Artificial Intelligence – A revolution that will boost Online Sales Performance

 Artificial Intelligence has been influencing humankind for decades. It has disrupted every area of our lives, from curating ‘Discover Weekly’ playlists on Spotify to predicting our Google searches.

In the business arena, there have been alarmist calls surrounding technology replacing human jobs.

However, the ultimate role of AI is to assist human efforts and help workers increase productivity, not replace us.

Artificial intelligence is transforming every possible field, from marketing to customer support to sales.

Although sales and marketing have traditionally been reserved for humans with great communication skills, today, machine intelligence is re-shaping and revolutionizing the field.

How AI is Transforming Ecommerce Retailing

In the realm of business, there are many repetitive and time-consuming tasks like updating the contact list for CRM, fraud detection, product recommendations, and purchase predictions. These tasks have always been completed by people.

Today, with the evolution of technology, Al is able to do these repetitive yet necessary tasks more efficiently while employees focus more on high-priority areas – accounting, operations, teamwork, collaboration, etc.

AI works in the background, giving employees the freedom to focus on their unique abilities and areas of expertise.

Companies like eBay, Amazon, and Alibaba are using AI to sort through their massive databases of customer purchase behavior to predict their future needs.

AI’s automated analysis of individual customers’ needs helps increase efficiency by reducing manual work, therefore providing a competitive advantage.

So, just about every brand under the sun is intensively investing their money in Al in order to build brand competitiveness and customer loyalty.

Understand Your Customers Better with AI

To develop long-term customer loyalty, marketers can use AI to better understand an individual consumer’s desires.

Through predictive analytics, brands recommend the most suitable product offers or send personalized messages through email marketing, messages, etc.

This helps to create unique customer experiences and targeted offers that go beyond selling and buying, and strengthen customer relationships with the brand.

Artificial intelligence can identify the most suitable customers who are most likely to buy a given company’s products.

This gives companies more revenue and sales opportunities as their efforts are directed towards qualified opportunities.

Early adopters of Artificial Intelligence have been seeing tangible benefits.

For example, Daiwa Securities has been able to increase its customer purchase rate by 2.7 times through the adoption of AI-enabled technology.

AI is the Boost Your Sales Team Needs

Today, consumers’ lives are greatly influenced by a variety of different media.

In such an age and day, developing an impactful sales message that is visible to your customers both at the right time and on the right platform translates into the integration of AI with your CRM system.

With the help of AI, your CRM system can answer customer queries and resolve their issues.

By maintaining a consistent and meaningful relationship with your customers, AI can improve customer engagement and sales.

Keeping customers engaged is a primary challenge for e-commerce retailers.

AI can easily spark customer engagement by acting as their personal stylist (providing a personalized experience through product recommendations).

A common challenge across all industries is to maximize revenue, increase market share, and maintain low costs while minimizing risks.

Artificial Intelligence allows companies to take advantage of their internal database to the fullest potential and mine it for new opportunities.

Look what AI has in store for Online Sales

With the use of AI, business processes will become fully automated and innovative in the near future.

It will help companies to be completely customer-focused, offer unique and personalized services, use predictive analytics more accurately, and save time otherwise spent on finding and converting leads.

Artificial Intelligence will make things easier by optimizing budgets, personalizing every customer’s experience, and reducing time and cost with automated online sales processes.

This means that brands will be able to improve their customer engagement more efficiently.

Source: Online Sales Performance

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Salesforce CPQ: Sales, Revenue, or Profit? You Choose.

 Salesforce CPQ needs no introduction as of itself. However, if you want to acquaint yourself with it, consider Salesforce CPQ Trailhead. Here, you can learn all the basics about Salesforce CPQ. And you can forge a personalized experience with Salesforce CPQ Cloud Software.

As a software as a service (SaaS), Salesforce CPQ has been instrumental in bringing the digital revolution to the Configure Price Quote.

Salesforce CPQ is a transformative cloud computing technology that has made pricing faster, easy, and more accurate.

Using a smart device, it’s accessible from anywhere. And it has made remote access feasible because no complicated hardware is needed to access its processes.

The result is that it’s less expensive, even though the services provided by Salesforce CPQ are immense.

Salesforce CPQ benefits

Many complexities that hold back B2B businesses from scaling have to do with a lack of technological expertise.

In fact, the more sophisticated the operational complexity of the industry, the more it calls for sweeping technological changes.

Let’s take the case of the manufacturing industry, where a lot of factors from pricing to shipment factor in and the selling is on a larger scale.

