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Join us for an exclusive webinar in collaboration with Salesforce, where we delve into the pressing pain points of the planning and forecasting process for RCG companies. In this insightful 45-minute session, we will take a look at the challenges businesses face and the significant impact these obstacles have on overall performance.
One of the pain points discussed during the webinar will be the ongoing struggles when planning and forecasting within Excel. Many organizations heavily rely on spreadsheets, but this approach often leads to major inefficiencies and errors. We will explore the limitations of Excel and offer alternatives that can streamline processes and improve accuracy.
Accurate forecasting is a critical aspect of effective planning, and we will address the challenges associated with achieving precise forecasts. From unpredictable market trends to changing consumer demands, businesses encounter obstacles that impede their ability to generate reliable predictions. Our webinar will provide insights into how Salesforce Customer Planning and Forecasting can help overcome these obstacles, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions with confidence.
Another prevalent pain point is the lack of visibility across various departments and functions within an organization. Outdated processes and siloed technology often obstruct seamless collaboration and hinder decision-making. We will discuss strategies to break down these obstacles and demonstrate how Salesforce’s solutions can provide instant visibility, fostering a cohesive and collaborative environment.
Additionally, the webinar will shed light on the importance of adaptability to market changes. In today’s dynamic business landscape, organizations must be prepared to respond swiftly and adjust their strategies to meet evolving customer needs. We will showcase how Salesforce’s technology equips businesses with the agility to adapt to market shifts efficiently.
By participating in this webinar, you will gain invaluable knowledge about the pain points faced by the retail and consumer goods industries and the corresponding solutions offered by Salesforce. Equipped with accurate forecasting, enhanced visibility, and state-of-the-art technology, you will be empowered to stay ahead of the competition.
Don’t miss out on this extraordinary opportunity to transform your company. Register now and embark on a journey toward unlocking the full potential of your business with Salesforce.
About Corrao Group
As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. We’ve worked with nearly 1,100+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150+ Salesforce projects. We are proud to be on the Consumer Goods Cloud Partner Advisory Board and Salesforce Managed Service Board, in addition to being the exclusive US launch partner of the Salesforce Trade Promotion Management (TPM) Pilot. If you want to learn more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!
Sales planning and forecasting is a crucial aspect of any business, as it helps organizations anticipate their future sales and align their resources accordingly. However, the traditional approach to this process can be tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone, leading to frustration for CEOs, marketing teams, sales managers, product managers, and financial teams. Fortunately, with advancements in technology, there is a more efficient and accurate solution. In this blog, we will explore the pain points of the sales planning and forecasting process and how Salesforce customer planning and forecasting (CPF) can streamline the entire process, saving time and providing more accurate predictions for all involved parties.
CEO
The CEO is typically responsible for setting the overall strategy of the company, including sales and marketing goals. They may have final approval on all major decisions related to customer planning and forecasting. Even though they’re not as hands-on in the planning and forecasting process as Sales Managers and Product Managers are, they still have issues that can be solved with an enhanced customer planning and forecasting tool.
Lack of visibility into departmental progress: Since they’re not as involved in the process, CEOs need to be able to review the progress of each department when it’s convenient for them. Due to running the company, sometimes that review time comes at 8 pm or other times when their employees aren’t working. They can’t afford to wait for department heads to both collect and then send the necessary information. At that point, the data is already outdated and could be filled with manual errors.
How Salesforce CPF helps: Salesforce CPF provides a platform where CEOs can check in on the progress of each department at any time of the day with confidence that the data is in real-time. This helps them know which delegation activities work best for certain department heads, and reveal those that need improvement.
Outdated Technology: Unbeknownst to most CEOs, the planning and forecasting technology their company uses is hindering their team’s performance and costing them revenue. Spreadsheets continue to become outdated as consumer behavior has drastically changed since 2019. This technology can’t support the thousands of equations required within the forecasting process. And using multiple, disconnected systems to accomplish this entire process is too time-consuming and error-prone.
How Salesforce CPF helps: Salesforce CPF is the ultimate tool to run every step of the sales planning and forecasting process in today’s world. With three major updates per year, CEOs can be confident that the tool is always staying up to date with the consumers constantly changing behavior. Salesforce also does a great job of listening to their customer’s requests so these system updates contain requests from people actually using the tool. Salesforce CPF provides companies with one centralized area for both internal and external teams to collaborate on and view their KPIs in real time. CEOs can jump in at any time to see the ongoing process and comment if they need to. The advanced tool can also support custom equations required in the planning and forecasting process. This information can automatically be analyzed and displayed in reports & dashboards so CEOs can review them at any time of the day without needing to wait.
KPI Reports and Dashboards: Typically, CEOs need to wait for meetings with department heads to view sales planning and forecasting KPIs. It takes time to gather this information, and then even more time to prepare it for a presentation.
How Salesforce CPF helps: Salesforce CPF provides one dashboard for CEOs to view all KPIs in real time. Comprised of multiple reports, this dashboard can be modified exactly how the viewer would like. It can contain out-of-the-box reports as well as the company’s custom KPIs.
Sales Manager
Sales managers are responsible for managing the sales team and ensuring that sales goals are met. They are heavily involved in creating and reviewing sales forecasts. The CSO oversees the sales team and is responsible for meeting revenue targets.
