Salesforce, the market leader in CRM, has created a storm in the world of sales and marketing of products and services catering to a diverse set of industries. Cloud-based CRMs such as Salesforce have made companies realize the importance of using individual consumer data for the purpose of communicating with them at large scale by making use of real-time messages, constantly varying data, etc. This high level of interaction with consumers by way of meeting their needs and requirements on time would ultimately help these companies in retaining them in the competitive business environment.
Companies across the world belonging to different sectors and industries are now moving towards Salesforce for improving organizational growth and productivity. Some of the most common industrial sectors which use Salesforce include:
- Retail
- Financial Services
- Life sciences
- Communications
- Media
- Public Sector
- Automotive
With more industries searching for innovative methods to make the best use of CRM, there are many technological upgradations that are touted to happen into Salesforce CRM in the year 2020. These upgradations that are predicted to happen in Salesforce are expected to enhance the experience of the users, in addition to providing them with the necessary resources for reaching their targeted goals and objectives in the shortest possible time frame.
Top 6 Predictions for Salesforce for the year 2020
In order to predict the upcoming trends in Salesforce 2020, let us first look into the major moves that the CRM giant has made in the year 2019:
- Salesforce Acquisitions – Tableau, ClickSoftware, Bonobo AI, Griddable, Mapanything.
- More features being added to the Lightning platform as compared to the Classic platform.
- Introduction of the new Consumer Cloud for different industrial verticals such as manufacturing, retail, and blockchain.
- Einstein Analytics extended to various Clouds such as Financial Services Cloud, Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud.
On the basis of the above-mentioned developments, we can get an idea as to why these strategic initiatives were made by Salesforce in 2019. Let us now classify the Salesforce predictions that are bound to happen in the year 2020 in a clearer manner, by keeping in mind these initiatives and also certain other market factors that are to be taken into account:
1. Bringing more technology to CRM
Salesforce has made a handful of acquisitions in the year 2019 with a majority of them reaching up to billions of dollars. Salesforce aims to bring about various technological changes into its future CRM offering via these acquisitions, some of which include synchronizing enterprise data in the cloud (Griddable), location-based intelligence software integration (MapAnything), AI-based communication tools (Bonobo AI), introduction of data analytics and data visualization (Tableau) and improving field service offering in Salesforce Service Cloud (ClickSoftware).
2. Lightning Platform will take center-stage
More user-friendly features are being added to the Lightning platform, mainly for the purpose of scaling up the product and making it more productive for its users. Also, these new features are being made available only for the Lightning platform and not the Classic platform. This means that Salesforce is expected to introduce newer and more useful features to the Lightning platform in the upcoming year as well. So, it is being presumed that many companies currently using the Classic platform will possibly migrate to the Lightning platform. In order to ensure smoother migration, these organizations can avail of the services of top Salesforce consulting companies.
3. Unified customer profile via Customer 360
Number of organizations are switching to Customer 360, mainly for gathering data from sales, marketing, and other units of the organization and with this data, aims to transform this data into something that would make it easier for business organizations to forecast sales opportunities, chalking out the marketing plan, solving customer service problems and also looking into the product recommendations.
Gathering and maintaining data in such a well-integrated and governed manner using Salesforce Customer 360 will enable organizations to deliver personalized experiences to consumers, together with meeting all their relevant demands. Looking at the investments Salesforce has made in Mulesoft and Customer 360, we can presume the emergence of a unified customer profile.
4. Scaling up of AI using Einstein Analytics
Salesforce in the year 2019 has extended the power-packed features of Einstein Analytics to its various Cloud service offerings. Some of these Clouds include Financial Services Cloudwhere finance companies will now get access to critical data via AI-based recommendations and actionable insights taking into account the needs of the customers.
Similarly, Einstein was introduced in Service Cloud for powering up of customer service workflows with Artificial Intelligence. Commerce Cloud saw the addition of a unique image search feature called ‘Einstein Visual Search’ which provides shoppers to take pictures and search for products. In a similar way, there are high chances of Einstein AI being introduced to many other Cloud service offerings of Salesforce in 2020 as well.
5. Sellers wanting more mobile
It is highly important for companies like Salesforce to prioritize the mobility needs of sellers that are not being fulfilled. Moreover, the onset of 5G mobile networks is now making it all the more important for improving the speed, security, and reliability of enterprise and consumer-grade mobile experiences. Adapting to the ever-changing mobility environment is a determined challenge which always has a major impact on sales performance.
For breaking these technical barriers between sellers and selling, Salesforce has introduced mobile SDK which broadens its mobile capabilities beyond field service agents. It is expected that Salesforce will definitely take more steps to spread out its wings of mobility to different horizons for improving sales capabilities.
6. Making use of CRM for specific verticals
Salesforce, in the year 2020, has a high likelihood of expanding its CRM solutions specially catered to meet the needs of specific industry verticals. To testify this, Salesforce has introduced Consumer Goods Cloud and Manufacturing Cloud for the retail and manufacturing industries, respectively. The Martech Advisor report says that since there is a need for people-centric functions like marketing, contact management or communications to incorporate task-oriented functions, there is also the need for more industry-specific verticalization to happen in CRM Cloud solutions.
7. Get ready for emerging technologies
Emerging technologies, such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Virtual assistants, have the power to completely transform the way businesses operate with a CRM as amazing as Salesforce. According to Nate Skinner, VP, Product Marketing, Salesforce Pardot, “Marketers should be evaluating campaign performance across growing and evolving digital channels (email, messaging, voice, and video conferencing) and analyzing what channels are providing the best marketing ROI across first-touch, last-touch, and multi-touch attribution. Intelligence and analytics are at the crux of effectively evaluating engagement on digital channels of yesterday, today, and the future.”
There has also been an increase in the number of companies taking up the services of reputed Salesforce consulting companies in the market, primarily for realizing the investment made on the CRM in a much quicker period of time.
Let us hope that these predictions made for and a few of them by Salesforce turn into reality for the year 2020!
Blog Resource: Algoworks