Salesforce CPQ streamlines the entire selling process with everything inclined to meet the needs and expectations of individual customers.

For someone more interested in counting the benefits of Salesforce CPQ than the technology itself, here are the top benefits of Salesforce CPQ for the manufacturing industry.

Top Benefits of Salesforce CPQ for the Manufacturing Industry

Pricing variables and product options are two major contributors to the erroneous CPQ process in the manufacturing industry. Salesforce CPQ removes those errors.

What’s wrong with manual CPQ isn’t only errors in quoting and configuring prices but also it’s the time-consuming nature.

In fact, there are multiple factors that preserve the margin for profit that renders the CPQ process painfully slow.

But, Salesforce CPQ equipped with AI capability brings automation to the process and allows sales reps to compile prices without committing errors in calculation.

Salesforce CPQ promises the utmost accuracy in quoting and pricing, forecasts, and furnishes data to improve sales.

1) Avoid loss of revenue due to errors in pricing

Human hands are bound to commit errors when tasked with manually performing the delicate process of price configuration.

Considering the manufacturing industry where factors to be taken into account are many, errors are staggering.

Though on paper it’s just an error in quotes, pricing, or discounting, these could add up to cost a business a large chunk of its revenue.

The solution is the adoption of Salesforce CPQ, which automates manual, time-consuming, and fluctuating tasks.

As a result, sales reps get more time to concentrate on selling.

2) Squeeze profit for your company even if margins are thin

The dwindling profit margins, because of global competition, create what’s called margin pressure.

And for manufacturers, it’s a really bad predicament.

But, technology solutions offer a reprieve to those businesses who already find themselves in the midst of margin pressure.

Implementing CPQ eliminates non-standardized quotes, promotes intelligent discounting, and facilitates smart upselling.

Salesforce CPQ offers sales reps a better understanding of discounts and margins, which helps you squeeze profit for your business out of thin margins.

3) Gain better insights into customers and channels

Taking a traditional or manual route to the CPQ process means missing out on customer data.

As a result, any measure taken to ensure personalized pricing or discounting might lead to nothing.

Knowing your customers is paramount and Salesforce CPQ offers you great insights into customers and channels, helping you understand your customer better.

So, depending on what you want, Salesforce CPQ is there to help you improve Sales, Revenue, or Profit in a highly customizable manner.

A consensus has grown among CPQ users that it enhances sales effectiveness. If you wonder how, here’s the answer.

Enhance Sales Effectiveness with Salesforce CPQ

Enhancing sales effectiveness CPQ is indispensable. Salesforce CPQ software is the best in the business for its immense capacity to scale and grow. It brings market acumen, speed, accuracy, and precision to sales strategies .

Then there’s accessibility, and since Salesforce CPQ is a cloud-based software/application, it offers:

Access from Anywhere

Omnichannel selling is made easy with Salesforce CPQ. Its real-time pricing feature has proved fruitful for B2B eCommerce. One such feature is accessibility.

Accessibility empowers sales teams, as it offers a cross-channel and cross-device access pricing database.

This ensures that selling is integrated across all channels and is consistent and accurate.

Accessing a single product catalog is especially liberating for sales reps who have the freedom to access it anytime and anywhere, and initiate a customizable sales process.

Customer-Specific Insights

Targeted selling improves sales. And targeted selling implies that sales reps take into account the whereabouts of customers.

Salesforce CPQ, with embedded robust AI technology, offers result-oriented insights into customers.

It aggregates data and turns it into intelligible inputs usable in designing marketing strategies.

Its predictive analytics help delve deeper into customers’ preferences and makes selling all the more fun and rewarding.

Salesforce CPQ Is Intelligent Discounting CPQ

What do we mean when we say that salesforces are intelligent discounting CPQ? Simply put, it means Salesforce CPQ helps implement custom discounts.

It’s not easy to figure out how much to discount. In all its aspects, overt and covert, the discounting process is complicated and hectic.

And delicate too, in the sense that as profit margins plummet, bad discounts could ruin the business itself.

The reductions in the regular price have to be made in the manner where room for profit isn’t closed, or that customer satisfaction doesn’t come at the cost of business.

A balance has to be struck so that both businesses and customers benefit from the discounting process.

Since we know that discounts a) increase sales, b) create brand awareness, c) attract new customers, and d) forge lasting customer-business relationships:

Salesforce CPQ, as a tool, helps businesses create error-free and accurate sales quotes.

Owing to overall Salesforce CPQ Solutions, all inefficiencies are successfully eradicated.