Inaccurate Data: Accurate data is always required to forecast sales but too often Sales Managers face challenges in obtaining access to this. Data is either already outdated by the time it reaches the Sales Manager, or there is simply not enough. Inaccurate or incomplete data leads to inaccurate sales forecasts, severely impacting the overall sales strategy.
How Salesforce CPF helps: Salesforce CPF provides a centralized platform for all customer data: purchase history, preferences, demographics, and much more. This reduces the likelihood of data errors caused by hosting this info across siloed systems. CPF provides real-time reports and dashboards to track the progress of each department and make data-driven decisions based on accurate data.
Inefficient & Manual Processes: The sales planning and forecasting process is extremely time-consuming and complex, which tends to lead to inefficiencies across the board. There are many players involved in the process, leading to additional errors. Sales managers often have to manually gather and consolidate data from multiple sources, a tedious and error-prone process.
How Salesforce CPF helps: Salesforce CPF speeds up manual tasks via automated data collection and analysis, real-time updates and alerts, forecasting accuracy, and enhanced collaboration and communication. It also gives clients AI-powered forecasting capabilities that use algorithms to analyze historical data, current trends, and additional critical info. This eliminates the need for error-prone manual data entry and saves Sales managers tons of time.
Poor Team Collaboration:Sales forecasts constantly need to be communicated to stakeholders but poor communication can lead to misunderstandings and misalignments. Departments need to be completely transparent as certain processes can’t be started until others are completed correctly. Constant communication helps fellow department heads with expectations so that they can hit the ground running when they need to contribute. Sales Managers need to ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page to execute sales forecasting quickly and accurately.
How Salesforce CPF helps: Email notifications containing the latest sales forecasting updates can automatically be scheduled to send to key members. These notifications can be customized to show the details each client prefers. The data is in real-time so that reports aren’t already outdated as they are with archaic systems such as Excel and others.
Limited Visibility: Sales Managers require visibility into the sales pipeline to accurately forecast future sales, but often, they may not have complete visibility. Some parts may require information to be sent from colleagues, slowing the process down. Not having access to all of the data makes it difficult to identify potential roadblocks and opportunities for improvement.
How Salesforce CPF helps: Salesforce CPF gives Sales Managers a comprehensive view of every detail across each department that is related to the planning and forecasting process and sales pipeline. Without the need to access different systems to view key data, this rapidly accelerates the planning process and reduces the manual time spent consolidating the data into one view.
Unforeseen Market Changes: Unforeseen market changes can drastically impact sales forecasts and catch everyone off guard. These changes include economic factors, changes in consumer behavior, and shifts in the competitive landscape. Sales Managers need to adapt quickly to these changes and adjust their forecasts accordingly. The problem is, no human can accurately predict what’s going to happen in the future.
How Salesforce CPF helps: Scenario Planning within CPF helps create different scenarios and models to simulate the impact of possible market changes on one’s sales performance. This helps Sales Managers understand the potential risks and opportunities associated with different market scenarios. If these market changes happen, Sales Managers are well prepared to adjust to “plan B” without major profit loss.
Financial Teams
Financial analysts may be involved in creating financial models and analyzing data to help inform sales forecasts.
Disconnected Systems and Processes: 77% of planning processes depend on having access to accurate data. As Excel spreadsheets quickly become outdated daily, finance teams need to ensure their data is always updated. Consolidating data from multiple sources is time-consuming and extremely error-prone. By the time the data is collected and consolidated, it can already be outdated upon sharing it with other teams. Forwarding inaccurate data to other departments only continues to decrease the accuracy of the overall sales forecast. Excel spreadsheets also can’t support the infinite number of calculations and macros that a professional planning and forecasting tool can.
How Salesforce CPF helps: Salesforce CPF gives companies one platform for all internal and external departments to run every step of the planning and forecasting process within. All data within the tool is up to date and accessible at any time of the day. So financial teams can access data after hours without needing to wait for other team members to provide them with the necessary info.
Time-Consuming Manual Tasks: Finance teams can’t afford any slow-downs within their processes. They need to generate timely insights, but many teams spend too much time sorting and organizing data instead of actually analyzing it.
How Salesforce CPF helps: CPF provides financial teams with the power of bringing their own custom processes onto the Salesforce platform, streamlining it for maximum efficiency. This also keeps all members of the finance team on the same page, where other departments (heads) can also see how things are progressing in real-time. This allows them to get prepared to either act on the incoming data or provide whatever is needed to the finance team.
Lack of Team/Departmental Collaboration: Finance teams rely on information provided by other departments to do their job, and vice versa. When companies use multiple systems for planning and forecasting, info-sharing is slowed down tremendously.
How Salesforce CPF helps: Real-time data gives all departments insight into the information provided by their peers in separate departments. Finance doesn’t need to wait “X” days for a sales report to come in; they can simply grab this info within Salesforce at any time of the day. Collaborative forecasting enables companies to move away from disparate and isolated forecasting activities to a unified, real-time enterprise forecasting process.
Outdated Information: Finance needs up-to-the-minute information and they are under constant pressure to deliver these actionable insights to assist in decision-making. The lack of accurate, real-time data limits the level of detail that financial planning systems can provide.
