Unlocking Potential: My Top 5 Under-utilized Features in Oracle Sales Cloud that Add Value to Users

On a prior post on Oracle’s Customer Connect Community, I had created a list of my top 5 Underutilized  Out-of-the-Box (OOTB) Features in Oracle Sales Cloud that add value to users.

WOW a lot has changed in a few years.  With the addition of the Service functionality; the features and capabilities have exploded.  The purpose of this post is to highlight a few common features that if implemented; could make for more efficient output and better experience for users.  We all know that time is money and if you can improve the experience for your users and save them time; you will have become your organization’s hero.

Before I start with the 2020 list, I felt the need to recap my prior list as these are still very underutilized features.  The added value they provide to your sales users in terms of efficiencies and guidance they provide is great. 

The Prior Top 5 Recap:

1. Sales User Campaigns (not Marketing Campaigns) – for personalization & communication efficiency
2. Direct Social Network integration (Oracle Social Network or Slack)
3. Outlook Plug-in – Drag-and-Drop emails into Sales Cloud for one-click saving to Contact History
4. Sales Coach – Optimize cross-sell and up-sell opportunities with sales guidance at every stage
5. Leveraging the expansive use of Lists – to save time, filter, and create your own segments

My New Top 5 Under-utilized Features for 2020 are:

1. Auditing Features – Auditing tools are no longer just for big brother!  There are so many reasons to like this tool. The auditing tool was always available, but the added functionality makes it easier to use on each object record, (I.e., track field changes on an opportunity).  The reason I love this feature as a user is that over a course of a day, week or month; you may touch hundreds of different records AND so does everyone else on the Account Team.   I have a hard time remembering which fields I may have updated over time and I also may want to see what others have updated as well.   Yes – management or legal can use this tool for their compliance reasons as well but from a user standpoint, it is a great feature.  It is underutilized as many companies or departments do not even know it is there.
   
2. Having Multiple Dynamic Dashboards.  Why limit yourself to just one dashboard when you can have two? Or even more?  This of course depends on if there is a need.  For those reps or co-agents who may manage both Sales and Service, it might be nice to have those dashboards separated into two different pages. To highlight another reason to beef up your dashboards, you can now enable tasks directly from the Dashboard! 
   
3. Business Plans. Love these!  Use them with your Accounts, co-create business plans with your partners or put together a territory plan for your Reps.  There are many ways to use Business Plans and some companies have not implemented this feature at all.  You can create your objectives, build out a SWAT analysis, and manage plan tasks in one place.  Should you decide to add-on Partner Relationship Management (PRM), there’s even more you can do with your business plans. (Next blog coming soon!)
   
4. Service Request (Incident) Management:  Hands-down my favorite and biggest add-on of value-added functionality.
   • Users can utilize one platform to see all incidents related to your accounts and opportunities.
   • IT benefits from the streamlining of sales and service records. 
   • Sales know if there are issues at a customer site before connecting with customers. 
   • Customers benefit from your real-time knowledge of their account. 
   • Co-agents have a better mechanism to up-sell and cross-sell with direct access to sales force automation tools.
   • Service Agents can see what active opportunities are in progress when managing incidents. 
   • Teams can be automatically notified when issues arise, or should an incident escalate.
     
5. Sales Assets:  Having your Administrator enable your Sales Assets functionality helps provide users that full 360-degree view and can help users understand what products your customers may already to help future sales.  Users can leverage that knowledge to create up-sell and cross-sell tasks and activities based on the existing portfolio and associate the assets with their opportunities and leads.  Additionally, users can utilize the shared asset calendar to know when milestones and renewals occur and coordinate meetings around these events. 

Overall Benefits

The high-level benefits of these under-utilized features include customer experience improvements, increased revenue, better customer service, automation, increased productivity, customer and employee satisfaction.  A more detailed sampling of KPIs related to these implemented features is listed in the green box below.   An implementation of any of these features should help move your needle and improve your user and customer experience overall.  What more could you be doing with your existing tools that will impact your teams?

No proprietary information has been shared. This post and this blog are solely the opinion of the author.

Oracle license options are standard, enterprise or premium.  At this time, most the above features come with the enterprise license.  Business plans come with the premium license.  Oracle often adds functionality to different packages so please refer to Oracle’s website and your Oracle representative for any updates to your existing license agreements.

I will dive into some of the add-on functionality that adds direct revenue value to the business in my next post.