Author: John Carroll

Launch Partner for Consumer Goods Cloud TPM Pilot

We are excited to announce that we’ve been selected as the exclusive US launch partner supporting Customer 360 for Consumer Goods with Trade Promotion Management (TPM)! Over the past two months, we have been working with Salesforce and a top American Sports Drink Company on their extensive trade promotion program. We learned first-hand that Salesforce TPM can optimize trade planning, track effectiveness with real-time reporting, manage funds and budgets, and streamline claims management. Throughout the engagement, we have found key insights into Salesforce’s latest product:

Business Validation of Salesforce TPM

    • Current disconnected systems don’t allow for ROI monitoring of Trade Promotion Funding, i.e. to time and resource-intensive.
    • Large teams of resources are involved in the Promotion Funding reconciliation.
    • Few companies actually have accurate, if any, ROI reporting!
    • Having a centralized system that supports integrations with ERP, POS, and other data sources will be critical to accelerate monitoring key metrics and improving ROI and forecasting.

Salesforce TPM Pilot

    • The solution provides scalability to managing large TPM programs with reduced resources.
    • The ability to easy clone Trade Promotions for future years will be a game-changer in the reduction of resources.
    • UI supports the Promotion KPI performance while also allowing for granular details with a few clicks.
    • KPI setup process provides real-time visibility for planning and active promotion.
    • The Scenario Planning feature is a game-changer for analyzing Year-to-Date results with projected promotions. This feature is also available for updating the balance of the year to optimal ROI.

If you would like to learn more about Consumer Goods Cloud TPM or the TPM pilot, please visit our website or email us at tkeil@corraogroup.com.

Consumer Goods Cloud Consultant Leader

Over the years, we have been using our experience to help digitally transform the consumer goods industry. As our main industry focus, we are proud to be on the Consumer Goods Cloud Partner Advisory Board.

About Corrao Group

Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. We’ve worked with nearly 1,050+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150+ Salesforce projects. If you are interest d in learning more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!

Salesforce Announces Customer 360 for Consumer Goods with Trade Promotion Management

Salesforce has announced Customer 360 for Consumer Goods with Trade Promotion Management. Customer 360 for Consumer Goods delivers profitable growth as companies can increase profitability, win at the shelf, build brand relevance, and work efficiently from anywhere. With one single source of truth, Customer 360 for Consumer Goods gives you an intelligent and robust solution to help manage key accounts, deliver profitable growth, and accelerate time to value across your entire organization.

Salesforce Trade Promotion Management allows you to optimize retail pricing and promotions in real-time to maximize trading effectiveness. Salesforce TPM gives your team the resources they need to plan, manage, and execute relationships with distributors, customers, and end-consumer marketing on a consolidated and integrated platform. With Trade Promotion Management digitized, your brand can optimize trade planning, track effectiveness with real-time reporting, manage funds and budgets, and streamline claims management. To learn more about Salesforce Trade Promotion Management, visit our blog: Digitize, Unify, and Integrate Your Trade Promotion Management with Salesforce

We are excited to announce that we’ve been selected as the exclusive US launch partner supporting Customer 360 for Consumer Goods with Trade Promotion Management! Over the past two months, we have been working with Salesforce and a top American Sports Drink Company on their extensive trade promotion program. To learn more about the TPM pilot, please visit our blog: Launch Partner for Consumer Goods Cloud TPM Pilot.

Salesforce TPM Features

To learn more about Salesforce TPM, please visit our website.

Consumer Goods Cloud Consultant Leader

Over the years, we have been using our experience to help digitally transform the consumer goods industry. As our main industry focus, we are proud to be on the Consumer Goods Cloud Partner Advisory Board, in addition to being the exclusive US launch partner of the Salesforce Trade Promotion Management (TPM) Pilot.

About Corrao Group

Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. We’ve worked with nearly 1,050+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150+ Salesforce projects. If you are interest d in learning more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!

Digitize, Unify, and Integrate Your Trade Promotion Management with Salesforce

Grow Revenue With Salesforce TPM

Consumer Goods companies have been starting to transform a critical aspect of their business, Trade Promotion Management (TPM). According to Salesforce, 60% of companies rely on spreadsheet-driven processes that don’t use real-time data, don’t connect with AI-driven analysis, and are difficult to manipulate at the account level.

