Everything About The New Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud

According to new research, 95% of the total sales are still coming from traditional retail channels. Therefore, it implies that the companies related to consumer goods are still aiming to find more ways that would help in optimizing retail execution as well as creating more meaningful relationships with the consumers spread across the value chain. While being an industry leader in providing the best customer relationship management solutions (through CRM services), Salesforce further took the step into more innovative releases and introduced the Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud. It is a complete cloud solution that can manage consumer goods so businesses can smoothly ensure the execution of their retail planning while optimizing store visits, boosting in-store productivity, and further driving up high sales.

In this blog, we will discuss the Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud and analyze the many benefits of this innovation.

What is Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud?

Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud is a suite of cloud-based software products that are capable of helping retailers and brands in managing their retail stores and their operations and increase sales & revenue. This cloud is built on the Salesforce platform, making it a fast-to-implement and easy-to-use product that enables quick adoption of this technology throughout your organization.

This solution manages consumer products, optimizes store visits, allows users to perform retail planning readily, improves in-store productivity, and attracts more customers. It also employs Artificial intelligence to enhance audit accuracy and accelerate business growth.

Consumer Goods Cloud provides users with a holistic view of consumer profiles across all the touchpoints, including demographics, purchase history, location, and more, along with real-time insights.

Users get to set up custom fields for tracking the most relevant data for their business. Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud permits retailers to target the right segment of customers at the right time, no matter if you are targeting via marketing campaigns or delivering your content across the channel. Another great news is that now you get Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud implementation done with other clouds of Salesforce like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud.

Why Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud?

The main objective of Consumer Goods Cloud is to address the exceptional challenges that CPG companies are facing a lot. It makes retailers realize the significance of technology in promoting growth while simultaneously taking care of complexity and cost. Salesforce Consumer Goods collaborates with the power of Salesforce CRM with its comprehensive industry-oriented capabilities.

With the rapid increase in competition in the Consumer Goods industry, Consumer goods companies were in great need of a tool that helped them deliver a unified and unique buying experience, unlike any other industry. Salesforce Consumer Goods did this job perfectly by helping retail managers create personalized customer experiences by blending digital and physical platforms and having a full charge on their databases.

Salesforce designed its Consumer Goods Cloud to engage and deliver the correct value to each customer because, in the end, this is what a consumer is reaching out to your brand in the first place. It allows manufacturers, distributors, and retailers to develop deep connections with their customers and comprehensively understand them. Lastly, Consumer Goods Cloud is something that not only supports managers in knowing and understanding the customers better but also helps you read and adapt to the constantly happening changes in the market more effectively.

You can also read here why Salesforce is the best CRM.

Features of Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud

Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud provides these extraordinary features to sales representatives:

1. Improved Visit Planning

Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud provides access to a list of assigned and prioritized store visits for each day to your field representatives, along with necessary and suggested activities and in-app mapping functionality to manage to route smartly. Additionally, representatives can also analyze the progress status of their business throughout their stores.

2. Optimize Visit Execution

From planogram and inventory to return order processing and surveys, once the representatives have access to all the customizable templates according to store or segment types, they can ensure that needs to be raised in a particular store are met every time. They can do all this right from a mobile device now.

3. Power of Einstein AI

AI from Einstein optimizes compliance and product placements. Einstein Vision for Consumer Goods Cloud provides an object detection solution and image recognition solution enabling planogram, accessible inventory, and merchandising compliance checks.

4. Easy Orders and Data Capturing

From mobile order capturing capabilities, a representative can collect orders on their store visit and record important information like product, quantity, and pricing from mobile devices.

5. Time Management

Consumer Goods Cloud has allowed field reps to invest more time in developing customer relationships and less time in auditing activities. For instance, reps can now click a picture of the shelf and immediately identify whether it is set up correctly. They are no longer required to manually count and update data in their system.

6. Task Management System

This task management system in Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud ensures that all field representatives have completed their daily tasks. It also correctly reports while offering a complete view of the visit to the executives.

Latest Updates in Consumer Goods Cloud

With the latest Winter 21′ release, Salesforce has launched some exciting updates in its high-in-demand Consumer Goods Cloud to expand the scope of introducing new experiments in Consumer Goods Cloud objects.

Most of these changes are applied to only those editions in which Consumer Goods Cloud is enabled, like Lightning Experience in Developer, Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions.

Here is the list of new updates in the Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud:

1. Faster Set up Of Retail Stores

Salesforce added a new Address field on Retail store objects. It will support Sales Managers in quickly creating records of their retail store as they won’t have to create location records every time they can update or create a new store record.

2. Easy Sharing of Retail Store Records

Now the retail store objects get the sharing rules from the account object that gets your sales representative access to records of your retail store automatically when you provide them access to account records.

3. Understand Visit Recommendation Flows

Users can easily understand how the visit recommendations are generated through Sample flows.

4. More Power From Consumer Goods Object Records

Now Consumer Goods object records allow you to add notes, attach files and create Chatter posts. It also helps you create formula fields and enable field history tracking on crucial consumer goods objects.

5. Improved Managed Access With Updated Permission Sets

The default access levels of Consumer Goods objects are updated at the beginning of Winter ’21 in Lightning Retail Execution Starter, Lightning Retail Execution Merchandiser, Lightning Retail Execution Plus, and Lightning Retail Execution Contractor permission set. Users can now change the level of access as per the requirements.