How Salesforce CPF helps: Salesforce CPF helps with self-service analytics to enable real-time reporting, assisting finance teams in understanding which revenue sources are underperforming, how to improve operational efficiencies, analyze the company’s performance, and develop an achievable plan for driving growth.
Product Managers
Product managers may be involved in forecasting demand for products or services to ensure that production and delivery processes run smoothly. Operations managers may be involved in forecasting demand for products or services to ensure that production and delivery processes run smoothly.
Inaccurate Data: Without accurate data, PMs are essentially working in the dark to develop and ship successful products. Bad data makes it difficult to make informed decisions, making it harder to move forward strategically and accurately. These manual efforts are typically error-prone.
How Salesforce CPF helps: Salesforce CPF provides one system to hold all key data: customer info, market research, user info, and product info. This ensures data is accurate and up to date. The tool also eliminates the constant human-caused errors and gives PMs extra time to focus on major tasks while Salesforce CPF takes care of the tedious, repetitive ones.
Forecasting Delivery & Timelines: There are too many variables that it’s nearly impossible to manually predict an accurate delivery timeline. Humans also tend to underestimate the time it takes to accomplish a task. This risks overpromising and under-delivering.
How Salesforce CPF helps: CPF helps accurately build timelines based on historical data, and future predictions. These have already been shown to be more accurate than predictions made by humans. Timelines are shared in the system for quick adjustments that can be viewed and sent out immediately.
Aligning Teams and Getting Buy-In: All department leaders have different objectives and priorities, leading to competing visions for the product’s direction. PMs need to navigate these priorities and bridge the gap between teams, stakeholders, and leaders. Without a centralized hub, PMs and department leaders are disconnected and can’t execute what needs to be done through emails and spreadsheets.
How Salesforce CPF helps: Salesforce CPF provides a centralized platform for all key leaders and stakeholders to view both company-wide and departmental KPIs in real-time. No more waiting for spreadsheets to be built, cleaned up, and shared by each department, containing outdated info by the time it reaches the recipient.
Overwhelming Product Backlog: PMs need the entire product backlog to be visible, transparent, and clear to all stakeholders and developers. Without this, they risk misalignment of the entire team’s goals, accountabilities, and deadlines.
How Salesforce CPF helps: The Product Roadmap provides companies with complete, real-time transparency throughout the entire process. This keeps everyone in the know, 24/7. Real-time updates can be scheduled to send automatically, or at the click of a button, alerting all appropriate teams of key updates.
CMO
The CMO is responsible for developing and implementing the company’s marketing strategy. They may be involved in market research and analysis to inform the customer planning and forecasting process. Marketing managers may be responsible for conducting market research and analyzing customer data to inform the customer planning and forecasting process.
Review Sales History and Make Predictions: Marketers need to utilize past sales data to help provide predictions to sales teams for the upcoming period. Having to wait for, and comb through multiple spreadsheets is too time-consuming and error-prone. Today’s marketers need a system that can streamline this process.
How Salesforce CPF helps: Salesforce CPF holds all historical sales data across different departments of the company that is available 24/7. Marketers no longer have to wait for sales teams to find and clean up their spreadsheets before sharing them. CPF’s platform provides a collaborative area where marketers can ask questions, and see other questions from all departments that may help them accomplish their goals.
Provide Historical Campaign Data:Which marketing campaigns had the highest ROI? Which ones underperformed? Marketers need to gather this data, run an analysis, and debrief sales on the findings. Without a centralized platform to hold these details, marketers are using outdated information in their process. This information is key in letting sales teams know which content pieces and marketing campaigns resonate best with customers.
How Salesforce CPF helps: The Salesforce CPF platform provides one place to hold all key campaign data: internal/external costs, revenue, and any custom information. Advanced analytics can accomplish in just minutes what takes human marketers days, sometimes weeks to complete in regards to campaign analysis. Prediction models can provide accurate predictions on how proposed marketing campaigns will perform in the upcoming period(s).
Tracking Always-Changing Customer Data: Marketers are responsible for collecting historical customer behavior, analyzing it, and providing predictions for the upcoming period. They need to provide the optimal price for a product based on this market research combined with their competitive landscape. With customer behavior constantly changing, this is an extremely time-consuming effort.
How Salesforce CPF helps: With CPF, marketers have all the historical customer data in one place. The tool can analyze the data, revealing certain trends and insights that the human eye may not catch. This is all done quicker and more accurately than any human can do. Salesforce CPF can take the analysis and provide marketers with predictions for the year which can then be shared with sales teams. This action saves days’ worth of time.
In conclusion, the sales planning and forecasting process can be a daunting task for businesses, but it is a necessary one to ensure success. The traditional approach can be archaic, time-consuming, and error-prone, leading to frustration and inefficiencies. By adopting Salesforce customer planning and forecasting, businesses can streamline the entire process, freeing up time for all department heads and providing more accurate predictions. With its advanced capabilities, businesses can make informed decisions, meet sales targets, and stay ahead of the competition. By embracing technology and innovation, businesses can take control of their sales planning and forecasting process and position themselves for growth and success.