In today’s competitive market, brands need a modern way to manage their trade spending related to planning and ultimately ROI. Account managers need the tools to thoroughly plan their trade spending, assess their performance in real-time, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to identify the best ongoing approach and strategy.

Salesforce TPM allows you to take complete control over your trade promotions, allowing you to analyze promotion performance across customers, within customers, SKU, on-brand, and more to fully understand your performance and make crucial changes for maximum ROI.

Why Companies are Moving to a Unified Platform

With cross-departmental planning, consumer goods companies and retailers can target investments at the store and channel level. Omni-channel selling has made the route to market more complex as companies are now engaging with multiple partners across in-person and virtual teams.

Traditional CG models utilize spreadsheets or homegrown systems to track, report, and analyze all promotions across multiple partners. Using a spreadsheet to track promotions does not support real-time collaboration and accurate ROI. Manual processes take away from selling and analyzing, making it impossible to identify what’s working and what isn’t in real-time. Here are four reasons why CG companies are shifting to a consolidated TPM platform.

Route to Market is Getting Complicated

    • Companies today need to be able to target and create different promotions with multiple omnichannel retailers based on channel, region, and store buy-level. It becomes impossible to track and manage various promotions in spreadsheets or homegrown systems without real-time TPM data.

Manual Tracking

    • Utilizing Spreadsheets and homegrown systems to track promotions is hurting your company. Working on spreadsheets is cumbersome, inhibits collaboration with file permissions, and is prone to be inaccurate.

Accruals and delays in reporting can result in P&L issues

    • According to Salesforce, 60% of trade promotions go unevaluated due to a lack of analytical rigor and staffing. CG companies utilizing spreadsheets deal with P&L issues as they fail to learn which promotions bring in the best revenue vs which don’t. Analyzing trade spend efficiency becomes difficult to manage without real-time data, as reconciliation occurs in the following quarters. You need the ability to pivot or quickly scale based on promotion performance.

No Ability to Clone/Replicate Successful Promotions

    • After completing a successful promotion, wouldn’t it be nice to clone or replicate the same promotion in less than 2 minutes? Account Managers are spending way too many hours reinventing the wheel of successful promotions when they could be focused more on developing strategies and relationships for more profit growth.

Salesforce Trade Promotion Management (TPM)

58% of business users do not have the real-time data and analytical tools to thoroughly evaluate the effectiveness of their trade fund programs (Salesforce). Salesforce TPM can help you improve revenue growth by optimizing trade activity on a consolidated and integrated platform. Investigate promotion performance across customers, within customers, on-brand, SKU, the event level, and overall performance.

With one single source of truth, Salesforce TPM gives your team the resources they need to plan, manage, and execute relationships with distributors, customers, and end-consumer marketing. Here are the ways Salesforce is helping businesses create a digitized, unified, and integrated TPM platform.

Maximize Trade Spend Effectiveness

    • Plan the customer account with a simplified interface that minimizes data entry.
    • View essential aspects of your account plan with adaptable views by user persona.
    • Identify holes in your trade plan with a comprehensive trade calendar.
    • View performance of KPIs with enterprise visibility and live spreadsheet-like P&L.

Deepen Trade Promotion Analytics

    • Increase trade spend efficiency with post-event analytics and visualization of performance metrics.
    • Identify and effortlessly clone successful promotions.
    • Compare planned uplift vs actuals with sell-in and consumption data.

Manage Funds and Claims

    • Deposit, transfer, or adjust funds and monitor budgets to evade overspends.
    • Review budgets within a single or consolidated checkbook view.
    • Manage reconciliation of claims and deductions against promotions and funds while streamlining settlements.

Strengthen Cross-Functional Alignment

    • Collaborate with marketing, field sales, and finance on a single platform to better manage 360-degree support plans.
    • Find optimal account or promotional plans with scenario planning and real-time performance comparison.
    • Share promotion details to gain alignment from internal stakeholders and retail partners.

If you would like to learn more about Salesforce’s Trade Promotion Management (TPM), please contact us!

Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud Consultant Leader

Over the years, we have been using our experience to help digitally transform the consumer goods industry. As our main industry focus, we are proud to be on the Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud Partner Advisory Board, in addition to being the exclusive US launch partner of the TPM Salesforce Pilot.

About Corrao Group

Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. We’ve worked with nearly 1,050+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150+ Salesforce projects. If you are interest d in learning more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!

Sources 

Salesforce Trade Promotion Management Images

Salesforce Trade Promotion Management

Inside Consumer Goods and Retail Digital Transformation Data and Trends

In March of 2020, McKinsey conducted a worldwide consumer survey to understand the impact of COVID-19 on consumer sentiment, consumer behavior, and the digital transformation of the industry. The impact of these rapid changes has not been the same for all consumer goods companies. Some dealt with a tremendous decline in sales/profit and unfortunately had to lay off thousands of employees, whereas other companies succeeded and thrived through the pandemic to grow and accelerate. But what was the key difference between these two different outcomes? Digital Transformation. Digitization, online ordering and delivery, and remote working became widespread overnight. New trends that might have taken a decade to come to life happened in days. Here are the new ways that have changed the industry forever.

Five Major Changes in Consumer Spending

    1. Shift to value and essentials
      • Consumers are more mindful of their spending and buy less expensive products.
      • Increased focus on household essentials; cutting back on most discretionary categories.
    2. Increased digital and omnichannel presence
      • Most consumer industries have seen more than 10% growth in their online customer base through COVID-19.
      • Most plan on shopping online with the use of e-commerce.
    3. Decrease in loyalty
      • Many consumers have tried different brands due to supply-chain disruptions.
      • According to Mckinsey, “Our research shows that in China and the United States, 75% or more of consumers reported trying a new shopping method.
    4. Health and “caring” economy
      • Consumers buy more from companies and brands that have healthy and hygienic packaging as well as demonstrate concern for employees and customers.
    5. Homebody economy
      • In most countries, more than 70% of survey respondents did not feel comfortable resuming their normal out-of-home activities (2020).

How COVID-19 has Changed Consumer Behavior

Rapid shifts have heavy implications on retail and consumer goods companies. Three main changes have occurred because of COVID-19:

    1. Covid-19 is transforming consumers’ lives
      • Three change forces: Economic downtown, preference shifts, and digital acceleration
    2. Behavior changes are not linear, and their stickiness will depend on satisfaction with the new experiences
    3. The Future is now: Players should prepare
      • Prepare for consumption declines or trading down
      • Address footprint offer and shopping experience for new reality
      • Follow consumers in their new decision journeys when marketing and communicating

Behavior changes will reshape consumer decision journeys, and companies will need to adapt fast

Retailers will face challenges across multiple departments. Here are some of the challenges Sales, Marketing, and Assortment are facing.

Sales

      • Reinvented shopping experience: hassle-free shopping in a high-hygiene environment; change store layouts and proposition, reconfigure checkout, per longer operating hours, omnichannel experiences.
      • Right-size network to recognize 15% drop in consumption.
      • Leapfrog digital capabilities toward first-class e-commerce, consider drive-through, click-and-collect.
      • Reevaluate physical-store footprint as traffic from professionals and tourists declines and affects travel retail and on-the-go consumption.

Marketing

      • Consumers have changed where and how they engage, and marketing spending should reflect this.
      • Stay relevant across multiple touchpoints (brand.com, platforms, e-retailers, own stores, multibrand stores).
      • Allocate resources in line with journey shifts; eg, increase digital engagement (social, influencers, D2C) away from out-of-home advertising, print, trade marketing.
      • Win in loyalty shifts: ensure a first-class customer-relationship-management system, foster trust through communication, and provide incentives for first-time shoppers.

Assortment

      • Reimagine value for money: price, private label, quality, branding, merchandising.
      • Capture new needs: health, safety, fresh, new ready to eat; reduce exposure to highly discretionary categories.
      • Adapt formats to new needs: polarization in pack size (large and single packs) and hygiene certainty.
      • Rethink brand mix: increase exposure to post-COVID-19 loyalty-shift winners (trusted A-brands and local brands), and simplify assortment.

