A Q&A with our Lead to Cash Practice Lead, Rui Fonseca on the latest Revenue Cloud news and highlights from this year’s Dreamforce

We spoke with Rui Fonseca, Senior Business Manager and Lead to Cash Practice Lead, on his Salesforce Revenue Cloud highlights from this year’s Dreamforce, most specifically on CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) and Billing.

From the Revenue Cloud sessions you attended at this year’s Dreamforce, what stood out to you?

From a Revenue Cloud perspective, this year’s sessions were focused on new product capabilities and innovations, highlighted through customer success stories with testimonials about the success different businesses have been experiencing and leveraging.

Having said that, the new Sales Cloud and Revenue Cloud features bring in artificial intelligence (AI) powered insights, integrated sales enablement resources, and subscription management capabilities.

Not surprisingly, Slack was also one of the highlights given the recent acquisition, which is now integrated with the Customer 360 platform, allowing for intensive collaboration and workflows that fuel optimisation and efficiencies across the business.

Salesforce is continuously working to build upon the Sales 360 solution that leverages insights, capabilities, and resources to help sales teams operate at their best.

What were your highlights?

The Subscription Management product, which allows organisations to manage the entire subscription journey from product to cash, enables the capture of recurring revenue across any channel. This is particularly relevant given the high propensity for customers to self-serve these days, allowing for greater agility in order to meet the business demands.

The acquisition of Slack, and how it adds new collaboration capabilities to existing functionality, was very interesting to see. It shows how Salesforce is really delivering value from their many acquisitions and bringing them together to meet business outcomes. The ability to pull specific capabilities from each of those acquisitions, to bring it all together in the solutions that you know are going to benefit customers – that’s really powerful.

On the topic of acquisitions, Vlocity is another recent one that resulted in a big focus on industry specific solutions, which is now Salesforce Industries. The ability for customers to leverage from a range of capabilities that speak to the heart of their business is immensely valuable.

Of all the Revenue Cloud updates, what were your takeaways?

Apart from the product innovations and capabilities already mentioned, it is all about the customer experiences and stories that are shared throughout those sessions.

It is so valuable to hear other Trailblazers speaking about their journeys on adopting Salesforce to benefit their businesses, being a true testament to the whole Salesforce ecosystem, with us partners included.

What’s most relevant for New Zealand organisations right now?

All the improvements to the Sales Cloud and the Revenue Cloud are extremely relevant to New Zealand organisations, because a lot of existing customers are already leveraging the Sales 360 platform, but also because this is a typical entry point for companies coming into the Salesforce ecosystem.

The Subscription Management capability in particular plays to businesses that leverage this revenue model, which is so common these days, mixed with consumption/usage-based components, and providing the ability to expose it across any channel of customer engagement.

We have also been experiencing that industry-tailored solutions are on point for many use cases because they speak to the customer’s business and requirements. This facilitates putting solutions together that cater to those scenarios and have a best fit to support the customer needs. We’re seeing movement around financial services, insurance, and telecommunications, so there’s a good number of enterprise-level customers that are attracted to the industry-specific solutions.

In the end, it’s all about business value and outcomes. Salesforce helps businesses to achieve these through the wide range of product capabilities and industry-specific solutions that can be leveraged. Success then lies in the ability to bring together product expertise and business needs to define the right strategy and initiate the journey – which is where we come in. If you’d like to know more about what’s new with Revenue Cloud and how your organisation can get complete visibility on your end-to-end purchasing process, we’d love to chat.

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