Revenue Cloud makes B2B buying fast, flexible, and simple for customers without sacrificing compliance and accuracy

When COVID-19 hit, some business’ revenue cycles were immediately thrown into limbo — deals stalled as customers’ needs suddenly changed, sales channels were disrupted and forecasting data became unreliable. Other companies struggled to meet the increase in demand for their products that happened seemingly overnight. And while new challenges arose with the pandemic, the need to manage revenue didn’t change; it’s just now more urgent.

B2B buyers now expect fast, flexible purchasing options as budgets tighten, including the choices of how and when to pay. They want the option to start the buying process online, get personal help from a sales rep, and later adjust their contract quickly, without waiting weeks for a new quote or starting from scratch with a new rep. According to our recent State of the Connected Customer report, 80% of business buyers say the experience a company provides is as important as its product or service, and 74% have used multiple channels to start and complete a transaction.

However, delivering on this experience involves a maze of disparate people, processes and stakeholders including not only sales, but finance, partners, digital commerce, operations and IT. It gets more complex as businesses grow with partner networks or acquisitions. There are also compliance and legal rules around revenue reporting that make accuracy critical.

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Take Control of Revenue Growth Across Any Channel

Today, we’re introducing Revenue Cloud, which gives businesses the agility to transform the buying experience, accelerate new revenue streams and improve revenue efficiency. Revenue Cloud brings together CPQ and Billing, Partner Relationship Management, and B2B Commerce capabilities to help businesses take control of their revenue growth across every channel. And because it’s part of the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform, Revenue Cloud will allow companies to connect sales, partner, operations, and finance teams to create a single source of truth, from purchase to renewal to revenue recognition.

With Revenue Cloud, businesses will be able to: 

• 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, from launching a subscription product to 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.

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Podium Digitally Transforms the Buying Experience 

Utah-based tech company Podium provides small businesses with technology to help them communicate and interact with customers. The company’s main challenges stemmed from their complex pricing catalogue which had several hundred products and led to sales reps heavily discounting without realizing it. Reps could not implement the correct approval processes or bundle products the way they needed to, and the quote process was manual and inconsistent across customers.

“Podium helps small businesses interact and communicate with their customers, and COVID-19 hit our customers hard. The way in which consumers now expect to interact with a local business has fundamentally changed. With Salesforce, we were able to quickly launch new products to support new needs such as curbside pick-up”, said Jason Taylor, CIO of Podium. “Having that single source of truth for Podium gives us a strategic advantage because we can answer questions and navigate the ever-changing market we’re in faster than anyone else.”

With Revenue Cloud, Podium simplified the product catalogue from several hundred down to 30 products and reduced the time it took to develop a quote by 80%. Podium was also empowered to automate onboarding and provisioning once a deal is signed, and enable customers to upgrade or add products easily on their own. With Salesforce, Podium saw the average deal size increase by $45 per month. And when COVID-19 hit and small businesses were in dire need to adapt to new customer expectations, Podium was able to create a new product SKU in under a week to get customers the solution they needed fast.

Speed Up Growth with Revenue Cloud

We are helping businesses accelerate growth, whether that means filling the gaps of lost revenue or doubling down on the areas of your business that are doing well. No matter the complexity of your deals, business model, or revenue processes, Revenue Cloud can be the single source of truth for all customer transactional data. And with partners like Docusign, Digital Route and Avalara, businesses can extend Revenue Cloud to manage the entire revenue management process.

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