With a handful of acquisitions and new releases this year, Salesforce has been unstoppable. It seems like the company has taken an oath to simplify processes for all kinds of industries, which is definitely what we need right now. Salesforce has recently launched its very first Manufacturing Cloud for manufacturers and Consumer Goods Cloud for brick-and-mortar stores. This launch is part of the continuous effort of Salesforce to overtake other leading competitors in the CRM segment, namely, Oracle and SAP. Customers belonging to various industries are making use of the CRM and customer service applications being offered by Salesforce.
Very recently, Salesforce has been trying to implement steps for making its CRM system adaptable to different categories of industries, which is evident in the launch of its platforms for the healthcare sector and financial services companies. With the launch of Manufacturing Cloud and Consumer Goods Cloud, Salesforce aims to maximize revenue and increase the level of customer satisfaction by unifying market data from disparate sources.
Manufacturing Cloud helps in precisely forecasting, planning, and driving predictable business performance based on the customer and market demand, by way of collaborating sales and operations teams in an organization. Consumer Goods Cloud, on the other hand, enables reps to utilize Artificial Intelligence for optimizing key tasks, generating higher revenues via better order management, and promoting execution. This is likely to result in an improved in-store experience for the customer. Salesforce Consulting Companies can now expand their services to a broader range of customers, by adding these two newly launched Salesforce solutions to their existing portfolios.
Manufacturing Cloud – A product created by Salesforce for manufacturers
Manufacturing Cloud, through its sales agreements and account-based forecasting solutions, facilitates manufacturers to get better insights into their interactions with customers, thereby, generating accurate sales forecasts.
According to Cindy Bolt, SVP and GM, Salesforce Manufacturing, “In the manufacturing industry, changing customer and market demands can have a devastating effect on the bottom line, so being able to understand that they can avail of in the future, in addition to getting a complete overview of their present business. This will help disintegrating internal silos. At the same time, perfectly accurate forecasts can be developed by the sales, finance, and operations teams in the manufacturing company.”
Einstein Analytics for Manufacturing
With the help of Einstein Analytics for Manufacturing, account managers will get access to an intelligent experience since the Analytics takes into account important KPIs like demand insights, account health, sales agreement progress, and product penetration for determining the analytics.
Consumer Goods Cloud – A Salesforce product for field reps of consumer goods companies
Consumer goods companies can completely change the way they handle their business by providing field reps with Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud. The Consumer Goods Cloud is a strong and brilliant solution that helps in enhancing the experience of the customers in-store, as well as, streamlining operations. This facilitates field reps to focus more on pushing sales with retail channel partners and building long-term relationships with customers rather than having routine operational activities.
In the words of John Strain, GM and SVP, Retail and Consumer Goods at Salesforce, “Retail execution remain one of the most important pieces of a consumer goods brand’s strategy, but so much opportunity is wasted if the field rep doesn’t have the data and technology needed to make smart decisions. Consumer Goods Cloud provides these field reps with the tools they need to be successful on the ground while helping build both business opportunities and stronger relationships with their retail partners.”
Some of the benefits of Consumer Goods Cloud to field reps include:
- Einstein AI: Consumers Goods Cloud has an object detection and image recognition solution that facilitates planograms and merchandising compliance checks and easy inventory, thereby, enabling field reps to spend lesser time on routine activities like those relating to the audit. All of this is useful for product placements and optimizing compliance processes.
- Improved visit planning: For efficiently handling routing, Consumer Goods Cloud will provide users with in-app map functionality. Moreover, it will offer a list of those visits that hold top priority and have been assigned, along with the suggested and essential activities for the day.
- Capture orders and data: During the store visits that reps conduct, crucial data like the product’s pricing and quantity can be gathered via the mobile order capturing feature of Consumer Goods Cloud. This provides an assurance to the higher authorities about the completion and reporting of tasks assigned.
- Optimization of visit execution: For meeting the changing needs of any given store ranging from planogram and inventory checks to return order processing using a mobile device, reps can customize the templates on the basis of the store or segment types on reaching the store.
The above-mentioned features of both the Salesforce products need to be carefully studied by those companies offering Salesforce Consulting Services so that they provide better Salesforce implementation services to their clients belonging to any of these industries. From October 15, 2019 onwards, the Manufacturing Cloud and Consumer Goods Cloud will be made available generally, followed by the launch of Einstein Analytics for Consumer Goods in February 2020.
References: VentureBeat, TechRadar, Salesforce
Pratyush Kumar
