Salesforce Release Revenue Cloud To Speed Up Buying Process

Salesforce on Thursday launched Revenue Cloud, a new solution designed to give organizations the agility to make the buying process faster and easer while accelerating new revenue streams and improving efficiency.

According to Salesforce, Revenue Cloud brings together CPQ and billing, partner relationship management and business-to-business commerce capabilities to help organizations take control of their revenue growth across every channel.

Revenue Cloud is part of the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform, making it easy for companies to “connect their sales, partner, operations and finance to create a single source of truth for revenue and customer transactions from purchase to renewal to revenue recognition.”

According to Salesforce, Revenue Cloud can help businesses:

Transform the buying experience: Give customers the ability to seamlessly jump across different sales channels with direct sales, partners and digital storefronts. Now, a customer can fill their online cart with a specific configuration of products or services on their own and then reach out to a sales rep to ask a question or request a discount. Their rep will already have a complete understanding of the customer’s existing product history and online interactions at their fingertips for a smooth transaction. Our new CPQ-B2B Commerce connector allows businesses to customize digital storefronts for complex B2B selling and add customizable, configurable pricing to digital carts for a self-service experience.
Accelerate new revenue streams:Revenue operations teams can quickly spin up new monetization strategies, such as launching a subscription product or implementing consumption pricing. New technology from our recent acquisition of Vlocity provides industry-specific solutions for unique workflows related to revenue, like managing ad inventory or content syndications for media companies. With new Multi-Cloud Billing, companies can create revenue streams from other clouds on a single platform. For example, field service reps can upsell products or create revenue from onsite services with billing and payments handled on one single, unified system. And with Revenue Cloud Quick Starts, businesses can launch a subscription offering from start to finish in eight weeks instead of months.
Improve revenue efficiency: Automation removes the burden from teams who are tasked with manual approvals, data reconciliation and transcriptions of orders from one system to another. Automatically validating sales orders and consolidating invoices prevents issues such as underbilling for services or incorrectly tracking changes to a contract, which can lead to lost revenue in the sales cycle. Instead of manually downloading outdated order forms, the new Customer Asset Lifecycle Management tool shows a simple, visual dashboard of everything a customer has purchased, keeping track of all contract amendments over time and open balances to provide a deeper understanding of the customer relationship. Real-time tracking against valuable KPIs like customer lifetime value, net revenue retention and monthly recurring revenue help teams align and make strategic decisions on where to cut costs or what kinds of customers to target. Integrations to ERP systems make revenue data actionable by adjusting go-to-market strategies or providing discounting guidance.

The new solution comes as many business’ revenue cycles were thrown into limbo when the COVID-19 pandemic hit earlier this year. Deals stalled and sales channels were disrupted as customer needs changed. Meanwhile, other companies couldn’t meet demand for their products.

According to a Salesforce study, 80% of business buyers say the experience a company provides is just as important as its product or service, and 74% have used multiple channels to start and complete a transaction.