Chapter 2: Salesforce AI for Sales

This chapter will cover the core sales-related artificial intelligence (AI) options in Salesforce. We will systematically go through scoring leads and opportunities, forecasting the value of sales, capturing activities from email, and analyzing conversations between staff and customers using the out-of-the-box Einstein features. For each topic, we will also discuss the pros and cons and what options an architect has if the limits of the feature are reached.

As part of each feature discussion, we will reference the Pickled Plastics Ltd. scenario that is used throughout the book to give a real-world grounding. In addition, we will do a hands-on configuration of the Lead Scoring feature in line with our scenario requirements.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

• Introducing Sales Cloud Einstein
• Setting up Einstein Lead Scoring and Opportunity Scoring
• Learning about Einstein Forecasting
• Diving...

Technical requirements

To follow along with the hands-on parts of this chapter, please register a Sales Cloud Einstein-enabled developer org from the following link:

https://developer.salesforce.com/promotions/orgs/einsteinleadscoring

The Code in Action (CiA) video for the chapter can be found at https://bit.ly/3l96I7M.

Introducing Sales Cloud Einstein

The whole point of Sales Cloud Einstein is to make your sales team more effective. That means spending less time on routine chores and more time on selling and also enhancing that time by focusing it on the right leads and opportunities. Thereby, your organization will be able to close more sales and gain more revenue.

The following three key components make up this ensemble of sales productivity:

• Einstein Lead Scoring and Opportunity Scoring: This gives a numeric score to leads or opportunities that indicates its likelihood to convert a lead into an opportunity and an opportunity into a sale, based on the historical data you have available.
• Einstein Forecasting: This is an AI-enabled sales forecast to enhance the accuracy of your forecasts and give you insights into which direction your current pipeline might evolve.
• Einstein Activity Capture: This automates the process of linking activities from your mailbox to the right leads and...

Setting up Einstein Lead Scoring and Opportunity Scoring

In the following sections, we will cover in detail Einstein Lead Scoring and Opportunity Scoring. First, we will cover the basics of Lead Scoring, then the key use cases and configuration options. We will cover the main architectural considerations for using the feature and then move on to a hands-on example. Finally, we will look at how Opportunity Scoring differs in some minor ways from Lead Scoring.

The basics of Einstein Lead Scoring

Lead Scoring is not a new invention. It refers simply to any way in which a company may numerically differentiate which leads to prioritize for distribution to sales staff, given limited sales resources. Many companies have pre-existing models, ranging from the basic (for example, the title is chief executive officer (CEO) and value > £1m) to sophisticated (for example, a statistical model informed by demographic and trend data). Einstein Lead Scoring, however, is a step up in so...

Learning about Einstein Forecasting

In the following sections, we will look at the Einstein platform's answer to one of the most vexing business problems around: How do I generate accurate sales forecasts? We will look in detail at the feature, its configuration, and the concerns you need to have as an architect when considering using it for a real-world scenario.

The basics of Einstein Forecasting

Forecasting is a central business problem affecting all companies that rely on predictable sales to make money. Turns out, most businesses do the same. The forecasting problem, however, is hard because shifts in demand rarely signal themselves in an easily discoverable way. Not surprisingly, many organizations struggle with producing consistently accurate forecasts.

Einstein Forecasting is Sales Cloud Einstein's contribution toward solving or at least ameliorating this problem. It sits on top of normal Salesforce collaborative, manually updated forecasts, using automated...

Diving into Einstein Activity Capture

Einstein Activity Capture is an automated way of importing messages and calendar events into Salesforce tied to the right contacts in the system. We will go through the basics of this feature and its uses, how to configure it, and what considerations to make as an architect when you are planning to implement it.

Einstein Activity Capture basics

If you have ever interacted with a sales team in a customer relationship management (CRM)-heavy environment, you will no doubt have heard them complain about the amount of data entry they have to do to keep the CRM up to date. Despite most big organizations having substantial sales operations teams whose job it is (among other things) to keep everything up to date in the CRM, actual salespeople still have to spend time doing basic updates such as logging emails sent to contacts or ensuring that the opportunity status reflects reality.

Enter Einstein Activity Capture, a tool designed to automate...

Examining Einstein Conversation Insights

Einstein Conversation Insights is a feature that enables better visibility of what's going on in the sales organization through an analysis of the content of captured sales calls. We will look at the details of this feature, why you would want to use it, and what you need to consider in the following sections.

Einstein Conversation Insights basics

Einstein Conversation Insights is a part of the High Velocity Sales license that also includes a range of other sales-related features and aims to improve sales coaching by allowing managers to zoom in on the parts of sales calls that provide the most impactful or coachable material without having to listen through the entire recording for every call. It does this by scanning transcriptions of recorded sales calls for keywords that are either predefined (for example, words related to price or pricing), related to products or competitors of your company, or that you have defined as custom...

Summary

In this chapter, we have looked at some of the key parts of the Salesforce Einstein platform, including elements from the Sales Cloud Einstein and High Velocity Sales offerings. We started by learning about Lead Scoring and Opportunity Scoring, which deliver an easy-to-deploy ML-based model for judging the quality of leads and opportunities. We saw in detail how to configure this feature, which is a good representation of the typical flow for configuring out-of-the-box Einstein features.

Then, we reviewed Einstein Forecasting, an automated ML-based forecasting model, which uses your historical opportunity data to generate a prediction of whether your current sales efforts are on track.

We then devoted considerable time to exploring Einstein Activity Capture, a nifty feature that can save sales reps a lot of time entering data into the CRM by automatically matching email, contact, and event data from users' emails and calendars to the relevant records in Salesforce...

Questions

1. What feature would you use if you wanted to know the likelihood that a lead will convert to an opportunity?
2. Which external cloud provider is used by some Salesforce AI services such as Einstein Activity Capture?
3. For what geographical region is Einstein Conversational Insights particularly well suited?