About the author: Lars Malmqvist has spent the past 12 years working as an architect and CTO within the Salesforce ecosystem. For the past 5 years, he has been particularly focusing on advanced AI solutions. He has worked on over 40 Salesforce implementations, ranging from simple out-of-the-box scenarios to advanced, bespoke, multi-cloud solutions for large global brands. He is a 23x certified Salesforce CTA with degrees in computer science, mathematics, and technology management and an MBA from the University of Cambridge. Currently, he works as a senior manager at Accenture and is in the final stages of completing a PhD with a focus on deep learning.
Let’s be honest, there’s a reason why Salesforce is called Salesforce.
Making life easier for your sales reps, getting better info for your sales managers, and thereby closing more deals is likely to be one of the main reasons your organization adopted the platform in the first place. These days, where Salesforce is positioning itself to become the center of business IT, the Digital HQ from which your structure your workday and access all of your corporate apps, it is worth noting that for most organizations it all begins with sales.
As with the core CRM, so with the Einstein platform offerings. Sales Cloud Einstein is at this point in time one of the strongest and most mature products in the Einstein suite and it is true to Salesforce’s roots in delivering ways to level up your sales team’s performance.
In this blog post, we will go through the ways Sales Cloud Einstein enables you to reduce time on manual drudgery, target opportunities better, get better forecasting accuracy, and gather analytical insights.
First, we will look at one of the topics closest to the hearts of sales reps: how to spend less time putting data into the CRM.
Spend less time on data entry
In my experience, there are few parts of the job that sales reps dislike more than keeping data up to date and accurate in the CRM. Unfortunately, the real value of a CRM boils down to having up to date and accurate data. Therefore, it’s not particularly surprising that one of the areas where Salesforce has applied AI is to automate some rather tedious data entry tasks that involve matching and keeping up to date emails, calendar events, and contacts between Salesforce and your email client. In a nutshell, that’s what Einstein Activity Capture and Automated Contacts do.
The features work by connecting your email provider – Office 365, Exchange, and Gmail are supported – to Salesforce and then automatically matching data from your email account to records in Salesforce. There is quite a bit of complexity involved in setting up the matching and avoiding any data privacy issues, but once configured, it more or less runs itself and ferries across the data from your email client to Salesforce and back.
Target the right leads and opportunities
Finding out what Leads and Opportunities to target and prioritize with limited sales resources is a perennial problem and most organizations have internal models and processes for making such assessments. Einstein Lead and Opportunity scoring seeks to improve on these by applying machine learning to the historical data housed in your Salesforce org to give you a numeric score you can use for prioritization.
Effectively, you configure what data to consider both in terms of fields and by segmenting your Leads and Opportunities in meaningful ways and then set the algorithm loose to come up with a predictive model. Internally, Salesforce will run a model tournament of different machine learning models to come up with a best fit answer. Depending on your data that may be very good or less good.
One major limitation of these models is that they rely on all data being present in the object that you’re predicting. You can’t really aggregate data across objects in a meaningful way. But if you have solid historical data in your Lead and Opportunity objects these features can be winners.
Engage accounts and opportunities with better information
Better information about your accounts and opportunities leads to more deals won, at least in the big picture. Einstein Account Insights and Opportunity Insights are two features designed to give you better information, although in quite different ways.
Einstein Account Insights is effectively an AI-driven news analysis service. It finds and highlights articles related to your accounts from a selection of sources and aggregates these into thematic insights such as whether the company you are dealing with is expanding or contracting. That way you can stay on top of the trends affecting your accounts without having to put in a lot of effort.
Einstein Opportunity Insights on the other hand tries to give you actionable insights about specific opportunities. These come in three kinds:
- Deal Predictions that tell you whether or not you are likely to win a deal and whether it will be on time
- Follow-Up Reminders that pop up if there haven’t been any recent communications related to an opportunity
- Key Moments which appear when something out of the ordinary happens on the opportunity
There isn’t much you can configure for the two insights features, so they will either work for you or they won’t. In general, that will depend on the amount and quality of data in your org as well as the extent to which your accounts appear in mainstream media.
Forecast with greater accuracy
Forecasting accuracy is another problem, which tends to recur with staunch regularity across organizations of all shapes and sizes. Einstein Forecasting builds on top of normal collaborative forecasting by adding predictions for what deals will close by period of time based on a machine learning model that takes into account both historical data on opportunities and the tendencies of the sales reps in the company such as whether they tend to over or understate their projections.
This is the feature that will likely be of least use to most organizations as it is unlikely that a basic machine learning model can really outperform existing forecasting processes in most larger organizations. For smaller outfits, the equation might be different. But you would have to trial it and see.
Get insights in the sales process at all levels
The Sales Analytics app that comes with Sales Cloud Einstein is less AI and more traditional analytics, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t quite good. In effect, you get a range of general-purpose dashboards as well as role specific ones that answer common questions one might have as a sales rep, sales manager, or sales operations professional. There are also a set of reports for reporting on how well the various Sales Cloud Einstein features are performing in your particular org.
All in all, Sales Cloud Einstein is a compelling featureset if you are a heavyweight Sales Cloud user with a good amount of historical data. If you would like to learn more about architecting, designing, and implementing solutions with Sales Cloud Einstein and the rest of the Einstein platform, I recommend getting a hold of my book Architecting AI Solutions on Salesforce, which covers these topics in depth.