How Shopping Behavior is Changing

Shopping behavior has changed dramatically because of COVID-19. Brands are now being forced into what Mckinsey calls the “Fight to Online”. Here are three main data points Mckinsey found on how shopping behavior is changing:

    • Digital Shopping is here to stay.
      • Categories, where expected growth in online shoppers exceeds 35 percent, include essentials such as over-the-counter medicine, groceries, household supplies, and personal care products.
    • Millennials and high-income earners are in the lead when it comes to shopping online.
    • Consumers are switching brands are an unprecedented rate.
      • Shoppers have cited a number of reasons for switching brands, with availability (in-store and online), convenience, and value leading the pack.

12 Disruptive Trends Hurting Traditional Business Models

Why hasn’t the old success model continued to grow? Because the model has been pummeled by 12 disruptive trends during the previous decade. COVID-19 has intensified most of them.

The New Model

Traditional consumer business models are becoming obsolete. More and more companies are realizing they must innovate to a new model in order to remain competitive and “win.”

The seven shifts of the next normal

Accelerating the Recovery in Consumer Goods Through Digital and Analytics Programs

Is your Management Team Preparing for the Future of Work?

Questions to consider:

    • What is the size and scope of the workforce that would be affected by your road map and technology?
    • What business changes or adjacencies could generate significant new jobs?
    • Do you have a plan to train people for the skills of the future? Do you need partners?
    • Given the workforce implications across the economy, would you prefer to address them proactively or reactively?\
    • Do you have a plan to source new talent at all levels of the company?
    • How do wages need to evolve so that you retain workers and attract good talent?

CEO Prospectives on COVID-19 and Digital Transformation

Nick Vlahos, CEO of Honest (Consumer Goods)

    • “Consumers are spending their money on brands they believe they can trust.”
    • “By giving the consumer an experience that connects with how they shop and by creating solution sets that meet her needs, we start to create stickiness and loyalty to our brand.
    • “We’re constantly listening and responding to the wants and needs of our customers.”

Hubert Joy, CEO of Best Buy

    • “My personal experience is different. When we started the turnaround, I was very clear about my philosophy, which was that profit is not the purpose but that purpose is to contribute to the common good. We did not spend time in the first three years of the turnaround on refining our purpose. We spent the time saving a ship that was sinking, by addressing key operational-performance drivers.”
    • “We spent a lot of time on making sure that the soil of the company was fertile. A lot of our emphasis was on creating a joyous, growth-oriented culture, on creating a very human environment where people felt that they belonged, that it was a human organization, that we emphasized individual development.”
    • “The purpose of Best Buy, in relation to customers, is not just to sell you a TV or a computer – though we’d gladly help you buy one. But it goes beyond that. It’s about what we call enriching lives through technology by addressing key human needs. The reason people buy a computer or a phone is not really for the product, it’s for what it can do.”

Daniel Zhang, Alibaba Group CEO

    • “We are a data-driven company. We create value from the data generated by the real activity of users and merchants; we use data as fuel for our marketplaces to help merchants better serve their customers. That is our logic, and we have been working on this for many years.”
    • “Technology and data empower our whole business— not only on the sales side and marketplace side but also in the back-end office, in customer service, in every single area. This is how we work.“
    • “In this digital era, when we talk about Alibaba’s future, we focus on helping our business partners win through successful digital transformation, rather than about how we can make ourselves even stronger. When small businesses can grow faster and grow healthier, it will benefit the whole society.”
    • “We give our people a lot of space to try new things. It means you have to accept mistakes. The vast majority of innovations will result in failure; you have to acknowledge that”

Time to Go Digital

When all these trends come together, it is clear that COVID-19 has required companies to make dramatic changes. Now is the time to go digital, and there are several products that can help you achieve business and customer success.

Salesforce created Consumer Goods Cloud to help the industry digitally transform their business to accel now and in the future. Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud offers you an intelligent and powerful solution to help you manage key accounts, deliver intelligent growth, optimize field execution, Salesforce TPM, and accelerate time to value across your entire organization.

