What is Revenue Cloud?

According to recent State of the Connected Customer report, 80% of business buyers say the experience a company provides is as important as its product or service, and 74% have used multiple channels to start and complete a transaction. However, delivering on this experience involves a maze of disparate people, processes and stakeholders including not only sales, but finance, partners, digital commerce, operations and IT. It gets more complex as businesses grow with partner networks or acquisitions. There are also compliance and legal rules around revenue reporting that make accuracy critical.

To address the issue Salesforce has introduced Revenue cloud.

Revenue Cloud gives businesses the agility to make the buying process faster and easier, accelerate new revenue streams and improve revenue efficiency. Revenue Cloud brings together CPQ and Billing, Partner Relationship Management and B2B Commerce capabilities to help businesses take control of their revenue growth across every channel. And because it is part of the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform, Revenue Cloud will allow companies to connect their sales, partner, operations and finance teams to create a single source of truth for revenue and customer transactions, from purchase to renewal to revenue recognition.

With Revenue Cloud, businesses will be able to:

Transform the buying experience: Give customers the ability to seamlessly jump across different sales channels with direct sales, partners, and digital storefronts. Now, a customer can fill their online cart with a specific configuration of products or services on their own and then reach out to a sales rep to ask a question or request a discount. Their rep will already have a complete understanding of the customer’s existing product history and online interactions at their fingertips for a smooth transaction. The new CPQ-B2B Commerce connector allows businesses to customize digital storefronts for complex B2B selling and add customizable, configurable pricing to digital carts for a self-service experience.

Digital carts allow customers to configure products on their own time and then reach out to a salesperson for a discount. When this all happens on the Salesforce platform, the direct sales representative or partner can pick up exactly where the customer left off.

Accelerate new revenue streams:

Revenue operations teams can quickly spin up new monetization strategies, such as launching a subscription product or implementing consumption pricing. Industry-specific solutions for unique workflows related to revenue, like managing ad inventory or content syndications for media companies. With new Multi-Cloud Billing, companies can create revenue streams from other clouds on a single platform. For example, field service reps can upsell products or create revenue from onsite services with billing and payments handled on one single, unified system. And with Revenue Cloud Quick Starts, businesses can launch a subscription offering from start to finish in eight weeks instead of months.

Revenue Cloud gives sales reps visibility into customer purchases for more strategic interactions; for example, a sales rep can see at a glance outstanding payment balances and that a customer is approaching their consumption limit.

Improve revenue efficiency:

Automation removes the burden from teams who are tasked with manual approvals, data reconciliation and transcriptions of orders from one system to another. Automatically validating sales orders and consolidating invoices prevents issues such as underbilling for services or incorrectly tracking changes to a contract, which can lead to lost revenue in the sales cycle. Instead of manually downloading outdated order forms, the new Customer Asset Lifecycle Management tool shows a simple, visual dashboard of everything a customer has purchased, keeping track of all contract amendments over time and open balances to provide a deeper understanding of the customer relationship. Real-time tracking against valuable KPIs like customer lifetime value, net revenue retention and monthly recurring revenue help teams align and make strategic decisions on where to cut costs or what kinds of customers to target. Integrations to ERP systems make revenue data actionable by adjusting go-to-market strategies or providing discounting guidance.

Dashboards provide CROs and revenue operations teams a single source of truth on all revenue data. KPIs such as ‘revenue by channel’ help teams understand how to manage and optimize revenue and run the business effectively.
Revenue Cloud includes CPQ, Billing, CPQ for Partner Communities, CPQ for Customer Communities and CPQ & B2B Commerce Connector, all generally available.

Case Study – Podium Digitally Transforms the Buying Experience

Utah-based tech company Podium, aimed to improve the buying process for both customers and reps. The company’s previous solution took more than 15 minutes to get to closed-won and with their rapid growth, this was hundreds of hours wasted by customers and reps alike. They chose CPQ and Billing to deliver a sales process that delivered the same amazing experience as their messaging platform.

With CPQ and Billing, Podium was able to simplify the product catalogue from several hundred products down to 30 products while reducing the time it took to create a quote by 80%. With a streamlined quoting process, Podium then turned their attention towards automating the onboarding and provisioning processes. They are now able to efficiently close new deals, expand existing accounts and rapidly launch new products.

“Podium helps small businesses interact and communicate with their customers, and COVID-19 hit our customers hard. The way in which consumers now expect to interact with a local business has fundamentally changed. With Salesforce, we were able to quickly launch new products to support new needs such as text to take-out”, said Jason Taylor, Podium’s CTO/CISO. “Having that single source of truth for Podium gives us a strategic advantage because we can answer questions and navigate the ever-changing market we’re in faster than anyone else.”

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