Continuing its legacy of solving challenges that B2B ecommerce was replete with a decade ago,

Salesforce CPQ provides volume discounts with diligence and intelligence. The same is the case with bundle offers, promotions, etc.

Guided Selling, Automated Quote Generation, Customizable Templates – Salesforce CPQ Offers it all.

As competition grows steeper, guided selling becomes imperative for businesses to survive and scale.

Though the concept of guided selling is simple, its actual realization remains a far-fetched fantasy as long as technical support and deeper insight into customer behavior are missing.

Salesforce CPQ comes to the rescue of sales reps! Leveraging its AI capability to run through tons of customer data generated over a long period of time, Salesforce CPQ offers deeper insights into customer’s sales journey.

And that’s the key to offering a targeted selling experience to customers.

The next thing businesses need is customizable templates, which are indispensable if you’re aiming to boost your productivity.

What you get with Salesforce CPQ powered by Einstein AI is intelligent quotes – a key to maximizing your sales.

Interactive Sales Catalogs CPQ

Salesforce CPQ has been around to make over how sales work. In the process, it has significantly reduced quote-to-order time, resulting in faster production.

The advent of CPQ has seen catalogs turn into Interactive Sales Catalogs. This means that alignment is engineered where resources and materials never lose sight of each other.

THis results in a straightforward production process – no derailments.

In every sense, Salesforce CPQ implementation is engineered to pave the way for your business to work efficiently and improve performance.

And you’ll have more control and oversight over all aspects of the quote to fulfillment processes.

As a make-to-order products CPQ and multi-channel sales CPQ, Salesforce CPQ ensures that all operations related to sales operations carried out in a sales channel perform as expected or deemed.

For a multi-channel sales organization, Salesforce CPQ is the best solution to take care of individual customer needs and expectations.

How efficient is Salesforce CPQ?

You might be interested in learning about the operational efficiencies that CPQ brings.

Accurate Salesforce CPQ Billing renders selling faster. And B2B businesses understand its importance in digitally-driven commerce.

However, if you’re new to Salesforce, you might be wondering how efficiently it works when put to use.

The short answer is sales automation CPQ significantly improves your customer experience, which, as a business, is your primary challenge given that B2C experience is sought on B2B platforms.

Its application widens and engulfs the entire sales lifecycle.

All in all, sales configuration CPQ puts sales reps, partners, and customers all on the same page where they can interact and access data, or even close deals from literally anywhere and any device.

Order-to-Opportunity Syncing

Think of Salesforce CPQ not as a mere software but a full-fledged application offering all sorts of services to B2B businesses.

One such service is Order-to-Opportunity Syncing, which links orders back to the opportunity from which they were created in the first place.

And everything that transpires between the two processes is synchronized and the record is kept of all updates.

Looking for Product Management Discounting CPQ? Choose Salesforce CPQ

Salesforce CPQ takes discounting to the next level, including product management discounting. In its wake, you improve your sales process.

To begin, Salesforce CPQ applies discounts to a few products so as to negotiate or close a deal.

Then, there are customers who order bulk. To reward such customers, Salesforce CPQ initiates larger discounts.

Such volume-based discounts encourage bigger sales. And it happens automatically without involving sales reps.

Quote Approvals Process

For a successful quote approvals process, productive communication taking place from time to time between a Client Manager and Client is needed.

And when done through Salesforce CPQ, automation makes things easier for your sales teams by equipping them with necessary data.

In fact, beginning with a quote request, sales managers are guided through the entire quote-to-order process until the quote is approved.

And for a robust quote-to-order CPQ such as Salesforce CPQ, its deployment gives your business a competitive edge to outrun your competition.

It makes things easier not only for businesses but for prospective buyers as well who are given ample room to negotiate as freely and conveniently as possible.

Using Salesforce CPQ is undoubtedly a win-win situation for both the business and B2B buyers.

Source: Salesforce CPQ

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B2B Buyer Behavior Explained: Online, Offline, or Omni-channel

 Any B2B organization that wants to be successful in the long run must amend its business architecture by putting buyer behavior at the center. Most successful B2B players realize the importance of learning their customers’ buying patterns at an early stage.

To understand buying behavior, marketers need to understand how buyers make decisions. Buying behaviors that drive the customer’s decision-making journey are extremely complicated and may be impossible at times for mediocre marketers to completely grasp.

Getting to Know Your Buyer is one of the keys to running a prolific B2B enterprise as it helps analyze any customer’s needs with precision. It can help in more than one way by feeding each customer with only those products and services that matter to them.

How can it be done?