With all these updates in Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud, users can experiment with different objects and build proficiency in managing their retail store.

On that note, let’s dig deeper into the basics of Consumer Goods Cloud, what features it brings in and what are some significant impacts of Consumer Goods Cloud on the retail sector.

What is its impact on the Retail Sector?

As per the statistics, most goods sold in retail are from physical stores. Besides that, there are specific strategies that retail businesses must focus on, such as in-store placement, store management, and promotion of goods. For that, a company needs the right technology and data.

Fortunately, Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud has successfully revolutionized the Store Management Services. It helps brands establish long-lasting relationships with their customers. Additionally, the rest of the improvements are made in the store management from the analytics provided by Einstein AI.

This cloud was launched by Salesforce back in 2019, majorly for retail companies. Salesforce specified that this Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud would act as the left hand for retail companies in generating more revenue and driving more ROI via improved retail execution capabilities.

This Consumer Goods technology provides business intelligence, ultimately helping brands solve complex business problems. One of the significant impacts of Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud is that field representatives can ensure that shelves in the store always have ample stock and that respective pricing and promotions are synchronized with it. It also helps sales executives in creating effective connections with retail channel partners.

Companies in the retail sector can fully trust this platform to achieve their overall objectives and earn a competitive advantage in the best possible manner.

Benefits of Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud

Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud has come up as the newest addition to the extensive suite of Salesforce products for businesses. This new edition has been designed further to modify the relationship between retailers and field representatives while streamlining the retail execution, which will help improve the overall customer experience. Following are the key benefits of the Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud, which have been discussed briefly:

1. Improvements in Store Planning

Salesforce can provide consumer goods companies with the best available option and helps in optimal planning. The Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud has been ensured to provide sales managers with an overall 360-degree view of their sales targets, orders, discounts, and promotions. Moreover, this is also done by ensuring the execution of all the retail business activities in a smooth manner.

2. Better Store Layout

The organization of inventory is done quite differently in each of the stores. With the help of Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud, businesses can personalize and assign templates that will further depend on the segment categories of a store. Templates could also be used, which is dependent on individual stores to increase their productivity from check-in to check-out.

3. Accurately Auditing The Shelves

The maintenance of store shelves and proper management of the inventory will be smooth with Consumer Goods Cloud. It would enable the organization to have a proper improvement in inventory management, creation of planograms quicker, and assuring the conformity of the merchandising.

Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud is used to bring up the shop shelves to the fingertips of the organization and have its usage as the best planogram software used explicitly for visual merchandising. Furthermore, the businesses could scan the shelves in the store while using Einstein Vision in Consumer Goods Cloud, which would help track the inventory and further identify out-of-stock products. It also assists businesses in embracing information about a particular product category, pricing, quantity, promotions, and discounts, all from the mobile device.

4. Navigable Store Visits

The field sales representatives could be made more effective by  Consumer Goods Cloud while streamlining the activities and shop visits. To understand how this is precisely accomplished, follow the given example. The Sales Representatives might need the maintenance of tracking each of the store visits through the collection of crucial parameters such as store name, location, the number of hours spent, visit time as expected, and any previous visits with quick access to the available data. All of these incredible features that the Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud provides would help the retailers work while this is among the top retail management software.

5. Capturing Orders on Mobile To Increased In-Store Sales

In-store sales have been a game-changer for businesses while ensuring high profitability delivery. Retailers can use the best shop management software to create the best strategy, provide discounts, properly execute promotional activities, and improve customer experience.

The users could further increase in-store sales with the help of Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud while taking up orders with the help of their mobile phones. Thus, it helps assist the sales professionals while also guiding them with assorted product recommendations, which helps in having a complete picture of order management, price, promotions, and discounts.

6. Comprehensive Surveys And Data Collection

Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud enables organizations to have efficient retail management by ensuring promotions in real-time with the help of collaborations among multiple teams through a single and unified platform. In addition, this addition, this will bring in all the data in one place and help devise better strategies. In addition, the businesses can also leverage the Salesforce Consumer Cloud with the help of conducting surveys, gathering feedback over the same, and further collecting data from various stakeholders.

Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud Pricing

Regarding Pricing Strategy, Salesforce plays well by dividing the functionalities of its Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud into different categories.

The upfront costs of Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud ultimately depend on your plan. With the increased number of users, you have to pay additional costs.

Take a look at how Salesforce has kept the pricing of its Consumer Goods Cloud:

Final Thoughts

A daily schedule of all the assigned and prioritized store visits, with more suggested and needed activities, have been routed and mapped with the help of Salesforce Maps, all due to Consumer Goods Cloud. Representatives could use smartphone-optimized segments, storing multiple templates for planogram inspections, proper inventory planning, and processing return orders and surveys. Furthermore, this has allowed them to adequately capture the orders during all the store visits and collect product data such as pricing and quantity.

Therefore, Consumer Goods Cloud has been jam-packed with several tool sets designed for the smooth running of retail operations by ensuring the availability of products and promotions. The price has been kept in line with corporate standards.

To fully leverage the Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud, we are here to provide expert Salesforce Consulting Services to ensure that the retail management software would help make the store perfect.