business to business sales

Business to Business Sales Thoughts from the Salesforce Tour

This past week I attended the Salesforce Tour event in Washington DC. There were many interesting items that relate to Business to Business Sales that were covered in a jam-packed day. I have been to the Salesforce Tour event in Toronto a number of times and like those events, the Washington event did not disappoint. There was a large focus on government and non-profit organizations being in Washington DC, but there were also many interesting topics covered for the Business to Business sales team.

 

Artificial Intelligence

AI was a huge focus of the event. The centrepiece was Einstein for Salesforce. Einstein is like having your own data scientist to guide you through your day. It learns from all your data and delivers predictions and recommendations based on your unique business processes. In some cases, it even automates tasks for you, freeing up time for you to connect with your customers. They had many different types of use cases including creating better lead scoring to dashboard reporting for sales reps, to creating automated communications paths for drip marketing campaigns. Einstein allows organizations to harness AI power using their own tools set. This is probably a better fit for medium and large organizations in the short-term, but AI will have big impacts on startups and growing firms.
 

Sales Apps

One of the biggest advantages for Salesforce versus any other CRM is the ability to utilize apps to help the sales rep and sales team. There were many business to business related sales apps exhibiting and leading sessions at the event. As an example, SpringCM had a tool to help create content through Salesforce. An interesting sales support use case was creating a custom NDA for a prospect within a few minutes. This would speed up the admin side of the sales process and allow the sales team to go faster.
 

Marketing with Pardot

Pardot was weaved throughout the event with mentions in the keynote, many break-out sessions, and a spot in the exhibitor hall. Pardot is an excellent option for growing companies to automate marketing tasks and get a better view of prospects. This is especially the case if you have Salesforce on the CRM side.
 

Salesforce for Everyone

I think that for many sales people we can think of Salesforce as a sales and marketing tool first. The reality is that many organizations use Salesforce as the central application. Salesforce used to have a service cloud and sales cloud focus, but more and more there is a vertical focus. Salesforce is strong and growing across multiple verticals with an extra focus on Nonprofit, Health, and Government. As an example, there was a big focus on digital transformation for government. There are many government apps that are still built on legacy systems.
 
If you use Salesforce or are interested to see how it can help your organization then look for a Salesforce Tour event in your area this spring and summer. I will be at the Toronto, New York, and Boston events, so feel free to contact me if you would like to connect at one of these events.
 

Business to Business Sales Thoughts from the Salesforce Tour