Virtual meetings are the new norm of every business unit. Today, the world’s number one CRM maker, Salesforce, has announced a new suite of Sales technologies, including Salesforce Meetings. The new Sales Cloud 360 innovations help sales teams shift to an all-digital experience and help businesses adapt their end-to-end sales processes with video conferencing, AI-powered video call coaching, and so on.

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Seven months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the nature of B2B buying and selling has changed, and companies are eager to re-accelerate growth. Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, has been leading the efforts in making B2B marketing and sales more effective and readily deployable at clients’ end. The newly announced sales tech suite would empower sales teams to stand out from the pack, and provide engaging and trusted buying experiences for customers.

At the time of this announcement, Doug Camplejohn, GM and EVP, Sales Cloud. (Salesforce) said:

“The world’s best-performing sales teams use the #1 CRM, Salesforce. And with our new innovations in Sales Cloud 360, you’re seeing us continue to set the bar. We’re enabling sales reps to stand out in a sea of virtual meetings, and helping remote teams to work together more effectively during these unprecedented times.”

This year, every sales rep became a virtual seller, and have had to reimagine how they interact with customers. Buyers face uncertainty and are looking for trusted sales advisors to help them get back to growth. And sales leaders need to rapidly deploy technology and processes to increase rep productivity. Companies are relying on Sales Cloud — widely recognized as the flexible, scalable CRM platform that delivers fast time to value, built around a 360 view of the customer.

Bring Personalization to the Center of Every Sales Meet and Reporting

McAfee is a Salesforce customer.

Pilar Schenk, Vice President, Global Sales Operations at McAfee says —

“The wise move is to take the time to pause, evaluate, and decide what few simple things — and I mean very few — are the priority. For McAfee, it was Salesforce. The platform could easily adapt to new processes and resulted in big wins for both the business and our new virtual culture.”

Pilar added, “We really want to enable sales to have one place that they can go to ensure that they have the collaboration, the connectivity and the visibility, and Salesforce is that hub, all centered around the customer.”

Enterprise Communication Trends: Video Meetings Boom Past Text Messaging

Enterprise video conferencing trends have exploded in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote workplace collaborations are heavily dependent on face to face meetings, even as Sales leaders are relying on video analytics to evaluate sentiments and sales rep performance every week, month and quarter for effective sales results.

According to independent market research, the global video conferencing market size stood at USD 3.85 Billion in 2019; by 2027, this would be valued at over 6 billion USD.

As enterprises look for HD video and Audio services with stronger privacy and security features in their existing unified communications suite, companies like Salesforce bring in totally new options for Sales teams as far as accurate reporting and analytics built using better integrations with productivity tools are concerned.

Today, Salesforce is announcing the following new capabilities to supercharge virtual selling with a 360 view of the customer:

• Salesforce Meetings: A new meeting management system that helps reps be better before, during and after sales calls. Before meetings, sales reps have a 360 view of all meeting attendees on a single screen —  including customer history, open service cases and attendee bios. Once the meeting starts, both the presentation and the presenter are shown together for a more engaging, human connection. And after the call, reps can log notes for internal collaboration with Salesforce Anywhere and move deals forward faster with automated action items.
• Einstein Video Call Coaching: Einstein Call Coaching can now analyze video conversations to capture AI-powered insights on customer needs and rep performance.  Managers can better personalize their coaching as employees shift to selling via video, and build out team strategies based on customer needs.

• Salesforce Maps Field Safety Kit: With the Maps Field Safety Kit, sales organizations can now understand how customers are affected by visualizing COVID-19 trend data inside CRM to determine which areas are safest for travel. Easy to build travel approval workflows and new mobile enhancements with customizable pre- and post-visit health checklists ensure field sales are both efficient and safe.

• Enhanced High Velocity Sales: High Velocity Sales, originally built for prospecting, will now provide automated actions across the sales cycle. When COVID-19 took hold, every field sales rep suddenly had to become a virtual seller, and now only 54% of outside reps are confident in their personal ability to close deals in the current environment. Tailored outreach across various communication channels like calls and emails can now be applied to the deals that outside sellers are working on. This ensures that a fully remote team can be even more efficient than they were when working in the same location.

“This is a transformational moment for sales, more so than any other role in the enterprise,” said Gerry Murray, Research Director, Marketing and Sales Technology at IDC. “Companies have to find new ways to optimize the day to day tasks of sales reps and support contactless relationships with customers. With Salesforce’s new virtual selling suite, reps can better leverage a 360-degree view to sell more effectively and elevate their customers’ experiences.”

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Gamification and The Future of Sales Meetings

Video meetings help business decision-makers stay on top of business goals during various remote work scenarios. Common video conferencing and collaboration suites include Microsoft Teams, Skype, Facebook’s WhatsApp, RingCentral, Cisco WebEx, Zoom and Slack. As sales trainers look for better video meeting suites, new trends in sales coaching such as enablement, gamification, sales simulation and AR VR selling techniques would come to the fore with Salesforce Meetings’ arrival.

Video meetings in Sales and Marketing would remain effective media to onboard, train and manage personnel in any scenario.