Almost every office job has some level of annoying administrative work involved, but Salesforce thinks that new features added to its flagship Sales Cloud service will make the lives of sales and marketing professionals a little easier.
The new features are designed to improve the productivity of Sales Cloud customers by making it easier to search for information across customer accounts from Salesforce’s mobile email app and by surfacing better intelligence from how customers responded to earlier marketing campaigns. A recent study of salespeople conducted by Salesforce found that 66 percent of their time is spent on tasks other than actually selling, said Robin Grochol, senior vice president of product management for Sales Cloud.
Capitalism being capitalism, every year those salespeople are also under increased pressure from their bosses to produce results. Reducing the amount of time it takes reps to plan for sales calls — as much as 17 minutes for each call in some industries, Grochol said — could give them just enough time to increase the number of calls they can make in a day.
“The bar for sales reps continue to rise, their quotas are increasing,” Grochol said. “People think of productivty as a side benefit” from modern sales management software, but it’s actually very important, she said.
The new features in Sales Cloud, which will arrive as part of Salesforce’s annual summer release, also include the ability to pull data about current customers or prospects directly from social media services into their Sales Cloud environment. Users working on sales pipelines that are especially long or complicated will also be able to share documents with team members through Quip integration and coordinate prompts to follow up with customers across teams.