About Corrao Group

Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. We’ve worked with nearly 1,050+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150+ Salesforce projects. If you are interested in learning more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!

Sources

https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/retail/our%20insights/perspectives%20on%20retail%20and%20consumer%20goods%20number%208/perspectives-on-retail-and-consumer-goods_issue-8.pdf

All photos via Mckinsey 

Keeping Up With the Rapidly Changing Retail and Consumer Goods Industries

The consumer goods and retail industry has been undergoing a massive digital transformation these last few years. Both industries have faced rapidly evolving technology, economic instability, changing consumer behaviors, and consumer demographic shifts. Add on the effects of COVID-19, and the retail and consumer goods industries have accelerated by a decade. Redefining your business model is not an easy task to deal with. Left unaddressed, these changes can destabilize and render traditional consumer goods business models. Businesses must innovate and adapt to succeed in today’s digitally accelerated world.

Dominant Consumer Goods Business Models

Deloitte University Press recently studied 97 Consumer Goods companies to analyze and find what business model delivers exceptional performance. Based on the report, Deloitte found outstanding winners in the ecosystem who focused on three dominant business models: Operational Excellence, Brand Leadership, and Customer Solutions. Each business model focuses differently on key strategies, operations, and KPIs (See Figure 1 via Deloitte). Exceptional winners clearly understand how they create and deliver value, a clear business strategy, and deliver exceptional customer solutions. They have figured out what they’re really good at and have configured their model accordingly.

Figure 1

There are four themes that set Exceptional Winners apart from their peers:

    • They focus on what they do best by constructing a coherent business and operating model— Deloitte calls this the Business Model Coherence Premium.
    • They drive value from one of three business model types—Operational Excellence, Product/Brand Leadership, or Customer Solutions.
    • They develop a set of essential and specific capabilities that work together as part of a self-reinforcing business model.
    • They drive greater maturity into the distinctive capabilities than their peers.

Digital Transformation With Salesforce

Innovating your business model to remain competitive in today’s market is required to stay in business. Redefining your model involves finding solutions to help your company digitally transform to unite your teams around the customer with customized solutions. Companies are starting to ask the right questions like, “Can we change processes in a way that will result in more productivity, better decision-making, and a more profitable customer experience with personalization”? Another question is, “How much faster can we do the tasks we are currently doing with the help of automation”?

Enter Salesforce. Moving your business processes onto the #1 CRM platform allows you to better connect with your internal staff, partners, customers, and potential customers from anywhere in the world. With a 360-degree view of your crucial data, you are in total control to have more connectivity and accessibility, increased collaboration, and improved efficiency.

Salesforce created Consumer Goods Cloud to help the industry digitally transform their business to accel in today’s world. A move to Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud gives you an intelligent and strong solution to help you manage key accounts, deliver intelligent growth, optimize field execution, TPM management, and accelerate time to value across your entire organization. Learn more about how Consumer Goods Cloud is helping the industry digitally transform.

About Corrao Group

Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. We’ve worked with nearly 1,050+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150+ Salesforce projects. If you are interested in learning more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!

Connect with Corrao Group
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LinkedIn

Sources

Deloitte University Press
Salesforce

Salesforce Summer ’22 Sandbox Preview

The Salesforce Summer ’22 sandbox preview is arriving in late April! Below are the key dates for the Summer ’22 release so that you can mark your calendars and prepare.

Key Dates for the Salesforce Summer '22 Release
Image by Salesforce

Depending on your instance, the major release dates for the Spring ’22 features are:

    • May 20: First release
    • June 3: Second release
    • June 10/11: Final release

Other key dates through the Spring ‘22 Release include:

April 21: Sign up for the pre-release environment

In this test environment, you can try new features to figure out which features are right for your organization.

April 27: Preview release notes are available

All release notes become available. Head to Salesforce Help to scan and review the new release notes.

May 5: Sandbox cut-off date

Utilizing a sandbox environment can help you get early access to new features before your scheduled production upgrade. You must have an active sandbox environment before May 5, 2022.

May 6: Salesforce Summer ’22 release site is live

The release site becomes live! Trailhead modules are also available to quickly learn new features.

