can customize the Tasks entity, including creating custom Lightning components and screen flows. This change allows you to customize how your team interacts with Tasks, boosting seller productivity and data accuracy.
We’re building Forecasting Submissions so everyone on a sales team can submit their forecast with a timestamp, review their previous submissions, and confirm their teams’ numbers are up to date. Submissions ensure that teams work with the most current information and drive a consistent, rigorous forecasting business process. This is the winning IdeaExchange idea for Forecasting so I am very excited to deliver it soon.
Last but not least, we reimagined setup to help you get started and drive adoption quickly. With Sales Cloud Go, admins can activate new products and features with just a few clicks. You also have tools to explore new and unused functionality with easy, consumable resources in context. We’ve shared this new experience with roadshows and customer advisory boards. The feedback has been incredibly positive. Thanks for helping us improve our designs. I cannot wait for you to see how much easier and faster it is to get started with the tools your company needs to accelerate growth.
Resources
The Sales Cloud product team invites you to join us at Dreamforce in-person or online to learn more about all of our latest innovations and our upcoming roadmap.
Join us for a Sales Cloud Roadmap Sharing Webinar!
Get an exclusive look at where Sales Cloud is headed. Join our Sales Cloud product team on November 13th, 2024, at 9:00 AM PT for a live webinar. We’ll share the latest roadmap, upcoming innovations, and answer your questions in an interactive Q&A. Register now!
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