Get Started with Revenue Intelligence
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- List the components of the Revenue Intelligence solution.
- Describe why the features are included and how they fit together.
- Explain a sales team’s typical workflow using Revenue Intelligence.
What Is Revenue Intelligence?
Tracking revenue, forecasts, pipelines and well, sales, is no small task. With Revenue Intelligence, you can forecast revenue accurately, maintain your pipeline, and gain performance insights to help you keep sales on track and identify key areas to focus on.
But what does all of that mean? Let’s paint a picture. You’re a Salesforce admin, and your company has a problem. Even though business is booming and Salesforce helps you build great customer relationships, coaching sales teams to make quotas, managing pipelines, and forecasting sales is a huge challenge.
Currently sales teams track their forecasts in messy, disorganized spreadsheets. It’s hard to know if reps are following up on the deals that can make or break the quarter. Without data, it’s nearly impossible to identify what deals to focus on and which teams or reps need coaching.
How Does Revenue Intelligence Work?
In comes Revenue Intelligence, a brilliant way to not only track forecasts and manage your pipeline in Salesforce, but also to quickly get insights on which deals need intervention. It does this by offering a set of analytics and predictive capabilities to answer important questions. Will you hit your revenue targets? Where are there risks in your pipeline? What can you do to close forecast gaps?
Revenue Intelligence enables your company to:
- Forecast sales with precision.
- Spot trends and identify issues in your sales cycle.
- Understand where to focus and communicate efficiently with your team about where to pivot for quick success.
- Grow revenue and close deals faster.
What Are the Components of Revenue Intelligence?
What are the tools in Revenue Intelligence that make it so powerful? And how do they work together to help you build a foundation for data-driven selling?
Revenue Intelligence Component |
What It Does |
Purpose |
|---|---|---|
Revenue Insights |
Provides dashboards for sales teams to gain performance insights in order to build stronger pipelines, improve forecast accuracy, and generate more revenue. |
Understand the state of your sales, determine where to put your efforts, and identify the best opportunities. |
Pipeline Inspection |
Gives sellers a consolidated view of opportunities and pipeline metrics while tracking changes in opportunities over time. |
Generate insights about the health of open deals, and identify which deals need more support to close. |
Salesforce Forecasting |
Enables sales teams to accurately forecast revenue; adjust; and track forecasts and quotas. |
Collaborate across the team on sales expectations so managers and sales reps can make adjustments and work together on outcomes. Forecasts can be adjusted as needed by managers and reps. |
Tools are great, but only effective when used. Just like tools are used to build a piece of furniture or construct a building, more features in Revenue Intelligence help you build sales success with rich insights and data.
Revenue Intelligence Feature |
What It Does |
Purpose |
|---|---|---|
CRM Analytics |
A native analytics layer in Salesforce that uses Salesforce and external data to make recommendations and guide decision-making. |
CRM Analytics (CRMA) creates the insights you see in Revenue Insights. Enable CRMA to run the recipes that produce the datasets consumed in Revenue Insights dashboards. |
Einstein Activity Capture |
A productivity-boosting tool that helps keep data current between Salesforce and your email and calendar applications. |
Einstein Activity Capture provides the rich activity and email data shown in Pipeline Inspection. Insights from this data inform sales teams about the impact of activities on deal health. |
Einstein Deal Insights |
A model that shows insights and predictions about deal health. Insights include recommended actions for moving deals forward. |
Deal Insights provide a wealth of AI-related insights and predictions that indicate deal health to direct sales reps on next steps for key deals. |
Einstein Discovery |
A clicks-not-code solution for building custom models to predict things like customer churn risk or account propensity to buy. |
Einstein Discovery augments your business intelligence with statistical modeling and supervised machine learning to identify, surface, and visualize insights into your business data. Einstein Discovery uses your own data (in Salesforce or beyond) to create customized predictive models in a simple visual way. It identifies trends in your data, and provides everything you need to publish model results and recommendations to Salesforce users. |
Einstein Forecasting |
A feature that predicts forecasts for each layer in your business. |
Einstein Forecasting uses AI technology to generate forecast predictions with more certainty and visibility for your team. It improves forecasting accuracy and tracks sales teams’ progress. |
Einstein Opportunity Scoring |
A feature that displays intelligent scores to identify risk in the pipeline. |
Opportunity Scoring uses AI to focus sales teams on the right opportunities to close more deals. Each opportunity is given a score from 1 to 99 that is available on opportunity records and list views. In Pipeline Inspection, Opportunity Scores are shown as ranges rather than numeric scores. |