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Salesforce intros new Sales Cloud features for billing, marketing automation

he CRM giant is also a touting a new customer win with Lyft Business.
Written by Natalie Gagliordi, Contributor
salesforce-billing.jpg

A screen shot of Salesforce Billing. Image via Salesforce.

Salesforce on Thursday announced updates to the Sales Cloud platform that aim to bring improvements around prospecting, billing and marketing automation. The CRM giant is also a touting a new customer win with Lyft Business, which it says has signed up to use Salesforce Pardot and Sales Cloud to identify prospects, boost lead conversion and drive customer loyalty.

As for the Sales Cloud updates, Salesforce is launching Salesforce Billing, part of Salesforce CPQ, its software that generate quotes for orders. The feature is described as a way to automate renewals and adjustments and to streamline the revenue cycle. It connects a company's finance and sales data with the billing workflow, paving the way for usage-based pricing, flexible invoicing and automatic contract renewals.

Updates also include new capabilities to its High Velocity Sales feature that it says will help users prospect faster and manage leads more effectively. New features include Sales Cadences, which serve as pre-built activity sequences for sales teams, Work Queues, which uses machine learning to create prioritized email and call lists.

Meanwhile, said Salesforce Pardot, its company's B2B marketing automation software, will now run on Lightning and Einstein. The move, Salesforce said, will enable sales and marketing teams to more closely align on a single platform and work with the same data sets, campaign insights and customer engagement history.

The Einstein infusion leads to the new campaign insights feature, which uses machine learning to drill down into engagement data to help tailor future marketing. There's also a behavior scoring feature that identifies prospects most likely to convert, based on their engagement behavior.

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