By Katrina Gosek, vice president of product portfolio strategy, Oracle CX Sales & Commerce
Sales and digital commerce leaders from across industries are not just asking how to better connect sales and purchasing processes in the current environment – they are also asking about how new approaches can give them a long-term competitive advantage.
The need to rethink existing approaches was underlined in our recent study with Denis Pombriant, a well-known CRM analyst. The study, “Getting Past the Breaking Point,” found that traditional CRM systems are simply not working and are seen more like a burden than a resource. And with findings such as 66% of sellers would rather clean the bathroom or stand in line at the DMV than updating their CRM system; it’s no wonder something is broken.
The problems with traditional CRM systems are only one component of today’s complex sales and commerce challenges, but the results do point to the need for a more connected omnichannel sales relationship for businesses. At the heart of this approach lies the need to bring front-office channels and back-office applications together on a unified platform that can provide one view of the customer and business. This not only helps direct sales teams move the right opportunities forward and close deals faster but also helps connect buyers more closely to the sales experience online.
With this in mind, we have introduced a number of new sales and commerce innovations within Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience to improve the virtual selling and buying experience.
Improved Virtual Selling Experience
- Predictive Lead Scoring: Helps sellers focus their efforts on the strongest opportunities and where they will have the most impact. It does this by using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate a probability score that shows a seller how likely a lead will close based on first-party and historic lead data such as past interactions, product purchases, and account profile data.
- New User Experience: Helps sellers improve efficiency and accelerate sales cycles with a new user experience that adapts to the seller’s role and gives action-driven prompts to focus the seller and remove the guesswork. The new CX Sales Mobile application showcases Oracle’s Redwood UX design philosophy for natural, intelligent interactions on-to-go.
- Streamlined Sales Processes: A new integration between Microsoft Teams and Oracle CX Sales lets sellers work in familiar collaboration tools without worrying about data loss or duplication. In addition, we continue to build on the integration between CX Sales and Oracle CPQ to give sellers the ability to start, search for, and finish quotes and proposals within the Oracle CX Sales user interface.
- Advanced Sales Forecasting: A new sales planning dashboard helps sellers make better decisions with views of evolving forecast trends and complete revenue models. The dashboard helps provide a level of accuracy and predictability to the sales planning and forecasting with data sourced from ERP actuals and real-time CRM pipeline.
Improved Virtual Buying Experience
- New Customer Intelligence Capabilities: New integrations between CX Commerce and Unity, our Customer Data Platform, help businesses leverage online purchasing behavior and data through the rest of the customer journey with other types of data (demographic, IoT, 3rd party enrichment). CX Commerce also now connects natively to Oracle’s Customer Data Management system linking online sales to a customer’s master record for automated data profiling and enrichment across channels. Finally, new AI capabilities within Oracle CX Commerce improve the customer buying experience with optimized and embedded recommendations and search.
- Streamlined Configuration Management Capabilities: Help businesses make even the most complex goods and services available for online purchasing giving B2B buyers the ability to configure their own packages and services online. In addition, proposals started online can be seamlessly passed to direct sellers if ahigh-touch engagement is required.
- New Subscription Management Capabilities: Help businesses quickly and easily launch subscription business models and make revenue more predictable by bringing together Oracle CX Commerce, CPQ, and Subscription Management.
New Commerce and Content Capabilities: A new integration between Oracle CX Commerce and Oracle CX Content gives buyers the product content and information they need to guide and enrich self-service purchasing decisions.
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