Opportunity Scoring - and a few new “AI” features for Sales Cloud…..

As one of the solution architects at DCS, I do a ton of work with our customers on optimizing lead to cash processes. Salesforce has been slowly starting to sprinkle in new AI features to Sales Cloud, and I wanted to talk a few minutes about Einstein Opportunity Scoring.

Einstein Opportunity Scoring, which is included in Enterprise, Unlimited and Einstein 1 Sales editions of Salesforce, is a great tool for helping to quantify pipeline health. Einstein Opportunity Scoring shows you the likelihood of an opportunity to be sold based on overall metrics such as, but not limited to:

• the size of the deal
• the overall discount?
• how long the deal has been in progress
• what type of account it is?
• the lead source?

At this time Opportunity Scoring is limited to Opportunity and Account level fields, but this is a good starting place and can be sufficient for many organizations. It is very handy for sales reps to see a list of their opportunities and a score next to each of them that basically tells them where to focus their attention.

We find the opportunity scoring is a great way for both reps and sales leaders to better track their pipeline and see if there are deals that require more attention or should be moved to a closed lost status. By combining this machine learning-based objective view with the more subjective fields provided by the sales reps, sales managers can get a much more realistic picture of what is in the pipeline. You can think of Einstein as a separate pair of eyes with a more analytical viewpoint.

Of course the biggest factor in how helpful Einstein Opportunity Scoring can be is about data quality and consistency. When everyone is using opportunities consistently and with the same approach, then the data can be extremely powerful. The more accurate the data is that the sales team puts in, the more beneficial the AI tools will be.

We’re going to continue our theme of “AI features” in Sales Cloud over the coming months, but if you ever want to chat more about using AI with Salesforce, please don’t hesitate to reach out!