There are primarily 3 channels that are responsible for running a business: Online, offline, and omnichannel. Categorizing buyers is the first step but to get deeper into the psyche of buyers, careful analysis of buying patterns and behaviors, the KPIs and a lot more.

Let’s understand buying patterns and behaviors in detail.

Online Buyers

After its inception, ecommerce has remarkably changed the ways of doing business. Buyers are more inclined towards an online approach. However, even after online being the most preferred choice, the actual sale sometimes does not satisfy business-owners.

It could be due to the lack of addressing issues such as complex reordering, difficulty in placing orders, laid backorder delivery, or inefficient order tracking.

Offline Buyers

Buyers belonging to this category have either tried purchasing online earlier but left unsatisfied, or they are yet to try ecommerce.

While some like to research and try a product or service before making a purchase, offline buyers are termed as traditional in nature as they like to visit a store, take assistance from sales representatives and then purchase the product/service.

Omnichannel Buyers

An omnichannel strategy enables live interaction and allows customers to purchase anywhere at any time, creating a seamless shopping experience that breaks down the barriers between sellers and buyers.

A large number of customers have started using multiple channels during their shopping journey.

For example, an omnichannel buyer might look for a product or service using a smartphone or a desktop computer, ask for a quote or read customer reviews, and then finally make the buying decision.

Key Stats

• 75% of B2B product purchases are already made online, but buyers want to make even more purchases online.
• 47% of buyers conduct web searches to look for information during the B2B buying process.
• 33% of B2B buyers are persuaded to choose a vendor based on the ability to place, pay for, track, and return orders online.

In the End

Understanding these consumer behaviors just in time helps businesses remain relevant.

There is no doubt that these behaviors will change in the future and new behaviors will emerge.

But until then, learn to invest in understanding your customer base to magnify the success of your enterprise.

Source: Omni-channel

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Customer-Centric B2B Commerce – Docmation

 The B2B e-commerce market is booming. With the increased pressure to decrease time to market, generate revenue, reduce costs and enhance customer experiences, an inefficient engagement strategy and mediocre e-commerce technology won’t win your brand any points.

Many B2B organizations like Coca-Cola and Adidas have already implemented commerce in the cloud via Salesforce. “When we look at B2B commerce, the one solution we turn to is CloudCraze,” say Salesforce.

But why CloudCraze? What is it?

1) Firstly, What is CloudCraze?

CloudCraze helps deliver robust B2B cloud commerce native on Salesforce. It allows you to generate online revenue faster and effortlessly scale for growth.

Its customer-centric commerce unveils every single interaction, landing data across commerce, sales, marketing, service, and more.

B2B organizations have many complex business functions, pricing models, and workflows, which can become cumbersome to manage.

This is why a truly seamlessly integrated solution like Salesforce CloudCraze is the key to fill in the gap by providing B2B e-commerce solutions that help businesses automate various processes, therefore, allowing brands to grow.

With B2B eCommerce poised to reach $1.2 trillion by 2021, businesses acknowledge the opportunity of investing in digital strategies.

2) Secondly, Why CloudCraze?

Speed to market is critical and innovation is a necessity as digital commerce continues to gain friction.

CloudCraze helps increase your agility and ability to adapt in this increasingly competitive marketplace.

3) The customer at the Center

Salesforce B2B Commerce offers the industry’s only customer-first data model with CRM and commerce in a single solution.

It enables you to access complete and accurate customer data across sales, service, and commerce, also using real-time data on Salesforce to notify each and every customer interaction.

With the excellent capabilities of the CloudCraze data model, businesses can generate online revenue faster, stay connected with customers, and easily scale for growth.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Cloudcraze) offers the ability to create coupons, sales kits, recommendations of related products; all within a connected environment on top of your existing Salesforce CRM.

4) Agility, Omnichannel, And Experience Management

Legacy commerce technology is becoming outdated and less effective, so capabilities such as speed up time-to-market (TTM) and revenue, reduce support costs, and experience management dictate which providers will lead the pack.

Businesses that provide these capabilities position themselves to successfully deliver seamless digital commerce experiences.

Provides Agile Commerce Solutions That Go Beyond The Shopping Cart

CloudCraze facilitates you to swiftly adapt to customer needs and market dynamics and smoothly twirl up new business blueprints rather than having to wait for months or years for updates.

Cloudcraze being data-driven enables you to understand, predict and shape customer behavior.

5) Helps adapt on-demand

A high percentage of users say that providing personalized customer care has a major or moderate influence on their loyalty.

CloudCraze is built for business users to easily adapt to existing systems and processes. Therefore, lets you configure without any IT upheaval.