The Salesforce Summer ’23 Release notes have arrived! The latest update for Analytics introduces many new features and improvements. From unifying all your analytics in the updated Analytics home to improving recommendations with Decision Optimization, these features will take your analytics to the next level. Keep reading to learn more about the top updates for Salesforce Analytics in the Summer ’23 Release.
Rather than managing analytics scattered across different tools, find what you need in the updated Analytics home. This personalized environment for CRM Analytics and reports and dashboards organizes all your content in a cohesive and intelligent experience. Go to See Also to learn more about the reimagined Analytics home for CRM Analytics and reports and dashboards.
Share analytics with colleagues across your Slack workspaces and channels. Recipients can view dashboard details, share, subscribe, view a real-time snapshot of the dashboard, and quickly open the dashboard in Salesforce.
Explain Lightning dashboard charts, describe metrics and KPIs, and clarify tables with rich text right where users need it. Add company logos and branding, flow diagrams, and embedded images. Guide users through their data with section titles, narrative text, and even animated GIFs. Components are now called widgets in Unlimited Edition. Dashboards now support up to 25 widgets, including a maximum of 20 charts and tables, 2 images, and 25 rich text widgets. The previous limit was 20 in total.
Save time and effort and reduce dashboard redundancy. No more cloning dashboards for different teams and business units. Refine and target your dashboard data with up to five filters on Lightning dashboards. The previous limit was three filters.
Control Einstein’s suggested improvements by incorporating your business rules, objectives, and constraints to ensure that the recommendations are relevant, feasible, and aligned with the big picture. For example, send field service reps to improve customer satisfaction while limiting the number of appointments. Or, focus your sales reps on maximizing revenue and not just their win rate by optimizing for opportunity amount and suggesting actions within time limits and budget constraints.
Learn More about the Salesforce Summer ’23 Release Notes
If you want to learn more about the exciting new features of the Salesforce Summer ’23 Release for Analytics, don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll be happy to provide you with all the information you need.
About Corrao Group
As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. We’ve worked with nearly 1,100+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150+ Salesforce projects. We are proud to be on the Consumer Goods Cloud Partner Advisory Board and Salesforce Managed Service Board, in addition to being the exclusive US launch partner of the Salesforce Trade Promotion Management (TPM) Pilot. If you want to learn more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!
The Salesforce Summer ’23 Release is packed with new features and updates, and we’re here to highlight the key updates for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. One exciting addition is the ability to trigger external actions after a prospect engagement, allowing for even more personalized and targeted marketing efforts. Plus, the Optimizer feature is now generally available and includes new tools to help keep your business units running smoothly. Keep reading to learn about additional updates, including the Prospect Change Monitor, the ability to convert dynamic lists to static, and more.
Now you can trigger an external action on any Account Engagement asset that has a completion action. For example, after a prospect completes a sign-up form, you can register the prospect for a webinar. You can send a text message after a prospect clicks a custom redirect link or send an alert to your sales team when a prospect visits a pricing page.
Get performance information, recommendations, and required steps on the Optimizer page when you need them. The Optimizer feature, now generally available, also includes some changes since the last release. Diagnose and treat setup problems that are blocking your access to features with the Configuration Issues table. The Performance Improvement Measures table now includes good measures so that you can see what’s working well in your business unit. Plus, the new Prospect Change Monitor helps you understand which features result in the most prospect changes for your business unit.
Find out which features are creating or updating prospect records in your business unit with the Prospect Change Monitor. Use the monitor to help you adjust your API integrations and automations that could be eating up processing power in your business unit. Access the Prospect Change Monitor from the Optimizer page in Account Engagement.
Save processing power in your business unit by converting your old or unused dynamic lists to static lists. After you convert a dynamic list, you must manually add and remove prospects because the list no longer updates based on rule criteria. Select inactive or unused dynamic lists and use the table action dropdown menu to convert them to static. You can also convert individual lists from the record home.
Based on customer feedback, you can now use the most recently updated field value as a source of truth for the prospect Opted Out field. You also choose either Salesforce or Account Engagement to use as the system of record instead. Previously in the Spring ’23 release, selecting a system of record was required. Business units created after October 18, 2023 use the Account Engagement value by default.
Tracking cookies are now added retroactively after a prospect confirms consent. Previously, tracking cookies were added before a prospect clicked the consent banner and then deleted if they didn’t consent.
The Enhanced Email Builder now aligns images evenly. Previously, the content in the far right column was wider and taller than the columns to the left. Check to see if images in email templates published before this update need to be adjusted.
Learn More about the Salesforce Summer ’23 Release Notes
If you want to learn more about the exciting new features of the Salesforce Summer ’23 Release for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll be happy to provide you with all the information you need.
About Corrao Group
As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. We’ve worked with nearly 1,100+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150+ Salesforce projects. We are proud to be on the Consumer Goods Cloud Partner Advisory Board and Salesforce Managed Service Board, in addition to being the exclusive US launch partner of the Salesforce Trade Promotion Management (TPM) Pilot. If you want to learn more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!
