Oracle Fusion Sales aims to automate repetitive sales tasks

The latest version of Oracle’s Fusion Sales customer relationship management (CRM) application wants to automate the most repetitive sales tasks by providing users with automated recommendations to increase productivity and close more deals.

The new look Fusion Sales tool looks to build on the data Oracle has collected for over 40 years and remove several manual steps in the B2B sales process.

“Traditional CRM systems were designed to be a system of record for planning and forecasting, versus a tool to help sellers sell more," said Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president for Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience. "As a result, sellers spend countless hours on data entry and administration that stunts sales productivity."

The updated sales application already comes bundled with Oracle’s Cloud Customer Experience CRM suite, which also includes marketing, customer service, finance, and HR modules.

Fusion Sales could turn marketing leads into opportunities

The updated sales application offers a step-by-step guide that helps sellers onboard faster. These steps can be based on the custom recommended practices of an individual enterprise, as well as helping to automate the process of qualifying and converting marketing leads into opportunities.

“When connected to Oracle Fusion Marketing, Fusion Sales automatically creates highly qualified leads and then passes them to sellers for follow-up,” the company said in a statement.

Sellers will be able to see quotes, proposals, and implementation schedules once new opportunities are created inside the CX cloud.

These quotes are automatically updated throughout the sales process as a deal progresses and are enriched with historical data that includes prior successful deals, the customer’s industry sector, and other key account attributes.

The application can also surface intelligent content recommendations for sellers that can be fed in from the marketing team. These approved pieces of information, such as commonly asked questions, can be used to quickly answer buyer or customer queries, easing the time taken to complete the sales process.

New app lets users create personalised mircosites

The updated version of Fusion Sales also includes a new Digital Sales Room, where an enterprise can create personalised microsites for its customers.

These sites can include resources such as quotes, past contracts, reference stories, and details of past or upcoming Zoom meetings to help move buyers closer to a purchasing decision.

These sites can also track certain customer signals or behavioural patterns based on their interaction with the website, and these signals can be used as further sales insights for training and future deal-making strategies.

Competition continues to be strong in the CRM market

With these product moves, Oracle is looking to keep pace in what is becoming an even more competitive cloud CRM space, alongside the likes of Microsoft, Salesforce, and SugarCRM.

Salesforce has been looking to leverage AI to make recommendations to users since it launched its Einstein product back in 2016, and Microsoft has added its own Sales Insights for Dynamics CRM.

“In 2021, many companies continued to pivot toward the more digital world that we now live in, including the procurement of technologies that would help them improve their level of engagement with their customers and the experience that customers receive,” said Alan Webber, program vice president for customer experience management strategies at the analyst firm IDC.