CloudCraze – A better Commerce Solution

Changing how your brand caters to your customers can be challenging, but blindly selecting a platform can prove to be a costly error which can hamper the brand value of your business.

To safeguard you from these erroneous assumptions, Salesforce has come up with a better solution, a platform that:

• Offers the industry’s only Customer-First commerce solution.
• Provides you with in-depth customer data.
• Doesn’t require complex integrations.
• Commerce and CRM solutions in a single experience.

Takeaway

To stay ahead of your competitors, you need a B2B commerce experience that both apprehends and leverages the data from sales and commerce, allowing you to draw insights and take actions according to the full customer experience to scale up for growth.

CloudCraze provides you with a powerful platform to connect with your customers and grow your business.

Thinking about spinning up your business model? Get in touch with us.

At Docmation Technologies, we have an experienced team to cater to your unique Salesforce needs and help you build a stronger brand. Drop us a line at info@docmation.com and we will be happy to help.

Source: B2B Commerce

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Salesforce Lightning Bolt Just Got Better with Subscriptions Enablement!

 

Salesforce Lightning Bolt, with its Apps, Lightning components, and industry process flows, allowed its users to get an industry-wide experience in a solution that was still tailored around their individual use case. However, there were still gaps that needed to be filled.

Customers wanted to integrate their CPQ and Billing with B2B Lightning while leveraging existing pricing rules and engines to automate the processes.

For instance – What about the recurring purchases? Most customer carts have, at least part of an order that belongs to the said category – be it weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. However, no such direct processes currently existed within the system.

Docmation’s team of Salesforce experts has launched the all-new ‘subscriptions accelerators’ functionality that works out-of-the-box to seamlessly automate CPQ and Billing processes with Lightning B2B store.

Here’s how

1. Easy and Straightforward Implementation

Activating the subscriptions accelerator simply requires following some basic configuration steps and setting up the data with the product. Once done, the subscription records will be displayed in the storefront.

2. Managed Self-Service

The subscriptions accelerator functionality lets the user stay at the helm of his product purchases and licenses.

From adding seats to the contract and making amendments to the product, its quantity, and installment frequency to renewing, pausing, or canceling existing contracts, the user can do them all without any assistance.

3. Real-time Syncing

Based on the opportunity that’s been created, a quote will be generated for approval. This approved quote will reflect in the invoice.

For instance – If a buyer applies for a discount, they can raise a code request and the CSR will be notified, who will look into the details and offer discounts that will then reflect in the cart in real-time and the buyer will be notified of it.

Then, the buyer can happily check out.

4. Functional Validations to Prevent Common Cart Errors

There’s always the possibility that users lose track of their product subscriptions and billing frequencies during online purchases.

Thankfully, the in-built validations of the subscription accelerator can prevent them from purchasing additional products by mistake. The same validations can help add additional licenses to the existing subscription.

5. A Completely Scalable and Customizable Solution

Another important feature of the subscription accelerator functionality is its scalability. Depending upon the unique requirements of the user, changes can be made to the accelerator solution to best serve their needs.

The Need for Subscriptions Accelerator and How the Docmation Team Did It

Bestowing customers the flexibility they deserve and offering eCommerce merchants the sustainability they crave, the subscriptions accelerator is the need of the hour.

With this new functionality that integrates CPQ Billing with B2B Lightning, it is now possible to –

1. See a Higher Customer Retention Ratio

The subscriptions accelerator functionality will help increase revenue by up-selling or cross-selling relevant products.

As good as that is, the better news is that this will not be a one-time increase – the functionality will help in retaining more customers for improved business stability.

2. Experience Higher Business Predictability

The pay-once model can end up being confusing when it comes to matters of inventory replenishment and total turnover.

The subscriptions accelerator turns the tables by giving an exact number for the items that need to be stocked and the revenue that may be expected within a specified period.

3. Better Customer Relationships

Since customers are the greatest business assets, ensuring their satisfaction and convenience is paramount to the success of any B2B storefront.

The subscriptions accelerator opens doors for more personalized experiences – tailored recommendations, discounts, and ads, thereby increasing opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. The result? Solid client relations and brand advocacy.

While developing the Subscriptions accelerator functionality, Docmation’s Salesforce experts have kept the customer at the front and center of it all.

They have sensed the gnawing need to close the gap preventing seamless CPQ Billing automation in Lightning B2B store and have designed processes that work out-of-the-box.

This is an endeavor to offer a sensible alternative to frequent buying and streamline business processes.

Source: Salesforce Lightning

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