Exciting news for Consumer Goods Cloud users! The Salesforce Summer ’23 Release has arrived, bringing some great features specifically designed for Consumer Goods Cloud TPM and Retail Execution. With improved customer service, enhanced analytics, and new tools to boost productivity, this release will surely improve the overall user experience for Consumer Goods Cloud users. Let’s dive into some of the key highlights of this release!
Give your service agents easy access to accounts, visits, orders, and engagement history records so that they have all the information necessary to plan and provide personalized customer service. Service agents can also drive revenue growth by placing orders over calls using Order Management and Penny Perfect Pricing.
Use the new Trade Promotion Effectiveness (TPE) Analytics app to measure and monitor the effectiveness of your trade promotions. TPE dashboards help you make better business decisions, which leads to increased sales and revenue and improved customer satisfaction. Use standard CRMA dashboards to analyze data for volumes, assortments, spending, and tactics. Embed customized dashboards or widgets in specific Lightning Experience pages in TPM to provide in-context insights.
Use the TPM Promotion Analytics Dashboard component to embed dashboards and dashboard components in promotion pages. In edit mode, see interactive visualizations of your data and apply filters to the promotion’s displayed values and related records. Use JSON strings to specify types of filters or dashboard selections that you can’t create using the Filter Builder.
When you modify promotions and manually adjust editable KPIs in a customer business plan (CBP), you can now quickly save and calculate your CBP. The CBP calculates data for the account and related promotions and displays the latest KPI metrics with the impact of your changes.
Evaluate different customer business plan (CBP) scenarios to maximize revenue and sales while planning for current and future financial years. Use the active CBP to create multiple scenarios for evaluation. Exclude promotions from a scenario in the CBP to simulate different strategies.
Integrate data seamlessly and connect accounts, products, and their hierarchies from third-party systems to the Consumer Goods Cloud without leaving the Salesforce platform. Use the pre-built APIs to quickly connect to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and get started with Consumer Goods Cloud with just a few clicks.
Penny Perfect Pricing helps sales reps calculate order prices online based on the same pricing conditions and configuration that they use in the Offline Mobile app. Reps can calculate prices for orders with different scales, units of measure, and conditions such as discounts, amount per unit, and flat rates.
Your reps can now update a store’s open hours and plan store visits efficiently using the Consumer Goods Cloud Offline Mobile App. Reps can edit and maintain Operating Hour records only if operating hours aren’t reused across multiple accounts. To avoid overriding operating hours across linked accounts, enable editing only for operating hours that aren’t used across multiple accounts.
By using the enhanced product filters in Consumer Goods Cloud Desktop app, users now see only the products associated with their sales org, which saves time and effort. Previously, product searches returned results from other sales orgs too.
Give your sales reps an advanced order creation and management experience by using the new Order Lightning Web Component (Order LWC). Reps can quickly navigate through the editable order fields, such as quantity, discount, and special price. The Order LWC experience is the default setting and supports both Simple Pricing and Penny Perfect Pricing.
Use the new Analytics for Consumer Goods—Advanced Data Model app to analyze your account performance and make informed decisions to increase revenue and compliance. Sales managers can gain insights into revenue by territory, assess sales executive performance, identify product whitespace opportunities in high-potential stores, and analyze the correlation between store visits, compliance, and revenue. Sales representatives get a quick view of their performance based on sales revenue, team average, most sold product categories, store visits, and compliance to identify areas that need attention.
Learn More about the Salesforce Summer ’23 Release Notes
If you want to learn more about the exciting new features of the Salesforce Summer ’23 Release for Consumer Goods Cloud, don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll be happy to provide you with all the information you need.
About Corrao Group
As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. We’ve worked with nearly 1,100+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150+ Salesforce projects. We are proud to be on the Consumer Goods Cloud Partner Advisory Board and Salesforce Managed Service Board, in addition to being the exclusive US launch partner of the Salesforce Trade Promotion Management (TPM) Pilot. If you want to learn more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!
The Salesforce Summer ’23 Release notes have arrived! The latest update for Service Cloud introduces many new features and improvements. From delivering products and services with Service Catalog to sending voice messages in enhanced messaging channels, this release is packed with updates designed to improve your customer service experience. Read on to learn more about the newest additions to Service Cloud and how they can help you better serve your customers.
Use Service Catalog, now generally available, to turn your customers’ requests for products and services into approved and documented orders. For example, automate frequent requests like resetting a password through Service Catalog. Previously, Service Catalog was available only as part of Work.com.
Create a Service Catalog site that provides your customer and partners a self-service portal for the seamless browsing and requesting of items from your Service Catalog. Build, style, and launch your site effortlessly with point-and-click Aura components built for Service Catalog and with prebuilt Aura site templates from Experience Cloud.
Voice is the new text, so make sure your agents don’t miss out. Agents can now easily record and send voice messages up to one minute long to customers in enhanced WhatsApp and enhanced Facebook Messenger channels. Previously, agents had to use a separate app to record messages and then send the audio files as attachments.
You asked, and Salesforce listened. The Send-and-End Chat buttons are now separated in the agent conversation window. Additionally, the toolbar now lives above the message field. These subtle changes help agents click the correct button and find the tools they need during messaging sessions.