May 20: First release weekend

Salesforce and a small number of customers will be upgraded.

May 20 to May 27: Release readiness live broadcast

Salesforce admins and developers kick off the Summer ’22 release with their favorite features from the release. The Salesforce team will discuss and demo new features around this time.

June 3: Second release weekend

Another wave of Salesforce instances gets upgraded. Salesforce’s Trust page has the information on the timing of your upgrade.

June 10-11: Final release weekend

All remaining Salesforce instances will be upgraded on these dates.

To show the date of the Salesforce Summer ’22 release reaching your org, visit Salesforce Trust and click on your instance name and click “Maintenance”. If you don’t know your instance, go to your company information within setup in your Salesforce org.

About Corrao Group 

For over 20 years we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications.

As everyday Salesforce power users, we understand how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. We’ve worked with nearly 1,000 customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,100 Salesforce projects.

If you are interested in learning more about how we can help your company, read our reviews on G2 or contact us today!

Sources:

Don’t Miss These Key Dates: Summer ’22 Sandbox Preview

 

Salesforce Spring ’22 Release Notes Highlights

The Salesforce Spring ’22 release notes are here! As we do every release, we have read through the release notes and highlighted our favorite new updates and enhancements. Depending on your instance, the Spring ’22 Release Notes are scheduled to go live on January 14/15, February 4th/5th, and February 11th/12th. In this blog, we highlight new features for Consumer Goods Cloud, Sales Cloud, Pardot, and Service Cloud. It’s important to note that most of these newly released features are only available in Salesforce Lightning and not Classic. If you haven’t already, check out our blog on the Salesforce Winter ’22 Release Notes.

Consumer Goods Cloud 

Scheduled Visits to the Right Stores at the Right Time

    • With Einstein Visit Recommendation, you can keep your products front and center to keep your store managers satisfied. Sales Managers can select a group of stores and receive recommendations on which ones to visit and when. Based on the recommendations, they can ensure their most valuable stores receive immediate attention.

Optimize Visit Frequency to Improve Store Sales

    • Help your sales managers determine how often to visit stores. Improve your strategy for store visits with optimal visit frequency recommendations to help generate more revenue for your company. You can create your smart visit story to optimize store visits by field reps with insights that identify the right selling tasks for them.

Ensure Timely Deliveries to Stores with Delivery Tasks

    • When sales managers see all of their region’s orders, they can prioritize orders so that the highest selling stores are restocked and supplied first. Sales managers can create and assign delivery tasks to drivers, who can view the tasks on their mobile devices.

Visit Execution: Enhanced Flexibility and Improved Productivity

    • Sales managers can now create custom tasks with the standard Consumer Goods objects. Field reps can become more productive to take charge of their day and capture more during store visits.

Build Stronger Relationships with Partners Through Communities

    • Consumer Goods objects are now available in Salesforce Communities. You can utilize these objects to create a portal for your store contacts, consumers, and partners.

Enjoy More Accessibility on the Go

    • Sales Managers can now edit store details, create promotions and visits, and perform other actives from their mobile devices.

Sales Cloud 

Revenue Intelligence

    • Sales teams can achieve sales targets, grow sales pipelines, and ensure forecast accuracy like never before. Revenue Intelligence is a data-driven sales solution that combines Tableau CRM dashboards and analytics with pipeline Inspections.

Pipeline Inspection

    • Get AI-powered insights into every opportunity’s progress, engagement status, and activity details.

Einstein Conversation Insights

    • Einstein Conversation insights now include transcripts for video and voice calls. Users can now receive custom coaching recommendations related to their customer’s conversations.

Integration with Google

    • Engagement data includes soft and hard bounces, replies, and out-of-office replies for each recipient of an email sent from the Gmail integration with inbox.

Integration with Microsoft

    • Sales reps who meet with customers using Microsoft teams can pin and access Salesforce records and Salesforce Meetings during the video meeting.

Pardot 

Marketing Assets

    • Customize your enhanced landing pages with custom redirects for retired pages, form styles, and more. Easily build email templates in Lightning for sales reps to use in Salesforce Engage emails. In addition, try out the Slack connector for Pardot (beta feature) to monitor where the Slack completion action is being used on Pardot assets.

