Salesforce.com is spinning out two new sales prospect tracking services called SalesforceIQ for Small Business and SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud. Both are designed to provide data-driven insights and suggested next steps for busy sales representatives.
The services, based on data analysis technology that Salesforce acquired with the July 2014 buyout of RelateIQ, analyze information in the ever-growing stores of customer and sales prospect data to help representatives close new deals.
“It brings all the data into one place and turns it into action items so your team can harness all that information you’ve collected to make deals,” Tim Fletcher, vice president of product, told eWEEK. “We see this as the next big opportunity,” to enabling small business in particular with tools typically reserved for larger enterprises, Fletcher added.
SalesforceIQ for Small Business is available now. Fletcher says the cloud-based service is designed to let small businesses that aren’t already Salesforce customers get up and running in minutes. The cost is $25 per user per month.
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A big selling point of both new services is the ability to extract insights and recommendations from existing data without requiring the user to manually reenter it.
For example, with SalesforceIQ for Small Business, data from emails, calendar and marketing automation systems are automatically captured to create reports that are designed to accelerate the sales process.
A "Suggested Tasks" feature recommends specific actions sales reps can take such as getting back to a prospect who asked a question requiring follow up research.
Another feature called "Closed Connections" is designed to identify the person in your company or network who is best suited to provide an introduction to a target prospect or company.
SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud
The new SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud, currently in beta test, integrates directly with a sales rep’s email so they don’t have to switch to different systems or screens as part of the selling process. Relationship Intelligence is integrated directly into sales reps’ email, allowing them to “sell smarter” right from their inbox.
“Straight from your inbox you can create a new lead,” Elise Bergeron, vice president of marketing at Salesforce said during an online demo. “We expect sales reps to replace their normal email inbox with this because it’s really powerful.”
For example, an email that comes from a sales prospect that the rep has communicated with earlier will display a Sales Cloud icon so the rep can see at a glance that the person already has a relationship with the company.
From there a simple click brings the rep into the record of past correspondence with that customer. Seeing a request for product information, the system calls up a selection of items that are most typically sent to prospective customers, simplifying the task for the rep.
Salesforce for Sales Cloud also tracks who hasn’t responded to emails and will alert the rep that a follow up may be in order.
A Shortcuts feature lets users quickly insert commonly used phrases to speed the creation of emails to customers and prospects.
Designed for desktop and mobile users, SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud works with iOS and Android devices as well as the Chrome browser. It’s currently available as a free beta version to users of the Sales Cloud in English. Pricing will be announced when the service becomes generally available which is expected to be “early” in 2016, along with support for additional languages.
“Today’s massive influx in communication data creates powerful signals about the health and potential of business relationships. It also creates a lot of noise,” said Steve Loughlin, founder of RelateIQ and now head of SalesforceIQ as part of Salesforce.com. “With SalesforceIQ, companies can now make sense of this data and pull out insights to drive their businesses forward with intelligence.”
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