Get your contact center users up and running more quickly with on-demand diagnostics. No need to troubleshoot or contact Salesforce Customer Support. Run the Single Sign-On service checks to verify that Service Cloud Voice can authenticate all agents and supervisors in your contact center. Run the Contact Center User service checks to verify that every contact center agent and supervisor is assigned the right permission set license and permission set. Without them, the user can’t use Service Cloud Voice.
Evaluate the performance of your voice channel by adding two new Voice objects to your custom report types. Spot trends on disconnected calls, missed calls by agents, call error rates, and other call actions. Some metrics are only available for Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect. All data for the new Voice objects are deleted after 30 days.
Collaborate on a Slack swarm from Lightning Experience with the enhanced Slack Conversations component that looks and feels more like Slack. To keep the experience consistent between Slack and Salesforce, Slack profile pictures now appear alongside the message, messages are left-aligned and timestamped, and users can see and send custom Slack emojis. Slack Conversations users can also view advanced Slack formats such as code and code blocks, easily identify attachments by a file emoji, send messages through Slack Connect, and even use the component on the go from a tablet.
Bring the power of Swarming and Expert Finder to Field Service with Service Appointments, now supported for Swarming. Field service workers can bring together cross-functional experts to quickly resolve tricky customer issues, even when onsite with a customer, helping reduce your cost to serve.
Show supervisors real-time metrics to help them identify and resolve issues quickly. In this continuing pilot, the wallboard includes more charts. On the Omni Supervisor tab, supervisors can select a queue of interest to filter the metrics shown.
When conversation intelligence detects a key phrase in calls or messages, it raises a flag on the Agents tab in Omni Supervisor. Supervisors can then jump in and help agents resolve the issue quickly.
Help users self-serve and find solutions quickly with the new Knowledge Article page for LWR sites. Now you can add knowledge articles to your Self-Service portal’s Knowledge Article Details page.
Use Timeline to monitor survey responses. View information related to responses and understand respondents’ interaction. You can enable a Timeline for both standard objects and custom objects.
Site visitors can now view knowledge articles in LWR. Administrators can toggle between field labels and field sections and adjust the style of the knowledge article title. Mandatory field labels, such as URL Name, that your site visitors don’t need are also hidden. And employees can customize knowledge articles in an unauthenticated help center and via an authenticated portal. Previously, the Knowledge Article component was available only in Aura, making it inaccessible to LWR users.
Learn More about the Salesforce Summer ’23 Release Notes
If you want to learn more about the exciting new features of the Salesforce Summer ’23 Release for Service Cloud, don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll be happy to provide you with all the information you need.
About Corrao Group
As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. We’ve worked with nearly 1,100+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150+ Salesforce projects. We are proud to be on the Consumer Goods Cloud Partner Advisory Board and Salesforce Managed Service Board, in addition to being the exclusive US launch partner of the Salesforce Trade Promotion Management (TPM) Pilot. If you want to learn more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!
The Salesforce Summer ’23 Release notes have arrived! The latest update for Sales Cloud introduces a plethora of new features and improvements that aim to streamline sales processes and enhance team collaboration. Among the highlights of this release, users can now split revenue by product mix with Opportunity Product Splits, create quotes without an opportunity, and quickly find specific items in the To-Do List with the new search field. Furthermore, the Revenue Intelligence Command Center and Sales Stage Analysis Dashboard offer deeper insights into sales performance and pipeline management. Let’s dive into the details and explore Salesforce’s new features for sales teams.
Use opportunity product splits to allocate revenue at a more granular level to team members who collaborate on complex opportunities. Without leaving the opportunity record, teams can see how multiple products and each team member fit into a sales motion. And with opportunity product splits reports, team members can track all of the opportunities they contribute to.
Sales teams can track product splits and rollups to opportunity split revenue with standard reports, giving them visibility to the contribution team members make to the deals they support. The reports also show how product splits’ data reflect on compensation for reps and on individual and team forecasts.
Sales reps no longer have to follow the opportunity-to-quote flow. They can fast-track deals by creating quotes without first creating an opportunity, speeding up delivering quotes to their customers for review. Quotes must be related to an account when they’re converted to orders.
Easily identify your most engaged prospects with the new Engagement History field. The field contains a chart showing all outbound activities and inbound engagement for the past 30 days. Reps can instantly see when and how often each lead, contact, or person account has been engaged so they can reach out at the right moment. Previously, users could see the number of recent engagements on prospect records, but not the timing.
Users can use the new search field to quickly find the specific items they’re looking for in the To-Do List. Users can act on the tasks that matter most, wherever those items are in the list. Previously, users could tag items and create lists, but not search.
Get all the details you need for sales success from the Sales Rep Command Center. You can see whether you’re aligned to meet your quotas, which opportunities are stuck, and overdue activities. You can also see step progression and amount changes.
Get a high-level view of the stages of your sales, identify bottlenecks and at-risk opportunities, and understand if deals are progressing smoothly. The new Sales Stage Analysis tab in Revenue Insights shows how long deals remain in each stage. You can see which deals are stalled, and which opportunities had amount changes or had deadlines pushed back.
Identify potential sales in Einstein Account Management. In the Product Whitespace view, see which products your accounts purchased and identify gaps for upsell opportunities.