Automation

    • Push enhanced emails-now with tracker domain selection-to your automation rules and completion actions. Use Einstein Key Account intelligence to improve your automation.

Pardot Lightning Email Builder

    • Create email templates and emails in a modern, drag and drop builder. Send and resend emails from the Pardot Lightning app, and view individual email performance and aggregated metrics across multiple sends.

Service Cloud 

Channels (Voice)

    • New enhancements to the Voice channel improve the experience for supervisors, agents, and contact center admins. “Enhance the supervisor experience by enabling supervisors to listen in on calls, filtering which queues and skills they see in Omni Supervisor, and giving them access to real-time metrics in Amazon Connect. Get an improved agent experience with org-wide access to voice call recordings and voice call records, and call routing that respects Omni-Channel agent capacity” (Salesforce).

Routing

    • With new Omni Supervisor enhancements, you can manage routing more effectively and efficiently. Manage offline agents in the agents tab, and focus your supervisors on the right queues and skills in the Queues backlog, assigned work, and skills backlog tab.

Einstein for Service

    • You can now include up to 10 fields in your Article Recommendations model. A newly redesigned Bot builder is now more user-friendly.

Incident Management

    • When urgent issues need resolving, Incident Management can help eliminate potential complications before they get worse. Salesforce has out-of-the-box Incident Management page layouts complete with SLA management tools to help right away.

Knowledge

    • Salesforce has made it easier to share knowledge article links that point to the latest updated version. Images can now open to full size to zoom in on crucial details.

If you would like to learn more about the Salesforce Spring ’22 release notes, please visit our Salesforce page and contact us!

About Corrao Group

For over 20 years we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. As everyday Salesforce power users, we understand how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. We’ve worked with nearly 1,000 customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,100 Salesforce projects. If you are interested in learning more about how we can help your company, read our reviews on G2 or contact us today!

Sources and Information:

Salesforce Spring ’22 Release Notes

Salesforce Helps The Consumer Goods Industry Drive Digital Transformation

The Consumer Goods industry is undergoing a massive digital transformation right now. The lack of digital presence and disconnected supply chains have caused stores to close at a rapid rate these past 2 years. A recent Salesforce report found that 54% of end consumers surveyed prefer to buy online. Add on the effects of COVID-19, and now 87% of shoppers begin their hunt in digital channels – up 71% from last year! The Consumer Goods industry requires a digital and accessible solution from anywhere, allowing you to build smarter and personalized B2B engagements at scale with AI-powered insights. Salesforce’s Consumer Goods Cloud helps improve field execution, account planning, promotions, channel partner relationships, and more.

Exposed Archaic Business Processes

The COVID-19 Pandemic has exposed the archaic “old-fashioned‘ ways of the Consumer Goods Industry. Lack of visibility into supply chains was already an issue before COVID-19, but with the pandemic outbreak, 56% of global retailers reported moderate disruption in their supply chains as a result of COVID-19 whereas 12% reported heavy disruption. Additionally, CG companies face visibility issues into shelf management with the increasingly tough job to keep inventory levels adequate as sales plunge and rise. Using spreadsheets to track key information and data is no longer sustainable. Unreliable and outdated data is when companies start to make bad business decisions, leading to wasted money and time on poor in-store execution. Consumer Goods companies need to understand in real-time how well their products are selling, what’s needed in the physical stores, and which locations need attention from field representatives. Innovative technology along with Artificial Intelligence is helping companies gain a competitive edge to become more data-driven. Salesforce’s Consumer Goods Cloud is helping companies accelerate account and retail growth.

Become Data-Driven With Consumer Goods Cloud

Salesforce’s Consumer Goods Cloud is an intelligent and seamless B2B CRM solution that can fuel alignment and growth from anywhere. With a 360-degree view of your customer, Consumer Goods Cloud allows you to streamline your account relationships and sales activities to optimize every selling opportunity. For field members, Salesforce Maps integrated with Consumer Goods Clouds maximizes your field reps entire day, sending them to locations that need attention first. Salesforce Maps along with Salesforce’s Mobile app optimizes your team to drive performance, reduce downtime with route plans, and enables your reps to sell more with key insights and analytics (Inventory Audits/Promotion Checks) at each store location. In today’s market, a move to Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud will help your company accelerate growth intelligently, accurately, and effectively. Transform your business with Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud today!

