Salesforce are introducing Revenue Cloud which “makes B2B buying fast, flexible, and simple for customers without sacrificing compliance and accuracy…no matter the complexity of your deals, business model, or revenue processes”.
Revenue Cloud brings together CPQ and Billing, Partner Relationship Management and B2B
Commerce capabilities to help businesses take control of their revenue growth and improve forecasting data. The aim is to connect sales teams, partners, operations, and finance to create a single source of truth for revenue and customer transactions, from purchase to renewal to revenue recognition.
What Does Revenue Cloud Do?
Provide Seamless Experience with Different Sales Channels
Revenue Cloud combines sales channels to provide a seamless experience. The channels your customer interacts with could include directly with your sales team, through partners and or digital storefronts.
Example: “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.”
A 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”.
You can see a digital cart in action below:
Spin up New Monetization Strategies
Revenue operations teams can spin up new monetization strategies. Examples include launching a subscription product or implementing consumption pricing.
Industry-specific solutions for revenue workflows: new technology from the Vlocity acquisition provides workflows related to revenue unique to specific industries. For example, managing ad inventory or content syndications for media companies.
Multi-Cloud Billing: new for Revenue Cloud, will enable companies to create revenue streams from other clouds.
Example: “a field service rep can upsell products or create revenue from onsite services
with billing and payments handled on one single, unified system.”
Revenue Cloud Quick Starts: businesses can launch a subscription offering from start to finish in eight weeks instead of months.
Improve Visibility on Payment Balances and Consumption Limits
Revenue Cloud gives sales reps visibility into customer purchases for more strategic
Interactions.
Example: “a sales rep can see at a glance outstanding payment balances and that a customer is approaching their consumption limit”.
Improve Revenue Efficiency with Automation
“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.”
Customer Asset Lifecycle Management: this new tool shows a simple, visual dashboard of everything a customer has purchased, keeping track of all contract amendments over time and open balances.
Revenue Analytics
“Dashboards provide CROs and revenue operations teams a single source of truth on all
revenue data. KPIs such as ‘revenue by channel’ help teams understand how to manage and
optimize revenue and run the business effectively”.
Why Revenue Cloud, Why Now?
Salesforce say Revenue Cloud is timely to meet the changing demands of B2B buyers:
“When COVID-19 hit, many business’ revenue cycles were immediately thrown into limbo —
deals stalled as customers’ needs suddenly changed, sales channels were disrupted and
forecasting data became unreliable because no one knew what to expect.
As budgets tighten, B2B buyers now expect fast, flexible purchasing options, including how
and when to pay. They want to be able to start the buying experience online, get personal help
from a sales rep via phone, and later adjust their contract quickly, without waiting weeks for a
new quote or starting from scratch with a new rep.”
Find out more
Revenue Cloud includes (all generally available):
- CPQ,
- Billing,
- CPQ for Partner Communities,
- CPQ for Customer Communities
- CPQ & B2B Commerce Connector.
Take a look at the demo and visit Trailhead to learn how to get started.
- To learn more about Revenue Cloud, visit here.
- To extend the power of Revenue Cloud with partners, visit the Revenue Cloud AppExchange Collection here.
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