A lot happens when you and your 170,000 closest friends meet in San Francisco for four days of Dreamforce. You know you've hit the big time when the event has its own cruise ship! Here are just a few of the many highlights from an exciting and informative show.
Sales analytics has its day in the sun
State of Sales 2015. Salesforce surveyed more than 2,300 sales leaders in North America and overseas. The survey found that sales organizations plan to increase their use of sales analytics 58% from 2015 to 2016. Top performing sales teams are 3.5x more likely to use analytics. High performers are moving beyond basic sales analytics to gather insights across the entire customer lifecycle. While 19% percent of sales teams are currently using predictive analytics, 26% are piloting or plan to use it in the next 12 to 18 months. Download the Salesforce report here.
Gartner Predicts. According to Gartner Research Director Tad Travis, leaders looking to improve sales execution should assess new sales training technology, sales performance monitoring, and technologies that use predictive and behavioral analysis. According to Gartner, by 2017, 50% of large B2B organizations will invest in predictive analytics solutions for prospect qualification, opportunity automation, forecasting automation or renewal management.
"Data-driven Rebirth of a Salesman". Shira Ovide and Elizabeth Dwoskin at the Wall Street Journal describe the digital tools that HR software firm GuideSpark uses to increase the efficiency of its 70-person sales force. See the article (requires a WSJ subscription).
What’s new for Salesforce Sales Cloud?
Salesforce Cloud Previews Lightning. The Sales Cloud user interface was beginning to look dated – no longer. The Lightning interface looks awesome, and is packed with features to help sales people productivity. The Activity Feed feature shows what just happened with an account and what to do next. Opportunity Board shows a complete picture across all of your pending deals. Sales Cloud will introduce Lightning in production on October 17, 2015. Existing users can toggle back and forth between the new and old user interfaces. And Salesforce admins can control the roll-out of the new interface at the user, profile and organization level. Learn more about Lightning.
Salesforce Forecasting Presents a Conundrum. Both customizable and collaborative forecasting have good features. Customizable forecasting will end of life, but the date has not yet been announced. The result is that many Salesforce customers are torn between keeping what they like with customizable forecasting yet being drawn to the new features only available with collaborative forecasting. Learn more about planning your migration from customizable to collaborative forecasting. Unfortunately, with both forecasting options you can no longer add quota at the user object level; you need to use Salesforce Data Loader or a third-party app on AppExchange. One important method to improve your forecasting is to use predictive analytics on your historical win-loss data; DxContinuum can help you there.
Salesforce Partners
DxContinuum Announces Series A Funding and Fortune 500 Customer Momentum. Sales and marketing teams rely on DxContinuum predictive analytics to increase revenue. “With the DxContinuum lead scoring solution, we had a double digit increase in conversions with half the number of leads chased quarter over quarter” said Pawan Goyal, Senior Director of Products at Adobe. In the past 12 months, the DxContinuum customer roster grew to include Adobe, Akamai, Cisco and Dell. DxContinuum customers have accelerated their lead-to-deal conversion by up to 2x, deal size by 20% and sales velocity by 25% using DxContinuum predictive analytics with their Salesforce Sales Cloud and marketing data. See more in the DxContinuum press release.
Tips for Partners to Market to Salesforce Customers. Peri McDonald and Becky de Loryn from the Salesforce partner marketing team shared excellent tips for Salesforce partners about how to communicate with Salesforce customers. It’s important to optimize your AppExchange listing to engage top prospects; 50% of visitors to the AppExchange put in a keyword and search to find an app. It’s important to be thoughtful about differentiation. Use “Aloha language”; talk to people in writing like you would speak with them. Always look your best, with nice clean graphics and crisp messaging. Two partners that do this well are Bluewolf and Bizible.
See you at DF16!
The DxContinuum team
Sales and marketing run DxC to rock lead-to-deal conversion
www.dxcontinuum.com
