Oracle unveils AI-powered application to automate sales

Oracle has unveiled the next generation of Fusion Sales, an application that automates sales and identifies the opportunities worth pursuing.

The new offering is part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX) and powered by AI.

Fusion Sales automatically gives sellers quotes, proposals and recommended steps to assist them in generating greater productivity, closing more deals, and giving buyers confidence.

"CRM is an integral tool, especially as we sell complex and expensive equipment and software solutions in 180 countries across the globe," Ricoh inside sales vice president Samantha Mohr says.

"We used to stitch together sales insights from an array of applications, Excel spreadsheets, and post-it notes. It wasn't an efficient process.

"Oracle Fusion Sales provides our sellers with a guided experience that focuses their time and improves deal success by delivering better insights to help us adapt to market shifts faster.

Citing research conducted in partnership with CRM analyst firm Beagle Research Group, Oracle notes that almost a third of sellers have difficulty closing deals and meeting quotas.

The study, Does Your CRM Leave Money on the Table, emphasises the challenges sellers deal with when it comes to customer churn and outdated sales processes.

As a result of the ongoing struggle, sellers have admitted to being open to greater automation in their processes and trusting AI to take on more responsibilities.

This includes 70% of respondents saying they would trust AI to qualify leads, 60% saying they'd let it identify priority deals, and 80% saying they'd allow AI to track deal progress.

"Traditional CRM systems were designed to be a system of record for planning and forecasting versus a tool to help sellers sell more.

"As a result, sellers spend countless hours on data entry and administration that stunts sales productivity," Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX) executive vice president and general manager Rob Tarkoff says.

"Applying 40 plus years of data and business process expertise, we have done the heavy lifting to engineer the next era of CRM. Oracle Fusion Sales removes the manual steps in the B2B sales process to help sellers close more deals faster and more efficiently.

Seller benefits of Oracle Fusion Sales include:

Step-by-step guided processes

Fusion Sales enables sellers to onboard quickly and improve productivity with a guided step-by-step process to assist in engaging with accounts, progress opportunities and closing deals faster.

In addition, customers have the option to base the processes on best practices set by leadership or customise with industry-specific templates.

Conversation ready opportunities

Fusion Sales is connected to Oracle's Fusion Marketing offering. This means that sellers can automate re-qualifying and converting marketing leads into opportunities by allowing Fusion Sales to automatically generate highly qualified leads and pass them to sellers for follow-up.

Automated quotes and proposals

Oracle's latest offering automatically sends sellers initial quotes, proposals and implementation schedules when opportunities are created.

The quotes are then automatically updated throughout the sales process as the deal progresses and are based on historical data that includes previous successful deals, a customer's industry and other important details.

Intelligent content recommendations

Fusion Sales automatically gives sellers marketing-approved content that is most likely to progress the sale, saving them and buyers time at each stage of the sales process.

Automating this process also gives sellers the correct offers and answers to commonly asked questions directly.

Digital salesrooms

Personalised microsites help sellers to improve the buying experience and foster stronger engagement with buyers.

By offering Digital Sales Rooms, Fusion Sales brings together useful resources such as quotes, past contracts, reference stories and details for past or upcoming Zoom meetings to help move buyers closer to a purchasing decision.

Further, sales operations can capture buying signals while buyers use Digital Sales Rooms, as well as other customer engagement data that can inform sales insights, internal training, enablement and create future deal success.

Advanced revenue intelligence

Oracle's Fusion CX Analytics allows sales leaders to easily access and report on business trends, recognise outliers, and monitor customer sentiment and sales performance.

Fusion Sales also provides a complete view across the business, pulling together data from sales, marketing, service, finance and HR without requiring support from IT.