Gartner predicts that by 2025, 60% of sales organizations will move from experience- and intuition-based selling to data-driven sales processes. These buyers want to engage organizations through multiple channels, including digital and self-service options. As Gartner notes, "More interdependence of people, processes, and technology will render the traditional sales models less reliable over time."

Data-driven sales processes seem like a great idea, in theory. Using the vast amounts of customer information and historical data to direct sales activities sounds good. But does it actually positively impact revenue?

Harvard Business Review seems to think so - research done for the HBR book Sales Growth shows that teams using AI-powered sales tools, like Salesforce's Sales Cloud Einstein, see call times dropping 60 to 70% and cost reductions of 40 to 60%. Most importantly, organizations using AI selling tools see an increase in appointments and leads of more than 50%.

With Sales Cloud Einstein available to organizations of all sizes, what are the benefits for a company's revenue using the platform? We've put together five key revenue impacts that Salesforce's AI-powered sales tools can have on your business.

Einstein's Benefits for your Business's Revenue

Increased Sales

Any discussion of business revenue usually turns to how to increase sales at some point. Sales Cloud Einstein does this in several ways.

The Salesforce AI combines features like Opportunity Scoring with buying signals to focus salespeople on those potential customers ready to buy. Using machine learning, Einstein creates a score for the lead based on the record's history and opportunity details, using information from the previous won and closed sales. 

The AI also analyzes a buyer's activity to provide Behavior Scoring. Einstein analyzes an opportunity's activities like email opens, page views, and time decay using data points from the past and the present. Those signals are combined to create a Behavior score between 0 and 100. Salespeople can focus on those buyers with scores closer to 100, making the best use of their time and ensuring that those buyers ready to spend don't fall through the cracks.

Effective Personalization

Personalization is king in modern sales and marketing. Organizations leading the way in personalization are reporting revenue increases of between 5 and 15% from sales personalization strategies.

However, Salesforce goes beyond just adding a person's name to email communication. Sales team members can get communication recommendations from Einstein, even including sentence recommendations that personalize their interactions. This encourages salespeople to engage with a prospect at the right time and with the correct language and message. 

Streamlined Sales Processes

Einstein uses previous sales data to score opportunities. Using your organization's pattern of successfully lead conversion, Sale Cloud Einstein prioritizes your incoming leads. Sales teams can then tackle those leads that require immediate attention and nurture those with a lower priority, using Einstein to help evaluate their readiness over time.

Additionally, Sales Cloud's AI capabilities connect your email and calendar to Salesforce, eliminating manual entry of activities. This productivity-boosting tool automates syncing a salesperson's communication, events, and contacts and creates an activity timeline. Highly configurable, Activity Capture can prevent leads and opportunities from going stale or cold by bringing visibility to pipeline touchpoints.

As if that weren't enough, Sales Cloud Einstein provides a centralized location for customer information. With key metrics at their fingertips, sales team members are empowered to have productive conversations with customers across account touchpoints, like past purchases and customer support.

Better Account Planning

Strategic account planning has a lot of benefits for an organization's revenue. Account planning can significantly better win rates, short sales cycles, and higher loyalty. Unfortunately, account planning can also be complex and relies on customer data to feed the process.

Because it's integrated with the entire CRM, Sales Cloud Einstein has the advantage of pulling together information from every corner of the platform to inform account planning, including CPQ, opportunities, and more. 

With a holistic understanding of accounts, Einstein simplifies the variety of activities related to account planning, from whitespace analysis and relationship mapping to account reviews and revenue goal setting. Thanks to Einstein Prediction Builder and Next Best Action functionality, salespeople have a clear path of what to do next to make the proper recommendations to their key accounts.

Forward-Looking Insights

The purpose of using an AI-focused sales tool is to help you get insights faster than you could on your own. Einstein Discovery looks for patterns in sales data and develops meaningful insights from the information in a fast and scalable way. That's because the AI does the heavy lifting, removing the need to create complex data models to analyze the information.

Insights can be brought to light in minutes, not days or weeks. With Salesforce's reporting functionality and integrations with Tableau, that information can be viewed and understood quickly thanks to data visualization tools. This offers sales teams self-service access to mine for insights without waiting for a data scientist to sift through data to surface the correct information. With this data, companies can take rapid action to opportunities as they arise.

Conclusion

A good sales team is invaluable. A good sales team backed by machine learning, timely insights, and automation is unstoppable. With Sales Cloud Einstein, organizations can task sales teams with selling while the AI takes care of number crunching and surfacing critical and actionable information.

Like most of Salesforce, Sales Cloud Einstein is most powerful when configured to work with your organization's needs. Six Consulting can help. Contact us today to learn more about our Salesforce consulting services and how you can increase your revenue with Einstein as part of your sales process.