See more Einstein Prediction details at one time in a full, slide-out panel on the forecasts page. Previously, Einstein predictions were shown in a shortened panel with the introduction of forecast pages in the Lightning App Builder.
Help reps adhere to visit spacing requirements by ensuring they visit customers one time during their shift in Salesforce Maps Advanced. Preventing same-shift visits is especially helpful for large volumes of accounts that require frequent visits. For example, a customer requires daily visits, but the rep travels 2 days a week. This option schedules the rep to visit one time on each of those 2 days instead of scheduling multiple visits to that same customer on each of those 2 days.
Meeting Digest is now available for all users automatically. And, it’s the default tab in Event record details for users with Einstein Activity Capture. Enable an activity sync solution, such as Einstein Activity Capture, to get the most out of Meeting Digest, including RSVPs, insights, and recommended actions.
Are your reps in a hurry to set up meetings? Now they can start the process with one click. Previously, reps had to open an email and click twice to insert proposed meeting times.
Sales reps often have to email back and forth with customers to set up a meeting. Now reps can quickly add three upcoming meeting times as a suggestion and avoid negotiating. Previously, this feature was available only with Outlook and Gmail integrations.
Learn More about the Salesforce Summer ’23 Release Notes
If you want to learn more about the exciting new features of the Salesforce Summer ’23 Release for Sales Cloud, don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll be happy to provide you with all the information you need.
About Corrao Group
As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. We’ve worked with nearly 1,100+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150+ Salesforce projects. We are proud to be on the Consumer Goods Cloud Partner Advisory Board and Salesforce Managed Service Board, in addition to being the exclusive US launch partner of the Salesforce Trade Promotion Management (TPM) Pilot. If you want to learn more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!
In the world of consumer goods, companies are constantly striving to improve their forecasting accuracy, collaborate more effectively, and streamline their workflows. That’s where Salesforce Customer Planning & Forecasting (CPF) comes in – an all-in-one solution that helps consumer goods companies achieve these goals and more.
Benefits of Salesforce Customer Planning & Forecasting
One of the primary reasons that consumer goods companies are turning to Salesforce CPF is because of its advanced planning and forecasting capabilities. With Salesforce CPF, companies can create accurate sales forecasts based on historical data, current trends, and market analysis easier than ever before. These forecasts allow companies to anticipate demand more accurately, adjust inventory levels, and optimize their supply chain operations. This can help companies lower costs, reduce waste, and improve customer satisfaction.
Another key benefit of Salesforce CPF is its ability to improve team collaboration. Sales, marketing, and supply chain teams can collaborate in a single source of truth, sharing data and insights in real time. This breaks down silos and enables teams to make more informed decisions based on a comprehensive business view.
The ability to add new products to your sales forecast is critical for companies to remain competitive and stay ahead of market trends. Accurately forecasting the potential sales volume of a new product is essential to planning production, allocating resources, and making informed business decisions. Salesforce CPF allows companies to track new product launches, collect customer feedback, and add new products to their sales pipeline efficiently, delivering a comprehensive view of your sales strategy. Proper collaboration between the brand team and buyers is essential to anticipate sales ramp, and it requires close attention to customer business plans to accurately forecast and add new products to the sales pipeline.
Overall, Salesforce CPF provides consumer goods companies with advanced planning and forecasting capabilities, improved team collaboration, and the ability to add new products to their sales pipeline, enabling them to optimize their supply chain operations and remain competitive in the market.
Get Started with Salesforce CPF Today
Salesforce CPF is a powerful tool for consumer goods companies looking to improve their forecasting accuracy, collaborate more effectively, and streamline their workflows. By leveraging advanced analytics, real-time collaboration, and automation, Salesforce CPF can help companies drive revenue growth, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction. As competition in the consumer goods industry continues to intensify, companies that adopt Salesforce CPF are poised to gain a competitive advantage and thrive in the future. Learn more about Salesforce Customer Planning & Forecasting.
About Corrao Group
As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. We’ve worked with nearly 1,100+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150+ Salesforce projects. We are proud to be on the Consumer Goods Cloud Partner Advisory Board and Salesforce Managed Service Board, in addition to being the exclusive US launch partner of the Salesforce Trade Promotion Management (TPM) Pilot. If you want to learn more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!
Forecasting for consumer goods firms can be incredibly challenging to manage throughout the year due to various factors impacting demand, production, and supply chain operations. These challenges can lead to significant losses and inefficiencies if not managed effectively. With the help of Salesforce Customer Planning & Forecasting (CPF), consumer goods companies can optimize their planning and forecasting activities to stay competitive and meet their business objectives.
Challenges with Forecasting for Consumer Goods Companies
One of the main challenges of forecasting for consumer goods firms is the unpredictable nature of consumer demand. Consumers’ purchasing behavior can be influenced by various factors, such as cultural trends, seasonal changes, economic conditions, and unanticipated events (COVID-19). These factors can lead to sudden shifts in demand that can be difficult to predict, resulting in overstocked or understocked inventory levels, leading to substantial inventory and monetary losses for the company.
In addition to demand volatility, forecasting can also be impacted by production challenges, such as unexpected delays, supply chain disruptions, or manufacturing issues. These challenges can lead to unexpected inventory shortages, production delays, and increased costs, all impacting the company’s bottom line.