Stats provided from Salesforce.

If you would like to learn more about Consumer Goods Cloud, please visit our Consumer Goods Cloud page.

About Corrao Group

For over 20 years we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. As everyday Salesforce power users, we understand how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. We’ve worked with nearly 1,000 customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,100 Salesforce projects. If you are interested in learning more about how we can help your company, read our reviews on G2 or contact us today!

Celebrating 2 Decades of Corrao Group

In January of 2002, Jack Corrao assembled in his home office in San Diego to begin the Corrao Group. He would build a company based on reinventing how companies operate, communicate, and interact with customers. Coming from two decades in the corporate world, Jack felt that too many data silos and lack of processes inhibited most companies from growing and ultimately provided poor customer satisfaction. The vision was to assemble hands-on experts, in a virtual fashion, that allowed a Work From Home mentality.

Twenty years later, Corrao Group’s employees continue to drive digital transformations for companies of every size and industry. Driven by our core values — Trust, User Adoption, and Giving Back — Corrao Group has helped transform businesses across the United States. On this 20th Anniversary, we want to say thank you to our customers, employees, partners, and Salesforce. We couldn’t have done any of this without you.

Salesforce Partner

If you would like to learn more about Corrao Group, please visit our website!

8 Salesforce Data Cleanup Best Practices

According to Salesforce, “Poor quality data costs businesses around $700 billion a year, or 30 percent of the average company’s revenue”. Poor data quality can include missing data, inaccurate data, duplicate data, and more. Bad data management can lead to costly business decisions because of misleading/incorrect data. Inaccurate reports and dashboards, wasted time and money, and a decline in user adoption are all ways bad data can affect your business. We recommend using any downtime to clean your Salesforce data during the holiday season.

8 Salesforce data cleanup ideas Include:

Deleting Data Duplicates

    • Look for and pinpoint duplicate data in your system. Duplicates in your system could include contacts, campaigns, accounts, reports and dashboards, and more. Run a report to identify how many duplicates are in the system. Salesforce Data Loader can help the records be queried and deleted from Salesforce.

Validate Your Data

    • Use this time to ensure all the data in your org is accurate, consistent, and effective. Your company can expect improved business results when employees start inserting high-quality data into Salesforce. Data validation should be a recurring project that can be done yearly or even multiple times per year.

Data Updates

    • Fill in important missing information on your Accounts and Contacts. Fields that could be missing include job title, location, phone number, and more. These pieces of information are critical for your team, and having incorrect or missing data slows the team down.

Data Rules

    • If you do not have rules on data entry into the system, this would be an excellent time to set up best practices for your employees on entering quality data into Salesforce. Data validation rules/requirements can help verify the data your employees are entering are meeting your business standards before the user can save the record.

Campaigns (Outdated and New)

    • Look through your Salesforce campaigns and clean up any duplicates, members who don’t belong in the campaign anymore, close outdated campaigns, and create new campaigns for 2022.

Reports and Dashboards

    • Reports and Dashboards in Salesforce can quickly become obsolete. Any reports or dashboards that are outdated or not in use should be removed from your org.

Pardot Landing Pages

    • Go through your Landing Pages in Pardot to review if there is any outdated content that needs to be updated. If you are not utilizing the landing page anymore, the best practice would be to archive the page to remove it from list views.

Outdated Content

    • Utilize this time to go through all the current content across your social channels. Find out if you need to update any of the data before 2022 arrives. Some of the most popular updates occur on blog posts.

The 2nd largest issue among Salesforce customers is bad data. If you are struggling with Salesforce data issues, schedule a free assessment with us today! We can walk through your system and provide best practices to clean up your Salesforce data.

About Corrao Group

Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. As everyday Salesforce power users, we understand how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. We’ve worked with nearly 1,000 customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,100 Salesforce projects. If you are interested in learning more about how we can help your company, read our reviews on G2 or contact us today!