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