Another challenge with forecasting for consumer goods firms is the limitations of traditional forecasting methods, such as using Excel spreadsheets. Excel spreadsheets are time-consuming and inefficient to manage, especially for large-scale operations, and can also be prone to errors and inaccuracies. Learn more issues around forecasting and planning by visiting our recent blog: Overcoming the Obstacles of Consumer Goods Planning with Salesforce CPF
Overcome Planning & Forecasting Challenges with Salesforce CPF
To overcome these challenges, consumer goods firms can adopt advanced forecasting and planning tools that utilize machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data analytics. Salesforce CPF is one of these tools that help companies make more accurately forecasted demands, optimize production and inventory levels, and reduce the risk of stock-outs or overstocking. By leveraging Salesforce CPF, consumer goods firms can improve their forecasting accuracy, reduce inefficiencies, and minimize the risk of losses, ultimately leading to a more profitable and efficient business operation.
As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. We’ve worked with nearly 1,100+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150+ Salesforce projects. We are proud to be on the Consumer Goods Cloud Partner Advisory Board and Salesforce Managed Service Board, in addition to being the exclusive US launch partner of the Salesforce Trade Promotion Management (TPM) Pilot. If you want to learn more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!
For years, Excel spreadsheets have been the go-to tool for many consumer goods businesses for customer planning and forecasting. As the consumer goods market becomes more complicated and dynamic, the limitations of using Excel are becoming increasingly evident.
Excel spreadsheets can be prone to errors and inaccuracies, which can have significant consequences for forecasting success. Additionally, Excel lacks the visibility and analytics capabilities that Consumer goods companies need to make informed decisions about sales strategies, production planning, and inventory levels. Siloed departments, ongoing forecast accuracy issues, and problems with tracking are also common challenges that companies face when using Excel for forecasting.
As such, the days of relying solely on Excel as a forecasting tool are over, and companies in the consumer goods industry must explore more comprehensive solutions to stay competitive. In this blog, we will discuss why the consumer goods industry needs to shift away from Excel spreadsheets and towards more sophisticated solutions, such as Salesforce Customer Planning & Forecasting (Salesforce CPF), to drive growth and success.
Pain Points of Excel Spreadsheet Planning & Forecasting
Excel is a powerful tool for managing and analyzing data, and it has been widely used for planning and forecasting for many years. As the market and business environment become more complicated, Excel may not be the best tool for planning and forecasting for several reasons:
Limited scalability: Excel has limitations in terms of handling large data sets, complex calculations, and multiple scenarios. As businesses grow and become more complex, Excel can’t keep up with the demands of planning and forecasting.
Lack of collaboration: Excel files are typically stored on local computers or shared drives, making it difficult for multiple people to work on the same document simultaneously. This can lead to version control issues and errors in data entry, which can impact the accuracy of the forecasts.
Difficulty in data integration: Excel can import and export data from various sources, but it may not be able to handle data from different systems or sources with different formats. This can make it difficult to integrate data from multiple sources and can impact the accuracy of the forecasts.
Limited automation: Excel requires manual input and updating of data, formulas, and charts. This can be time-consuming and can lead to errors if not managed carefully. In contrast, modern planning and forecasting tools have built-in automation capabilities that can reduce manual effort and improve accuracy.
Lack of advanced analytics: Excel has limitations regarding advanced analytics capabilities, such as machine learning and predictive modeling. These techniques are becoming increasingly important in forecasting and planning, particularly in today’s market, where businesses must adapt quickly to changing circumstances.
Lack of collaboration on new Products: Excel does not support collaboration with sales staff and buyers related to new item introduction into the forecast. Having to manage this process with alternative solutions tends to result in manual updates to forecasts that are prone to user errors and inaccurate forecasts.
Streamlining Forecasting and Planning with Salesforce CPF
Salesforce CPF is an advanced solution that enables consumer goods companies to move beyond Excel spreadsheets and achieve accurate forecasting and planning. Salesforce CPF can help companies leverage real-time data to make informed decisions about inventory levels, production planning, and sales strategies. It offers a range of benefits, including improved accuracy, access to real-time data from across the organization, streamlined workflows, better collaboration, and increased efficiency.
With Salesforce CPF, companies can monitor progress against key performance indicators, plan for future sales and inventory needs, and adjust their strategies based on historical data and trends. Overall, Salesforce CPF is a powerful tool that can help consumer goods companies stay ahead of the curve in an increasingly complex and competitive market.
Learn More about Salesforce CPF
In summary, while Excel is a powerful tool for data management and analysis, it may not be the best option for planning and forecasting in today’s market due to its limitations in scalability, collaboration, data integration, automation, and advanced analytics. As such, businesses may need to consider a more modern planning and forecasting tool, such as Salesforce CPF, that can better support their needs in today’s market. Learn more about Salesforce CPF.
About Corrao Group
As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. We’ve worked with nearly 1,100+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150+ Salesforce projects. We are proud to be on the Consumer Goods Cloud Partner Advisory Board and Salesforce Managed Service Board, in addition to being the exclusive US launch partner of the Salesforce Trade Promotion Management (TPM) Pilot. If you want to learn more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!
